dark fantasy – Horror Ghouls

Return to Oz (1985)

Posted on October 30, 2025October 30, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

– Look, Billina, these ones have lost their heads!

– Now, that’s what I call just plain carelessness.

So… after the young kiddies of the 80s were probably still disturbed by Mr. Dark and the wicked things from his carnival three years earlier, there was no question if Return to Oz, the next colorful big summer blockbuster from Walt Disney Studios, would finally be the antidote so that the parents finally didn’t have to constantly change the soaked-wet bedsheets. Right? Right..??

Hahahahahaha, oOOof…

The Japanese distributors knew exactly what kind of film this was by looking at that poster. I also find it funny that they did their best to obscure the Disney logo to make it look like a pure fantasy horror flick. Not so far from it though…

It’s only gone six months after Dorothy Gale (played by an 11-year-old Fairuza Balk) sang and danced through the mystical and colorful land of Oz together with Scarecrow, Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion and her dog Toto to meet the wonderful wizard. And who would forget such an experience, even though the wizard was as fake as a politician? Not Dorothy. Because the witch was at least real. And that keeps her up at night, to her Aunt and Uncle’s frustration. It’s the beginning of the year 1900, the times is harder than ever and the last thing they wanna hear about is her deluded fairytales talking about scarecrows, witches and flying monkeys.

Her Aunt and Uncle also have some bigger plans for her which they have used all their savings on, and that is to send her to a psychiatric clinic to meet Dr. Worley and his witchy assistant Wilson. Dr. Worley proudly shows off his little monstrosity of an electroshock device, because, as he enthusiastically says: It’s the 20th Century! The age of electricity! Uh-oh… yeah, fuck this boolshit, we know where this is going. It’s time for Aunt Em to grab poor Dorothy, take a U-turn and rather encourage her niece to use her crazy imagination to write a series of fantasy novels, or something.

Dorothy spends the night in a room in the cellar, sitting on a bed with an empty and hopeless stare in the air as the disturbing screams of the other mental patients can be heard in the distance. And yes, this is still a film made for the whole family and not some alternative version of Jacob’s Ladder. Dr. Wilson, the witchy assistant, comes in to get Dorothy tightly strapped on a stretcher as if she was Jack Nicholson after trying to strangle nurse Ratched. Just when Dr. Worley is ready to zap Dorothy’s brain, a thunderstorm hits that causes a blackout. As she gets left alone, strapped in the bed, a mysterious girl pops up, unties her and together they escape. As they get chased by Wilson, they stumble and roll into a river where Dorothy floats into the moonlight in a chicken coop.

And the next day, she wakes up in the land of Oz where the river has transformed into a puddle. Somewhere along the ride she’s gotten herself a new companion; the talking chicken Billina. After some brief open world exploring, she sees that the yellow brick road has been destroyed, and discovers that the entire Emerald City has been turned into an apocalyptic wasteland by the evil wizard Nome King (Nicol Williamson). The people are turned to stone, several of whose heads are missing. Beware the wheelers are tagged on the walls. Who the hell are the wheelers, you ask? They’re freaks on… wheels, who looks like former band members of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Something from your worst childhood nightmares, plain and simple. And we can only imagine, in a banned X-rated version, what they would do to little girls if they actually had hands. Ugh.

Dorothy is soon to be captured by the wicked witch Mombi, who lives in the only remaining tower in Emerald City. And haven’t we already seen her before as the witchy assistant at the clinic, just without the sprayed 80s hair? Hmmm… She’s played by Jean March, by the way, who is probably most known for the evil Queen Bawmorda in Willow three years later. She died earlier this year at age 90. RIP. Mombi also has an impressive collection of heads, where the parents now probably reached the final straw and switched over to Mr. Rogers or CNN. Makes me wonder if the writers of Dexter: New Blood took some inspiration from a certain set-piece here. Then we have the variations of the Nome King and his demons made by a mix of stop-and claymation. Pure 1980s magic at its very finest and just top notch production value. Anyway; Dorothy manages to escape the tower on a flying couch, attached and steered by a moose head called Gump. She, and a couple of new friends, the gangling Jack Pumpkinhead and the round mechanic soldier Tik-Tok (the only good TikTok) flies across the deadly desert to visit the Nome King and break the curse that lies over Em City.

