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You can call me Stu, I’m in my 20s and I’m a long-time horror fan.

This is my humble corner of the internet where I post long-form reviews of movies nobody cares about, but hey, it’s fun!

Every once in a while, I’ll host a promo event where anyone who sends an ask within a certain timeframe gets a short review of the movie(s) they suggested. Fun, right? If you don’t want to wait for the event or want a longer review, though, I do have a k0-fi set up. Just DM me a screenshot of your tip and the movie title, and you’re guaranteed a longer review within about a week (I do work full time, so please be gracious about the turnaround. Please also understand that you’re paying for an honest review; I can’t guarantee I’ll share your opinion, I can only guarantee the review will be thoughtful)

I’ve got no limits as long as it’s horror of some variety, and I welcome a challenge. Don’t feel like you need to hold back any suggestions— I’m not going to seek out anything illegal, obviously, but I’m not a stranger to effedupmovies and the weird shit within.

Youth you’ll never get back. Youth you may not even miss, but which so many people will play up as the best time of our lives. Was it really, though? Teenagers are assholes. Times were different. People are hateful now, yeah, but people were hateful back then too. I miss grunge and Y2K fashion and idogs and inflatable furniture and the freedom of being able to go outside as a kid but I wouldn’t exactly want to live in the fucking 90s or early 2000s. I wouldn’t go back, even if I am nostalgic. And I think there’s some very potent horror in that nostalgia.

I’ve been hyping this up for a while and it’s finally time I tackle WNUF Halloween Special, V/H/S 94, and V/H/S 99 all together— splatterfests, sure, but all poignant time capsules of a specific genre of media: the home recording. Not family movies, though a variety of those certainly plays a major role in both of the V/H/S titles I’ve selected. No, instead I mean tapes copied from local TV channels, ads and all. There’s something very unique about the experience of watching a film on TV. I think few of us would actively choose that route these days, when films are available seamlessly at our fingertips (unedited and uninterrupted). Yet, there is something so universally nostalgic about both local TV channels and VHS tapes for a certain generation of us that all three of these movies capture perfectly (albeit some aspects are captured better than others in each of the films).

The first film chronologically for both release and setting is WNUF Halloween Special. A gem of a film set in 1987, it pretends to be a home recording of a local news channel’s Halloween broadcast. Segments about dentists buying back candy, about Christians protesting the holiday, and the grand finale: a longer special about a news reporter and a team of paranormal investigators exploring a supposedly-haunted house. Things go, unsurprisingly, haywire. The plot of the film is paper-thin and predictable, the acting is sublimely cheesy (exactly what you want and expect from smalltown news personalities), and the effects are alright. A little blood here and there, a dead cat— nothing beyond that.

Where the film shines is its dedication to capturing the experience. The sound of the tape being pushed into the VCR, the blue screen— local commercials, and fast-forwarding through ones you’ve already seen or segments you find boring. “Kids, ask your parents permission before calling!” “Playing with drugs... is playing with DEATH.” “All the rock you could want, on the QUARRY!” — It’s truly a masterpiece. I feel like a little kid sitting too close to the TV screen with my bucket of Halloween candy next to me every time I watch this movie. It has its flaws, sure, but there is something so tangibly charming about a window into my childhood now preserved only on old Between The Lions tapes, captured here in a film released in 2013. I remember that broadcast on my TV. I remember my old Halloween costume, and my orange plastic pumpkin. I was that kid, watching in awe and horror was my local TV anchor hosts a call-in seance live. We all have, I think, if you grew up in that wonderful window from the late 80s to the early 2000s. It’s delightful, and WNUF Halloween Special has cemented itself as one of my favorite holiday films of all time.

V/H/S 94 is second, again for both release and setting (and isn’t that perfect?). Overall, this film takes itself the most seriously. While WNUF is not an anthology film, both of the V/H/S entries are. Our frame story here, Holy Hell, follows a SWAT unit on a drug bust that turns into a snuff film ring bust that quickly goes sour. As the film progresses, so to does our little unit— deeper and deeper into the facility, uncovering more and more eyeless bodies and strange TVs, until it’s finally revealed that the two female officers were the leads of the snuff film cult all along. The take a camera to the head of the final SWAT officer; lenses shatter and brain chunks splatter.

