October Streaming
This Month, We're all Peter, Peter [Lorre] Pumpkin Eaters: Spooky Season Programming, Including Final Girls, Scream Kings, and the Filmmakers Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock...
Welcome to October streaming. Are you feeling a slight chill race down your spine? Does your heart rate quicken, just a bit, and your pace pick up, ever so slightly, as we descend headfirst into spooky season? As these days grow shorter, do you long for the edifying light of the sun? I don’t. I’m the damn Phantom of the Megaplex, scuttling between film screenings and recoiling from the glare of a judgmental sun, longing for the forgiving night, content to report from within its inky shroud. This newsletter was forged in the hellfire of Halloween season four years ago and has altered the trajectory of my life and career in the years since, so horror programming will always be near to my blackened heart.
I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately — fear of the other, said to be encroaching on our lands, allegedly draining our resources and turning our cities into cesspits — and fear of the self, which externalizes itself onto the former. Fascists fear a society led by love, rather than governed through fear, and sometimes, it feels like that fear will win and swallow us all whole. This month, we’re featuring final girls: women who look directly into the abyss, feel fear, and re-emerge out the other side, banged-up, bruised, and traumatized…but alive. Fear is potent, but temporary: the movie ends, and we re-enter the light. Fear is the mind-killer, we’re told in Dune Phantasm (1979), a film featured in our “Scream Kings” program, which examines the unique positioning of men who feel fear in horror movies. “We all enjoy, shall we say, putting our toe in the cold water of fear,” Alfred Hitchcock famously drawled about the allure of his movies, also featured this month, and in conversation with the (generally incredibly horny) works they inspired. And we’re featuring an actor who was the direct cause of so much fear over the years: Peter Lorre, a gentle fellow who forged our cultural distrust of diminutive men with combovers and European accents.
These programs accompany our master horror list, which offers up-to-date streaming information for 565 (!) horror films of note that can be watched this month. Take the fear out of choosing what to watch and put it in our hands… just hope they aren’t the hands of a former murderer, welded onto a new body… because that actually occurs in more than one of the films featured on our list.
I Take Back Every Bit Of Energy I Ever Gave You: The Final Girl Hall of Fame
“Leave me alone,” Sidney Prescott, scream queen at the heart of Wes Craven’s self-reflexive 90s slasher Scream (1996) begs, near-silent, in the climatic moments of the film, credited with re-popularizing the slasher genre for the MTV generation. A victim of a masked, seemingly omnipotent killer, who has killed several of her loved ones and chased her through endless cinematic set pieces, Sidney is just exhausted. “Leave her alone!” we scream in turn, rooting, with cinematic convention behind us, for her survival. But Sidney Prescott, a straight character in an otherwise parodic slasher, makes it through the night, and by her own hand: when she dons her killer’s disguise to enact her final act of liberation (incorporating Jamie Lee Curtis via a TV playing Halloween in the process), it’s the moment the “final girl” enters the postmodern era. Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson said of the films: “As a gay kid, I related to the final girl and to her struggle because it’s what one has to do to survive as a young gay kid, too. You're watching this girl survive the night and survive the trauma she’s enduring. Subconsciously, I think the Scream movies are coded in gay survival.”
It’s a simple formula that never fails to hit: as long as there’s hope, we can ride out the night, outlasting the ones who want us wiped out.
The “final girl” — simply, the female character who makes it to the end of the movie without being murdered — is so ubiquitous to slasher cinema and modern horror in general that its conceit has been analyzed, parodied, and deconstructed both in films and by the people who watch them. What began as an early feminist trope in films — like Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), Black Christmas (1974), and (perhaps most famously) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which ends with Marilyn Burns, drenched in blood, narrowly escaping into the bed of a random pickup track and laughing in relieved, near-hysterical triumph — became the bedrock of modern horror, as well as its intellectual study. As Leatherface wields his phallic chainsaw fruitlessly into the light of a beautiful Texas sunrise, it’s an easy metaphor for the cultural gains made amidst the second-wave feminist movement, and the moment the final girl’s victimhood gives away to liberation: she made it. She overcame the impossible. She lived, bitch!
