Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: classic horror

  • Halloween 2026

    Coming this October: Halloween: The Film-of-the-Week Horror Adventure 2026

    Are you ready to be scared?

    Last year, this was called The Film-of-the-Week Horror Odyssey, but I feel like Mr. Nolan now de facto owns the word “Odyssey,” for all practical purposes.

    I can’t use it in any titles for the next, oh, nine years?

    I have a lineup—not of specific films, but of specific themes. These will be exactly the same as last year. The themes I’ll be embracing for the next four or so weeks are as follows:

    Week 1:
    Find a movie that will actually scare me.

    Week 2:
    Watch a classic monster movie.

    Week 3:
    Find a horror movie that everybody loves.

    Week 4:
    Find a horror movie I am embarrassed to have never seen.

    Week 5:
    Find a movie that everyone will watch for Halloween this year.

    Week 6:
    Find a horror movie I wish I’d seen as a kid.

    Week 7:
    Find the most notable current sleeper horror hit.

    Week 8:
    Find a horror classic I have no interest in, just to cross it off my list.

    Week 9:
    Watch the best-reviewed horror movie I can find that I haven’t seen.

    Week 10:
    Find a horror movie EVERYONE has seen (except me).

    Week 11:
    Find a horror movie that is supposed to be great, but I’m afraid I won’t like.

    Week 12:
    Watch a horror movie I had never heard of until it showed up on streaming trends.

    Week 13:
    Find the midnight movie du jour.

    Week 14:
    Watch a foreign-language horror movie I would otherwise skip.

    Week 15:
    What is the one horror movie I would still like to watch before closing the book on this year’s project?

    I know what you’re thinking.

    “David, why is this listed as weeks and not days? Last I checked, there weren’t 15 weeks in the month of October.”

    That would be fair.

    But hear me out.

    I love the classic childhood trope of the “horror movie of the week”: a generic formula where the heroes encounter some vaguely identifiable creature that is different from the bad guy they fought last week, although sometimes you might have to squint to tell the difference. An obstacle comes out of nowhere for no real reason, strikes true chaos into the citizens of a small town for a few days—or perhaps an extended weekend—then the creature is killed and everyone is relieved.

    What happens next to the main characters?

    It never matters.

    Horror movies always matter, even if the plots never seem to.

    I am also a fan of the philosophy of under-promising and over-delivering. Calling this the Film-of-the-Day Horror Adventure would make readers realize how lazy I actually was, and it would become painfully obvious that I was behind schedule when October 31 arrived and I had only gotten through 11 movies.

    This way, no matter how long it takes me to complete the project, it will still subconsciously seem like I am ahead of schedule.

    Last year’s biggest revelation: there is a sister movie to Psycho that I would now call my second-favorite horror movie of all time, behind the director’s cut of Little Shop of Horrors (1986).

    Meanwhile, the most-watched horror movie I had somehow never seen turned out to be one of the worst movies of all time.

    According to me, anyway.

    This year, I started to worry.

    I’ve already seen Obsession and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and Backrooms might still not be easily streamable by the end of October. I started wondering: Is this year’s project likely to be underwhelming? Have I already seen mostly everything worth seeing?

    I went through my resources, dug around a little, and now I have a glimmer of hope.

    Should this year’s offerings be better than last year’s?

    Probably not.

    Does the lineup have the potential to be unpredictable, exciting, occasionally terrible, and possibly deeply regrettable?

    Absolutely.

    So let me allow the AI Gremlin Assistants to say a little piece about the movies I have procured for this year’s offering.

    AGA says:

    This year’s lineup begins with an experiment that has already worked once before: if a sad clown knows how to rub salt in old wounds, perhaps things are looking up.

    But will it actually be scary?

    From there, things get considerably stranger.

    There are Universal monsters lurking in black-and-white shadows. There is a Spanish ghost story that nearly everyone seems to adore.

    [I don’t know what this is, David.]

    There is an embarrassingly large hole in David’s horror education involving a certain masked figure beneath an opera house.

    [Les Misérables?, David.]

    There are murderous children, a legendary old-Hollywood feud, a movie involving teenagers and monsters that David probably should have seen decades ago, and at least one acclaimed film he strongly suspects he may hate.

    Also—because apparently we’re doing this to ourselves—Titane.

    AGA predicts that one of the movies David is approaching with the most suspicion will wind up being his favorite, somewhere around a 9 or 9.5.

    For the bottom of the pile, AGA is betting on one of the movies he is watching largely out of obligation—the cinematic equivalent of eating your vegetables because they’re historically important.

    Prediction: somewhere around a 4.5 or 5.

    David returns to the typewriter to say:

    The gremlins might have a lot more faith in my appreciation for the charms of Will Smith than is likely warranted.

