31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 12: JIGOKU (1960)

"Once drawn by that merciless wind, the fair youth of morning is at dusk naught but bones. In the end, all must die. Numberless are the sins committed on the way to death. For those sins, there may be punishment in the law. Some may slip through its net, but the awareness of sin cannot be escaped. Religion imagines a world after death, dealing punishment in place of the law. That world is Hell."

— opening narration

Theology student Shiro Shimizu (Shigeru Amachi) is engaged to Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), the daughter of his respected teacher, Professor Yajima. He also maintains a strange relationship with the uber-creepy Tamura (Yoichi Numada), who seems to know the intimate and sometimes shameful secrets of all and sundry. Showing up uninvited to the professor's house as Shiro announces his intention to marry Yukiko, Tamura makes it clear to the professor that he knows of an atrocity that the man committed during WWII and leaves with Shiro. As Tamura drives Shiro home, Tamura lets on that he knows Shiro has been sleeping with Yukiko and asks him to consider the possibility that she may be pregnant. (The guy's a total buzzkill from the word "go.") 

Tamura (Yoichi Numada) and Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), on a road trip to a dire destiny.

Seconds later, Tamura runs over a drunk named Tiger Kyoichi, a leader of the Gondo yakuza syndicate, and drives away. Shiro demands that Tamura stop the car so they can see if the victim is alright, but Tamura stoically refuses and blames the accident on Shrio, citing that it would not have happened if he had not asked Shimura to deviate from his planned route of travel. While Shiro silently contemplates his culpability for murder if the man dies, the gangster's mother (Kyoko Tsuji), alongside his floozy girlfriend, Yoko (Akiko Ono), grieves over her son's corpse and vows vengeance should she ever find the hit-and-run perps. Upon reading of the hit-and-run in the paper the next day, Tamura could not give less of a shit if he tried, while Shiro tries to convince him to go with him to the police and turn themselves in. Tamura notes that Kyoichi was only some piece of yakuza scum and not worth the best years of their lives, but the guilt-ridden Shiro confesses the accident to Yukiko, who suggests that her father might know what to do. While on their way to see the professor, the cab the pair are riding in crashes into a telephone pole and Yukiko is tragically killed. After Yukiko's funeral, Shiro frets over whether he or Tamura will "win" their battle of conscience (or lack thereof) and finds himself hanging out in a sleazy nightclub, where he meets, picks up, and puts the bone to the yakuza's bereaved girlfriend (who is also revealed to be a heroin addict, in a narrative bid to up the vileness quotient). Yoko twigs to the fact that Shiro is one of her lover's murderers, so she reports back to the gangster's mother and, with the target now identified, the plot for revenge escalates.

As if Shiro were not already fucked up enough by his fiancee's untimely demise, he heads to a rustic retirement community upon being notified that his mother if terminally ill, and while his mother lays there slowly expiring, her husband cavorts in the very next room with some kimonoed hoo-er. (Yeah, this movie's a roller coaster ride of sunshine...) Suddenly, a cutie named Sachiko shows up and she happens to look exactly like the dead Yukiko (which only makes sense, as she's played by the same actress). Sachiko sent the letter that alerted Shiro to his mother's illness, and she is his mom's nurse, as well as the daughter of Ensai (Jun Otomo) an alcoholic painter who lives nearby and drinks heavily while painting a depiction of Hell. We also meet other assorted residents of the community, all of whom are quite sleazy and/or pathetic, and are each responsible for murders and other acts of awfulness in the past. Tamura, the professor, his wife, the yakuza guy's mom, and the yakuza guy's lover all converge on the retirement community and in short order all are killed, via natural death, suicide, a fall from a great height, hanging, consumption of rancid fish and poisoned wine at a party, gunshot wounds, or strangulation. Thus, every fucking character in the story is consigned to Jigoku, which is the Japanese word for Hell. Well most of them go to Hell, but I'm getting to that...

When I first sat through JIGOKU — aka SINNERS OF HELL — I was disappointed to discover that it's basically a slice-of-life drama focusing on the sleazy doings of some Japanese folks in 1960 whose climax features an infamous depiction of the culture's concepts of Hell and what becomes of those whose vileness during life earns them a one-way ticket to eternal damnation. Loaded with enough sleazy characters and situations to fuel several schlocky soap operas, the melodrama just keeps on coming, piling on atrocious behavior after atrocious behavior with the kind of glorious excess for which Japanese cinema is renowned. In fact, things get so over-wrought that it all verges on self-parody. But the most bizarre aspect of this flick is its dual nature as a two-way mind-fuck of a film. If one approached this movie knowing absolutely nothing about it, it at first reads as a straight drama picture, which is totally understandable, but then it turns into a balls-out gruesome and gory festival of the torments of the damned brought to life. It's like someone swapped out the last reel for the ultra-nasty and surreal final twenty-plus minutes of an unabashed horror movie.

Just one of the creepy images seen once the film quite abruptly turns into a straight-up horror movie.

Upon his death, Shiro ends up in Limbo, where he again sees Yukiko, who tells him she was pregnant with his daughter, whose soul has been sent along the river into the underworld, so Shiro must brave the horrors of Hell itself to save her. What follows is a journey through hideous punishments, tortures, and other such wholesome sights, coupled with a few shocking revelations along the way. Packed with creepy and gore-filled imagery, the Hell sequence features a cornucopia of folks being graphically beheaded, sawn in twain, flayed, disemboweled, tormented by naked temptresses, being boiled in oil, impalement, tongues torn out, walking barefoot through a landscape of three-foot-tall glass shards, and the general hopelessness of existence. 

Not even Hammer films went there like this back in 1960, so once again Japan delivers.