 Overall, the shorts in this film are delightful, and all in various ways. Storm Drain is most similar to WNUF, as it also parodies a news broadcast. Being a direct broadcast from the mid-90s, the camera quality has improved distinctly— only to drop again for the next short, The Empty Wake. After all, a funeral home certainly wouldn’t have the same quality cameras as a news station. You could (and people certainly have) argued that The Empty Wake is middling at best; a simple and obvious story that excels mostly with its use of effects and occasionally with its building of tension. Yet the use of three fixed cameras calls back to early survival horror in a delightful way. It feels almost Poe-esque, a sort of 90s Gothic I’ve never really seen before. Overly-haunting funeral music, a raging storm and a sea of brown. Brown chairs, brown carpet, ugly light fixtures that constantly threaten to go out. Its delightfully evocative of the sort of empty beige wasteland of many Midwest baptist churches. The only things unique here are the girl and the casket— and whatever monster lurks inside.

The third short, The Subject, is my second favorite. The effects are stunning and CGI is used sparingly, and I’m a sucker for mad scientist/Frankenstein’s Monster stories. Though it makes the least effort to maintain an “authentic” appearance, the creature and set design elevate it. There’s also a delightful emotional core; the girl becomes a monster of the soldiers’ own creation, and it is Jono’s kindness that helps re-ground her. I can only say it’s unfortunate Jono died, considering they each save the other (and he’d only ever been kind to her, trying to protect her from the start and even lying to his commander about seeing her crawling away before they run into each other again in the midst of her killing spree). I’m not sure whether I would’ve preferred that they both died together, or both escaped together, but having only the girl survived feels... odd. Especially considering the world she is escaping into is likely to hold little kindness for her.

Interestingly, the fourth short (and by far my favorite) has a similar sort of “monster of your own creation” through-line, though with a distinctly more serious twist. A white supremacist extremist group is preparing for a domestic terrorist attack, using vampire blood as a bomb. It’s got the grittiest, most low-quality footage of any of the shorts (which, again, makes sense — they’re using cheap, handheld cameras) and feels the most real to me. It’s set near Detroit, but the snowy wilderness is familiar as someone who grew up in the northern midwest. Each day, at a certain time, the militia members shoot the vampire in the head. One such scene opens the film— the vampire pleads for his life. Each subsequent time, the vampire pleads less and less, until he simply kneels in silence and accepts a bullet through the skull. At the end of the film, through a series of drunken mishaps, the vampire is released and all of the militia members are killed. The vampire uses the militia’s fail-safe to open a large window and expose himself to sunlight, killing himself and destroying the compound. It feels less tragic than The Subject, but remains very understandable. When you’ve spent most of your life being demonized, sometimes you do just want to let yourself become the demon.

The third and final film, V/H/S 99, is more consistent aesthetically than V/H/S 94, as it leans almost entirely into handheld, home movie style film-making. It is also mostly focused on teens suffering the consequences of their actions. There was certainly a specific brand of mean-spirited, Jackass-style “prank” content prevalent in this era alongside the blossoming newgrounds community of shock animations and flash games. All that to say, teenagers of this era fucking sucked.

Shredding, the first short, features a group of irreverent douchebag punks who break into an abandoned music club only to mock the deaths of Bitch Cat, the last band who played there before a fire broke out inside the building. Only one of them shows any concern for their actions, but all of them die gruesomely— and in a delightfully gory bit of effects work, their dismembered corpses are reassembled and puppeteered by the zombified ghosts of Bitch Cat to perform one last song.