In stark contrast to the cheerful, bright and upbeat vibe of the musical The Wizard of Oz (1939), writer and director Walter Murch wiped the rainbow black in one big stroke to take a much darker and psychotic wild-ride approach to L. Frank Baum’s books (you don’t say) . And so he sure did. But already a week into the shooting, the producers started to sweat, and decided to give Walter Murch the boot. Why? Because Disney. Or maybe they had already snorted all the cocaine. As new producers came into the picture, they cut down the budget and got rid of several set-pieces. So who took over the directing job? Thanks to some powerful Soprano friends in showbiz like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, the studio got pushed into a corner to hire Walter back again. The rats at Disney did what they could to sabotage the film and the career of the fresh first-time director by having almost no promotion for its theatrical release. And they succeeded as the film flopped and didn’t even earn half of the $28 million budget.

The critics weren’t impressed either by how dark and bleak it was, especially the two clowns Siskel and Ebert, who saw Tik-Tok as a R2-D2 ripoff. But yeah, going into this film completely blind and expecting the musical all over again, well… life’s not always fair. There’s no room for humor here and the somber/melancholic tone is pretty much already set in stone (no pun intended) from the first frame, where we see a depressed Dorothy lying in bed and staring at the starry night as she’s thinking about her friends over the faded rainbow. I also have a very weak spot for the score by David Shire. The closest to humor is through some dry, sarcastic lines from the talking chicken, and from a more adult perspective, The Wheelers, because, well, just look at them. All that said: the doom n’ gloom, the dead seriousness, and the constant underlying menacing tension, that get turned up to 666 by the intimidating echoing voice of the Nome King alone, is what makes this film so damn memorable — and, in the end, to a unique, delightful gateway horror that has aged like a fine green vine (not from Nilbog). Good times.

Director: Walter Murch
Writers: Walter Murch, Gill Dennis
Country & year: USA/UK, 1985
Actors: Fairuza Balk, Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh, Piper Laurie, Matt Clark, Michael Sundin, Tim Rose, Sean Barrett, Mak Wilson, Denise Bryer, Brian Henson, Emma Ridley
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089908/

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

Posted on October 29, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

The year is 1799, and Ichabod Crane is a New York police constable who has been dispatched to Sleepy Hollow: an upstate Dutch hamlet where there have been a lot of brutal murders involving people getting their heads chopped off. He is welcomed by the town elders, including the wealthy businessman Baltus Van Tassel who has a beautiful young daughter named Katrina, who immediately shows an interest in Ichabod. And vice versa. Once he starts his investigation, he hears the story about what the locals believe to be the cause of all the decapitations: the Headless Horseman, who was once a Hessian mercenary from the American Revolutionary War. Ichabod just scoffs of such superstitious nonsense, but his skepticism is put to the test over and over again as more people keeps dying.

Sleepy Hollow is a dark fantasy horror film from 1999, directed by Tim Burton and loosely based on the 1820’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It stars Johnny Depp in the role as Ichabod Crane, and Christina Ricci in the role as Katrina. Christopher Lee also has a supporting role here, as the Burgomaster, among some other well-known faces. The development of the movie started in 1993, where Kevin Yagher was originally set to direct the film as some kind of low-budget slasher horror film. There were some disagreements, causing Paramount to demote Yagher to prosthetic makeup designer instead, and Tim Burton was brought on board in 1998.