Even by today's standards, some of this stuff is very extreme and disturbing, and it's worth making one's way through all of the soap opera mishegoss just to get to it. That said, the ending is simultaneously disappointing and corny, but the film overall packs serious balls and must have been quite a shock to Japanese audiences in 1960. And if you're wondering why you've never heard of this movie, despite there having been a ton of Japanese horror and sci-fi flicks released in the States during the 1960's, trust me when I tell you that this film's content did not have a hope in, well, Hell of ever getting past American censors. Even without its visceral diabolical slaughterhouse segments, the film's adult content would have been tough for watchdogs of media decency to let by, and an edited version would have ended up as a very short and incomprehensible mess.

Though its 100-minute running time may occasionally seem to drag a bit, which has a lot to do with the film's utterly joyless/hopeless tone, JIGOKU is never boring and the final reel makes it worth a look for all horror completists.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 -Day 11: THE DAY I DIED (1977)

When a bitchin' day at the beach goes horribly wrong.

"The day I died was a great day for the beach. One of those super days... All bright and sunny... I was feelin' real good. Proud, too... 'Cause this was my car! I'd only had it a week. I bought it with my own money, money I'd earned working after school at the supermarket. You know, as a bag boy. I'd been saving up for this little old car for so long... Now, I was getting a real bang out of showing it off..."

-the incredibly ominous opening narration

A 17-year-old boy is psyched to go to the beach in the car he'd just bought a week previous, and he has a fun day with his young pals. Then things go to the Dark Side when one of his buds breaks out a 7-Up bottle full of vodka he'd swiped from his folks, and the liquor gets shared by the group of five happy-go-lucky teens. As the day winds down and the bottle is emptied, the kids leave, and our 17-year-old narrator, who freely admits that he "was not used to the stuff," drives off in his car by himself, the other preferring to leave with his buddy Joe, the supplier of the vodka. While attempting to pass an old lady in a Mercedes, our nameless narrator meets his fate in a tragic car accident...but continues to narrate the events following his body being hauled out of the twisted wreckage, including his parents coming to the morgue to I.D. his corpse, his friends and family mourning at his open-casket wake (where his body shows zero signs of having been in a terrible vehicular wreck), and finally his coffin being slowly lowered into the waiting grave at his funeral.

Parental anguish...or disgust over their now-dead son being a dumbass?

Having not seen one since maybe 1979, I have no idea what automotive safety films geared toward teens about to get their driver's licenses are like these days, but the ones aimed at my generation and those that came before were nearly always morbid exercises in cheap (but effective) scare tactics and often unintentional hilarity. THE DAY I DIED is a prime example of the genre, only minus the lingering shots of simulated gore found in many other examples, but what it lacks in gore it more than makes up for with over-wrought cheap shots to the emotions. 

One would think that anyone could relate to the short's events, what with a nice kid's day in his just-obtained car being spoiled by his booze-induced premature demise, but to many of us who grew up in the suburbia of the late-1970's and early-1980's, the details of the inciting incident don't necessarily add up. While it's clear that the group of five kids involved are alluded to as having a certain amount of experience with alcohol, save for our narrator, who admits he's a lightweight, if one does the math, it seems unlikely that one bottle of vodka divided five ways among kids consuming it with food would be enough to hamper a driver's ability unto the point of fatal lack of automotive control. Admittedly, I'm no expert, but I did grow up in Westport, CT, where hard partying was my youthful era's rite de passage, and I can tell you from personal experience that even a wine-bottle-sized container of vodka would be unlikely to render a pack of five kids from my community non-functional. And even if it did, there would have been at least two within the group who would have recognized that they or their friends were fucked-up and would not have allowed them to drive under those circumstances, either waiting it out for a modicum of sobriety or taking a bullet and calling parents for an assist.

Bummer. Way to harsh your buzz, dude...

But enough of the logistics. This sort of thing was made to scare the fuck out of kids who did not know shit from shinola, and as such I can see it being quite effective when deployed toward the youth of the disco era. Its protagonist (who is never named) is of the typical Californian surfer-stereotype mythologized in many pop music hits of the 1960's, so his "golden boy" archetype was deeply etched into the consciousness of the American public of its time, and seeing such a fresh young Adonis snuffed out before he'd even truly begun to live could be quite the narrative gut-punch to an auditorium full of innocent minors. But when seen from the perspective of a far-more-jaded 21st century viewer, THE DAY I DIED is a masterpiece of unintentional hilarity in the guise of scare film horror. The voice acting begins matter-of-factly enough but as events take a turn for the morbid, our narrator goes for the jugular with world-class histrionics as he — now a corpse — laments making his parents and friends witness him laying there bereft of life, eventually shifting to full-on escalating pleading/sniveling mode as the funeral guests slowly file away and his coffin is lowered into the earth:

"Is this the end? The end of everything??? Don't go away and leave me all alone... Mom... Dad... Don't go away... I... I tell you, I'm not dead! Not really dead! Please don't put me in the ground! I promise... If you give me one last chance, God, I'll be the most careful driver in the whole world! I'll never take a drink like that again! All I want is one more chance! Please, God!!! I'm only seventeen!!!"

And then the film simply fades to black.

I know all of this sounds utterly horrible, and it certainly is, but if you have even the slightest tinge of darkness to your general sensibilities and sense of humor, the entire short comes off as a brilliant, cliche-ridden parody of this type of cautionary film, and as such it's a must-see. It goes to show you just how fucked-up I am, because when I meet my inevitable fate, I demand that this short be run just before my wake's boozy dance party, a balls-out celebration that will kick off with Heaven 17's "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang."

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026-Day 10: SANTO VS. LAS MUJERES VAMPIRO (1962)

Just another day for El Santo.

Mexican horror from the early1960's is a cornucopia of cheapjack atmosphere, cheese, and sheer weird craziness that at times feels like it spewed forth from the brain of a child who was out of his mind during a serious fever. Heavily influenced by the look and feel of the classic Universal horror cycle and more than a little of the then-current Italian flavors, these south-of-the-border shockers overflowed with vampires, lycanthropes, Frankenstein-esque man-made-monstrosities, mummies, mad scientists, random cutlery-wielding madmen, and malevolent space aliens, and on many occasions those baleful ne'er-do-wells were righteously opposed by luchadores, Mexico's signature masked professional wrestlers-cum-superheroes. Those paladins brought a distinctly Mexican cultural angle to the proceedings and created a popular sub-genre that positioned them as the country's de facto defenders against the forces of diabolical evil. Mil Mascaras, Neutron, the Blue Demon, and numerous others put their boots up the asses of malevolent and beastly creatures, but none took to the challenge with the diligence and longevity of El Santo ("the Saint"), or simply Santo for short. 

