A woman installs clappers in her home when suddenly the clappers have a mind of their own. Is it the echo, or someone else in the apartment?
The Clapper is a simple but good horror short that knows how to build the tension!
Director: Neil Stevens
Country & year: USA, 2017
Actors: Aubree Bowen, Lindsay Garvey, Erich Kemp, Neil Stevens
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt6711598/
We’re in New England where Dr. Norman, Lucy and their son Bob moves to a big old victorian house, which by a coincidence lies right by a cemetery. How cozy. One of the former residents was a surgeon in the Victorian era, who did some really shady experiments in the house’s basement. And on top of that, his last name was Freudstein. Nothing bad could ever happen here, right?
Bob starts seeing visions of a mysterious girl with a doll, who says it was a stupid idea to come here, which has to be one of the first The Shining references. His parents do not believe in him (of course they don’t) and his mother is already struggling with her emotional problems while she refuses to take any medicine. After they have entered the house and started unpacking, the babysitter, Ann, comes in, straight from nowhere. A young lady with a menacing stare, ready to trigger Lucio Fulci’s eye fetish to its full maximum. And as soon the door to the basement is open, so is the can of worms.
House by the Cemetery is Fulci’s last part of the “Gates of Hell” trilogy, where he mixes zombies with the supernatural. This has a more of a cohesive narrative compared to The Beyond and City of the Living Dead, but is really slow at times with scenes that just seem to drag on forever. We get a long scene with a bat that could have been cut down to ten seconds, where it cuts straight to a guy who starts the scene with a yawn. Talk about timing. The kid who plays Bob has one of the most ridiculously out of place dubbing ever, that unfortunately ruins every scene he’s in, which just adds far more chuckles and eye-rolling than tension. It’s not the actors fault, but the movie would gain a lot just to remove the dub with a better one.
It’s not my favorite Fulci film, but far from the worst, and it has some great qualities. The soundtrack is good, in which the intro tunes give some serious Castlevania vibes. The technical aspects are pretty solid, with its thick, moody and sometimes gothic atmosphere, just as the predecessors. And several messy gory scenes, filled with maggots, of course.
Director: Lucio Fulci
Original title: Quella villa accanto al cimitero
Country & year: Italy, 1981
Actors: Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza, Silvia Collatina, Dagmar Lassander, Dagmar Lassander, Daniela Doria, Giampaolo Saccarola, Carlo De Mejo, Kenneth A. Olsen, Elmer Johnsson, Ranieri Ferrara
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0082966/
Related reviews:
– City of the Living Dead (1980)
– The Beyond (1981)
Late one night, a couple receives a mysterious package from an old friend. Opening it up, the box reveals nothing but a black hole. But soon, that changes..
Other Side of the Box is a pretty good horror short that delivers tension and an unsettling atmosphere.
Director: Caleb J. Phillips
Country & year: USA, 2018
Actors: Nick Tag, Teagan Rose, Josh Schell, Tyler Pochop
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt8164750/
Boston, 1942. The movie doesn’t waste any time and gets straight to the first body count, where a young boy is in his room minding his own business while pinning a pornographic jigsaw puzzle. In comes his strict and unhinged mother, who gives him a few slaps before she throws away that filthy thing. He then picks up an axe, which he happens to be allowed to have in his room for some reason, and chops his mother to death, before he saws off her head while he smiles, and then hides in a closet. When the cops come in, they just assume that the boy was lucky and managed to hide from the unknown killer. Little did they know..
Then we jump 40 years later, still in Boston, where the kid we just saw in the opening have grown up to be a serial killer (No, really? Who would’ve guessed). He hunts down young female students at a college, dressed as a classic giallo-style killer with a black coat, gloves and a big hat that hides his face behind its shadows. And speaking of shadows, the look of the killer is actually inspired by the comic book character The Shadow. He has also developed an obsession with pornographic jigsaw puzzles and is fixating to make his own, personal masterpiece(s) with real body parts. The first victim gets her head chopped off under the blue sky as she lies on the lawn outside the campus, studying. The chunky gardener, played by Paul “Bluto” Smith, is the first to be suspected, of course. The killings are being further investigated by Lt. Bracken (Christopher George) who also has a suspicious eye on the socially stunned anatomy teacher Arthur Brown (Jack Taylor), who looks like a reduced Vincent Price with a bad flu.
