Editorials
‘It Lives Inside’: Five Terrifying Movie Monsters Lurking in the Shadows
Warning: Major spoilers for the following films abound.
Few experiences unite people from all walks of life like a fear of the dark. Often surpassing specific concerns of serial killers, monsters, witches, or demons, what we collectively fear most is that mysterious, dark unknown. Anything and everything could be lurking in the shadows just waiting to pounce. Bishal Dutta’s terrifying new film It Lives Inside follows an ancient evil that hides in dark corners while terrorizing its prey. The film follows a troubled teen named Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) terrorized by a flesh-eating demon known as the Pishacha that feasts on negative energy. This malevolent being soon sets its sights on her best friend Samidha (Megan Suri) and begins a campaign of terror hoping to gorge itself on chaos, destruction, and emotional pain.
One of Dutta’s most frightening scenes takes place in Samidha’s darkened bedroom. Staring at her open closet door, the terrified teen notices a pair of tiny glowing eyes watching her from the shadows. Samidha shines a flashlight into the open doorway, but the light reveals nothing more than her familiar possessions. The second she drops the flashlight’s beam, the glowing eyes return, more malicious than ever.
The terrifying Pishacha is the latest in a long line of creatures and killers hiding under the cover of darkness. But really, in hindsight, the horror genre has practically been built on the stories of beings who use the absence of light to conceal the most unthinkable evil. In light of this week’s greatest scare, Bloody Disgusting is revisiting five films that terrify viewers by challenging them to decide if what we think we’re seeing is actually there. Hopefully we, along with the characters on this list, will find out what’s really lurking in the shadows before it’s too late.
Above, we have an exclusive conversation with filmmaker Bishal Dutta, who shares his favorite horror moments in the dark ahead of It Lives Inside, now playing in theaters nationwide via Neon. Get tickets now!
Gerald’s Game (2017)
The cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s harrowing novel terrifies on several levels. Jessie (Carla Gugino) Burlingame and her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) have traveled to their luxurious lake house well after the summer season has ended, hoping to kickstart their love life with a bit of kink. However, an innocent game of restraint takes a dreadful turn when Gerald suffers a fatal heart attack while Jessie is tethered to the bed frame.
In addition to the gruesome degloving scene and the ever present threat of starvation, director Mike Flanagan puts Jessie through a harrowing ordeal in which the keys to survival lie in the darkness of her own mind. In the middle of the night, Jessie wakes to see a pale face watching her from the corner. Sporting a ghoulish grin, this man with long, dangling arms stands for hours in the corner of Jessie’s darkened bedroom, watching and enjoying her misery. Lit only by the moon’s rays through the open windows, Jessie has no way to know if the creature she dubs the Moonlight Man (Carel Struycken) is real or simply the grim specter of death watching her final hours.
Lake Mungo (2008)
Following the tragic drowning death of their daughter, Alice (Talia Zucker), the Palmer family begins to notice her faded image in pictures and video footage created after her death. We eventually learn that Alice’s brother Mathew (Martin Sharpe) has been editing the images, hoping to help his parents process their pain. However, closer examination reveals something even more horrific. Lurking within the doctored footage is another hideous face hiding in the shadows. The family’s neighbor can be seen ducking out of view after sneaking into the Palmer house to find video evidence of a sexual assault.
The stunning image of his leering face hiding in the grainy footage is nearly as disturbing as the reason he’s there in the first place. But writer/director Joel Anderson isn’t done haunting us with phantoms. As if conjured by Matthew’s understandable deception, additional footage shows Alice beginning to appear in undoctored photos. A powerful examination of grief and depression, Lake Mungo ends with a haunting credits sequence showing a multitude of happy family photos that all contain her ghostly image, watching from the shadows as life moves on without her.
When a Stranger Calls Back (1993)
We’ve all heard the story of the babysitter and the stranger upstairs. Asking if she’s checked the children, he torments her with repeated calls eventually revealed to be coming from inside the house. Fred Walton’s 1979 film When a Stranger Calls brings this terrifying urban legend to life in one of horror’s most unnerving opening sequences. Fourteen years later, the babysitter returns in When a Stranger Calls Back, another twist on a nightmarish urban legend. Julia (Jill Schoelen) is babysitting when a stranger knocks on the door. Complaining of car trouble, he continues to harass her throughout the evening while the kids sleep upstairs.