El Santo.

El Santo was real-life pro wrestler Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta (1917-1984) and by far the most famous and popular wrestler in Mexico, so his expansion into entertainment areas outside of the squared circle was inevitable. That leap was made to the cinema and El Santo headlined 49 (!!!) films between 1958 and 1982, with only three making it to the States in dubbed form, and the masked hero re-christened as "Samson." The most well-known Santo movie in the U.S. is arguably SANTO VS. LAS MUJERES VAMPIRO, aka SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN, and when weighed against the quality of much of Santo's filmography, it's hands down one of his best. (NOTE: The Santo movies are all cheesy, to varying degrees, so take the praise I bestow upon this film with that in mind.)

The titular vampire women.

When a cabal of female vampires awaken after two centuries, their queen, Thorina (Lorena Velázquez), dispatches her minions to complete a goal that was interrupted two-hundred years previous by an ancestor of El Santo. (NOTE: Depending on the film, Santo is something of an Eternal Champion type, an old presence reborn in each era to fight a never-ending battle against diabolical forces.) Their objective: Find the reincarnation of a woman who had previously been chosen to take over from Thorina and also become the bride of Satan himself. The modern day incarnation is the daughter of a respected professor who's absolutely not down with his little girl becoming the thrall of Hell, so he calls in his old pal El Santo to put much wrasslin' boot to undead suckface ass.

The rest of the story plays like a live-action installment of SCOOBY-DOO, WHERE ARE YOU?, only with real monsters, and the Scooby Gang swapped out for a badassed Mexican wrestler in a silver mask. The vampire women and their male slaves get up to all manner of shenanigans that Santo inevitably thwarts in a kid-friendly way — the scares are mild and largely atmosphere-driven, and there's no gore — but there are a few truly memorable visuals to be had. There's a great bit where one of the vampire slaves is fleeing the scene of some evil that he committed, only to come face-to-face with a huge cross mounted in a churchyard that spurs him to use his cape in a futile attempt to shield himself from its influence, but to no avail. He bursts into flames, falls over, and burns out on the sidewalk. But the true highlight is when one of the vampire slaves takes the place of a wrestler who's slated to engage with Santo in the ring, and when it becomes clear that Santo's going to come out the victor and remove the evildoer's mask — the ultimate defeat in Mexican wrestling culture — when the mask comes off, the vampire is revealed as... A WEREWOLF!!!

What would Rowdy Roddy Piper have had to say about this?

The werewolf/vampire then proceeds to go buck wild in the ring and the mayhem is indeed glorious in its sheer ludicrousity.

SANTO VS. LAS MUJERES VAMPIRO was only the seventh of the Santo films and being of such a relatively early vintage, it had yet to become the kind of lazy, ultra-low-budget, rote time-waster that the majority of later entries ended up as, and sitting through it feels like watching a slower-paced tequila-infused analog to the old school Universal monster flicks. Best known nowadays for the treatment it got on a 1995 installment of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, the film is totally worth sitting through in its straight version, if for no other reason than to experience the flavor of kooky monster-laden fun of the kind they just don't make anymore. VIVA EL SANTO!!! 

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 9: MOTHER'S DAY (1980)

There's nothing like backwoods hospitality...and this is NOTHING like backwoods hospitality.

The "wrong place, wrong time" sub-genre, in which innocent people meet appalling fates when outside of their familiar environment, has yielded some particularly twisted fruit for decades. PSYCHO, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, DELIVERANCE, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, SOUTHERN COMFORT, EDEN LAKE, the list goes on and on, but the example of this niche that came as an interesting effort at the dawn of the 1980's slasher era was the indelible MOTHER'S DAY. 

Every year, a trio of college friends — Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), Jackie (Deborah Luce), and Trina (Tiana Pierce) — get together for a retreat to some location where they can catch up, reminisce, get high, and reaffirm their deep bond, coming away from the experience knowing full well that while other aspects of their lives may come up lacking, they will always have each other's backs. This time around the women decide to camp out for the weekend in some remote, wooded area of New Jersey, only to unwittingly find themselves in the territory of punk-rock-loving Ike (Holden McGuire) and disco advocate Addley (Billy Ray McQuade), a pair of insane brothers who do unspeakable things to interlopers simply because they can, all with the enthusiastic and supportive approval of their aged mother (Rose Ross). Operating in the middle of nowhere, discovery by the authorities is a virtual impossibility, so if Ike and Addley get you, you're done, and inevitable death is the very least of your worries. 

Ike (Holden McGuire) & Addley (Billy Ray McQuade): "Punk sucks!" "Disco's stupid!!!"

Shortly after their arrival at a chosen campsite, the women are abducted during the wee hours of the night and hauled to the ramshackle abode of the sociopathic family, where they are to be systematically brutalized for their captors' amusement. With their sensibilities informed by junk culture, the boys set up role-playing scenarios that humiliate their terrified victims before savage beatings and rape, and Jackie, the group's sad sack, is unlucky enough to be picked as the first "participant." While her bound and gagged friends watch helplessly, Jackie is battered and raped by Addley while Ike merrily snaps Polaroids, after which the boys are allowed to keep her in their room overnight, though their mother cautions them about being too tired the next morning. (*shudder*) On the following day while the boys train, Abbey and Trina  manage to escape, dragging the unconscious/in shock Jackie along, but Jackie soon dies from her abuse, so her friends steel themselves for a trip back to the home of their tormentors to grant them the gift of vengeance every bit as savage as the degradation that was inflicted upon them. And then some. Oh, and what about the possible presence of the legendary Queenie, the hairy and bestial sister of Mother?

