Occult

The Amityville Horror (1979)

The Amityville Horror (1979)

We're not 30 seconds from having hit play, and we already know this is going to be something else entirely. Why? Three things. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, American International Pictures, and Samuel Z. Arkoff. Why The Amityville Horror? This, for me, is the definitive horror film. It's also the definitive 70s horror film. The Amityville Horror is writ large all over my childhood. Growing up, early 80s, it was big, big news. This was a real inflection point. This was “Based On a True Story,” every one of those words, capital. This was based on a book, this was based in a double distance, almost Brechtian way on a book about a real-life series of events in the lives of two families in one Long Island, New York home.  

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

Many films feature memorable seance scenes or scenes of some kind of interaction between the living and the dead or the never-alive, facilitated through genuine mediumship. Some of which we've discussed on this podcast, like Insidious, Drag Me to Hell, The Legend of Hell House, and Talk to Me. And some of which we have not, like those in Seance on a Wet Afternoon and Hereditary, City of the Living Dead, Poltergeist, The Others, A Haunting in Connecticut.  Some of which seem akin to tonight's picture, Ouija: Origin of Evil, in that the locus of the supernatural activity is often a sensitive child and that the supernatural entities that seek a vessel to communicate are tied to the place history of a home or another physical space.  

Insidious (2010)

Insidious (2010)

When the movie came out, it was a bit of a sensation. It was a real genre juggernaut. I remember the poster, and being annoyed by the poster. “Insidious is.” I -S, Is in red in the middle of the title. I remember seeing the trailer. Boy, did they make liberal use of that “Insidious is.” Fashioning it into the marketing tagline to beat all marketing taglines, “Insidious is… insidious.” Which in fact, it kind of is, because it has a way of insidiously making you feel like maybe you've seen it before. And that might give you a false sense of security or complacency, until it expertly subverts or exceeds your expectations, terrifying you. But its claws are sharp and getting sharper, and they get under your skin. Because it is a little self-referential and it's a lot genre-referential.

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

The Legend of Hell House, or as I like to call it, Florence and the Machine, it's like a charming little Christmas movie. And it has an uncredited appearance by Michael Gough as Emeric Belasco, who effectively serves to pull Hell House into a lineage of Hammer and Amicus horror pictures that have brought us up to the point at which this was released. But this is, I think, very different from those films.