Anxious and unstable after removing herself from a money-grubbing rehab facility, a recovering addict isolates herself in a nearby rental home while she gets her life on track. Haunted by episodes of sleep paralysis and visions of silhouetted demons, she scores an Ambien from the strange property manager in order to get a good night’s rest. When the episodes intensify and town secrets come to light, she’s certain the haunting forces aren’t only in her mind.
It is Horror Short Sunday again, and this time we’re taking a look at Shut Eye! Sleep paralysis is never fun to experience, and it sure sounds horrible to not be able to have a single night’s undisturbed sleep because of it…
Director: Robert Gregson Writer: Addison Anderson Country & year: USA, 2025 Actors: Mia Darrow, John Posner, Chris Sirois, Adam Souza, Kate Tilley IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt11083262/
Imagine if Terrifier was directed by Andreas Schnaas, just with a more sober camera man and even a cleaner camera lense. There you more or less have 100 Tears. What else is there really to say.
Well, there’s actually a plot here, somewhere, I believe. It goes something like this: A mute double-chinned psycho clown, simply called Gurdy the Clown (Jack Amos), goes around and slaughters people like there’s no tomorrow with a ridiculously big meat cleaver. C o o l. He kidnaps some victims to drag home to his abandoned warehouse to, well, torture them. A girl gets slowly killed in Ginî piggu-style, before killing another guy and ripping out his intestines like a kid opening his presents on Christmas morning…and then chopping his head off with the meat cleaver, causing blood spurts like a garden hose. Gurdy surely has learned from the best.
Then there’s this mysterious young disturbed blond woman, a Harley Quinn wannabe, who picks up guys at the local bar to take them to an alley to have oral sex before she, yeah you guess it, kills them. What connection does she have to anything, you ask? It’s pretty obvious.
There’s also an iceberg to this Gurdy clown, and the two tabloid journalists, Jennifer and Mark, are working to get to the bottom of it. If they’re a couple/married or whatever, we don’t know. But what we know is that the guy who plays Mark, Joe Davidson, is no doubt a clone of James Gandolfini. And they’re overall entertaining to follow if you’re drunk enough, even though most of the wonky dialogues just flies over your head while we’re waiting for the next goreshow by Gurdy.
Because the most outstanding here are the practical effects made by the director himself, Marcus Koch, who has worked on 100-plus obscure independent horror films. Nikos the Impaler and Lung II are two I can mention that are reviewed on this site. So, if you’re first and foremost looking for crazy over-the-top violence where torsos get cut in half and limbs scattering left and right, spiced up with some dumb humor in glorious Z-movie format, you’ll have a jolly good time. A Director’s Cut Blu-ray is released by Unearthed Films and can also be found on Tubi.
Director: Marcus Koch Writer: Joe Davison Country & year: USA, 2007 Actors: Georgia Chris, Joe Davison, Raine Brown, Jack Amos, Kibwe Dorsey, Rod Grant, Norberto Santiago, Jerry Allen, Jeff Dylan Graham IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0943946/
An American researcher named Alan Whitmore is sent to Budapest in order to check out what has happened to Professor Roth who seems to have gone awol. Once arriving in Budapest, Alan meets the attractive guide Genevieve, who takes him to meet the professor. The professor’s wife leads him inside to what appears to be a paranoid and nervous man, someone who may have found out more than he ought to have. Alan plans for a revisit later, only to find that the professor has now been murdered, hanging from the ceiling in a rope that is…laced with cobwebs? Strange…and creepy as hell. Alan, wants the help of his guide Genevieve who is very eager to offer it (and who is not the least bit suspicious at all, of course). He wanders around the streets of Budapest, and sometimes encounter strange locals who aren’t the most welcoming. And more people keep dying. He’s trapped in a web of murder and strange incidents, all seemingly related to some kind of old spider God and a cult worshipping it.
The Spider Labyrinth (Italian title: Il nido del ragno) is an Italian horror film from 1988, directed by Gianfranco Giagni in his feature film debut. And this obscure little film, which was very hard to come by until the recent years, is an oddball that combines giallo with cosmic horror and creature feature. And spiders, mostly of the fun, jittery stop-motion kind.
