Oh you’ll certainly enjoy that. Very well-written and although something around 1000 pages long it doesn’t feel too long. Sadly the never Kings (post 1996 or so) are unreadable. Nearly just finished Under the Dome (1200 pages). God damn that is a piece of sh*t 
Ok, since we are not doing traditional marathon this year, here’s another challenge that I think will be fun to do. I came up with 15 horror categories. So instead of watching a horror per day, this October you get a point for every category a movie you’ve seen falls into. I’ve tried to avoid general categories like slasher, zombies, torture porn etc. Off course, if a movie satisfies more than one category, you get more points for a single movie, so choose wisely!
Here are the categories:
- Western/Horror crossover
- Animals/force of the nature/eco
- Profondo giallo
- Oversized monsters
- Eerie children
- Religious
- Stephen King
- Gothic
- Killer toys and vehicles
- Traped
- Body
- Dumb tourists
- In space/From space
- The undead
- Halloween
So, as Chucky would say: wanna play?
Well, I’m presently watching 31 (Zombie, 2016), a very typical Rob Zombie affair in which a happy band of travelling carnies (led by Sheri Moon Zombie, who else) are kidnapped on the road and trapped by some effete, powdered wig-wearing elderly folk led by Malcolm McDowell in an ornate theatre repurposed as a house of horrors, wherein they are forced to play a game McDowell and co. call “31”, in which they simply have to survive for 12 hours in this maze while various psychotic killers chase after them. Lazy critical comparison: It’s Zombie’s own House of 1000 Corpses (2003) revisited with a good dollop of The Running Man (Glaser, 1987) thrown in for good measure. And, although it’s okay - and it looks great; I love the poorly-exposed trailer-trash aesthetic favoured by Zombie - I can’t help but feel a little let down by what I feel is a bit of a back-step here. I thought his last picture The Lords of Salem (2012) was outstanding.
So, what do I get for that? Must get points for “Halloween” (the film takes place on October 31 1976, hence the 31 of the title), but I reckon points for “Trapped” and even points for “Dumb Tourists” are due, too.
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No eerie children or crosses in sight? Then yes, 3 points for les carres sounds right.
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Well, there was a little fella dressed vaguely like Adolf Hitler, and he had the crooked cross of Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei daubed across his chest, but I guess a midget with a Swastika painted on him is stretching the definitions of children and crosses a bit far so, no. 
Can’t we get any points for witches/witchcraft? 'Tis the season, and all that…
White Dog (1982)
Maybe not 100% horror, but this Samuel Fuller’s movie-with-a-message obviously gets points for animals category. Score is by Morricone, so I thought about points for giallo, but that would be a stretch (if it was by Goblin it would be another story). But there’s was a important scene happening in a church, dog all curiously looking at religious iconography on windows. That was no accident, so un point for that too.
ADJUDICATION! FLAG ON THE PLAY! REFEREE! SE INCONTRI SARTANA PREGA PER LA TUA MORTE!
White Dog’s not a horror, you cheating bastid! 
You can’t have points for any animal film, Shirley! Croatia: Nil Points!
I object your objection! IMDB has it as “Drama, Horror, Thriller” and Letterboxd as “Horror, Thriller, Drama” (Horror at the first spot), and it is a regular at many animal horror lists.
This cover alone is enough to qualify it as horror:
Fair enough, withdrawn (dammit!) .
I was thinking about an entirely different film, anyway 
Just watched watches Rosemary’s Baby. What’s that, 3 points?
Three points for finishing it
La bestia uccide a sangue freddo (Slaughter Hotel and also known as Asylum Erotica and Cold Blooded Beast) (1971)
The film follows a masked killer murdering the wealthy female inmates of a sanatorium, which is placed in and around a medieval castle. Interior looks like combination of lush ornamented furniture and museum of medieval weapons and torture devices, while exterior is completed with mowed lawn, greenhouse and surrounding forest. This look and effective music make the movie slightly reminiscent of Midsomer Murders series, but it is definitely not suitable for showing at Sunday afternoon like the mentioned series, because the complete plot of this movie is already in my first sentence, all of the dialogue could be completely left out and few would notice and denouncement is off course ridiculous. No, you see, all this movie is about (surprise!) is showing women naked, even more so than your regular giallo (some close-ups very, ahem, detailed). But Fernardo Di Leo sure knew how to frame the scenery and faces he had, music is good and ladies are very easy on the eye, so the movie is pretty to look at and certainly not dull.
Deux points for this gothic giallo (I could give one point for “body”, but I had different kind of body use in horror on my mind with that category 
).