Mother (Rose Ross) proudly surveys her sons' handiwork.

Opening a mere four months after the genre-defining FRIDAY THE 13th (1980), MOTHER'S DAY was likely already in progress when its more influential contemporary hit the nation's screens, but it would not be impossible for it to have been rushed out in an effort to capitalize. The only real set is the mad family's house, a residence that looks just a little bit more put-together than an actual run-down derelict in the middle of the local woods, and the gore — effective though it certainly is — would not have required more than a few hours of pre-filming preparation, so for all I know MOTHER'S DAY could have been shot over a period of about a week. Anyway, it appeared seemingly overnight in the wake of FRIDAY THE 13th and wielded considerably more mystery to us under-age would-be attendees because instead of a straight MPAA rating it bore one of those warnings that amounted to a self-imposed "X." Not even the slaughterhouse thrills of FRIDAY THE 13th went that far, so MOTHER'S DAY must have been really nasty! Sadly, none of us kids stood a hope in hell of seeing it during first-run, so we had to hold out until it hit VHS years after the fact, but it turned out to be worth the wait. 

By the time I and my peers finally got to see MOTHER'S DAY, we'd experienced most of the cookie cutter slasher flicks that helped define the zeitgeist of our generation, so we expected just another splattery ninety minutes of farming tool-fodder trotted out to sate our gorehound appetites. After close to a decade of the likes of the turgid HUMONGOUS, a succession of ever-worsening FRIDAY THE 13th sequels, and the unintentional hilarity of NAIL GUN MASSACRE, we had learned not to expect such luxuries as plot or characterization, so MOTHER'S DAY came as something of a surprise. Yeah, the trio of protagonists could pass for escapees from any number of post-collegiate reunion/nostalgia flicks, and the villains were like an even more nightmarish version of characters straight out of a vintage E.C. horror comic (only writ more explicit thanks to a pop-cultural distance of nearly thirty years), but they all had distinct personalities that made them interesting and worth spending the film's running time with. Ike and Addley fascinate me because of what we see of their family dynamic when they're not out murdering and raping. 

A nutritious breakfast with Addley and Ike.

They're like any other rough-and-tumble brothers; childish, ever-bickering and blame-casting,

engaging in an amusing perpetual debate over the relative merits of punk as opposed to disco, with only their physical age and grown-up bestial lusts belying their seeming perpetual pre-adolescence, with only their equally-warped mother wielding control over their borderline-feral wildness. They are true cases of arrested development, a state ensured by their controlling and needy mom, and their state is not at all helped by what appears to be a certain degree of mental retardation or the results of heavy-duty in-breeding. In short, they are man-child animals of the worst, most dangerous order; vile, all-too-human forest-dwelling bogeymen who know every inch of their backwoods home, and it is their non-supernatural humanity at its most base and lawless that makes them prime nightmare fuel. Their mother is certainly no slouch in the creepiness department, but her doting offspring make her look like a paragon of compassion and gentility.

MOTHER'S DAY is nasty, mean-spirited, and downright reprehensible in many ways, but I'll be damned if I don't find its every frame to be compelling stuff. It's my favorite of the many "city slickers vs. rednecks" movies and I recommend it to those who can handle its unsavory charms. All others are advised to stay out of the woods.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 -Day 8: LEMORA — A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL (1973)

Lila Lee (Cheryl Smith), the most innocent of the innocent, discovers things the church never warned her about...

Sometimes it's all right there in the title.

13-year-old Lila Lee (Cheryl Smith) is the beautiful daughter of a Prohibition-era gangster, a violent gunman who is a fugitive from the law after committing a double-murder. The girl has been raised in the church by a devout reverend and is as innocent and pure as the driven snow, but she still harbors affection for her criminal father. While on the lam, Lila's dad finds himself in the sinister town of Astaroth, where he is waylaid by a pack of vampires, and soon Lila receives a letter from him, urging her to visit him. Knowing her guardian would not approve, Lila runs away into the night, making her way to a depot where she catches a bus to Astaroth, a journey punctuated with ominous warnings from a creepy driver. As the bus passes through Astaroth's nearby swamp, the vehicle is beset by some especially-bestial roving vampires, causing the bus to crash. Upon awakening, Lila finds herself in the care of Lemora (Lesley Gilb), an imposing woman in black who lives with a number of ever-giggling and menacing kids. Innocent though she is, Lila swiftly becomes aware that Lemora is a queen vampire and that the entire town is overrun with vampires, including what used to be her father. Trapped in the town's perpetual night and surrounded on all sides by undead suckfaces, can Lila's purity and piety guarantee her survival?

Hell is for children.

LEMORA — A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL is exactly what its title proclaims, namely a horror film that operates within a childlike realm of terror. The entire film looks and feels like a kid's fever dream of dark places, ominous grownups, scary children and, of course, vampires (that further mutate into even worse creatures), and to me it comes off like what you might get if you allowed a particularly together eight-year-old to script and helm a horror movie. It's shocks are strictly of the PG-rated variety but the lack of gore and violent action are more than made up for by a pervasive mood of a nightmare being acted out before our eyes. 

Creepy old crone Solange (Maxine Ballantyne), whose eerie a capella song about an old woman — possibly herself — is one of the film's highlights.

The acting is just broad enough to strike the delicate balance between child's-perspective exaggeration that works in the film's favor and over-the-top self-parody, and the performance of exploitation mainstay Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith is letter-perfect for the material. Like I said, it's basically a crazed kiddie film, and there are innumerable children's movies where little girl characters are played by adult women, so Smith's natural waifish look made her ideal as Lila. She's clearly around sixteen or seventeen at the time of shooting the movie but she is totally believable playing a few years younger, and she exudes innocence on a collision course with unholy corruption. And speaking of corruption, the film features a strong lesbian subtext as Lemora attempts to seduce Lila to the Dark Side. Though couched as attempts at swaying Lila to willingly submit to becoming Lemora's undead, eternally-beautiful companion, adults will no doubt twig to the predatory sapphic vibe that Lemora puts forth, especially during the sequence where she bathes Lila while slipping her a drugged libation.

