Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: midnight movies

  • 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 4: Eraserhead (1977)

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


    Eraserhead (1977)

    What I know about it:
    A black and white horror movie from the same guy that did Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr. RIP. This has a very strange trailer that I can’t remember, and I saw it last week. Long static shots of a guy with a high-cut hairstyle looking blankly at the camera. Ok, now I’ll read the premise on IMDb.

    So this is a survival movie. “Henry Spencer tries to survive the screams of his newborn mutant child.” Shouldn’t those adjectives be in reverse order? Does Henry have a mutant newborn child, or does he have a newborn mutant child? Describing the child like that makes it sound like some sort of irregular baseball card, or like he came with a set of superhero clothes. “Mutant Child here! Now with a detachable umbilical cord and noise chip!”

    As someone who regularly saw the grosses for midnight movies nationwide, this was one of the standards, particularly in New York and California. If you specifically like watching cult or midnight films, you have already knocked this off your list long ago. I don’t know what it is, but it’s the type of movie that I want to know as little about as possible.


    —

    After the movie:
    Hair in the 1970s. You couldn’t mess with it. Today, if someone looked in the mirror and said, “You know, my hair kind of looks like a pencil eraser,” they would then get clippers and a pair of scissors and cut it down until it seems like the average length trending right now. But in 1976, that length was inches, which equated to a white man afro on some unlucky men. So all you could do was look out the bedroom window from the fetal position and sulk.


    The terminology “newborn mutant baby” is definitely accurate. It isn’t a mutated normal baby. It is a normal mutant baby, with a head that looks curiously like a human elbow. David Lynch deserves some sort of medal for comedy for playing such a long game for such a minor joke. Blink and you’ll miss it.

    I watched this with Josh, who seemed to mostly agree with me on Dead Calm. With Eraserhead, he realized it was boring and considered leaving 30 minutes in. “This movie is just *dull*. People in 1977 watched this because there wasn’t anything else to do.” He never left the room and watched the screen the entire time. He said he kept waiting for it to get better, although I think just enough new things happened to—not keep him interested, maybe—but to keep him from becoming bored out of his mind.

    I realized while watching this: mostly, this was an extremely influential movie for certain directors. It is clear that Barton Fink, which won the Palme d’Or in 1991, was about 70% Eraserhead when the Coen Brothers thought out what to do for their fourth feature film. Is it a drama? Thriller? Comedy? The decision to give it the biggest award was unanimous, which is as if they were saying, “Bravo. We saw Eraserhead, too.”


    This was pre–the mutated creature film boom of the late 70s and 80s, from directors David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Ridley Scott, et al. The stop-motion and practical effects were influential on many 1980s films. David Lynch figured out how to take the effects used in Jason and the Argonauts and claymation movies and do them on a next-to-nothing budget. The sequences don’t last long, but the effect feels straight out of Beetlejuice a decade later. The body imagery, which includes a rib cage split open, feels right out of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

    If the film is about anything, it is the crushing routine and existence of working-class, industrialized city life. Henry Spencer lies down and looks out his bedroom window, and then we cut to his perspective and see what it is he sees. When someone’s bedroom has a contender for “world’s worst view,” I always think, “How did he get stuck here? Henry must be the worst person alive at finding a job. Or the worst at finding an apartment.”


    I always assumed Angelo Badalamenti specialized in 1950s jukebox-style music, which is where the strange lounge act aesthetic came from in Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, et al. But no. That seems to mostly be Lynch’s idea as the origin point. The song here, “In Heaven,” was mostly written by the man himself. I like to think he started with this idea just to find something absurd to be “the mutant squish-y” song, and then he just decided to keep that style and really commit. The Twin Peaks aesthetic started here, in this bizarre, dark horror movie that no one was supposed to see.

    Because Eraserhead is must-see cinema. For anyone who grew to love David Lynch for Twin Peaks or Mulholland Dr., this is where a surprising amount of his craft was first seen. I could name 30 movies now considered classics released in the next 20 years that were directly indebted to Eraserhead. The entire 1980s cult movie genre was trying to be the next Eraserhead!

    9/10