This is followed by Suicide Bid, pivoting from punks to bitchy sorority girls who decide a great hazing prank would be burying a desperate girl alive for a night. Of course, as shitty as that would be on its own, there also has to be a ghost involved. The ghost of Giltine attacks Lily as the coffin slowly fills with rainwater after a storm starts, and the sorority sisters come back to a mysteriously empty coffin the next day. Lily gets the last laugh by trapping all the other girls in their own coffins, having made a deal with Giltine to offer the sorority girls in exchange for her own soul.

Ozzy’s Dungeon pivots from revenge against shitty teens to revenge against shitty adults— all while parodying Nickelodeon game shows. It’s gross, it’s sleazy, and it’s wonderfully demented in a SAW-esque way. It’s also an interesting look at failed child stardom. Donna was supposed to be the one who got out, the one who made it big, but now her leg is mangled. Her own mother says it looks like dog meat, goes on this revenge crusade that Donna barely takes part in. When she does, her mother takes over for her. Her father makes token protests but ultimately lets the mother take the lead— and the game show host was always more worried about appearances than anything else. At the end of their little vengeance plot, the host helps Donna and her family sneak back onto the set of the show to meet the titular Ozzy and get a wish granted (the promised prize of the show which no one ever won). Donna’s mother prompts her to wish for for a new car, for 15 million dollars— Donna wishes for everyone who used her to die.

The frame story of this film, stop-motion animated segments of a teen’s home movie made with toy soldiers, feeds directly into the fourth short, The Gawkers. We’ve returned again to the world of shitty teens— this time, to popular teen boys. They think they’re hot shit and treat women as objects, trying to sneak panty shots of girls in a park before being chased off, and later spying on Brady and Dylan’s neighbor. It’s hardly the most enjoyable watch, but it is quite gratifying. The teens who treated women as nothing more than sexual objects are themselves turned into literal objects. It turns out the neighbor is a gorgon, and she caught the boys spying on her through her webcam thanks to Brady’s programming skills. She attacks them all and turns them to stone for invading her privacy, betraying her trust and sexualizing her without her consent. This is the short that relies most heavily on CGI (to create the Gorgon) and it does feel extremely weak. The gorgon doesn’t seem to have any weight to her and the snakes on her head do not move naturally in the slightest— budget constraints are understandable, but this is why I much prefer The Subject’s merging of practical and digital to elevate the practical and execute what couldn’t be physically built.

Last, but certainly not least, is To Hell and Back, a short following to videographers recording a Y2K party hosted by a coven of witches as they attempt to summon a demon into the body of a willing host. A lower demon crashes the party, and as the witches banish it back to hell it grabs onto the two cameramen and drags them to hell with it. The only short that has nothing to do with vengeance (or teens), the two men must instead venture through the pits of hell in an attempt to find the demon being summoned and catch a ride back to earth. They succeed, but ruin the coven’s summoning and are killed for it (one of them using his blood to write the name of another lower demon who had helped them escape in the witches’ book before dying). The film closes as the videographers’ camera runs out of battery.

Each of these films captures a very specific era in the lifetime of VHS as a medium, and captures it extremely well. From the image and color distortion of WNUF’s faux home recording to the differences in camera quality to match the shorts’ settings in V/H/S 94 as we transition from newscasts to funeral homes, to amateur documentaries. V/H/S 99 is more consistent than 94, as stated, but this is inherent to all of their shorts being filmed by amateurs— the most polished segment is the beginning of Ozzy’s Dungeon while the actual show is being filmed. It’s an excellent depiction of the astounding jump in technological quality in such a brief time. At least in what was available to professionals. Perhaps the most charming part of this era of VHS is that while technology got smaller and cheaper for consumers, it did not necessarily get better. A cheap, handheld video camera is still a cheap handheld video camera.

In their commitment to this horror time capsule project, WNUF Halloween Special and most of the shorts from the two V/H/S films rely heavily on practical effects. It is, at times, bad-looking. You know it’s a guy in a rubber suit. The leech-like vampire isn’t really chewing a guy’s face off. Giltine is... well, an unarticulated latex mask with equally unarticulated hands. These monsters are fake and you know it, and that is part of the charm. It is a low-budget 90s film you picked up from the bargain bin, a home-burned DVD your friend gifted you of their high-school slasher created during summer vacation. It’s a guy in a mask, and it might be a guy you know, but you’ve got to suspend your disbelief. You’ve come home from Blockbuster with every intention of seeing that guy in a mask and believing he is a monster out to torment assholes, and it’s golden.