Seldom has getting squeaky-clean felt so dirty...

Lemora herself, while a ruling vampire, is far from the most evil examples of her breed. Yes, she's macking on an underage girl, but she's quite pleasant, which serves as an intriguing counterpoint to her chalk-white complexion, black-clad Victorian spinster/librarian look and obvious vampiric presence. Sure, she feeds on children who eventually become her undead, eternally-young minions, but she feels unease at the weird vampires who run rampant in the local wild, a pack whose alarming disfiguring mutations are a direct physical manifestation of the innate evil that lay within them before they were turned. In fact, it seems that her goal in seeking Lila's vampiric transformation has a lot to do with Lila's unabashed innocence, which would allow her to not physically degenerate like the hideous wild suckfaces. We fear Lemora solely because we know what she is and what she is capable of, not due to any truly aggressive nastiness on her part. She consumes human blood solely in order to survive, and she appears to be quite lonely, so she's actually somewhat sympathetic. That aspect really struck a chord in me when I saw the film as a youngster, and I consequently never forgot it.

Who can't relate to the need for companionship?

LEMORA is very much within the same territory as the kid-oriented INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), and the two would make for a cool double-feature for one's children on a rainy afternoon. (I suggest paying attention to your kids' reactions if you opt to run the films, mostly to see the look of "What the fuck?!!?" on their faces when confronted with the films' bizarre, oneiric twist endings.)

Cover art for the DVD release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 -Day 7: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

 "They're coming to get you, Barbara!" And they were...

A true classic whose importance to horror cinema and culture cannot be overstated, the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD reigned for a long time as one of the scariest movies ever made, but today it may seem rather quaint to audiences jaded by the far gorier zombie apocalypse offerings that came in its wake, and that's a goddamned shame. When first released upon an unsuspecting public back in October of 1968, at first glance it looked no different from any of the legion of innocuous, time-wasting low-budget black & white shockers that populated local grindhouses and drive-ins across America, but in no time its grimmer-than-grim and then quite graphic content was traumatizing attendees of kiddie matinees and shocking audiences used to more genteel fare. Genteel this movie sure as hell ain't.

As a bona fide "monster kid" who'd devoured horror movies since I was three or four and religiously read FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and books on the subject like the most fervent of Talmudic scholars, I had heard of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD mentioned as "the most horrifying movie ever made" and was aware of its zombies being clearly depicted in the act of consuming human flesh, so I longed to see it but never got the opportunity during my early childhood. Bitter over never getting to see it on any of the local NYC syndicated TV stations' horror movie showcases, I figured all the hype was probably just another come-on to lure the gullible and fleece them of the admission price, but my chance finally came when I was around twelve or thirteen and I was alone in the house on a stormy Saturday night. The local listings noted that the film would be on at 11:30pm on Channel 7, so I made myself some popcorn, turned off the light in my room, and turned on my black & white TV to the channel in question. Over the next two hours (including commercials), I was treated to what was up to that point the most relentlessly intense horror film I'd ever seen, and it frankly scared the shit out of me. And you know the film bore considerable power when even the periodic commercial breaks didn't douse the tension.

The story is simplicity itself: seven people end up trapped inside a remote, abandoned house somewhere in the vicinity of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as an unexplained invasion of slow-moving zombies surround the place. In short order they realize that there's little hope of escape or rescue from the siege of the undead, so they defend themselves with fire and limited weapons while crudely fortifying the windows and doors with bits of scrap plywood. They receive emergency TV news broadcasts that shed little light on the situation, but the reports state that the dead are rising all over the place and the only way to stop them is to burn them or shoot them in the head. ("Kill the brain, kill the ghoul.") And as if putting up a feeble defense against an ever-growing swarm of ravenous revenant flesh-eaters weren't bad enough, the trapped strangers must also contend with their mistrust and great dislike of one another. By the time it's all over, nobody wins and the ostensible hero (Duane Jones) meets an incredibly ignoble and ironic fate, which leaves the viewer utterly devastated and stranded in a world of doom and utter despair.

In retrospect I was glad I did not see the film any earlier than my tweens, because I knew in no uncertain terms that I simply could not have handled it while in the single digits. Watching the movie on a dinky black & white TV set only added to the experience, especially during the section where the characters watch the news reports. It felt like I was right there in the house with them, even when Channel 7 ran a title across the news segments that read "A Simulation." 

Now a firm supporter of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and its director and co-writer, George Romero, I kept my eyes open for a showing of the film where it would be completely uncut and projected, and it eventually turned up at the local youth center as a cheap show for Westport's tweeners who were (mostly) too young to have yet discovered the joys of stolen booze, pilfered weed and prescription drugs, and the physical fun that could lead to sweaty, backseat conceptions. The uncut version was even more of a revelation, with the brief gut-munching now being unmissable, as was the then-shocking presence of blank-faced nude zombies (that presumably wandered in from a local morgue or medical school). The implacability of the growing zombie horde was also much more effective when seen large, and the stark monochrome imagery read like some horrible latter-day E.C. Comics story, only written from a totally adult sensibility. The film is completely lacking in humor — excepting the famous "They're coming to get you, Barbara" scene, which almost immediately negates its dark levity with the arrival of the first zombie that unexpectedly attacks the Barbara in question — and its bleakness totally affected myself and the other kids who truly lost our horror cherries to Romero's instant classic. Sure, we'd seen horror movies for years prior to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, but for most of us it was that first life-changing moment when the scares were genuine, and from that there was no turning back to the almost corny weekly monster-fests that fired our imaginations as children. With NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, horror finally got real for Americans and bared its teeth like the gloriously nasty beast we always expected it could be. (The same could be said of the impact of PSYCHO in 1960, but that's one of those scary films that walks the fine line between the thriller and the outright horror film, while there was no such ambiguity about what Romero had wrought.)