The Spider Labyrinth is one of those movies where everything surrounding the protagonist just always feels off. I mean, you do of course have the straight-forward key points in the plot, like the pretty love-interest lady who seems to be overtly friendly and is definitely very, very sus. And the paranoid professor who happens to die before revealing something important, and stuff like that. But it’s also the overall scenery and setting, where the protagonist is walking through suspiciously empty streets. There’s more atmosphere than logic, and this makes the entire movie feel a little dream-like. With the old deity-worshipping cult, the movie definitely goes for a bit of a cosmic horror/Lovecraftian vibe as well.
Many of the filming locations are gorgeous to look at, and the practical effects are fun. The puppet and stop motion effects have the needed charm. I also like the strange witchy spider-like vampire woman, whom we see murdering people every now and then, but most of all I was intrigued by the small, black ball that always appears right before someone gets murdered. It makes an icky squelching sound when hitting the floor, and always adds to the already weird, uncanny atmosphere of the whole film. What’s inside those balls, you might wonder? Well, you can take a guess.
The Spider Labyrinth is a bizarre little Italian occult monster flick, heavily relying on its surreal visual style and building up to a totally crazy ending. As mentioned it was for a long time very hard to find, but a few years ago Severin Films picked it up and released it on Blu-ray and DVD. The movie can also now be found on streaming in some places, including Tubi.
Director: Gianfranco Giagni Writers: Riccardo Aragno, Tonino Cervi, Cesare Frugoni, Gianfranco Manfredi Original title: Il nido del ragno Country & year: Italy, 1988 Actors: Roland Wybenga, Paola Rinaldi, Margareta von Krauss, Claudia Muzii, William Berger, Stéphane Audran, Valeriano Santinelli, Massimiliano Pavone IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095728/
Something terrible is happening in Hamelin. After Kali Maclaire finishes her usual shift at the convenience store where she works part-time after school, she has a terrifying encounter with an ancient entity that has emerged from the woods beyond the edge of town.
Horror Short Sunday is here again, and this time we’re taking a look at the animated horror short Kali. This is one of the Don’t Walk Home Alone After Dark shorts, created by Andy Coyle (known for his work directing the animated Netflix series Hilda).
We’re in 1987, and Patrick Bateman is a New York City investment banker who is very obsessed with showing off a perfect façade. His clothes need to be perfect and of the best brands, he only dines at the most trendy and expensive restaurants, and is of course within a circle-jerk of apparently likeminded wealthy associates: shallow, arrogant, and secretly hating each other and filled to the brim with jealousy. However, Bateman is not all what he seems on the surface. Inside him there’s very violent impulses he can’t (or won’t) control. He’s in fact a reckless serial killer, brutally killing everything from animals, homeless people, prostitutes and also one of the other rich douchebags from his circle of acquaintances. This leads to the involvement of a private investigator. Bateman, however, has already spiraled so far down into a dark hole filled with sadistic depravity, that he has already started to lose his sense of reality.
American Psycho is a psychological thriller from 2000, based on the 1991 novel by the same name written by Bret Easton Ellis. The film was directed by Mary Harron, who co-wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner. It stars Christian Bale in the role as Patrick Bateman, and also includes some other familiar faces like Willem Dafoe.
The author of the novel, Ellis, considered it “unfilmable“. And if you were to do a proper and true adaption including some of the book’s most graphic content, then yeah…they would have censored the fuck out of it and probably banned it outright in many countries. The novel, while starting off rather slow, really goes hard in the latter part of the book and it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. Some of the scenes depicted in the novel are even more extreme and vicious than what you would find in a Terrifier movie, and that says something. Anyway, Edward R. Pressman was determined to make an adaption no matter what, with Stuart Gordon, David Cronenberg and Rob Weiss considered as directors before Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner started writing the screenplay in 1996. The pre-production didn’t go smoothly with lots of back and forth, and Harron was even fired when she wanted to hire Bale to play Bateman. Lions Gate Films wanted Leonardo DiCaprio for the role, so they replaced her with Oliver Stone. That didn’t go well, as DiCaprio and Stone had “creative differences“ which made them leave the project, where Harron was reinstated as the director and got her wishes to cast Bale. Which is good, as Bale does an excellent portrayal of the arrogant and unhinged yuppie.