Horror cinema of the 20th century, popular lore goes, operated on a series of unspoken rules that governed the denouement of the prototypical “slasher” narrative: the sluts and non-white characters die first, leaving behind one perfect, virginal (and white) “final girl,” who has seemingly earned her right to survive by being pure of heart and steadfast in her morals. Laurie Strode, Lila Crane, Kirsty Cotton, Nancy Thompson… these are fictional — and, physically, relatively weak — women who are stalked, terrorized, threatened, and harassed by malevolent forces, only to beat the odds and live to survive another day in a cultural climate that, at best, doesn’t care about their safety. It serves as a release for the audience, too: the great proverbial unclench at the end of the movie that allows us to walk out safely into the unknown night.
By the time that self-reflexive slashers like Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), and Urban Legend (1998) came around, the old rules fell by the wayside, mutating with the more sex-positive influence of third wave feminism and giving us final girls less burdened by moralizing cultural forces, though, frustratingly, no less white (with some notable exceptions).1 Instead of fending off baddies with whatever blunt and/or sharp object they could pick up,2 they got guns, knives, wits, plans, and — in the case of Courtney Cox in Scream, Manuela Velasco in REC (2007), or Angela Goethals in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) — cameras, capturing the truth despite mounting physical threats to their persons (again, easy metaphors). The explosion of horror in the aughts and 2010s — thanks to low budgets, high returns, and (between home video and streaming) increasingly diverse distribution models — only intensified the cult of the final girl, who continues to evolve in scope and depth, but never really stops feeling relevant... even if slasher films are more irreverent than ever (if the triumphant success of Terrifer 3 (2024) is any recent indicator). It’s Looney Tunes logic: cat chases mouse, mouse escapes, mouse drops something large on top of cat’s head.
Fetch the bolt cutters and enter the Final Girl Hall of Fame. This program doesn’t follow purist models of what constitutes a “final girl”: if she (as far as we can tell) makes it to the end, overcoming victimization, trauma, and heartbreak to do so, she’s earned a place within these lauded halls.
Feels like You've Got a Real Monster in There: Scream Kings
Much has been made of the comparatively outsized space horror has granted female protagonists, to the extent that “scream queen” is an easy label to assign to actresses who regularly appear in horror films: Jamie Lee Curtis, Heather Langenkamp, Sheri Moon Zombie, Jessica Harper, Maika Monroe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead... but identifying “scream kings” is a bit trickier. Men occupy an interesting, precarious space in horror films: they are targeted by outside threats, obviously, including those armed with literal weaponry, but they aren’t always codified as victims, in the traditional sense, and, if they are, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Because how are you, as a man, a thrall of Dracula? While women, with their perceived fragility and sociopolitical disadvantage, are perfect protagonists for horror films, serving as vulnerable ciphers of sex and violence, against which the monstrous can enact their fury, men’s ritual slaughter can feel… much less personal. They’re not necessarily hunted; to be hunted is to be vulnerable; to be vulnerable is to be feminine. They’re picked off, or tortured, or they’re the hunters, like the trio of Jaws (1975), who mount a vessel to take down their great white whale, only to confront their own hubris. But horror subverts, and interrogates, and gender roles have always been malleable within the genre. Films in which men are actively targeted tend to be a little more…subversive. Consider the genre-upending influence of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), which casts Bruce Campbell, as handsome as Cary Grant, as the target of a mysterious entity, to sick (and increasingly hilarious) ends. Campbell, perhaps our most prolific scream king, may kick ass, but he’s also the butt of the joke: the evil invades his body, terrorizing him from within for our entertainment. Consider John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), a commercial and critical failure upon release, in which a whole base of big, burly men struggle to fight off an invading, shapeshifting force.
The 1980s in particular were a hotbed for homoerotic and queer-coded horror films starring masculine protagonists, and dominate this list of the most interesting scream kings: from the easily-seduced pretty boys of The Lost Boys (1987) and Near Dark (1987) — both of which seem to draw clear parallels to the AIDS crisis — to the dishy victims of gross-out body spectacles like Society (1989) and Brain Damage (1988), men were running head first into danger only to become the damsels in distress of their own pictures. Perhaps most infamously, Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) replaced final girl Nancy Thompson (Langenkamp) with a final boy, played by Mark Patton, who is pursued by Freddy with the kind of sexual overtones usually aimed at scream queens: the source of the film’s conflict is gay panic, with Freddy acting as a manifestation of the young man’s suppressed sexuality.3 In Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1981), scream king Jimmy McNichol is accused of being gay just as he’s the subject of his creepy aunt’s murderous, covetous intent. Nightbreed (1990), another obvious allegory for homosexuality and the AIDS epidemic from queer writer Clive Barker, makes a case for its male hero embracing the monstrous in a cruel, discriminating world. My favorite films in this program feature men who inflict terror on their own bodies, like Brain Damage or The Fly (1986) or Videodrome (1983): films in which men must come to terms with garish, disruptive mutations to their form (thematically, something that is not examined as much outside of horror cinema). This program picks through horror history to find some of the more interesting men in peril, from Frederic March’s crisis of self in the pre-Code classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) to the internal terror corroding Justice Smith in this year’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024).