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD unintentionally gave birth to the zombie genre as we now know it, and while its descendants, several of them made by Romero, may bring more in terms of budget, action and graphic gory content, none of them can match the film that started it all as a feature-length journey to an inescapable Hell on earth. If you've never seen it, it's readily available and dirt-cheap, so watch it with a big bowl of buttered popcorn and make sure the lights are all turned off...

 

 

Poster for the theatrical release. 

 

The autographed photo I got for my niece, Barbara.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 -Day 6: HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964)

There are few places on this earth more psychologically fucked-up than the American south, a fact mined for storytelling fodder to great effect by such authors as Kyle Onstott, Tennessee Williams and the odious Lance Horner (whose GOLDEN STUD is one of the truly great plantation-set sleaze novels). After the critical and box office success of the ultra-fucked-up "hag horror" prototype WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE (1962), director Robert Aldrich wisely looked below the Mason-Dixon Line for the setting for his followup "creepy old broad" movie, 1964's HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE, and that creative decision payed off in spades, allowing for a parade of southern Gothic intrigue, family dysfunction, psychological cruelty and outright madness.

In 1927 Louisiana, during a lavish party at the Collins House mansion, Collins family patriarch Big Sam (Victor Buono) dissuades married man John Mayhew (Bruce Dern) from eloping with his daughter, Charlotte. As John breaks off his affair with Charlotte, telling her he "made a mistake," Charlotte runs away in tears, leaving John alone in the mansion's summerhouse. As John sits with eyes closed, pondering how things have fallen apart, a female figure runs into the room and graphically (for 1964, anyway) hacks off John's hand with a cleaver, then rains repeated cleaver blows down upon him, eventually beheading him (not seen on camera). Shortly thereafter, a dazed Charlotte walks into the party, the front of her party finery drenched in blood. As the body is discovered and all the attending guests stare in disbelief, Big Sam escorts his daughter away from the party.

The narrative then shifts to the present day of 1964, and we learn that Charlotte was sent away to England to allow the murder scandal to die down. Though never convicted of John's murder, Charlotte (now played to the hilt by Bette Davis) has become the town's local "crazy, witchy old lady" and lives, seriously unbalanced and just a bit dangerous when she's got a rifle in her hand, in her father's mansion, well-off but alone, save for her white trash servant, Velma (the inimitable Agnes Moorehead). After repeatedly refusing to heed the orders of the Louisiana Highway Commission to vacate her home so a new highway's construction can proceed, Charlotte calls her sole surviving kin, Miriam (Olivia DeHavilland), for aid in preventing the demolition of Hollis House. Once a poor girl who lived with the Hollises, Miriam arrives and assists Charlotte's doctor, Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten), in the care of her unstable cousin. As Drew and Miriam rekindle a relationship that ended when Drew dumped her after John's murder, Velma fears that Charlotte's cousin is after her money, so she arranges for a Lloyd's of London insurance investigator (Cecil Kellaway), to look into matters. As all of this goes on, Charlotte's sanity takes a steady nosedive as she begins seeing and hearing evidence of her dead lover's presence, and it's only a matter of time before the men in the white coats come to take her away for good...

HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE is very engaging and deserving of its considerable fan base, but for my money it could have done with a nip and tuck here and there. It's definitely overlong at two hours and thirteen minutes, and while its leisurely pace is like a mint Julep-induced hothouse dream that allows us to fully get to know the characters, it occasionally feels like it's taking forever to get from one scene to another. It does, however have some nifty scares, most notably the sight of John's mutilated corpse walking into Charlotte's study and baring a hideous and haphazard neck wound — is it real, or is Charlotte completely barking mad? — and both Davis and Moorehead are a lot of fun to watch at work here, especially the way-over-the-top Moorehead. The film's tag line should have been something along the lines of "Trust No One," and by the end of the movie you'll discover just how tragic Charlotte's thirty-seven-year nightmare of guilt, loneliness, dodgy sanity and status as a social pariah really is...

The bottom line on this one is that it comes in at number three in the hag horror pantheon, a ranking determined solely by its over-length. If it had the benefit of a tighter edit, it would have a firm hold on STRAIT-JACKET's rank in the number two slot, but even then it would still fall short of the superb WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? Now if only this had been written by Tennessee Williams...

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Gay 5: GINGER SNAPS (2000)

Excellent in just about every way, GINGER SNAPS is one of the few werewolf movies to look at matters lycanthropic from a female point of view and also, significantly, link that aspect to matters menstrual. It's not the first time that's been done in horror — Peter S. Beagle's "Lila the Werewolf" and Alan Moore's "The Curse" immediately spring to mind — but the handling of it here involves the universal horror of adolescence writ large and the result is glorious.

This Canadian entry is proof of what can be done with a low budget and a hell of a lot of talent and intelligence. Drawing once more upon the lycanthropy/horrors of puberty theme, GINGER SNAPS deals with two uber-morbid and very close high school-age sisters, a pair of creepy misfits who, like good old Carrie White, have yet to have their first periods. The older of the two, Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), finally starts her menstrual cycle but has the misfortune of that event coinciding with local animal attacks that turn out to be the work of a particularly savage werewolf. The monster catches her newly bloody scent and, in a scene intended to look and feel like a rape (according to the film’s co-scriptwriter), mauls the living shit out of her.

The newly wolfy and hyper-sexualized Ginger (Katharine Isabelle): on the prowl for some meat...

Ginger survives and in no time flat begins to exhibit a hitherto unseen level of aggression, both socially and sexually — NOTE: keep in mind that lycanthropy is a communicable disease — to say nothing of such undeniable signs of wolfing out as getting furry in odd places, her teeth becoming more suited to tearing flesh, and the tail that she’s sprouted from out of nowhere, all of which happens when the moon isn't even full, so you know it's really bad. Ginger's younger sister, Brigitte (Emily Perkins), realizes what’s happening and sets out to cure her sister, and if that doesn’t work, it'll be time for a more permanent solution…

Sorry, but there are some things Pamprin just ain't made to handle.