Interestingly, Harron had actually attempted to read the novel shortly after its publication, but was put off due to the very violent content. She gave it a second chance later, and was especially interested in the satire presented in it. The movie, just like the book, heavily satirizes the 1980’s yuppie culture, where Bateman and his colleagues are depicting social privilege in a very on-the-nose matter. What’s a little hilarious is how the movie got a pretty good reception, where mainly it was well received but some still criticized its “violent nature“. Hah…they should’ve read the book instead, those wusses. Roger Ebert liked it, though, and gave it 3 out of 4 stars.
Bale, in order to appear as much like Bateman as possible, started going to the gym to become completely ripped, and also got a tan and fixed his teeth. Still nothing compared to how far he went for his role in The Machinist, though…but yeah, Bale’s performance really stands out and he fits the role like hand in glove, and totally embodies the character. Some of the political and societal satire is still present, and I found myself often chuckling at how seemingly perfect lives Bateman and the other characters apparently lives, with all that fancy restaurant dining, expensive luxury brand clothing, and the world at their feet. Yet they’re all filled with sickly jealousy over the smallest thing, constantly in some kind of pissing contest with each other, doped on Xanax or snorting coke. None is as miserable as Bateman, of course, who harbors a deep hatred for pretty much everything. It’s entertaining to see how he falls deeper and deeper into the hole he’s been digging for himself, while also wondering exactly what is really going on when certain things become a little too crazy. Both the movie and the book are intentionally ambiguous.
American Psycho is a pretty fun popcorn movie which is also dark satire about the 80’s yuppie opulence. Of course, it is nothing close to as vicious and graphic as the book, so don’t expect anything close to it. A fun little nod to certain parts of the book is actually shown in the movie, though, when we get to see a glimpse into Bateman’s journal where’s he’s made some crude drawings depicting all kinds of acts. This includes some of the things he did in the book, but I don’t think I was able to spot any nods to the iconic “woman, cheese, and a starved rat“. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know…
There is actually a direct-to-video sequel, called American Psycho 2. The movie doesn’t really appear to have anything to do with the first, aside from a quick flashback scene showing Bateman’s death (who wears a mask since that role is not played by Bale), and a woman named Rachael Newman who have become murderous after her encounter with him.
Director: Mary Harron Writers: Mary Harron, Guinevere Turner Country & year: USA, 2000 Actors: Christian Bale, Justin Theroux, Josh Lucas, Bill Sage, Chloë Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon, Samantha Mathis, Matt Ross, Jared Leto, Willem Dafoe, Cara Seymour, Guinevere Turner IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144084/
In the year of 2001, Japanese director Takashi Miike made Ichi the Killer, the yakuza splatter horror which got famous for its graphic violence and how it was banned and censored left and right. Even here in Norway the movie was actually totally banned, even though an uncut DVD release in 2007 managed to circulate for a while. The ban was never lifted, so the movie is actually still not legal to distribute and sell or stream here (but it is legal to buy a copy of the movie for private use). Aside from his achievement with this movie, Miike had a very busy year in 2001 where he actually made another five films, one of these being another well-known movie called Visitor Q. However, we’re not going to talk about that one, instead we’re going to talk about another of his films from 2001, called The Happiness of the Katakuris. And…oh boy…if you thought you had figured this director out from watching his horror movie hits, you’ll be scratching your head at this one.
The Happiness of the Katakuris starts off with an opening scene of a woman eating soup in a fancy restaurant. In the soup is some cherub-like claymation stop-motion creature, who sees the screaming woman’s uvula (who has now turned into stop motion as well) and mistakes it for a heart, rips it out of her throat and flies away, and…hell, it’s really one of those things you can’t explain with words without sounding like you’re rambling about your latest fever dream, you just gotta see it for yourself. Anyway: the cherub-thing ends up getting eaten by a crow, who then gets killed by grandpa Katakuri who got pissed off and threw a stick after it because the bird took a shit which landed on his face. What significance this opening had to anything still boggles my mind, but I guess it’s a way of telling the viewer that the world is an absurd place and death is everywhere. Or something like that.