Hitchcock and Sons: The Films Inspired by the Master of Suspense
It might seem like a fairly obvious litmus test, but to be a great filmmaker, one must first be a great cinephile: the greatest directors study and steal from the best, and it’s a safe bet to steal from the man who had pretty much everything figured out when it came to making movies, Alfred Hitchcock. The man’s unmatched filmography is flush with films that have influenced generations of filmmakers, and not always in ways you might expect: Psycho (1960), seen by many to be the first American “slasher” for its infamous shower scene, influenced a genre of grab-and-stab flicks, but also Raging Bull (1980) — in its frenetic editing and bloody splatter — and Parasite (2019), in its careful arrangement of a dominant physical space (and its subterranean secrets). Night of the Living Dead (1968), the zombie film that helped beget American independent filmmaking, is just The Birds (1963); the fraught central relationship in Rebecca (1940) directly inspired Phantom Thread (2017); and every director pulls from Vertigo (1958). Every one of them. Even Hitchcock’s comparatively lesser-known espionage classic Foreign Correspondent (1940), which includes a famous sequence in which a murderer disappears into a sea of umbrellas, has been copied and recycled in countless cinematic works. The late, great William Friedkin, who actually directed the final episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, once praised the director’s work “not only for the advances in technique and the invention of certain techniques, but for the complexity of their stories,” advising aspiring filmmakers to study the director’s work instead of going to film school. Hitchcock’s ethos is a simple, but fruitful approach to visual storytelling: there should always be something you are not telling your audience, under the surface, that urges them to dig deeper.
Hitchcock Fanboys are a breed all their own: Brian De Palma, inarguably the greatest devotee, amassed his own impressive catalog of work liberally borrowing from the maestro. Pedro Almodóvar employs Hitchcockian motifs to examine the nature of disguise, presentation, and malleable forms of gender identity and sexuality. Park Chan-wook builds upon Hitchcock’s work to explore cultural taboos. So who is the biggest fanboy? Is it François Truffaut, who so admired the filmmaker that he interviewed him about every single one of his films, forming the basis for an iconic book (and whose 1968 revenge classic The Bride Wore Black serves as a running homage to the director’s best bits)? Is it Gus Van Sant, who infamously made a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1998), proving that no one can actually recreate the director’s work? Is it Paul Verhoeven, who admitted to unconsciously remaking a Hitchcock film not once, but twice: Basic Instinct (1992) from Vertigo (1958) and Black Book (2006) from Notorious (1946)? Is it you? Is it me? (And how can you tell the difference?) Decide for yourself with this sampling of Hitchcock’s films — and a few fun cinematic works directly inspired by them — and drop out of film school.
Strolling Through the Crowd, Contemplating a Crime: Peter Lorre and the “Other” in Classic Cinema
How does a man who once trod the boards for Bertolt Brecht cap his career in films like Muscle Beach Party (1964) and The Scent of Mystery (1960) — the first (and only) film released in “Smell-O-Vision”? In short: he flees the Nazis for Europe, then Hollywood. He spends his career cultivating an otherworldly persona seemingly anathema to American Essentialist identity, which turns him into a punchline. Short, stocky, Jewish, foreign, and well-versed in playing characters relegated to the shadows, few contributed more to American genre film than Peter Lorre, whose performances shaped the look and tone of films determined to plumb the depths of human darkness. In the script for John Huston’s proto-film noir, The Maltese Falcon (1941), Lorre’s character, repeatedly said to have a “high-pitched, thin” voice, is described as “Dark, small-boned, of medium height… he has narrow shoulders, plump hips… he speaks the rather too-perfect English sometimes heard out of foreigners.” In the script for Casablanca (1942), widely regarded as one of the greatest American films of all time, Lorre’s character (“REEEEK! REEEK!”), a war profiteer smuggling exit visas, is described as a “a small, thin man with a nervous air… if he were an American, [he] would look like a tout.”