One of the rare werewolf movies from a female perspective, GINGER SNAPS is highly recommended for its genuine scares, well-handled lycanthropy/puberty metaphor, and its wicked DeGRASSI HIGH MEETS THE HOWLING sensibility. And the first sequel’s actually pretty good! If you choose only one film from this countdown, this is one of the handful you should seriously consider. 

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 4: DAGON (2001)

Oh, the many squirm-inducing pleasures of DAGON, the horror flick that ranks as my very favorite of the current century.

Picture, if you will, a vast undersea expanse, all sound muted by the water that envelops you as shafts of light from the distant surface provide scant illumination. You swim through this seemingly endless dreamlike environment, your movements slow and clumsy, body leaden with the weight of your scuba gear and aided by the beam of a flashlight. Suddenly, through the murky darkness you encounter an opening in the ocean’s floor that is clearly the skillfully crafted work of hands unknown, a wide portal that is at once ocular, oral and vaginal in its aspect. You swim into its yawning maw and curiously explore this tunnel leading to…where or what you cannot begin to fathom. Your hands explore the eerily striated walls of the portal, and as your fascinated gaze scans what lays before you, the pallid face of a beautiful, raven-tressed mermaid smiles up at you.

She swims into clear view and you marvel at her strange beauty as her thick hair swirls about her, borne by invisible currents and exposing her lovely, buoyant breasts. This nubile vision swims over, unafraid, and removes your facemask and re-breather’s mouthpiece. Your senses reel as she kisses you, deeply and passionately, and you don’t even notice you no longer require your heavy equipment to breathe, so caught up are you in the deep-sea maiden’s unexpected ardor.

Then, with a ravenous shriek, she bares a dental array that would give a piranha pause and you awaken with a start.

It was only a dream, but you have just awakened from a harbinger of an infinitely worse, living nightmare from which there is no hope of escape for you or the companions who accompanied you on what was meant to be a relaxing getaway on a chartered yacht off the coast of Spain. You have just entered the world of the fish-god Dagon, and you’re about to learn some dark and ancient truths that will affect you in ways you would never have expected.

That’s the basic setup for Stuart (RE-ANIMATOR) Gordon’s masterful H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, DAGON (2001), the hands down finest of the many cinematic translations of the author's famously creepy works, and it really took me and my buddy Chris by surprise when we rented it to watch during the Thanksgiving weekend some nine years ago. Things get boring as hell in Connecticut during Thanksgiving (more boring than usual, that is) so Chris and I annually search for some flicks with which to kill the time. We drove all over Fairfield County on the night after this particular Thanksgiving, hitting several DVD rental stores before nearly giving up after not finding anything that piqued our craving for any kind of diversion on film/DVD. Our last stop, at some obscure video store somewhere in Trumbull, yielded gold in the form of DOG SOLDIERS — an incredible werewolf movie that I may add to this list of flicks to discuss — and DAGON, and neither of us knew a damned thing about either film. Both turned out to be exceptional but it's DAGON that really got under my skin and it's the one I immediately suggest when asked for a horror movie recommendation. (That surprises most folks who know me since I'm an out, loud and proud werewolf advocate, but DAGON is so good that it overrules my natural affinity for my beloved lycanthropes.)

The story follows the waking nightmare a group of yachters, two couples, find themselves in when their vessel hits something off the coast of Spain and begins to sink. One couple remains on the boat while the other makes their way to the isolated fishing town of Imboca in search of help, only to discover that the place is populated by hideous human-marine life hybrids, the direct result of generations of human women bearing the children of the ancient fish-god Dagon. I will say no more other than to state that the male protagonist discovers some very dark truths during the course of the story and there's even a very weird climax that, from a certain perspective, could be considered a happy ending.

There's a lot — and I do mean A LOT — going on in the narrative and chief among its many malignant wonders (to my way of thinking, anyway) is Macarena Gomez as Uxia Cambarro, the beautiful large-eyed mermaid from the opening dream sequence.

In the dream she was every man's mermaid fantasy brought to alluring life but in the incredibly creepy reality of the remote fishing village of Imboca, she’s the wheelchair-bound high priestess of the evil oceanic god who gets his condomless hump on with mortal women, thus spawning the aforementioned race of human/sea monster hybrids.

Uxia’s clearly one of those creatures, but even though she boasts a pair of floppy, sucker-laden tentacles in place of a scaly fish tail (which she possessed in the opening dream sequence), to say nothing of the enormous, gasping gills on her ribcage, she’s got that wild-eyed-and-crazy look that I find irresistible. (Yeah, you could say I have some issues...)

Crazed, incestuous, sacrificial dagger-wielding evil half-breed or not, I’d love a taste of her saltwater charms. Plus, unlike a traditional mermaid, with Uxia you’ve got a pretty good idea of where the pussy is. Always a plus.

No bullshit, if you haven't seen DAGON, run out and rent it immediately. It's fairly low on gore and violence but it's got an appropriately high creep factor that translates the crawly, sticky/slimy feel of Lovecraft's tales of cross-species interbreeding to the screen, and getting across the flavor of his works had never been truly successful in the movies until this one. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

As KRS-1 so wisely said back in the days, "You can't trust a big butt and a smile."

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2026 - Day 3: RENFIELD (2024)

Giving new dimension to the phrase "Dracula sucks." (The character, not the movie.)