Originally, the character Ichabod Crane is described as a very unattractive man in the novel, and Johnny Depp offered to wear prosthetics on his face to carry on those appearance traits. Paramount didn’t want any of that, though (hmmm….I wonder why…) so the character is more based on Ichabod’s squeamishness and eccentricity, but turning him into a skeptic. A rather big contrast to the animated Disney film from 1949 where he’s kind of a dick, and superstitious to the core.

The relationship between Ichabod and Katrina is handled in a completely different way here, and the characters are given much more depth and backstory, and we are also getting the backstory of the headless horseman himself. Especially grim is the story of Ichabod’s childhood and his mother’s death, which gives us a very grisly scene involving an iron maiden. Speaking of grisly scenes, there’s actually a fair amount of them so I think they decided to keep a little bit of that slasher flair from the original idea. There’s bloody and visceral decapitation scenes, and one scene where the headless horseman decapitates the parents of a child hiding under the floorboards, where the kid makes eye contact with his dead mother’s head before meeting the same fate himself, is a particularly vicious scene.

Tim Burton also included some scenes which are homages to the animated Disney movie The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad from 1949. This includes the scene where Ichabod crosses the bridge and hears the frogs croaking his name, and the scene with the flaming pumpkin. There’s a mix of fairytale and gothic horror in a perfect balance, where the slumbering and spooky village of Sleepy Hollow consists of beautiful periodic sets with crooked, twisted trees and old buildings which is a mix of Northern European and American colonial architecture. And while most of the movie was filmed in Leavesden and Shepperton studios, they actually built the village at the Hambleden estate at Lime Tree Valley. Compared to the Disney movie which was very colorful, this one is bleak and misty and kicks up the gothic atmosphere to eleven, perfectly complemented by Danny Elfman’s score.

Sleepy Hollow is a fun gothic horror story that oozes Tim Burton from start to finish, and while very much removed from the original Irving classic, it’s an inventive and fun reimagined version of the story. It is peak Tim Burton, and a perfect Halloween watch!

Director: Tim Burton
Writers: Kevin Yagher, Andrew Kevin Walker
Country & year: UK/USA/Germany, 1999
Actors: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid, Michael Gough, Christopher Walken, Lisa Marie
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162661/

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

Posted on October 27, 2025 by HorrorGhouls

– Funerals, bad marriages, lost loves, lonely beds. That’s our diet. We suck that misery and find it sweet. We search for more, always. ― Mr. Dark

As the 1980s came, The Walt Disney Mouse had reached the puberty/goth phase and wanted to break free from the family-friendly image to focus on more “mature“ films. Mickey pulled pretty much a Miley Cyrus, you might say. The mouse still kept the tongue in its mouth though. And after the mouse dipped its toes into the more dark fantasy territory with The Watcher in the Woods (1980), he decided to take it a step further with Something Wicked This Way Comes, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. Also, this time, a director with a horror background, Jack Clayton, got hired who directed the box-office success The Innocents back in 1961. Bradbury himself wrote the screenplay.

This was the first and last genuine horror film from Disney, although I’d say that Return to Oz (1985) is pretty close to being in the same category.

Something Wicked This Way Comes starts with a wicked foreshadowing and sinister tone as the title suggests, where we see a locomotive in the dark distance coming towards us during the opening credits, heavily spiced-up with a wicked score by James Horner. Something wicked is on its way, that’s for sure. This was my very first gateway horror, so yeah, that opening scene alone made an impression on my early ghoulish childbrain.

It’s October, the weather is crisp, the year is 1920 and the place is the quiet and peaceful little Green Town in Illinois, shot in the beautiful countryside of Vermont. We meet the two young boys, Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson), who’s been best friends even before they were born. Nothing much happens in the town, until one October night a train can be heard in the distance. But that’s not just a train; it’s the train of Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium carnival. Will and Jim eagerly run after the train, which miraculously has turned into the carnival itself in a matter of some seconds. Uhm…did we miss something? Yes, we actually did, which I’ll come back to. The exploration gets cut short when the boys get spooked away by a big spider in one of the trailers, where also the Dust Witch (Pam Grier) sits in the shadows.