    Mostly, though, I am still able to find movies that I am genuinely surprised I have not seen.

    Has my avoidance been for good, measurable reason?

    If I hate these movies or find them mediocre, it will be gratifying. I will have vindicated years of perfectly sensible procrastination.

    If I discover that I love them and will return to them time and again, well … color me surprised.

    An aging werewolf can still play with new bones every once in a while.

    I call that a win-win.

  • Day 8: Friday the 13th (1980)

    Goal: Find a horror classic I have no interest in, just to cross it off my list.

    What I know about it:
    I’ve seen bits and pieces of several Friday the 13th sequels. Every October, there’s usually a marathon, and I’ll turn it on for as long as I can stand. This isn’t much. I’ve definitely seen parts of 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8, and probably 4 and 6, though I couldn’t tell you which is which.

    My favorite was Part II—the one where Jason still had a sack over his head because the hockey mask hadn’t been invented yet. I caught the last forty minutes of it once, and it was shocky but exciting, almost like John Carpenter’s Halloween. I thought maybe I was missing something by not watching these all the way through. Then Part III came on and I laughed at how bored I was. Dull. In 3D.

    Still, there’s a weird pleasure in trying to tell the sequels apart. Turn on the Friday the 13th channel on Pluto TV and make everyone guess which entry it is. Sure, they’re all bad, but what kind of bad? Cheesy bad? Slow bad? Dialogue-from-another-planet bad? You’ll never remember the characters or even the kills, but the flavor of badness is always distinct.

    Despite all that, I’d never actually seen the original Friday the 13th. Cable marathons always started with Part II. I figured maybe the first one was too rough or too different. I’d heard The New Blood was the most entertaining, but ten minutes in, I realized there were better ways to spend an evening.

    So: my first Friday the 13th, start to finish.

    —

    After the movie

    That was… disappointing. Not because I hated it, but because I liked it at first. The first 45 minutes are immensely watchable: great introductions, fun little scenes, an effective sense of menace. At their best, Friday the 13th movies aren’t about bad dialogue—they’re about realistic bad dialogue. These kids actually sound like kids.

    Case in point: the Strip Monopoly scene. Everyone played Monopoly in 1980. Everyone had heard of stripping games. Combine the two and you get, well, this.

    > Brenda: “OK, you’re the banker. Remember what the penalty is for losing.”
    Bill: “What’s the penalty?”
    Brenda: “You lose a piece of clothing every time you lose money.”

    Girl, are you sure that makes sense? You lose money every turn in Monopoly. Are you wearing a hundred articles of clothing? Do you even own pants?

    No one ever seems to put their clothes back on, and, in true Monopoly fashion, they quit before the game even begins. One girl runs back to her cabin barefoot. They’ll finish in the morning, I guess. (Where are the camp’s kids?)

    The first half hour works because it forgets to be scary. It’s just a slice-of-life portrait of bored teenagers in 1980—hiking, joking, killing time. Honestly, if the whole movie had been that, I might’ve loved it on principle. It feels more like an art-house hangout movie than a slasher.

    Then the ideas dry up. The film turns into a faceless murder mystery where you never see the killer, just the aftermath. The deaths get bigger, the suspense smaller. The movie stops being about anything.

    The sequels fixed what didn’t work—mask, mythology, pacing—but broke what little it tried to do right. In time, Friday the 13th became the franchise that perfected its own mediocrity. Critics hated the original for being a ripoff of Halloween; Gene Siskel even spoiled it by naming the killer in his review out of spite. It has a 22 on Metacritic. But time has been kind: now it sits comfortably above 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, the horror fan’s version of “we were wrong.”

    I think people admire it now the way musicians admire the rough early versions of their genre. Fred Durst once said he liked the Beastie Boys because “it’s nice to see an early example of our style of music done right.” Friday the 13th is like that—an imperfect template everyone else copied to death. It didn’t invent the superstition, the killer, or the kids, but it invented the business model.

    In 1979, producer Sean S. Cunningham took out a full-page Variety ad for a movie that didn’t exist.

    > “FROM THE PRODUCERS OF LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT — FRIDAY THE 13TH — the most terrifying film ever made.”

    No script, no plot, just a title. He saw that Halloween proved a scary date could sell, so he picked the unluckiest one on the calendar. The ad worked, and within months he had to start filming. Victor Miller wrote a quick script about camp counselors, a drowned boy, and his vengeful mother.

    It’s not a great movie. But it is a great idea for one, or at least a great title they were determined to turn into *something* everyone would want to see eventually. It is the series that perpetually almost had an idea that really, really worked.

    *Oh well. We’ll market it anyway. *

    Maybe the purest example of a movie that exists because it sounded like one.

    5/10