Which 3? Gothic, religion and creepy children? (I haven’t seen it yet)
The Thing (2011)
The extra ending makes it look like this is a prequel to Carpenter’s version, but a lot of story elements are directly copied from it, which makes this movie predictable. It offers little new, apart from a bit more evolved (mostly CGI) FX, suspense is not there, so this remake is in essence pointless. (Mary Elizabeth Winstead does a good job impressing the Ripleyesque heroine, Joel Edgerton stands in for Kurt Russel but is underused, Paul Braunstein is ‘bad guy in SF horror’ stereotype).
One point from space, one point for body.
I quite like The Thing (2011), although of course it doesn’t hold a candle to Carpenter’s masterpiece despite the similarities all over the place. I think the CGI is fine in this picture but I’d be glad if I never saw another “Ripley-esque” heroine in a movie of this nature. They all seem to want to attempt it, and none of them come anywhere close.
Are Gialli horror or no horror? Anyway, this one has a lot of blood (and also a lot of sexy women) and the killings are quite gruesome:
SO SWEET, SO DEAD (1972, Roberto Bianchi Montero)
In a small provincial town in the South of Italy a maniac is killing adulterous women, always leaving compromising photographs on the spot.
The Italian title of this movie is hypnotic: /Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile/, in English: /Revelations of a sexual maniac to the head of the flying squad/. The idea of a serial killer talking to the police is a familiar but (provided it’s well-used) effective story device, but the scenes with the maniac talking to the police inspector investigating the case only appear very late into the movie. For most part this is a well-made and stylish, but otherwise unexceptional genre piece.
The female cast includes, among others, Femi Benussi, Sylvia Koschina, Krista Nell, Nieves Navarro and Annabella Incontrera, and you’ll get ample opportunity to watch them all in the nude or semi-nude. Now if that’s not a good reason to watch this movie! Apparently a special version (called 'Penetration’) was edited for the American market, featuring hardcore scenes starring porn stars Harry Reems (Deep Throat) and Tina Russell. The version available on You Tube is not that version. I repeat: Not.
In Italian, English subtitles:
For me, gialli in 90% of cases qualify as horror. Most are (proto) slashers like Blood and Black Lace, Torso (or any other with masked killer with big blade), many are psychological horrors (usually dealing with Eros and Thanatos) like The Perfume of the Lady in Black or All the Colors of the Dark and some are gothic (The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, The Psychic, Suspiria, many inspired by EA Poe). The only ones that are not horror (or have very little horror ingredients) are the police procedural types like La ragazza dal pigiama giallo or Devil in the Brain.
I haven’t seen this one, so one point for giallo is all?
Last night I saw The Purge (2013).
Interesting premise, little bit sloppy in execution. Especially when the action starts director didn’t really knew what to do, repeating the same deux ex machina cliche for almost every scene. Twist was predictable too, but I give it extra points for original idea and provocativeness.
Regarding all the negative reviews this movie got, it has many flaws, but I think modern audience is too obsessed with insisting on logic in horror (and SF) movies. Whoever finds premise of The Purge silly and message half-arsed, I wonder what he/she would make for example of this classic and its socio-commentary if it was made today instead of almost 30 years ago: “A drifter discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to wake up to the fact that aliens have taken over the Earth”.
One point for being traped.
The Purge is okay but its sequel The Purge: Anarchy (DeMonaco, 2014) is a lot better, imho. The Purge: Election Year (DeMonaco, 2016) is good fun too, although it doesn’t live up to its predecessor.
Yes, I’ll probably go the whole route…
The Boy (2016, William Brent Bell)
To get away from her abusive boyfriend, a young American woman travels to England, where she finds a job as the nanny of … well, the parents look more like grand-parents and the boy is a doll called Brahms. She’s told that the doll is a stand-in for the real Brahms, an eight year old boy who died in a fire 20 years ago: it’s his parents’ way to cope with the terrible loss. Having lost a child herself, she understand the old people’s grief, but very soon strange things start happening … is the doll actually a living doll?
The film is an American-Chinese co-production (you don’t see that every day, do you?), set in England, but shot in Canada. It seems to blend two types of horror movies, the haunted house type and inanimate-object-coming-to-life type, but it takes a couple of radical turns along the way. It borrows freely from genre classics like Kubrick’s The Shining and Carpenter’s Halloween, but in the end it plays a lot like - believe it or not - Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. There are a couple of tense moments but too often they’re red herrings, mainly of the nightmare type (a person waking up screaming in the middle of the night).
Lauren Cohen (apparently known for her appearances in the TV-series The Walking Dead) is good-looking and she’s not a bad actress, but she’s too old for her part. She’s in her mid-thirties and they tried to make her look at least ten years younger with the help of a haircut and a lot of make-up.
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