Now we get introduced to the four-generation family of the Katakuris: Masao Katakuri and his wife Terue, his father Jinpei, the couple’s son Masayuki who’s got a criminal past, and their daughter Shizue who is divorced and a single mother with her child Yurie. And of course, we must not forget their cute dog Pochi. They have just purchased a large, old house nearby a former garbage dump close to Mount Fuji, which they have converted into a bed and breakfast and named it “White Lover’s Inn“. Sounds cozy. They have big hopes for this becoming a success, as the road nearby will be expanded up to their house which would turn it into a perfect spot for tourists. However, the road construction isn’t finished yet…and they currently haven’t had a single guest. So when one finally comes during some heavy rain, they’re all so excited. Finally! The first guest! And of course this dude was someone who decided to stay there just to commit suicide during the night. The bastard should’ve just gone to Aokigahara forest instead. To top it all: the way he committed suicide looks more like a murder. The Katakuris decide to save their business by burying the body.
Up next is a sumo wrestler and his young (very young, it appears…) girlfriend. Let’s just say this doesn’t turn out well either. The bodies are piling up, the Katakuris still haven’t had a single “normal“ guest, and Shizue also falls head over heels for a man called Richard Sagawa, who claims he’s a U.S naval officer and the nephew of Queen Elizabeth II. Nothing shady about this one, not at all. Oh, and of course…the nearby volcano also starts rumbling every now and then…
The movie is said to be loosely based on a South Korean film called The Quiet Family, but an obvious The Sound of Music parody is all over the place here and it’s also obvious Miike liked Monty Python. Yes, this movie is also a musical comedy, filled with upbeat and sometimes romantic dance numbers and even a karaoke sing-along. The premise of the story, a family trying to start a guest house and only getting visitors who ends up dying on one way or other, is one that could easily be tackled in all kinds of ways (including ones much darker and grittier). But this is pure batshit bananas absurdist comedy from start to finish. I have to admit it took some time before I got properly into the overall tone of this film. When it comes to comedy, I’m a bit more fan of the dark and subtle kind, and during the first half hour or so I found myself thinking this might be a little too much for me…but somehow, I got more and more into the bizarre, over-the-top vibe without feeling too exhausted. There’s always something happening, it goes from one song number or weird incident to another, and it’s truly unpredictable. Aside from the opening featuring stop motion claymation, this is also featured multiple times during the movie, sometimes mixing real footage with the animated parts. It’s…part uncanny-valley nightmare fuel as well as being fun and amusing.
The Happiness of the Katakuris is a totally bonkers musical that certainly proves that Takashi Miike is a versatile director. And the message you can take away from this movie, I guess, is that no matter how hard and fucked up your life becomes, no matter how much bad luck, just sing a happy song and keep doing your best!
Director: Takashi Miike Writers: Ai Kennedy, Kikumi Yamagishi Original title: Katakuri-ke no kôfuku Country & year: Japan, 2001 Actors: Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, Naomi Nishida, Kiyoshirô Imawano, Tetsurō Tanba, Naoto Takenaka, Tamaki Miyazaki, Takashi Matsuzaki IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304262/
Sadie is a teenage witch with all the regular problems. She’s head over heels for her childhood best friend, James. The Devil is trying to force her to become his undead bride to rule over hell. And since her mom’s disappearance, all the evil around town suddenly has it out for Sadie. But when a ghost from her mother’s past threatens James- Sadie will stop at nothing to protect those she loves. The one problem? She doesn’t really know how to use her magic.
It is Horror Short Sunday again, and this time we’re taking a look at The Séance! A fun spooky short where a séance doesn’t go as planned (do they ever?).
