Risen From The Dead - The Rolling Horror Thread 2019

Watched last night: Lost Hearts. Oh dear. This is 1973’s offering in the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas series and I’d been hearing really good things about it. Sadly, this just didn’t do it for me. It’s far from terrible, and there’s lots of mist-drenched atmospherics to pass the time but after the magnificence of the preceding entries, this just isn’t anywhere near as scary. The plot here, based on MR James’ short story, finds an orphaned young man going to live with a long-lost relative. It quickly becomes apparent that the relative has some sinister plot in mind involving his young ward; to add to the intrigue our young protagonist keeps encountering the ghosts of two children, with very long fingernails and a predilection for the hurdy-gurdy… This one definitely sets itself apart from the others in the series – the ‘hero’ here is not the antiquarian of previous installments and at 35 minutes, it’s significantly shorter than the prior episodes, meaning that there’s less time to really lose yourself in the story. I don’t know, maybe I was missing something here; plenty of people seem to love it, regard it as the best in the series and find it genuinely terrifying, so what do I know? A lot of the positive reviews I’ve read of this mention that the viewer originally saw it when they were a lot younger and that the imagery really stayed with them, and that I can totally understand. So don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself, and maybe you’ll it love too. Me, I’m hoping for better things from The Treasure of Abbot Thomas…

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More Ghost Story for Christmas goodness earlier this week with 1974’s The Treasure of Abbot Thomas. We’re back in familiar territory here with a typically James-ian scholar unearthing something that he shouldn’t have. I’m happy to say that I enjoyed this much more than last week’s Lost Hearts. Although this bears many similarities to earlier installments in the series, this is by far the most typical ‘mystery/detective’ story so far, with Michael Bryant playing the Reverend Somerton hot on the trail of the titular treasure. This one saves most of its scares for the end, although as always with these, director Lawrence Gordon Clark demonstrates his mastery of creepy atmospherics. Much of this was shot on location at Wells Cathedral in Somerset with the location adding massively to the tone of the piece. All in all, another highlight in a series that I can’t recommend enough. Will probably take a break from these for the time being, simply so I don’t burn out on them.

One final thing: just learned today that Clive Swift, who played Dr Black in two of these adaptations and who also featured in the amazing Dead of Night episode, The Exorcism, has passed away at the age of 82: Clive Swift, actor in Keeping Up Appearances, dies aged 82 | Television | The Guardian

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Watched last night, Await Further Instructions…

This Brit film featuring a semi-recognisable cast had a bit of buzz last year, so was mildly excited to watch it.The set-up is pretty good - dysfunctional family find themselves thrown together for a Christmas which turns out to be somewhat unconventional. However, the longer the film goes on and the mystery unveils the less compelling it is. It features not very subtle nods to the Milgram and Stamford Prison experiments, but the characters’ motivations fluctuate wildly which makes it hard to really care about them. The attempted meta ending is a bit shrug. Has some interesting design however, and the writer/director had clearly watched Videodrome A LOT before making this. 5/10

Watched The Predator last night. Hmmm. It’s brainless fun and there are moments where it feels like a long lost classic 80s action film. But…it’s a total mess, tonally all over the place, and generally just questionable. It’s like whenever there was a decision to be made during the creative process the team looked at all the options, weighed them up, and plumped for the wrong one every single time. It’s still better than Predators, mind.

Watched last night, Dead Of Night - The Exorcism. Got the nod from @SloameOcean in last year’s thread…

As ^that review suggests, this is really good. Genuinely creepy from the get go without ever being explicit. The claustrophobic single setting is very effective, but it is the four-strong cast who absolutely nail it. Only 50 minutes long, but is deliberately languid with its pacing. Nicely chilling pay-off too. Definitely worth checking out :+1:

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Watched a couple of things that have recently popped up on UK Netflix

Woman finds out her wife is a psycho. Some moments in this that proper made me wince, you can feel bones cracking. Good performances, some lovely locations.

Director of the (first) Strangers, distributed by A24. Very old school style monster film, small cast, limited setting, minimal exposition, mostly practical effects. Thought it was very decent, managed to raise a lot of tension when it needed to, and Zoe Kazan was good as usual.

I enjoyed both of those too :+1:

The long haired one from What Keeps You Alive is in The Purge TV series and is pretty good in that too. Look forward to seeing her in more stuff…

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Ah I thought I recognised her!

