[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.

[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] horror comedy*. This post goes out to Max Linder, who – together with his wife Hélène “Ninette” Peters – took his own life 100 years ago, on October 31, 1925.

 

Max (Max Linder) bets that he can spend one whole hour in a haunted castle without calling for help. In face of all the (in camera!) terrors, Max faces his fears with ease. Until, just minutes before the clock strikes midnight, the phone rings.

“Strange things are happening today.”

– title card

And there was this other bet. One between Linder and director Abel Gance. Linder bet that Gance would not be able to shoot a movie in only three days. With ghosts, skeletons, and wildlife galore, the result is a delightful Grand Guignol à la Max.

 

* 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] color [horror] film*

“Here lies Pierre MOLINIER born on 13 April 1900 died around 1950 he was a man without morals he was proud of it and gloried in it No need to pray for him.”

– Pierre Molinier, mock-epitaph (via, NSFW as goes without saying)

* 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] exorcism film*

“Blood of Christ. Demon. A curse upon this man. A curse that he will never forget me. Blood of my body. Until the grave. A curse that he will never forget me.”

– Purificazione

When a rejected young woman puts a curse on her heart's desire, the locals see nothing less than witchcraft. It is decided that Purif must be possessed, and exorcised.

 

* 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 movie with more than one bad guy*

 

A shrine must give way to a brothel, and a game of supernatural storytelling follows. At the end of the spooky tales, the landowner neglects to complete the all-important purification ceremony resulting in one-hundred yōkai – one for each story – coming out to haunt the rich man and his cronies.

 

* 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) zombie movie*

 

Now, settima. Of all the zombie movies in the world you had to pick a vampire story? Why yes. Yes I did.

“Again he shook his head. The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!”

– Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)

Just like my actual favourite zombie film, that one from 1968, Soy leyenda is based on Richard Matheson's post-apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend (1954). The story describes a world where the living have become undead vampire-like creatures. A lone man tries to rationalise that new world through reason and science, and legend.

 

In the man's mind, the undead become the familiar, the vampire. In our mind, watching this, we believe to see the foreshadowing of the popculture zombie. The abandoned well-known landscapes, the ceaseless repetition of what the old life had instilled, the normalcy of the grotesque. Oh how familiar they have become.

 

* 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.