As much if not more so than major stars, character actors and contract players shaped the texture of films during the Golden Age of Hollywood, in which studios maintained assembly line-like production of films starring actors within their stable. Largely playing identical roles across films, these actors appealed to audiences by embodying easily recognizable stock characters and archetypes, and could be a kind of draw all their own. After their easy, sordid chemistry as modern treasure-hunters in The Maltese Falcon, Lorre and co-star Sydney Greenstreet — another classic Hollywood baddie — appeared in nine films together across five years, including three underrated film noirs for Jean Negulesco (a director who once called Lorre “the most talented man I have ever seen”): The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), The Conspirators (1944), and Three Strangers (1946), embodying the always-timeless “big guy, little guy” formula. Perhaps no other character actor from that era was as memorable, nor as distinctly unnerving, as Peter Lorre, whose unmistakable, accented rasp, bulging eyes, partial combover, and small, stocky stature marked him as distinctly “other” within the landscape of early 20th century cinema.
Born in current-day Slovakia (then Austria-Hungary) to German-Jewish parents, the performer moved to Berlin in the late 1920s where he became a celebrated stage actor, working with Brecht in productions of “Happy End” and “Man Equals Man.” His first credited screen role would put him on the international map: German expressionist figurehead Fritz Lang considered him the perfect casting for a child-targeting serial killer in the perennially creepy M (1931) — an early template for the modern crime thriller and the director’s first sound film — which established an unsettling aura through Lang’s formalist style and a whistled “In the Hall of the Mountain King” leitmotif. Repellant and oddly sympathetic, Lorre brought an incredible degree of nuance to a monstrous role with a performing style that bridges silent and sound cinema: throughout the film, he’s hunched-over, skulking, and paranoiac; a creature unsettled in his own skin. He’s so convincing as a creep that it would typecast him for the rest of his career.
Forced to flee Germany due to the rise of the Nazi Party (and its takeover of the German film industry just two years later), Lorre found work in exile, appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s massive British hit, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), a part he learned phonetically as he did not actually speak or understand English at the time (something that Hitchcock apparently learned two weeks after casting him). Lorre would appear in another film for the ascendant British director, Secret Agent (1936), after he’d already departed for the United States. His early Hollywood career includes a litany of fascinating projects, all of which cast him as some iteration of his M predator, including Josef von Sternberg’s truncated adaptation of Crime and Punishment (1935), in which Lorre is perfectly cast as the murderous (and instantly remorseful) Raskolnikov of Dostoevsky’s classic novel. For Karl Freund, the German expressionist cinematographer of Metropolis (and innovator of the multi-camera sitcom format for I Love Lucy, never forget), he starred in Mad Love (1935), an extremely unnerving rendition of Maurice Renard’s oft-adapted Les Mains d'Orlac: a “mad scientist” (Lorre, with his head shaved) replaces a pianist’s mangled hands with those of an executed murderer, driving the man to violence against his will. These roles traded on his perceived Otherness to paint him as a sinister, malevolent force; elsewhere, he was cast as Japanese secret agent Mr. Moto — a sort of follow-up attempt to ape the Orientalist pulp appeal of Charlie Chan — in a string of yellowface movies that were extremely popular at the time but increasingly depressing for the actor, who struggled all his life with a morphine addiction due to chronic gallbladder problems, plaguing his career and keeping him in fairly poor health. Essentially, it didn’t matter what race, ethnicity or national background Lorre actually was in these movies: he played all of them and none of them. He wasn’t a WASP, and that’s all the viewer really needed to know. Our longstanding association between foreign cultures and criminality is codified by filmic signifiers that shape our perception of these cultures as inherently threatening, because they are unknown to us. In Lorre’s case, he was the signifier. He’s not like us, and that’s terrifying.
