[A] favourite horror movie overall*

”'M. Valdemar,' I said, 'are you asleep?' He made no answer, but I perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus induced to repeat the question, again and again. At its third repetition, his whole frame was agitated by a very slight shivering; the eye-lids unclosed themselves so far as to display a white line of the{n} ball; the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued the words:

'Yes; — asleep now. Do not wake me! — let me die so!'”

– Edgar Allan Poe, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) (via)

A man agrees on being hypnotised while in the state of dying. This particularly haunting and efficiently gory film – the first in the genre – is the result.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

[A favourite] Bela Lugosi film*

“No, I never left the wheel; not for a moment.”

– Anton Lorenzen

A post-Dracula Lugosi demonstrates that he's more than the cursed aristocrat. An efficient early Hammer production, made just a year after their founding.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

“My whole idea behind this in the first place was to see how dumb America was. How dumb the world is.”

– James Hydrick

[A favourite] horror remake*

“I never thought I could be friends with a German again. But here I am… Werner is somehow like Murnau brought back to life.”

– Lotte Eisner visiting the set of Herzog's Nosferatu (via)

Coming back to Murnau's expressionist masterpiece was Herzog's bridge between the films made by the grandfathers of German cinema and his era. Herzog, born in 1942 Munich, noted this void created by that philistine regime and felt that, by picking up the thread cut a quarter of a century earlier, German culture could see a restoration to its (non-nationalistic) greatness. Thus a menagerie of rats and actors was released in a reluctant, bourgeois Dutch town.

 

But that's a story for another generation to draw upon.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

A favourite horror film adapted from a book or short story*

“Everything in this masterpiece contributes to its unity: the absolute mastery of editing and rhythm; slow motion, superimpositions, tracking shots, the mobile camera all play their roles and never gratuitously. The photographic quality, worthy of the most learned German operators, the lighting of the sets which envelops them in mystery, the sets themselves, neither realistic nor stylized, but as if sketched; the acting neither realistic nor expressionist, and yet adapted to the fantastic, to the violence; to the pauses; to the blur.”

– Henri Langlois, via

A groundbreaking expressionist interpretation of Poe's inner horrors. Many of the tropes so common in later horror films, are fully fledged and present here.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

– “Memories for Abigail Lester Crain: A Legacy for Her Education and Enlightenment. From her devoted father, Hugh Desmond Lester Crain, Hill House, October 21, 1873.”

– But that's today.

– Tomorrow and 90 years later.

[A favourite] Alien [“alien”?] movie*

 

Three segments envision the future of the Swiss Confederation. In the Fredi M. Murer instalment 2069 – oder wo sich Futorologen und Archäologen gute Nacht sagen, an alien visits surveillance state Switzerland. The visitor in question is designed by H.R. Giger, and glimpses of the XX121 xenomorph are present in its exoskeletal core.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.