I’ve said it before, seen it said by others, and will absolutely say it again: bad practical effects will always be better than bad CGI. I don’t care how cheap it looks— if there’s a real, tangible thing in front of the actors I’ll buy it so much more than PS1 graphics slapped against the background. Something with weight, something the actors can really react to. A good performance can make bad practical effects passable and passable effects amazing. You forget you can see the wire in certain shots until some dude on IMDb points it out in the trivia section. The actors sell it. The film scares you. You’re 14, 15, 16 and you snuck a horror movie out of the rental place your parents would never let you watch normally. You’re tuning into the late-night broadcast of Ghoulies or Reanimator or Killer Klowns from Outer Space. It scares you because it’s not something you’re supposed to see. None of these tapes were something we were ever supposed to see, but here they are.

Here’s death, here’s gore, here’s horror. Here’s a man in a mask. Here’s a cheap video camera and here’s the nostalgic sound of your tape thunking into place in your VCR, whirring to life as a commercial flickers across the screen as that home recording of your favorite movie comes on. The one you were only supposed to see once, that Halloween night, preserved carefully now on your shelf lined with hand-labelled tapes. Maybe it’s not as scary as it used to be, but it’s joyful! It’s a trip down memory lane, an experience not many of us will get back (at least not the way we all individually remember it), but we can still plug in any of these masterfully crafted movies and get a dose of nostalgia whenever we want. They’ll always be there— and you can always be a friend.

Distant horror sequels are rarely good— this is a simple fact. With a gap of over twenty years between two films, the second is bound to suffer. For what it is, however, I think The Lost Boys: The Tribe has a lot of charm.

A disgraced former surfer moves with his sister to a small beach town where they wind up clashing with the local group of vampires, led by another former surfer. What you quickly learn is that the siblings are the children of Michael and Star, and they are quickly taken in by Edgar Frog, who has hermited himself away in this town shaping surfboards when not hunting vampires.

The girl, Nicole, is quickly swept up in the world of the vampires. After the death of their parents, her brother snapped and got kicked out of the surfing circuit— Nicole, on the other hand, has taken on a more philosophical view of death. It’s her perspective that attracts Shane’s attention. Shane, the head vampire, shares his blood with her moments after meeting her. Chris, her brother, reluctantly follows her into the darkness.

While the film absolutely revels in the “college antics” side of The Lost Boys’ version of vampirism, showing the vampires pranking each other by stabbing each other and throwing their intestines in retaliation, it also revels in connection. Nicole and Shane share a tender moment immediately after her turn, riding Shane’s motorcycle through the night streets, Nicole in Shane’s jacket. When she later expresses her concerns about losing her brother if she embraces the turn, he promises her she won’t.

Nicole and Chris have a positive, if somewhat dysfunctional relationship, and though they clash it’s made painfully obvious that Chris would do anything for Nicole— even if he is, at times, an idiot.

The film does suffer from a lack of budget, and the CG in particular is lackluster; when they do choose to go practical, it’s well-utilized. The vamp faces in particular are excellent, as well as some of the deaths (others are... laughable). It also struggles to balance its humor and horror as well as the original, but when the jokes land they’re really funny. The location they chose for the vampires’ lair is also stunning— it’s someplace I’d kill to explore, much like I’d kill to hang out in the original Boys’ hotel.

Sometimes, the acting falls incredibly flat. It’s rarely stellar, but often believable. Nicole has little to work with, mostly looking pretty in the background when she’s not fawning over Shane, and Chris’ actor can come off as flat at times. The vampires, however, are all uniquely engaging, and Angus Sutherland is captivating when he’s on screen. Corey Feldman, of course, steals the show.