Director: Hunter F. Burns, Jordan P. Spalding Writer: Hunter F. Burns, Jordan P. Spalding Country & year: USA, 2025 Actors: Sammie Keach, Levi Ladd, Lainey Martin IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt37036456/
Two teenage boys, Ethan and Sean, decide to pull the prank of the decade on their old, grumpy neighbor Harold. One morning when the old man leaves his home, the two boys get inside his house and set up cameras and equipment that will help them simulate a haunting. Yup, they’re going to trick Harold into thinking his house is haunted! It’s supposed to also be the basis for a school project, where the “experiment“ will give them insight in a person’s unfiltered reaction to experiencing a haunting. And yes, these are teenage boys, and teens do all kinds of stupid shit for all kinds of stupid reasons, but…it doesn’t require more than a sliver of common sense to understand that what they’re doing isn’t only illegal, but highly immoral. So when these very tech-savvy kids keep monitoring their old neighbor’s home through their hidden cameras, you don’t exactly root for them.
Now, first of all they decide to play it small by making a kitchen door bang loudly in the middle of the night. Harold’s reaction to this is…not what they expected, to say the least. As they continue their experiment, they also notice something that really peaks their curiosity, especially Ethan’s. The cellar door, which was bolted and locked when they entered the house (which caused some frustration since they would not be able to place any cameras or equipment there) is suddenly opened by Harold in the middle of the night. And after going down there, he’s spending hours until he gets back up. What’s in that cellar? And why is Harold acting so…strange, to say the least, when faced with what he surely must think is some kind of supernatural phenomena?
The Good Neighbor is a thriller from 2016, directed by Kasra Farahani and written by Mark Bianculli and Jeff Richard. It’s a mystery-fueled story which is actually pretty simple, but also suspenseful and entertaining. Two teenage boys playing a prank on their grumpy neighbor by using illegal means, what could possibly go wrong!
Harold, played by James Caan, really comes off as your typical grouchy “get off my laaawn!“ type of neighbor. Kind of like Nebbercracker in Monster House. There’s even a scene where he’s threatening to kill some guy’s dog after it urinated on his property. Yikes…and just like we can’t really be on the teenagers side as what they’re doing is wrong on so many levels, there’s not much sympathy to be had for Harold in the start of the movie either. He just seems like a crabby, miserable piece of shit. Then, of course, you wonder if he’s got reasons for being the way he is, just like Nebbercracker…
There were multiple times where I was fairly certain where this was headed, and I guess that’s a little because the movie sometimes certainly nudged you in that direction, but there were one surprise after the other which made the mystery fairly compelling. Needless to say, there are of course more layers to the characters and their motives and personalities, and since the movie often breaks into short segments from present time where we’re witnessing a trial, we know early on that things really went bad in some kind of way.
The Good Neighbor is one of those films where it’s best to go in without knowing much. Definitely a suspenseful thriller which keeps you guessing, and may take different turns than you expected.
Director: Kasra Farahani Writers: Mark Bianculli, Jeff Richard Country & year: USA, 2016 Actors: James Caan, Logan Miller, Keir Gilchrist, Laura Innes, Edwin Hodge, Bailey Noble, Lili Reinhart, Anne Dudek, Mindy Sterling, William Charles Mitchell IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2262315/
If London wasn’t dangerous enough for Americans to visit, Paris wouldn’t be much better. So try Bratislava instead, haha. That being said, this is not a sequel to the well-known cult classic that is John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981), but more based on the idea that the first film was originally to be set in Paris. And why not. Paris rules! The only thing this one has in common with the original is that an American student visits a European country and becomes a werewolf.
The film has some very loose connections to the first one though, and to cut it short: John Landis was asked to make a sequel to London in 1991 and wrote several screenplays. The studio, Polygram Pictures, declined all of his scripts for whatever reason and ended up with Tom Stern and Tim Burns to write the script that was later rewritten after Anthony Waller got hired as director (catching my breath). He had recently made Mute Witness, a solid horror/thriller which had already gained a cult-following.
Andy (Tom Everett Scott) and his small group of American friends are visiting Paris to sneak up to the Eiffel Tower at night to bungee jump. The big event gets interrupted when they see a young woman, Serafine (Julie Delpy) standing on the handrail, who looks like she’s ready for a suicide jump. After she leaps off, Andy jumps after her, attached to the cord (duh) and grabs her foot at the last second before she would hit the ground. The only thing he has left from her after flying back up is her shoe. Andy gets knocked unconscious and ends up in the hospital. Welcome to Paris.