Robert Montague Renfield is a name familiar to anyone who knows the lore of Count Dracula as depicted in the classic 1931 Universal horror film starring Bela Lugosi. In the early 20th Century, Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), a British solicitor, is hired to broker a real estate deal for Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage), who seeks to set up residence in England, and once within the Count's Transylvanian castle to settle the paperwork, Renfield's journey into undying horror begins when he discovers that his host is a vampire. And not just any old undead suckface, either. Count Dracula is possibly the most evil creature on the planet, and poor Renfield is subjugated to his will as Dracula's pathetic slave. Through periodic infusions of his diabolical master's blood and the ingestion of bugs (apparently his main form of sustenance), Renfield gains the gifts of immortality, impossibly fast reflexes, physics-defying agility, super-strength, and hand-to-hand combat acumen unlike anything previously seen by man, and he has used those powers to procure victims for Dracula to feed on for the past 90 years or so. Hopelessly enslaved by Dracula, Renfield lost his family and home, traveling to wherever Dracula finds himself after his latest routing by vampire hunters and making sure that the master's coffin is protected during the daytime. And it's bad enough that he's the complete and utter bitch of the undead aristocrat, but insult accompanies injury as Renfield's existence is one of being Dracula's favorite target for vicious psychological and emotional abuse. The Count strips down Renfield's dignity and self-esteem at every turn, and their domestic situation is the very textbook example of a toxic relationship, and there appears to be neither any end in sight nor a way out.

Skip to 2023. In the wake of their latest run-in with vampire hunters, a confrontation that nearly ends Dracula, the pair relocate to New Orleans, and Renfield once more hits the streets in search of victims to sate his master's insatiable blood lust. At some point Renfield encounters a 12-step program for people in toxic co-dependent couples, and while there the seeds are planted for him bolstering his self-esteem and taking back the reins of his life. But first, moved by the stories of mistreatment related by his fellow 12-steppers, Renfield resolves to kill two birds with one stone and eliminate his fellow sufferer's abusive "monsters" by chloroforming them and dragging them back to Dracula's lair, where his regenerating master can feed on them at his leisure while Renfield suffers no guilt. 

While out hunting an abuser who, unbeknownst to Renfield, stole a sizeable amount of cocaine from the Lobo crime family, Renfield decimates the abusive lover, his cohorts, and the hulking Leatherface-like professional killer "Apache Joe," who was sent by cowardly asshole mob prince Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) to kill the coke thieves and retrieves the goods. Terrified by the gory takedown that he witnesses, Lobo flees the scene and blows through a sobriety checkpoint manned by cop Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), and is promptly apprehended. Teddy is released in short order, which pisses Officer Quincy off to no end because Lobo killed her father, an exemplary policeman who inspired his daughter to join the force, and she harbors an obsession with taking down Tony Lobo and his entire crime family.

When Renfield brings home his haul of bodies for Dracula's feast, the Count berates him for bringing him what is in essence trash, and sends him out again to find blood that is "pure." Renfield cruises a restaurant for suitable fodder, and at that moment the paths of Tony Lobo, Officer Quincy, and Renfield cross in a spectacularly gory shootout/kung fu fight wherein Quincy and Renfield lay waste to a small army of heavily-armed Lobo goons. Renfield's moves are nothing short of astonishing, and when the dust settles, the restaurant is strewn with corpses and body parts, and Renfield and Quicy, now heroes, acknowledge each other with respect. Teddy Lobo, however, has escaped, and he now, on orders from his mob boss mother, Bellafrancesca Lobo (Shohreh Aghdashloo), seeks to avenge his wounded pride by hunting down the mysterious super-badass who wiped out his hit squad. 

His confidence bolstered by his heroic reduction of the hit squad to sandwich spread, Renfield takes the lessons of the 12-step program to heart. He moves out, gets his own apartment, buys colorful new clothes, and in general sets out to fix his life. But he still has to contend with Dracula, who is none-too-pleased at his whipping boy's change in attitude. Upon finding out about the 12-step program, Dracula crashes an evening session and kills all present, leaving a blood-drenched Renfield to be discovered by Officer Quicny and her partner, who automatically assume that Renfield was the killer. But shit really hits the fan when Teddy invades Dracula's lair with another gaggle of hitmen in search of Renfield, and Dracula,  who has been using his regeneration period to begin planning world domination, joins forces with the Lobos and grants Teddy the vampiric "gift," which finally gives him the means to become the badass he always fancied himself as.From there, the mayhem only escalates, and Renfield and Quincy find themselves wanted fugitives. With no other option, the pair team up and take the fight to the fortified stronghold of the Lobo family, where they engage in a final insanely violent showdown with the mob and the Lord of vampires.

Ignoring the fate of Renfield in the classic 1931 Dracula film, RENFIELD can be taken as a direct sequel to the Bela Lugosi horror landmark, the film that lit the fuse of the Universal monster cycle during Hollywood's golden age. Though gory as hell, the film is a pitch-perfect black somdey, and a damned funny one at that. The entire cast is perfect, even Awkwafina, whose presence usually sinks movies for me, and let us not forget that this is a Universal release, so I say it's a rightful heir to the Universal Monsters pedigree while at the same time taking the piss out of it. Horror comedies are a dicey proposition and they more often than not fail at both flavors, but this film absolutely nails the tightrope walk of laughs and scares.

But if I had to single out the one absolute selling point of the film (aside from the amusingly excessive torrent of spewing blood, offal, and severed body parts), it's the stunning performance of Nicolas Cage as Count Dracula. I love Cage anyway, for his cornucopia of over-the-top roles, and his full-tilt crazy histrionics liven up even the worst of the films that he's in, so casting him as Dracula and turning him loose with the material was a stroke of genius. Cage's Dracula is simultaneously howlingly hilarious and utterly terrifying, and I hope his performance here is at least given a nod when it's time for Oscar nominations. He's mean, manipulative, selfish, slyly playful and seductive, and, above all, just a total bastard to poor Renfield. In short, he's simply perfect and the film would not have been half as good without him. No lie, comedic interpretation or not, Cage's Dracula may just be my favorite take on the character.

Nicloas Cage pulls off a bravura performance as Count Dracula, seen here in a dead-on accurate recreation of Bela Lugosi in DRACULA (1931), managing to be simultaneously pants-pissingly hilarious and absolutely terrifying. 

So, I heartily recommend RENFIELD, especially if you are already well-versed in the classic Universal films, and also as a damned good vampire movie in its own right. I will definitely be adding this to my DVD library, where it will occupy a place of honor, right next to my set of all of the Universal monster flicks.

Poster for the theatrical release.