The vampires are seductive, unsettling, funny, exciting; everything you want from the next group of Lost Boys. It also introduces a lot of unique lore, though it does play fast and loose with their powers. It seems to establish that Shane has some form of telekinesis, though its rarely utilized, and the other vampires don’t seem to have any abilities. The most unique aspect of their lore comes not from the movie itself, sadly, but from a companion comic book: Reign of Frogs. While that story is, for the most part, a standalone showing part of Edgar’s journey between the first and second films, it ends with Shane’s origin. He was one of the surfers attacked on the beach in the original movie, and the first thing he fed on was a shark.

See, in this universe the first thing a vampire feeds on affects their “vamp face.” Feed on a human, get a standard Lost Boys face a la David. Feed on a shark, however, and you and your childer will bear a striking resemblance to that first meal: pure black eyes, flat noses, greyed skin and at least four fangs (Shane himself has a mouth full of fangs, suggesting the severity of the... sharkness, for lack of a better word, dilutes with each generation). Unfortunately, the third film does nothing to explore this further; it would be interesting to see how this mythology would play out with other animals.

While the film is far from perfect— in fact, it’s not even my favorite 2000s vampire film (that honor goes to The Forsaken) —The Lost Boys: The Tribe is enjoyable. And really, what more can you ask from a film that will live eternally in the shadow of its far superior sibling? It takes guts to tackle a sequel for one of the most beloved vampire films of all time after ten years have passed, let alone twenty. The fact that The Tribe is such a genuinely enjoyable film is stunning. The soundtrack is good, the story and lore are interesting, it nods its head to the original while still doing its best to be unique and, for the most part, succeeding.

Jeez, it’s been a while. I have to admit, I’ve been struggling with motivation to write since starting a full time job. All my creative projects have suffered, but especially this one. I think it’s fitting that I make my return to these reviews with a vampire movie.

I’ve discussed Daybreakers, a sore disappointment, and used it to broadly cover many films in a discussion of the relation between gayness and vampirism— beyond that, this blog has been sorely lacking in vampire films. The problem is, I don’t feel like I have a lot to add to the discussion of my favorites: The Lost Boys and Near Dark (they’re both great, go watch them). Someday I really will write that defense of the second Lost Boys movie, but today is not that day. No, today I’m writing about The Forsaken.

The Forsaken is a 2001 vampire flick starring two actors from Final Destination (Carter and Tod’s brother respectively), and it is one of my favorite pieces of vampire media of all time. It follows Sean and Nick as they travel through Texas, being chased by an ancient vampire hell bent on killing a girl they’d picked up on the way. That’s as much detail as I can give you without getting into spoiler territory, but if you feel like watching an early 2000s vampire film that shares similarities with both Near Dark and Ginger Snaps 2, I highly recommend checking it out. If you don’t care or have already seen it, I’m about to break down why this movie does what no other vampire film has: made me care about the humans.

Now, some are better at this than others: I like Michael and Sam both in The Lost Boys, but I like the vampires more. Some are worse; I would’ve payed good money for Severen to kill Caleb in the beginning of Near Dark and just had the rest of the movie follow the vamps’ travels. I use these two films specifically because they share a few core similarities with The Forsaken: the vampires are a family, and vampirism can be cured. What sets the Forsaken apart specifically in terms of its human leads is that, for one, they’re never directly taken in by the vampires. Nick was bitten by a completely different vampire before the film even began, and Sean was bitten accidentally by Megan (the half-turned girl they pick up while on the road).

Interestingly, however, we still have a similar dynamic through Sean and Nick. Instead of the clueless young man being swept up into the seductive, wild world of a gang of vampires, it’s a man getting unwillingly pulled into the fucked up world of a hunter trying desperately to stave off his own turn. That’s another thing The Forsaken does extremely well (and uniquely): the lore for its vamps.

