From the Vault: October '21 Streaming

Essential Horror; Underrated Horror; "Vamps, Sluts, Witches, and Thralls;" Christopher Lee; and Midnight Movie Horror

October 4, 2021

Greetings ghouls and girls! October (and October streaming) is finally here.

I'm firing up my doo wop Halloween songs, thinking of the Home Depot yard skeleton and how he'd look sitting in my apartment with a little flower crown on, and beginning to dream up my Halloween costume (I'm thinking Edith Massey in Female Trouble, what about y'all?). It's my absolute favorite time of the year (the so-called "spooky season") and a particularly great time to be a horror head. Possession and Arrebato —  two largely unavailable cult masterpiece horror movies — are getting restorations and re-releases into theaters, Hitchcocktober is back, and Criterion Channel is showcasing classic Universal Horror films for October. We're honoring spooky season with a streaming month of ALL. HORROR. We've got FOUR horror themes and a seasonally appropriate actor's showcase to kick off this month of malevolence and mischief. And for those disinclined to imbibe in the harder stuff, I've marked non-scary options with light pink and blue color coding (for babies, get it?). So come up to the lab....and see...what's on...the slab....

The Disgusting, Shameful, and Profane: Essential Horror

Carrie (1976) Dir. Brian De Palma

Horror, the so-called "body genre," gets one month a year to receive the respect and attention it deserves year round. Horror is the reason I started these streaming programs in the first place, and this program is a primer, remixed from my original list to include all of the information you need to know about the general pantheon. If you're looking for a starting point for horror, this is hopefully helpful to you! It's got old classics and new contenders from all over the world, cult favorites, highbrow and lowbrow and every brow in between. Horror is, in many ways, the definitive film genre about the human condition, because there is one thing that unites every single person on this planet: that we are alive and will one day die. Horror forces us to confront our own insecurities about violence and death, unearthing the ugliest aspects of humanity while finding resilience in the very struggle against despair and defeat. It shocks, repels, seduces, and entertains. It holds a mirror up to society, exposing social ills that we've let fester and run rampant. It helps us understand our own bodies, as complex and grotesque and marvelous and transitory as they are in all their forms and machinations. It's a populist genre, often made on micro budgets that require significant creativity and ingenuity. It's one of the few genres with a historically feminist bent, providing outsized space for female protagonists and stories as few other genres have (what is "the final girl" but an opportunity to interrogate women's shared struggle against the violent patriarchal society that terrorizes and governs them?) It's an international genre, with different cultures translating their mythology and folklore into visual stories that can be shared globally as they examine the barriers between life and death. Horror is chic, grotesque, cheap, Camp, scary, lurid, and just plain fucking fun...it's everything. It's spooky season.

Streaming Now on Tubi, RT score 40 percent: Underrated Horror