Monster in the Closet (1986)

Surprisingly, in over five years of writing about monster movies, I have never covered anything from the indefatigable Lloyd Kaufman and his company Troma Entertainment, whose run of intentionally over-the-top exploitation splatter comedies are certainly something of note in the realm of B-movies (if nothing else, a few famous filmmakers like James Gunn got their start there.) If Troma’s usual shtick is to take puerile content to its extreme for the sake of laughs, as typified by The Toxic Avenger, then writer-director Bob Dhalin’s Monster in the Closet is something of a pivot, an attempt to do a horror-comedy that’s borderline family friendly—which in practice means no gore and only one pair of naked breasts. That’s real restraint on their part! In place of the usual exploitation fare is a take on the average monster thriller—a little fifties melodrama and a little eighties grunge—that is maybe possibly a bit sillier than usual.

Pulse (1988)

Programming Note: I’ll be on vacation next week, so the next scheduled movie post will be sometime during the week of August 20th. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The idea that our increasingly technological lives set us up for trouble has been a recurring theme since the twentieth century (and probably before that), updating itself whenever some new convenience becomes entrenched in the routine of the average westerner. Pulse is the late eighties version of this, set in a home with such advanced appliances as VCRs, microwaves, and air conditioning units, all things that can be turned against us when under the influence of something sinister. In the mind of the devoted Luddite, our homes used to be a solidly independent thing of wood and stone, but the advent of appliances not only makes people overly reliant on them, but invites an outside presence that we do not even understand, let alone know how to control. In this case, the presence takes the form of a malevolently intelligent jolt of electricity, something that can undermine the entire modern home—it’s another high concept horror, but one with a surprising amount on its mind, fanning out not just into the technological aspects of contemporary living, but with a specifically eighties critique of suburbia.

Invaders From Mars (1953 & 1986)

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch has had me thinking about horror stories for children on and off for the last few months—that was a movie that completely homed in on a very specific kind of dread aimed squarely at kids, the sense of a family in collapse, the people you love suddenly turning against you, or authority figures simply not listening. An older and influential movie in that vein is Invaders From Mars, an early entry in the 1950s Science Fiction film boom that was apparently made in a rush in order to beat the George Pal-produced War of the Worlds to theatres (giving it the distinction as the first colour alien movie in American theatres)—it’s a smaller film, very clearly, but trades the spectacle of the bigger alien invasion movies with a nightmare scenario that aims squarely at the kids in the audience, utilizing many of the same triggers that Snake Girl eventually would. Although it might come off as hokey to modern audiences at times, its sometimes very inventive concepts scarred/inspired a generation of genre film fans—and to prove that, we need only look at the fact that one of the most influential horror directors of all time remade it in the mid-eighties, attempting to retain its atmosphere while updating its visuals to appeal to a modern audience.

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

The streaming site of cult movie distributor Arrow Video came to my attention last year, and their selection of genre fare is a curated bunch of weird world cinema from across the ages, so I felt like covering a few creature feature selections currently streaming on there (most of it seems to be available on Blu-Ray as well, for collectors and lovers of special features.) What initially brought me there was their complete collection of Daiei’s various monster series—the entire Gamera saga (including the Heisei trilogy and Gamera the Brave), and both the Daimajin and Yokai Monsters trilogies…basically, a lot of things I’ve written about before on this site. With that in mind, a good place to start this month would be with another Daiei monster mash, which brought me to The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, which is sort of that? It’s complicated.

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa, who directed all but one of the Showa Gamera films (this released nine months after Gamera vs. Viras, and three months before Gamera vs. Guiron—Yuasa was clearly a workhorse), this movie is a loose adaptation of multiple comics by horror master Kazuo Umezu, best known for manga like Cat Eyed Boy and The Drifting Classroom. The collected version of the stories is called Reptilia in English, and while many plot elements and even specific moments are taken from them, this is a completely new story. Even so, it carries over some of the horror ideas from Umezu’s work, which were often written for a younger audience, but are filled with truly grotesque imagery (contrasted with Umezu’s sixties manga kewpie doll figures) and cruelly play on specific childhood fears. This is a strange movie that goes in many different directions, but throughout it is the consistent story of a child trying to find familial love by enduring a constant stream of nightmare situations.

Wendigo (2001)

Continuing our examination of Shudder’s selection of films, we’re jumping ahead a good 81 years from our last subject to the uneventful year of 2001, and to a very different sort of movie. Wendigo, written and directed by indie horror auteur Larry Fessenden (who had previously directed the acclaimed vampire flick Habit in 1997, and more recently co-wrote the PS4 horror game Until Dawn, which seems to have some thematic connections with this movie) skews more on the psychological thriller side of things, and while there is a titular monster to actually qualify this for the Creature Canon, it’s not something you’ll be seeing a lot of in the movie itself. It’s really more of a vague presence than a physical force (at least, until it suddenly is physical force), a darkness skirting along the edges of much more down-to-earth story—which, if you know anything about the legends the movie is ostensibly pulling from, is actually rather appropriate. As well, if you have any less-than-favourable preconceptions about indie films, this may be one that fully lives up to most of them…but we’ll get to that.