Happy Horror Movie Day

Time for Halloween again! Here are three more movies that you won’t see on television – well two, one of them shows up from time to time.

Jigoku (1960) – A college student is racked with guilt after he witnesses his friend commit a hit-and-run. While waffling over whether to go to the police everything goes hideously wrong: his fiancée is killed in a car wreck, his sick mother gets worse in a poorly run nursing home and his new girlfriend and her mother start plotting to kill him – turns out that they are the relatives of the hit-and-run victim, who also happened to be a yakuza. In the end everyone dies and goes to Hell.  Yup.

This is another weird Japanese horror movie. I’m not spoiling the ending for anyone: everyone coming into this movie knows what happens at the end, mainly because of the title of the film itself. Jigoku is the Japanese word for Hell, and boy is this Hell a doozy: filled with all sorts of surreal imagery and gory, hideous tortures. It’s interesting that all of the films characters end up there: perhaps director Nobuo Nakagawa is commenting on how everyone in life has baggage and we all end up in our own private Hell – no one is perfect, and in a moral universe everyone is guilty of something and therefore everyone who ever was and is and shall be will suffer for eternity in a universe of pain and agony. Heartwarming.

Young Frankenstein (1974) – Frederick Frankenstein (that’s Frahnk-en-steen) is an American surgeon who inherits his infamous grandfather’s Transylvanian castle and laboratory. After showing initial reluctance to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps he decides to make his own Creature, unfortunately his none-too-bright assistant Igor (that’s Eye-gore) supplies him with a bad brain (“Abby Normal”) and the resulting monster goes on a rampage with results both pathetic and hilarious.

This one is actually popular (it comes on the TV every so often) and is technically a comedy making fun of horror, but I’ll let it in here just because it’s so damn fun – plus it nails all of the Frankenstein tropes brilliantly so I had to include it. What makes this film work is that it’s not just another mindless parody – Mel Brooks obviously loves the old Frankenstein movies and it shows. The lab equipment is right out of the 1931 Boris Karloff movie and the whole thing is filmed in black-and-white. Everyone nails their roles, and makes the characters more than just comedic caricatures. The humor in this film is more subtle than normal for Brooks (it’s not as obvious as Blazing Saddles, for example) but that works to this film’s advantage, not its detriment.

Vampire Hunter D (1985) – In the FUTURE vampires have entrenched themselves as Nobles, preying on human society with only the elite Vampire Hunters keeping them in check. One of these Hunters, a mysterious dhampir (half human/half vampire) known only as “D” encounters a young woman in a remote village by the name of Doris who has been assaulted by an ancient vampire lord. Together they fight the evil count and his minions in order to prevent Doris from being taken as an unholy bride in a wedding from Hell.



This is a dumb but fun eighties anime flick. It’s by the same director who brought you Fist of the North Star, so you know that it’s going to involve buckets and buckets of blood. And it does. There is also gratuitous nudity, freaky villains, and just weird shit in general so, you know, your average anime horror fare. This is based on a series of Japanese young adult novels, but you don’t need to seek them out as they’re not that well written. You might want to seek out the illustrations though, seeing as the artist for those books (and the character designer for this movie) is Yoshitaka Amano, who has an interesting art style (he also did the character design for the first six Final Fantasy games).


Well, there you go. One American horror spoof and a double-dose of weird Japaneseness.  I worry sometimes about the Japanese, but then I remember that I am American and that my country is the strangest in the world – and to many, the scariest.


Happy Halloween.



Next Month:  There will be no next month.  The Pharonic Fantasy Theatre will take a break for November while I cower in fear under the sheets and wait for the election to be over.