The tagline for Pieces says “You don’t have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre“. It’s probably the best and fitting tagline I’ve ever read for a film like this, and it isn’t an exaggeration either. Pieces is easily one of the goriest slashers from the 1980’s with all the mandatory recipes of Blood, Tits and Gore. The effects really stand out, especially the girl who gets sawed to pieces in the toilet, and some visual highlights like the woman who gets butchered on the water bed. And as bad, wooden and stiff the acting is, which is also the funniest part of the movie, they sure were dedicated enough to deal with gallons of animal blood, fresh from the local slaughterhouse, while organs from dead animals were used as the more gorier effects. Must have smelled just like pure movie magic. There is some really bizarre dialogues here, such as one of the female students saying right of the blue and makes it pretty clear that it’s the middle of the mating season: “the most beautiful thing in the world is to smoke pot and fuck in a waterbed at the same time”. I want a T-shirt with that quote. There’s also a complete random cameo of a Bruce Lee imitator that doesn’t make any sense. But nevertheless, Pieces is a lot of bloody, brainless fun with solid entertainment value that definitely belongs in every gore-hound’s film collection.
Director: Juan Piquer Simón
Original title: Mil gritos tiene la noche
Country & year: Spain | USA | Puerto Rico, 1982
Actors: Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Frank Braña, Edmund Purdom, Ian Sera, Paul L. Smith, Jack Taylor, Gérard Tichy, May Heatherly, Hilda Fuchs, Roxana Nieto, Cristina Cottrelli, Leticia Marfil, Silvia Gambino, Carmen Aguado
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0082748/
Mary and her mother run a post-mortem photography business in 1840’s Australia. They arrive at a small farmhouse to find devastated parents grieving over the death of their daughter. As they get to work, Mary’s mother is required to comfort the grieving parent, leaving Mary alone to confront her phobia. She must do all she can to make the dead look alive…
Looking up “post portem photography” in Google’s image search can be both fascinating, sad and unsettling. In this creepy horror short, called “Post Mortem Mary“, you get a closer look at the practice of a young girl and her mother who are making a living by taking photos of the recently deceased…
Director: Joshua Long
Country & year: Australia, 2017
Actors: Stella Charrington. Melanie Zanetti, Kathryn Marquet, Edie Vann, David Breen
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt7633674/
When Sandy awakes from a strange dream she suddenly realises she’s awoken into a very real nightmare.
Sandman is a creepy and effective little horror short!
Director: Liam Banks
Country & year: UK, 2016
Actors: Matthew Barker, Esmee Matthews
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt6799182/
A British expedition to Antarctica goes terribly wrong. Carter and Williams must seek shelter in the hull of a ship where dark things are about to happen.
Black Ice is a chilling horror short (no pun intended) where two guys on an expedition to Antarctica must seek shelter in the hull of an old ship. When they notice the place has been decorated with wooden crosses, and there’s a dead body inside as well, they realize something bad must have happened there. Still, they have nowhere else to go and must spend the night in that place…
Director: Christopher Goodman
Country & year: UK, 2019
Actors: Abe Buckoke, Joe Warner
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt10081446/
Do you play or are you being played? See what will happen if you play your favorite horror game too much!
Gamer Over is a horror short about a man who decides to spend the evening/night gaming, and chooses to play a game that is simply called “Don’t Play” (but of course, he still decides to play it). While gaming (and drinking) things start happening around him…
Director: Viktor Rek
Country & year: Slovakia, 2016
Actors: Bobes Zabojnik, Emmka Rekova
Francis, a tomcat, moves to a new neighborhood with his owner, and quickly gets involved in a series of cat murders that’s been going on for some time. He meets a local cat named Bluebeard, who shows Francis one of the recent victims. Bluebeard is convinced that “can-openers” (cat slang for “humans”) are behind these murders, but Francis disagrees and takes it upon himself to investigate this further. As he delves further into the mystery, Francis comes upon more mutilated cat corpses, a cat suicide club, a blind feline, and old VHS tapes featuring brutal experimentation performed on cats by crazy scientists. Francis tries to put all the pieces together in order to solve the mystery and find the culprit, while also suffering from terrifying nightmares.