Lorre’s casting in The Maltese Falcon (1941) changed the trajectory of his career, as it brought him into the fold at Warner Bros. with a stable of actors including Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Conrad Veidt, Claude Rains, and Paul Henreid, who all (more-or-less) appeared in Casablanca (1942), its spiritual follow-up, The Conspirators (1944), its clear knock-off, Background to Danger (1943), as well as wartime hit Passage to Marseille (1944). In these films, Lorre’s a duplicitous, scheming cretin who uses the moral vacuum created by the war4 for his own survival and benefit; a true rat boy. It can’t have been easy to be perceived as such, but Lorre seemed to realize somewhere along the way that parodying his monstrous screen persona would afford him a chance to flex the true range of his skills, and he settled into a form of perma-parody. In the tremendous screen adaptation of black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), he plays “Dr. Einstein,” an alcoholic doctor specializing in cosmetic surgery for criminals who somehow manage to escape capture, and his deadpan delivery and soft-spoken, affable demeanor, despite the gruesome nature of his profession, are some of the best bits of comedy in the film:
Lorre never really had something like respectability as a performer (his final film role was in, of all things, a Jerry Lewis comedy), and his post-War career is mostly littered with self-parody, but the actor always managed to find small, interesting ways to complicate and subvert his on-screen image — such as his dancing turn in the Cold War musical Silk Stockings (1957), where, sadly, he was dubbed, or his memorable appearance in Bogart’s cult Maltese Falcon parody Beat the Devil (1953). He also pivoted to television, appearing as the villainous Le Chiffre in the first screen adaptation of Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel Casino Royale for CBS anthology series Climax!, originally broadcast in color (though only a black-and-white kinescope of the production, located in 1981, remains). He further appeared in a number of episodes of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including “The Man from the South,” memorably flipped in Quentin Tarantino’s contribution to Four Rooms (1995).5 At some point, he began working for American International Pictures, appearing alongside other popular horror artifacts like Vincent Price and Boris Karloff, including a truly hysterical appearance in the late Roger Corman’s Poe short story triptych Tales of Terror (1962), in which he outdrinks Price’s character at a wine tasting despite being prohibitively drunk. He’s very funny!
Lorre’s onscreen tics — his nasal lilt, outbursts of emotion, cut-off laughter, and high-pitched accent, even the pronounced lines of his face — became synonymous with pop cultural depictions of psychopaths, creeps, ghouls, and madmen, particularly once his caricature made it to Merrie Melodies’ short animated films, which incorporated a vaudevillian sense of humor, pulling from recognizable cultural artifacts for parody.
Perhaps it is a bit sad that the man — who, by all accounts, was apparently quite kind, generous, and intelligent, if shy, soft-spoken, and haunted by addiction — was minted in popular imagination as a monster. His popular association no-doubt exploits an inherent bias within the viewing audience, who (to this day!) reacts to a thick European accent or a particular swarthiness like a Pavlovian trigger: do not trust this man. Yet Lorre was (and is) incredibly popular with film-going audiences, thanks to that strange kind of likability he possessed as early as M. For whatever reason — be it his sly sense of humor, or the rich, unrepentant glee his characters took in behaving badly — you root for him, even as he’s committing terrible deeds. We like the shtick; we like that he scares us! “You know I can get away with murder,” Peter Lorre once told a reporter, as the legend goes. “The audience loves me.”
That’s it for October! Stay safe, stay spooky, and see you back here in November. You know, these days, I feel my life just like a river running through. Don’t bother asking for explanations…
Final girls of color are still somewhat of a rarity in modern horror, though I’ve made a concerted effort to incorporate several into this program, featuring talented performers like Jada Pinkett Smith, Sanaa Lathan, Loretta Devine (!), Georgina Campbell, and Teyonah Parris.
In one particularly gruesome act of climatic violence, final girl Deborah Benson rams her fist down her attackers throat, causing him to choke to death, in Deliverance-knock-off Just Before Dawn (1981).
Patton, who was closeted at the time and subject to cultural ridicule, later turned his experience into a documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019).
During the war, Lorre hosted an anthology radio program for servicemen called Mystery Playhouse, which was broadcast on the American Forces Network and relied on his signature menacing, accented drawl; each episode opened with Lorre waxing poetically about the episode and general themes of horror and terror.
“There is some inherent obstacles in this undertaking…first of which being the fact that I’m not like Peter Lorre in that TV show. I’m not some sick fuck traveling the country side collecting fingers.”