Robtober

Robtober is what I call the horror movie binge I do every October. After I redesigned my site in 2017, I started documenting the event each year with a horrifically custom-designed blog post, getting a little more elaborate each time. This post goes behind the scenes of the 2021 edition.

The data

I generate my site with Jekyll, and a custom-designed post like Robtober gets its own unique layout file. To keep things tidy, all the… See more →

Do yourself a favor and read up on Colonia Dignidad before watching this if you don’t want to feel like you got to class and found out too late that there was a homework assignment.

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me.

This year’s batch is a little less focused than usual, drawn from new releases, repertory screenings in Philadelphia, recent additions to Time Out’s “100 Best Horror Films,” Criterion… See more →

I gather that the first Ghoulies movie didn’t get its name until after it was made. They realized its little Gremlins wannabes are the best thing it has going for it, and I bet they wished they had pushed that button harder. Thankfully Ghoulies II takes full advantage of the opportunity to correct that error, roughly quadrupling their screen time and letting them terrorize a carnival. This movie is not remotely clever and it doesn’t… See more →

Ghoulies always felt like a glaring omission in my personal horror canon because it was one of the most memorable VHS boxes on display in the video store that was my second home in the late ’80s and early ’90s. And somehow I never noticed until now that the little green guy on that box is wearing an adorable half shirt and tiny red suspenders! Unfortunately he doesn’t wear them in the movie, so that’s… See more →

I wonder if everyone who’s so tickled that James Wan funneled big studio bucks into a kooky grindhouse premise would find similar delight in, like, Nickelback covering a Bad Brains song.

Looks and sounds great, and the lead performance is fantastic, but oof, what a shoddy script. A short film stretched out to feature length with plenty of repetition and a variety of plot threads teased out and then just left to dangle, culminating in a tacked-on shrug of an ending that basically amounts to “the butler did it.”

I avoided seeing Rocky Horror forever, mostly because throughout high school and college, I found all the attention-starved theater kids who worshipped it to be so irritating. Decades later, I can’t help but be charmed by how giddily transgressive it is.

Every October, I make a schedule of dozens of horror films, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. I call it Robtober, only half-ashamedly. It’s fun! For the past few years, I’ve announced the schedule’s contents via blog posts with increasingly elaborate designs, effectively dressing my site up for Halloween. This year, I wanted to harness some of my favorite visual themes from horror movie marketing (such as posters and trailers), and distorted hand-lettering… See more →

When Melanie says to Sgt. Parks, “It’s not over, it’s just not yours anymore,” I so badly wanted Sgt. Parks to be Mitch McConnell.

Like all Dahl adaptations, this pulls its punches more than it should, but Jim Henson’s magic and the crazy camera work manage to make it truly special, and it’s miles beyond the atrocious Zemeckis version that came 30 years later. The experience was also elevated for me by watching it with my partner, whose lifelong idolization of the titular witches is morbidly adorable.

The office politics themes and serial killer plot may be uninspiring, but Office Killer’s overall craft is very enjoyable. Though it doesn’t noticeably echo the self-portraiture Cindy Sherman is best known for, the cinematography is deliciously and unselfconsciously skewed, which, in tandem with the chamber ensemble score, lends it a peculiar elegance. The whole thing is pretty firmly dated by its pre-Y2K anxiety and the ostentatious graphic design of its titles (courtesy of Bureau),… See more →

Tales from the Hood’s vengeful ghosts aren’t nearly as scary as the real-world racism and cycles of violence that provoke them. The film’s portrayals of those social ills are anything but subtle, but they are nevertheless undeniably horrific.

Why in the world did it take me so long to see Street Trash?! It might be the most grotesque film I’ve ever seen, and its gleeful commitment to thorough vulgarity wouldn’t be a virtue if it weren’t made with such flair. It’s several steps above what I remember of the Troma movies, but doesn’t quite reach the bravura heights of Sam Raimi’s and Peter Jackson’s early splatstick gems. Street Trash is apparently also the… See more →

Neither the trailer nor writer/director Leigh Whannell’s bonafides in the Saw and Insidious franchises gave me much confidence that this Invisible Man remake would be any good, so its overall high quality is a very pleasant surprise indeed. Its loudest moments are its weakest, but thankfully it spends much of its time quietly plumbing the depths of Elisabeth Moss’s crippling PTSD. If there is to be a modern version of the scream queen, may Moss’s… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. It’s usually a mix of home viewings and public theatrical screenings, and the schedule is published both for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me. This year, sadly, the pandemic will keep me out of theaters, and guests won’t be able to join me for home viewings. But… See more →