As they return the next day, it all just looks like a plain, ordinary boring carnival. I agree. Cuz where’s the haunted house, The Satan’s Den? There’s a mirror-maze over there. So? I wanna see some ghosts, not a bunch of mirrors! Oh, you will see some spooky shit soon, just you wait. The whole town is there, even Will and Jim’s mousy old teacher Miss Foley. When they sneak into a closed area to discover the classic horse carousel, they get grabbed by Mr. Cooger and handed over to Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce) ― a charismatic British magician who fits his name, just like Ritchie Blackmore. If he was a German, his name would be Herr Dunkel! And there’s nothing shady about him. Just look at his kind eyes and the cheerful smirk. Well, he’s kind enough to let them go with a warning and gives them a free ticket to the horses when it gets reopened.

The boys hide to see what’s going on after closing time, and spies on Mr. Dark and Cooger as they do a test run on the horses. And what in the actual tarnation… the carousel goes backwards and reverses Cooger into a little boy that would fit right in with the children of the corn. And, well… this is just a taste of Mr. Dark’s shenanigans. It’s also been ages since I read the book, but I can say that there’s some striking similarities to find in Stephen King’s Needful Things (1993). Townspeople there start to disappear after they’ve made some of their deepest, delusional wishes and unfulfilled desires, buried by time and dust, to come true ― granted by none other than Mr. Dark. And with the wishes comes a price/curse. Old Miss Foley wishes to be young and beautiful again. As she looks in the mirror and transforms into a twenty-five-year-old blonde, she loses her sight where “Looks can be deceiving“ gives a new brutal, ironic twist. And like the hardcore malignant narcissist that Mr. Dark is, who feeds on other people’s suffering, what’s better than to grant someone wishes and, at the same time, make them handicapped to live in a mental prison so they can never enjoy the magical fix? How wicked! A porn-addict would get a collection of all the porn magazines, but have both hands paralyzed so he can’t masturbate. Oof. The ultimate endgame is that it will be a thousand years to next Christmas. Fine with me, as long as we have Halloween.

We also have the son/dad relationship between Will and his dad, Charles (Jason Robards), who’s getting eaten alive by guilt and shame when he couldn’t save his son from drowning in a river when he was little. Instead, Jim’s dad had to step in. An incident that broke him as he talks much about death and dying, and that three AM is The Soul’s Midnight, where many people die. And then he means old people, of course. He’s the town’s librarian and maybe reads a lot of Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, dad is depressed while he smokes cigars like a chimney, has a bad heart, and Will just wishes he could be happy. But the thing is that he’s pretty old, and cutting the cigar and not smoking yourself to emphysema would be a nice start before you say to your son that Just tell me that I will live forever. Then I’ll be happy. But if dad couldn’t save his son back then, he gets a new chance when Will and Jim is getting caught in the web of Mr. Dark.

So, what we have here is a mix different layers like coming-of-age, on both sides, acceptance of mortality, to the bitter and shallow greediness where only thing counts in the end: What’s inside. Too mature for the kids to fully grasp and not so scary for the older audience. Caught between a rock and a hard place. That said, on the surface, there’s a lot to enjoy in Something Wicked. The overall atmosphere reeks of dead leaves where the crisp colorful autumn scenery is like watching a classic oil painting coming to life. Jason Robards, and at the time a relatively unknown Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark does a great combo as Good vs Evil, where their scene in the library is pretty intense just on a psychological angle alone. And no one rips books apart in a more classy way than Mr. Dark as each glowing page represents one lost year after the other of Mr. Halloway’s life. It’s also worth mentioning that Stan Winston is an uncredited effect-maker here, where he was behind a memorable scene at the end where Mr. Dark is having an extreme ghoulish makeover. Unfortunately, some of it was cut as it got too realistic. Well, that’s Stan Winston for you. Man, I hope we get to see all these deleted scenes one day, but I think that train has vanished into the lost media realm a long time ago.

