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It's almost that time of year again! Welcome to the Racketboy Month of Horror 10: The Rebootening!

As per tradition, this thread will act as a catch-all place for horror movie watching and horror-game playing (as long as it's not directly related to this months Together Retro. Seriously, go post in that thread instead) and anything else horror related that you wish to talk about during the month of October 2019.

Here's a list of past threads for reference:

dsheinem's MONTH OF HORROR! What horror games will you play? (games)
dsheinem's MONTH OF HORROR 2011! What games are you playing? (games)
noiseredux' month of horror (movies) (movies)
The MONTH OF HORROR 3: Season of the Dream Warriors (games)
noiseredux October horror film spooktacular 2012 (movies)
The Month of Horror PART IV: dsheinem vs. noiseredux (combined games and movies)
Month of Horror V: the Seed of dsheinem & noiseredux (combined games and movies)
noiseredux Presents THE MONTH OF HORROR VI (2015) (remake) (movies)
The 2016 October Horror Marathon (movies)
Spooky time games for spooky times (games)
Month of Horror 8: The Hellworld Gospel Resurrection Legacy
Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil Legacy


What are you planning to watch, play, read and listen to?

Can anyone tell me if the Netflix film In the Shadow of the Moon qualifies? I got a horror vibe from the first part of the trailer, but then it seemed to go in a sci-fi route that wasn't what I expected, so I'm not sure if I should watch it for this.

Also, it's time to delve into Prime's horror collection again. I may pay for a reason movies there this time...

Awwww yeah! I've been in full Halloween mode since the start of September and am really feeling the spirit this year!

Earlier tonight I rewatched Elivra: Mistress of the Dark (1988) for the first time in over a decade; I got to upgrade from VHS to a snazzy new blu-ray! Let me tell you guys, if you like the character Elvira at all and you haven't seen it, it's a must-watch! Elvira's basically goth Mae West, she drives the coolest car in movie history, has a punk-rock poodle, and lives in a rainbow house. The movie's sense of humor really gets me and even watching it alone makes me laugh out loud. It's extremely goofy and campy in the best way.

I'm also planning on making my first Halloween mood table this year. Despite being a longtime fan of Dinosaur Dracula, I've never made one before now! It should be good.

Ack wrote:Can anyone tell me if the Netflix film In the Shadow of the Moon qualifies? I got a horror vibe from the first part of the trailer, but then it seemed to go in a sci-fi route that wasn't what I expected, so I'm not sure if I should watch it for this.

Hrm, I'm not sure. Everything I see categorizes it as a scifi/mystery/crime procedural, but not horror.

Nemoide wrote:I'm also planning on making my first Halloween mood table this year. Despite being a longtime fan of Dinosaur Dracula, I've never made one before now! It should be good.

And we demand photos once it's done!

your banners get me every year, michi. The Amy Adams made me lol.

noiseredux wrote:your banners get me every year, michi. The Amy Adams made me lol.

You would be giving me the finger too, bum. I like to think of this thread as "When Evil Gets an Upgrade."

So, serious question time. I'm going through the various offerings on streaming services and my home collection, but I want to know if there is some area that I should prioritize:

Sequels or unseen entries in series?
Foreign or domestic films?
A particular kind of horror, such as zombies, werewolves, cannibals, killer animals, etc?
A specific decade?

This is a serious question to pose. Also, who else wants to be guided by the crowd toward incredible and terrible horrors?

Also...who wants to build a "Racketboy forum recommendations" list for folks who want to check out some amazing horror movies?

IT’S TIME!!!!!!!

My plan for this October is quite ambitious to ensure I am completely burned out on horror by the end of the month.

First, movies! Amazon Prime is a treasure trove of great (and not so great, but obscure) horror films, and I will be mining it this month. Some of the films I’m planning on watching include:

Goodnight, Mommy
Spider Baby
Opera
The Bloodstained Butterfly
The Love Witch
Frightmare
Behind the Mask
The Case of the Bloody Iris

And many more! I also still have a few discs with horror films I haven’t seen, and I’ll try to get through a few of those too.

