[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.

– You expect me to eat that?

– Americans live on ketchup and milk. I'm a whiz at geography.

A [favourite] Frankenstein film.

 

One wet, ungenial summer in 1816, lovers Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, visited a dear friend at Villa Diodati. That friend was Lord Byron, exiled and residing in the Swiss villa with his physician Dr John Polidori

“There are no ghosts in daylight. You'll get used to our nights at Diodati. A little indulgence to heighten our existence on this miserable Earth. Nights of the mind, the imagination. Nothing more.”

– Lord Byron

Forced indoors, over the cause of three days they turned to the occult, to laudanum, to stories from the Fantasmagoriana, and the horrors of their own. That summer, Frankenstein saw the light of day.

A translator for International Translation Day

“This mirror reflected a painting… with words. Chinese idiograms. 'The she-crane calls in the shadow. Her cheek answers.'”

– Alice Campos

Alice, the always fantastically brooding Florinda Bolkan, works as a translator when all of sudden she loses her job and finds herself on the small island of Garma. People tell her she has been there before, recently, but she knows this is not possible.

 

Some English-language posters try to sell Le orme as an action-ridden sci-fi giallo, but oh boy leave that perception behind and you're in for one unsettling treat! Le orme can be placed somewhere between Don't Look Now and that other Alice film, Chabrol's Alice ou la dernière fugue. Drifting and elegant, distant and claustrophobic.

“Tot dusver had ik mij steeds vrij tevreden met het leven gevoeld, zonder er wonderen van te verwachten. Die morgen geloofde ik, dat het voor een mens niet onmogelijk is gelukkig te zijn, kortstondig gelukkig misschien, maar gelukkig onmiskenbaar.”

– Hubert Lampo, De komst van Joachim Stiller (1960)

We watch the final report by Will Roczinski, who sadly died in a car crash while working on a TV documentary about UFOs and the like. A fascinating early “faux footage” film from the BRD. One can only wonder how the average West German processed the fantastic premise.

“We've been to Haunted Hills, and through Tinglers, and even Ghosts... but now we're going to meet a group of people who just happen to be… Homicidal.”

– William Castle, introduction