And after he wakes up in the hospital, the film bounces all over the place where we have a rather flimsy romance movie, a ghostmovie that could be in the same universe as The Frighteners, another romance side plot and, of course, something to do with werewolves. Andy spots Serafine at the hospital, where she just by coincidence works as a nurse (or does she?), and goes after her with her shoe, looking like a deranged psychopathic stalker as he’s holding up her shoe and says: You forgot…this! How romantic. After they start to date, Andy and his friends get access to a secret underground nightclub that connects to the catacombs. Nice! But here is also where it gets messy, because one of Andy’s pals finds Serafine, for whatever reason, locked in the basement. And don’t tell me that she can possibly be… a werewolf?! Now that she knows that Andy is in the club, which happens to be an underground society of werewolves who eat tourists (!), she has to get him far away. Too late. The moon is full, hell breaks loose and poor Andy gets bitten in the leg after running around in the sewer before he manages to escape through a pipe. Enjoy rest of Paris and good luck finding an antidote.
There are especially two classic “pure cinema“ moments here that stick out. The first is the most awkward date scene ever, also called the bubble gum scene, where our charming American blows up a condom while Julie Delpy sits in front of him with a cold stare. Can’t really blame her though. I won’t even try to explain the context, just watch it. The second one is where Andy’s werewolf senses start to kick in, goes on all fours in a cafè (still in human form) and does a quick ass sniff to some random woman (Julie Bowen) straight in her bum. Because it’s mating time, baby! They end up having sex at Père Lachaise Cemetery, because, of course, this is Paris, the city of love, after all. But then the moon goes full. Oops.
Going in and expecting a direct sequel to the first film, you’d be disappointed…very disappointed. And forget about any memorable werewolf transformation scene. This is not that kind of movie. It’s all, if not mostly CGI, or “the first CG werewolf in movie history“ as Anthony Waller called it. And it looks like you’d expect from the 1990s: not good. So no, I wouldn’t say that this is a great movie in its genre. It has its glaring flaws, it’s very unfocused at times with a very forgettable villain (yes, there’s a villain here if I forgot to mention) and the romance between Andy and Serafine seems pretty forced. While Tom Everett Scott had a fun time making the film, the same can not be said about Julie Delpy who only took the role to pay her rent. For unknown reasons she hated working on An American Werewolf in Paris so much that she avoided doing any other commercial Hollywood movies. (That was until she signed up for Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015). She still does a good performance as a mysterious melancholic downer though.
What makes the film a win is the comedic elements, the many set-pieces of Paris and just overall the distinct fun, goofy 1990s vibe which only us who experienced that decade, before the world went down the toilet, can fully appreciate. The few of the practical effects are great, the most noteworthy being the gags where the ghost version of Julie Bowen tries to whistle and pops out her eye instead. Delightful stuff. And since comedy is the most subjective thing ever, I can only speak for myself. Or maybe just being in the right mood helps a lot. I dunno. It’s certainly entertaining and far from the worst movie of all time. The film was not a success at the box-office though, barely earning back its budget. That’s a bummer, because a third film where it was the other way around, A European Werewolf in Chicago would surely be interesting. But then the movie would be over after just ten minutes or so, because, well…I think it speaks for itself.
Director: Anthony Waller Writers: Tim Burns, Tom Stern, Anthony Waller Country & year: USA/France/Luxembourg Actors: Tom Everett Scott, Julie Delpy,Vince Vieluf, Phil Buckman, Julie Bowen, Pierre Cosso, Thierry Lhermitte, Tom Novembre, Maria Machado, Ben Salem Bouabdallah, Serge Basso IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118604/
When 11 year old Juliet stubs her toe on a loose floorboard, she unwittingly sets off a series of mysterious events. A faint noise and an unusual glow seeping through the cracks capture her curiosity. But as she investigates, Juliet finds herself pulled into a chilling, otherworldly encounter.
Horror Short Sunday is here again, and this time we’re taking a look at The Littles! A fun little horror short mixing live action with stop motion animation.
Director: Andrew Duplessie Writer: Andrew Duplessie Country & year: USA, 2025 Actors: Violet McGraw, Janel Parrish, Dominic Sherwood IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt37432997/
