The arrival of October means the official onset of Halloween.
You needed teenagers, you needed tension, you needed a body count, you needed a villain.
Their unsung cousin isThe Slumber Party Massacre.
Image Via New World Pictures
Its strength was meant to be its effectiveness as an entrant.
It was supposed to beScream, just a decade-plus ahead of schedule.
Unfortunately for the writer, her director was not interested in satire.
Image Via New World Pictures
HisVengeance Trilogyis poignant, brutal stuff that should be seen by even the most puritanical of horror fans.
Included in Criterions Halloween programming is his 2009, post-Trilogyvampire offering,Thirst.
One might remember 2009 as a quite vampire-minded time in popular culture.
Image via Focus Features
To that end,Thirsthas read the room.
Its got violence, its got sex, its got romance.
Its about an accidentally undead priest and his torrid affair with a woman wanting for physical intimacy.
Image via New Line Cinema
Lucky for our priest, she is quite open-minded about how much blood-sucking nihilism this intimacy can contain.
Its kind of his thing.
Or, not in the mortal peril sense.
Image via New Line Cinema
Some like to vicariously explore the fear of heartbreak, and so here comesGus Van Sant.
He is an artist with dual spirits.
The first spirit is a European cinema studying art-cannon who almost never misses his target.
Image via Criterion
One could argue that the only example of his successfully merging those competing instincts isMy Own Private Idaho.
This one is a noir thriller with racial and class politics on its mind.
Post-1980s excess, American cinema was ready for relatively grounded stories in general.
Image via Strand Releasing
This might be due to it wearing its genre intentions so brazenly.
It wants to tell a crime story, and it wants to tell it with style.
The co-lead isLaurence Fishburne, but he is also the films MVP.
Image via De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
There are 11 teens altogether, but their camp supervisor isemphatically certainthere should only be 10 of them.
That means, one of them is an imposter.
ThisCzech filmhas elements of a paranoid thriller and heaping portions of teen horror.
Or was it a person?
She is clumsier, foggier, and not quite herself.
Could that have really been a little boy she killed?
She doesnt want to know, and its that tell-tale unknowing that becomes her slow, psychological undoing.