Several other scenes that included some of the earliest uses of CGI combined with animation were cut from the film. Such as the scene where Mr. Dark’s carnival train arrives and becomes the carnival as it enfolds and builds itself up while the boys are witnessing the paranormal spectacle. The effects were made by the team who had recently worked on Tron (1982). But since it wasn’t convincing enough, we just have to use the imagination like when one of the boys says but how could it…

And then we have the scene where Mr. Dark uses his magic to make a green-glowing mist follow after the boys. The original idea was to have a big ghostly disembodied hand to reach for the boys inside their house. Since the effect wasn’t realistic enough, there was plan B: Spiders! A lot of spiders. Of course. And there’s no surprise that the two young actors would prefer the ghost hand instead of a chaotic shoot with 200 tarantulas. But like we always say: that’s showbiz.

Speaking of showbiz: Something Wicked This Way Comes was a pretty wicked production filled with bumps, hiccups and fights, that makes for some juicy stuff for the trivia section. Writer Ray Bradbury and director Jack Clayton wanted to stay as faithful to the novel as possible, while Disney wanted a more accessible, family-friendly film. And there you already have the door wide open for conflicts, bullshit and headaches. Jack Clayton was also notoriously hard to work with, and I doubt that working with drunk madman Sam Peckinpah would be much easier, who was considered to direct the film in the 1970s. After a disastrous test-screening, Disney fired the original editor, got rid of the original score by Georges Delerue, amped up the budget of 4 million, spent several months of polishing and hired James Horner to make a new score. A new narration was inserted, and the whole third act was re-shot along with the opening. The original score was scrapped because it was too dark — which is pretty baffling considering that Disney decided to keep the shot where we see one of the boys getting his head chopped off by a guillotine, with blood and all. And what could be too dark when you already have a villain called Mr. Dark? Huh… Disney Mouse was surely in an identity crisis here, but that comes with puberty. While all this sounds just like a normal day at the Marvel Studios (from the last five, six years), these movies from the Disney-after-dark era actually turned up to be surprisingly good that still holds up, despite the behind-the-scenes turmoils and bad box-offices. Bradbury also referred to the film’s final cut as “not a great film, no, but a decently nice one.“

Something Wicked is on Blu-ray, but from I’ve heard, it’s the same quality from the DVD’s, with no bonus content. The film has been a rarity for many years and got just recently its first streaming release on Disney+. Another rarity I have to mention, is the bizarre, zero-budget and somewhat trippy amateur film adaptation from 1972, made by the British underground filmmaker Colin Finbow. Watching this on LSD with headphones is maybe the best way.

Director: Jack Clayton
Writer: Ray Bradbury
Country & year: USA, 1983
Actors: Jonathan Pryce, Jason Robards, Vidal Peterson, Shawn Carson, Royal Dano, Pam Grier, Mary Grace Canfield, Bruce M. Fischer, Richard Davalos, Jake Dengel, Ellen Geer, Diane Ladd
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086336/

DEATH AND THE WINEMAKER – Animated Horror Short

Posted on February 5, 2023June 19, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

In a fairy tale world, a winemaker creates the most exquisite wine in the world. When Death herself wants to taste the wine, he discovers that his bride is next on Death list.

Death and the Winemaker (Le vigneron et la mort) is very atmospheric dark/gothic fairytale with beautiful animation.

DEATH AND THE WINEMAKER - Animated Horror Short

Director: Victor Jaquier
Writer: Victor Jaquier, Damien Mazza
Country & year: Switzerland, 2021
Actors: Kacey Mottet Klein, Virginie Meisterhans, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Jacques Roman, Séverine Bujard, Stephanie Schneider, Marie-Claire Dubois
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt7227252/