Television! I loved Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and I also adored the 1960s film adaptation. I’ve read the Netflix series expands on the book quite well, and if I binge watch a show this month, it’ll probably be that one.

Books! I’m finishing up a book right now, but once I’m done with it, I plan on reading the first Walking Dead graphic novel before diving into Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. I think I can easily get through both by month’s end. My son and I are also reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book together, and I think we’ll finish that before the end of the month too. (It is such a perfect book for kids at this time of year, and although we’re only one chapter into it, we’re already enjoying it a lot.)

Finally...games! I’ll be playing Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles for this month’s TR, and I’ll be writing about it in that thread. I also plan on clearing out some creepy apps from my iPad by playing through:

The Room: Old Sins
Oxenfree
Tormentum

If I have time, I may start up REmake, but I really want to finish up both Eternal Ring and Skyward Sword before embarking on another console game.

Ack wrote:So, serious question time. I'm going through the various offerings on streaming services and my home collection, but I want to know if there is some area that I should prioritize:

Sequels or unseen entries in series?
Foreign or domestic films?
A particular kind of horror, such as zombies, werewolves, cannibals, killer animals, etc?
A specific decade?

This is a serious question to pose. Also, who else wants to be guided by the crowd toward incredible and terrible horrors?

Variety is the spice of life. Don’t prioritize anything. I think you should watch a variety of horror films in different horror sub-genres. That said...focusing on obscure films available on streaming services will benefit us all by guiding us to movies we might overlook otherwise.

Ack wrote:Also...who wants to build a "Racketboy forum recommendations" list for folks who want to check out some amazing horror movies?

I do! Let me know what you’re looking for, and I’ll get started on it. (My specialty is...Giallo.)

Hey, first film is down!



Mulberry Street (2006)

One day, rats in Manhattan suddenly turn fiercely aggressive, and they now transmit a plague which infects the bitten and mutates them into violent rat-human hybrids. The residents of one condemned tenement building on the island are now trapped, struggling to deal with the growing horror and the crumbling building they're all being evicted from.

Here's a fun question: can a horror film made for $60,000 actually manage to be an effective piece of cinema? Nick Damici and Jim Mickle prove in this microbudget movie that yes, a solid script with believable, realistic characters can in fact do exactly that. Jim directs Nick as he plays an aging former boxer known as Clutch, who is waiting for his wounded soldier daughter Casey to return home. But in the meantime he's busy dealing with the potential of dating a neighbor, Kay, talking to the two old guys upstairs, or spending time with his best friend, a flamboyant black man known as Coco. It's the little things in their lives that make them seem believable, like Kay struggling with her groceries, Coco potentially dealing with his own feelings for Clutch, or the elderly Frank and Charlie dealing with their bad hearing and need for oxygen while bantering constantly. The building feels dilapidated, but more importantly, it feels lived in.

I was thinking this year about possible themes and elements that I've seen recurring, and the truth is, rat movies had actually popped into my head for some reason, so this ended up fitting the bill. There is a small pantheon of these kinds of flicks, including the likes of Willard (original and remake), sequel Ben, post-apocalyptic Rats: Night of Terror, made-for-TV-movie The Rats, and the great Peter Weller vehicle Of Unknown Origin. Yeah, even further defining killer animal movies into animal-specific categories, you can come across some weird and cool stuff.

Prfsnl, you asked for some attention to obscure films on a streaming service. Well, here you go. This movie is streaming for free on Amazon Prime. While you can see the limitations in the budget (the few instances of special effects are blatantly awful), that money went to making sure the script was shipshape and the talent was well worth it. It's not the greatest microbudget film I've ever seen; that's reserved for the stupidly amazing The Head Hunter. Yet it's one of the earliest from the Damici/Mickle combo, which has given us Stake Land, We Are What We Are, and the Hap & Leonard series, along with Damici's work in films like the geriatric werewolf movie Late Phases.