Horror/thriller movies come in all forms, and animation is absolutely no exception. While some animated thrillers have become more and more known over the years (especially some anime classics like for example Perfect Blue) there are others that have been kept more obscured. So when opening the Animated Horror section here on Horror Ghouls, we thought it would be fun to start with a feature we expect few of you have heard of before: the German neo-noir cat thriller Felidae!
Now, don’t let Felidae’s cover fool you, this is absolutely no film for kids. While animated movies have never really been something that was supposed to only be aimed for kids, and have often targeted an adult audience, it’s a very common belief among a lot of people to believe that “cartoons are for children” (although those people are very, very wrong…but there are people out there who believe “Disney” is a synonym for “animation“, so what can you do). If a parent unwittingly brought this one home for their children to watch under the presumption it would be a kid flick, I hope the majority of them were smart enough to switch it off as soon as the first murder appears on the screen (which is pretty early in the movie). If not…well, then those kids ended up watching an animated film with nightmarish dream sequences featuring mutilated dead cats on puppet strings, mutilated cat corpses, horrible experiments done on cats, and scenes with Kama Sutra pictures on the walls. Oh, and a somewhat cheesy sex scene, of course. Much of the film’s murder plot would probably not be easily comprehended by children anyway…I doubt many 7-year olds would understand the film’s references to acts committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, for example. Felidae is purely intended for adults.
Felidae was directed by Michael Schaack, and based on a novel by the same name written by Akif Pirinçci. This animated feature from 1994 has pretty decent animation, and especially the “puppetmaster” nightmare scene is quite awesome with its stylish animation (which appears a bit different from the rest of the film, and thus makes it stand out). There are a lot of scenes that are beautiful to watch, with atmospheric painted backgrounds. The character design is…interesting, in some places. While you have the protagonist Francis, a more natural-looking cat with realistic movements, you have some characters that are very stylized. Like one of the “bad guys”, Kong, and his two neutered henchmen. Still, the stylization of the characters doesn’t actually distract from the rather dark and realistic tone of the film.
The movie follows a typical noir detective formula, and the mystery behind the murders is a bit more complex than what you might be led to believe from the start, with references to eugenics and racial purity. At the time Felidae was made, it was the most expensive animated feature produced in Germany, costing 10 million marks (approx. 5 million dollars). It was mainly animated by TFC Trickcompany in Hamburg, but they also outsourced some of the animation to 10 different studios, from London to Seoul. While it did get an English version, it never got any wide release in neither the US or UK, but the English version was included on the German and French DVD releases.
Now, if you want to check this one out it’s almost impossible to get on DVD anywhere (except maybe a used one on eBay, which is how we got it actually) and it doesn’t appear to be on any streaming sites. So your best chance here is probably YouTube. The official trailer for this movie doesn’t include any of the violent scenes, so it has actually been classified as “YouTube Kids”. Probably just because it’s animated. So regarding that incorrect “all cartoons are for kids” belief many people seem to have, I simply rest my case…
Director: Michael Schaack
Country & year: Germany | Denmark, 1994
Voice actors: Ulrich Tukur, Mario Adorf, Helge Schneider, Wolfgang Hess, Gerhard Garbers, Ulrich Wildgruber, Mona Seefried, Manfred Steffen, Uwe Ochsenknecht, Michaela Amler, Christian Schneller, Tobias Lelle, Frank Röth, Alexandra Mink
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0109791/
A woman finds herself locked in an isolated cabin with something sinister on the other side of the door.
Beast of Prey is a horror short that gives hints of a bigger story underneath, which actually makes it feel a bit like a scene from an actual full-length feature film (and making you wish there actually was one). It’s got good production value and manages to create a lot out of just one small location and one character.
Director: Danny Donahue
Country & year: USA, 2020
Actors: Ashley Erin Campbell
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt12727546/