Need to go back to that, only watched the first couple.

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:wave:

really want another “holy shit!” type experience, the last few years have been so good for horror (the vvitch, it follows, hereditary, etc).

So glad to hear you checked this out and liked it. :smiley:

bow about some horror books friends? i really like kelly link, not horror per se but some of stories are very creepy and weird.

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Saw Escape Room (new one in the cinema, not the 2017 one on Netflix) tonight.

It’s a pretty solid 6/10 overall, and it has a proper, proper franchise-bait ending, but I thought some of the individual set pieces were great. Particularly loved the upside-down bar, with the disappearing floor and the horrible distorted Petula Clark loop. Could almost feel myself going mad with the characters..

Sorta hope this turns into a new Saw, with a ludicrous ambitious multiple film narrative arc. Just… better.

Climax

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Have you read any John Langan? His book, The Fisherman, from a few years back, is one of my favourite recent weird novels. Also, if you like haunted house/religious weirdness, I’d recommend Gethsemane Hall by David Annandale. This really freaked me out the first time I read it; I revisited it a couple of years later and it still really held up.

Also, if you’re an HP Lovecraft fan and haven’t read Alan Moore’s Neonomicon/Providence books, I’m guessing you would really enjoy them.

oh hell yeah, i’m putting these into my kindle today! cheers

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Watched last night, Escape Room…

Not, no that one - the 2017 one. No not the one with Skeet Ulrich/Sean Young, the other 2017 one. Jeez, who would have thought that taking the recent escape room craze and turning it into some sub-Saw fodder would be such an obvious idea.

Anyway, this was rubbish. Several entirely dis-likeable characters go on a birthday escape room and get picked off one by one in not particularly imaginative ways. One female character gets to spend almost the entirety of the film naked for…no reason. It’s done broadly in real time, so in its favour it is only 80 minutes long. The ending offers zero resolution, presumably because the writer was grubbing around for a sequel. Weak. 3/10

Yes - I did deliberately pick a terrible poster for this but wow…did this really get a cinema release?

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Going to see this on Sat… Looks pretty good.

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I’m going to the Glasgow screening of this, completely love The Final Girls.

Anybody watching Kingdom on Netters? Feudal Korean zombie shit. Only watched 1.5 episodes so far but it is pretty fucking good!

Watched recently: I Eat Your Skin and Blue Sextet. So… these came to my attention basically as extra features on Grindhouse’s Blu-Ray release of the somewhat more well-known I Drink Your Blood. I Eat Your Skin has little to connect it to IDYB other than the fact that it formed the lower-half of a notorious 70s double-bill, the irony being that no blood is drunk in IDYB and no skin is eaten in IEYS. Instead, with IEYS what we get is a relatively mild Del Tenney-directed film in which a womanizing author is whisked away to the ominously titled Voodoo Island by his agent to investigate rumours of mysterious goings-on. Apparently, this was originally (barely?) released under the title Zombies, and has way more in common with earlier voodoo-themed movies than with what zombies would become once George Romero got his hands on the template. While no classic, this is a fun watch. It’s shot in black and white and the opening has a kind of Carry On meets James Bond tone that keeps things moving along. It starts to feel more like a traditional horror film once our intrepid writer makes it to Voodoo Island, but Tenney still maintains a lightness that some might find boring but which I really dug. Ultimately, as long as you don’t mind some blatantly chauvinistic behavior, you could probably screen this at your next family-friendly Halloween party without ruffling too many feathers.

The same can most definitely not be said about Blue Sextet. The first two syllables here should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about where this film’s coming from. This is the first feature from David Durston, director of IDYB and if you don’t go into this expecting anything like a horror film, you might have a pretty good time here. Our plot here focuses on the apparent suicide of a guru-like figure and the efforts of 6 of his followers to determine whether one of them had a more active role in his death than might originally have been thought. Cue 6 narratives from each of the characters detailing their experiences of their deceased leader. Cue also some groovy lounge music, some pretty trippy visuals, a Grand Guignol-inspired stag movie and more early 70s nudity than you can shake a stick at. Ahem. Not sure what this says about me, but I really enjoyed this. Its portmanteau approach keeps things moving and means that even if you don’t like the current story, you don’t have to wait too long before another comes along. This made a nice change of pace from my usual viewing and I’d recommend it if you want a night off from horror and have the house to yourself…

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