To count down the few days left before Mischief Night and it’s follow-up, Halloween, I will be posting a day-to-day guide to my favorite horror films. All are highly recommended. Most will date from the 70’s/80’s, as I’m less familiar with 90’s/00’s horror….or maybe I’ll turn that around, I just thought of some great recent horror, let’s just see how this goes, because it’s my world to control.

Alone in the Dark (1982) – Slasher formula gets skewed all to hell in this one. Donald Pleasance, Jack Palance, and Martin Landau do what they do best: Chew up that fucking scenery with some absurd overacting!! Inventive kill scenes (a hospital orderly is broken in half across another man’s knee) and a strange humanization of the villains shows some desire to go leftfield with what is otherwise a genre exercise. It’s as if the screenwriter had a minor stroke prior to the last three rewrites. Best scene: Jack Palance wondering into a punk rock club and becoming oddly captivated by the band, The Sic Fucks (who were real, I believe), doing “Chop Up Your Mother.’

PIN: A Plastic Nightmare (1988) – Legitimate attempt at ripping off Psycho or Flowers In The Attic, a lot of folks see this movie as a serious and engaging affair. I don’t. Terry O’Quinn (Stepfather and Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy, or as I like to call it, S2MRD) will always be a poor man’s Craig T. Nelson, but I must hand it to him for this one, a career definer/destroyer that required some grapes. Put simply, this is a “psychological thriller” about an anatomically correct medical dummy that a schizophrenic boy believes to be alive, due in part to his father using it as a therapeutic tool. There are plenty of “maybe it IS alive” scenes, and the sequences of Nelson (and the boy/teen lead) using ventriloquism through the dummy are blue-blooded, roll-in-the-floor gut-busters.

Rituals (1977) - A Deliverance rip that scared the living shit out of me as a kid, and this was the edited version on the Saturday night “Creature Feature” (Memphis’ horror showcase on regular TV in the 80’s…also where I watched Dogs, Frogs, and Ants). Still sort of creepy and worth checking out for the sheer alienation of the landscape shots and a few mildly disturbing moments. Has Hal Holbrook, so, walk fast, don’t walk. Maybe you shouldn’t rent this one. I don’t want complaints.

When A Stranger Calls (1979) - A classic. Could be in my top five horror films, or could be number one; I fluctuate. This is the original “the call is coming from inside the house” movie. Slow burning, with virtually no onscreen violence, but nonetheless manages to be super eerie. With Charles Durning as the obsessed cop/detective. He’s so fat in this film that he literally rips a set of swinging doors from their hinges during a foot chase scene. And why does Durning’s character chose “throwing nails” as his only weapon? Do “throwing nails” exist?