Every Halloween if I’m able to I like to write an essay on one of the great horror movies. This particular one is very important to me in part because it’s the specific movie that turned me into a horror fan. I’ve written about it before but here I try to get at both why I still love it and how it speaks to me about the world today. Hopefully I’ve done it justice. Happy Halloween, everyone.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET begins either in the past or a dream. A montage plays inside a rectangle within the larger frame, in which the hands of Fred Krueger (Robert Englund, SLASHED DREAMS) construct what will be a major element of his iconography: his four-bladed right-hand glove. Maybe the thought at the time was that a horror movie couldn’t just jump out with a crazy weapon like that – they had to establish it.
The scene fades to black as the title comes up, and the next shot, of the blades cutting through fabric, fills the screen. We’re definitely in a dream as Tina (Amanda Wyss, FORCE: FIVE) runs from a white void into a flooded, steaming, labyrinthine boiler room where she’s stalked by Freddy, who calls her name, cackles, makes his (new?) claws squeal against metal like fingers on a chalkboard. Right when he grabs her she wakes up, escaping into reality, but she finds four slashes in her nightgown. (read the rest of this shit…)
I enjoy the work of director Jeremy Saulnier. He did the bleak, regular-dude-sloppily-getting-revenge movie 
Many years back I wrote about 
THE BIRDS. By Alfred Hitchcock. The one where the birds attack. Good movie. He was a total bastard to Tippi Hedren but she was good in it. Her first movie. Then she raised Melanie Griffith and a bunch of lions.
Every October for the last 14 years I’ve been doing what I call “Slasher Search,” where I try to scrounge up some obscure slasher movies you probly never heard of, preferably from the ‘80s, and usually still only available on VHS. Originally the hope was to discover some little-known gems from this particular subgenre and era I enjoy, or at least get to dissect some strange ones, and I achieved those things for a long time. But between the finite number of stomachable films of this type, my deep scraping of the barrel, and the fine work of Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and other blu-ray companies to shine their bigger spotlights on movies like this, I’m having a hard time finding fresh material these days. There will always be new horror out there to discover, but not ones that I considered eligible for the name Slasher Search.
I started to think I was reaching the end of the line last year, but some of you kindly encouraged me to keep going even if it meant adjusting the rules to a different type of movie. So I’m taking your advice. This year I’ll try exploring a different era of also-ran low budget exploitation by treating Tubi (and possibly other ad-supported streaming services) as my video store, searching for titles I’ve never heard of, to see if I can find some watchable ones. I went through a page of 1,000 horror titles and jotted down a long list of not-well-known vaguely slasher-ish ones, and I’ll pick some out to sample. We’ll see how it goes. No guarantees are being made. (Except that I started late due to all that 
SPEAK NO EVIL is the English title for the Danish film Gæsterne (The Guests). It’s directed by Christian Tafdrup, an actor who was in The Killing and Borgen, and he co-wrote it with his brother Mads. I watched it on Shudder with only a vague awareness that it had been on some people’s lists of best movies in the banner horror year of 2022. I keep forgetting the title and questioning whether it’s actually SEE NO EVIL or HEAR NO EVIL, but no, it’s gotta be SPEAK, ‘cause there’s a kid in it with no tongue. Anyway, it was a successful viewing. If my stomach was coal it would’ve turned into diamonds.
COBWEB (2023 American film) is not to be confused with COBWEB (2023 South Korean film directed by Kim Jee-woon). Totally different thing. This is a new horror movie that wafted briefly through theaters during the OppBarbenheimerie era, came out on disc a few weeks ago, now is on Hulu. I knew nothing about it except that some people had said it was good, and that served me well. It’s a pretty simple story that benefits from a sense of unfolding mystery, so I’ll try to tread lightly for a bit and then warn you when it’s time to start stomping.
NIGHT OF THE HUNTED is a really tense, unsettling single-location thriller just released to Shudder. It’s directed by Franck Khalfoun (who did the 
Are you familiar with the screenwriter John Logan? He’s been nominated for three Oscars – for 
THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT is an enjoyable, well-put-together modern slasher movie. I saw and liked the first chapter of the 