Vampirism is a blood disease, full stop. While working on treatments for HIV, a doctor who’d been bitten discovered some of the medication they were developing slowed down the process of turning (which takes about a week without the drugs). Vampirism is also “telegenetic;” once you’re bitten, you and your sire have a psychic bond— until you start taking the drugs, since Nick has no link to his sire and Megan’s link is severed when the drugs kick in. Vampires themselves are even more powerful: while they can be killed by the sun, beyond that they can only be killed by beheading. Even then, it can only be on hallow ground (though the sun can kill them anywhere)— so even if you get lucky enough and have an opening to saw that vamp’s head off, you better hope you’re standing in a church or a graveyard.

There are other little details I like, which seem to be natural extensions of the vampire lore established in Near Dark. For example, snake venom is like a drug for these vampires. It also gets creative with what it counts as a decapitation— like a point-blank shotgun blast to the face. Point being, the vampires in this movie are cool, dark and sexy and stylish with just the right touch of humor at times, that sick, twisted sense of humor that shines when they’re in the middle of slaughtering people. They’re got everything I want to see in vampires! So what is it about them?

As I touched on above, we’re never swept up into the fold of these vampires— we get brief glimpses of their dynamic, but it’s not the intimate invitation that The Lost Boys and Near Dark provide. It works in the movie’s favor (and the Lost Boys sequel portrays its vampires similarly), allowing the vampires to remain mysterious and intimidating through the entire runtime. Nick fills the role that Near Dark and The Lost Boys’ vampires play instead. Sean picks him up at the mechanic’s after having his car repaired, this hitchhiker about his age that he quickly bonds with— only for them to stumble across a terrified, feverish Megan. Suddenly, Sean is bitten and he’s caught up in Nick’s world of blood diseases and drugs, violence and monsters.

And the even more unique thing? Sean chooses to stay in that world. Where Michael stays with Star and helps kill the Boys, where Caleb kills the others and cures Mae with a blood transfusion, Sean says his goodbyes to Megan, goes to his sister’s wedding, and then spends three months tracking Nick down just so he can help him hunt down the vampire who bit him and hopefully turn him back human.

When Sean finds Nick, Nick tells him he doesn’t have to do this, his disease having clearly gotten worse— Sean responds that yeah, yeah he does. It’s as much an acknowledgement that what Nick’s doing is dangerous as it is that he may very well not last much longer. At least, not as a human.

So much of the joy I get from these films is the idea of family. Family that will love you to the bloody, bitter end. Family bound by more than blood, family that will never abandon you because you chose each other, both the beautiful and the monstrous. As an LGBT person, that’s an extremely attractive idea. To never have to worry about being rejected for who I am, or about losing my loved ones to sickness or time, or the violence of others. To be a vampire is to be truly safe, to be surrounded by those just like me, to fear nothing.

Similarly to Ginger Snaps 2, where lycanthropy is portrayed as a disease which can be staved off but not totally cured (and lycanthropy in relation to the trans experience is an essay for another time), the sort of vampirism presented by The Forsaken is mostly undesirable. It’s an interesting dichotomy. Without its rude intrusion, Sean and Nick would’ve gone their separate ways in Houston and Sean would’ve lived his life blissfully unaware (of vampires, and of any potential feelings for Nick). However, he’s now facing the cruel reality that Nick is getting sicker as the drugs lose their effectiveness— they may end the movie close to the vampire responsible for Nick’s sickness, but there’s no telling whether they’ll actually succeed in killing him before the turn takes hold.

In Ginger Snaps, lycanthropy is an undeniably negative ailment. Vampirism, even in The Forsaken? not so much. Unfortunately, there’s no sequel exploring Sean and Nick’s stories further. We can only speculate on what happens. Do they succeed? Hunting down and killing the vampire and curing Nick (and after, do they continue hunting, helping others who have been bitten along the way or simply settle down somewhere isolated?). Or, instead, do their best efforts fail? The vampire eludes them, just that much faster, and Nick finally turns as the drugs stop working completely. (and what significance does Sean’s “yeah, I do” take on then? Will he kill Nick now that he can’t turn back, or does he ask Nick to bite him too? How far would he be willing to go?)

For once, I can’t say which ending I prefer for them.