With a locked door between them, Julia believes she is safe. However, she begins to fear there may be someone else in the house. It seems this killer has been hiding in the shadows of the darkened living room for hours. A ventriloquist by trade, he’s been throwing his voice to convince Julia that he’s outside the front door, when he’s been just inches away the whole time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. This slightly ridiculous premise feels like a nightmare come to life as the murderous trickster emerges from the shadows with claw-like hands outstretched.
The Conjuring (2013)
Immediately after moving into a rambling farmhouse, the members of the Perron family begin to hear strange sounds in the night. Middle daughter Christine (Joey King) wakes to find that her covers have been pulled to the floor and there’s an overpowering smell of rotting meat filling the room. Still wiping the sleep out of her eyes, she looks around her darkened bedroom and notices a sinister presence lurking in the corner. As her sister gets up to investigate the door suddenly slams, removing the possibility that it’s just her imagination.
However, this is only a precursor to one of the film’s most famous scenes. After putting her daughters to bed, Carolyn (Lili Taylor) ventures downstairs to investigate a strange sound. She opens the door to the cobwebby cellar and peers down the stairs with only the flame from a match to light her way. As she tries to make sense of the shadows, a pair of ghostly hands appear just behind her ear and clap twice, a sinister mockery of a beloved family game. Once again the door slams locking Carolyn inside the basement, alone in the pitch-black darkness with the house’s evil presence.
Hereditary (2018)
One of the darkest films in recent memory, Ari Aster’s Hereditary is filled with sinister spirits hiding in the shadows. After the horrifying death of his little sister Charlie (Milly Shapiro), Peter (Alex Wolff) awakens to see her standing in the corner of his room. He calls out to Charlie, but before she can answer, her head falls off and rolls toward his bed. A closer look reveals nothing more than a ball rolling across the floor, but this horrific vision mirrors the details of his sister’s horrifying decapitation.
Set in a cold and unsettling house, Aster’s film is filled with hidden horrors including naked cult members hiding in dark corners and visual details that grow more unsettling upon rewatch. However, these nightmares pale in comparison to the scene that kicks off Aster’s shocking climax. As Peter wanders through his suspiciously quiet house, our eyes adjust to take in the dimly lit scene. We eventually notice Peter’s mother Annie (Toni Collette) perched like a waiting spider in the upper corner of his room. When she finally does attack, Peter retreats to the attic where an even more hellish fate awaits.
It Lives Inside hits theaters nationwide on September 22nd. Get tickets now!
The problem with filming sequels back-to-back is that, unless you can afford expensive reshoots, there’s no easy way to adjust course in between movies if fans react badly to where the story is headed. That’s why it’s important to have a complete narrative thought out well in advance lest you accidentally kill a budding franchise.
However, this isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, it seems like the cinema gods smile upon certain chaotic productions and gift moviegoers with complete franchises that feel like more than the sum of their hastily produced parts. Ted Nicolaou’s Bloodlust: Subspecies III is precisely one of these miraculous pictures, with the raw talents of the artists involved (as well as the continued support from Romania) turning the feature into an effective conclusion for a series that kind of made things up as the filmmakers went along.
That’s why I’d like to invite my fellow readers to join me on this third part of our journey through the Subspecies franchise as we look into Bloodlust and talk about how it remains a surprisingly satisfying finale to the original trilogy.
A Trilogy Planned on the Fly
Released only a year after Bloodstone found plenty of success in rental stores and mail-in VHS catalogues worldwide, 1994’s Bloodlust was produced at the same time as its predecessor in (mostly) the same locations and with the same team. This means that the movie benefited from all the same upgrades as Bloodstone, with the crew now being more experienced with the ins and outs of surviving a low-budget Romanian production and the cast really settling into their characters.
At this point, everything from location scouting to the makeup process had been streamlined, with Wayne Toth and Norman Cabrera, the main duo behind special effects, even switching out time-consuming prosthetics for latex gloves in order to speed up Anders Hove’s monstrous transformation. The titular “subspecies” demons were also once again relegated to a mere cameo appearance due to the laborious puppetry required to bring them to life.
The only real hiccup came from the fact that actress Denice Duff had replaced the first film’s Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and was immediately expected to portray the character as both an innocent victim in part II and as a secondary villain in part III. According to behind-the-scenes interviews, the hectic production schedule that blended two different movies meant that Duff would often find herself having to alternate between two incredibly different versions of Michelle during the same shooting day – though it’s obvious that she’s having more fun with Bloodlust’s more traditionally vampiric version of her character.
In the finished film, we pick things up immediately where the previous entry left off as Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) is forced to leave her vampire sister Michelle (Duff) behind in the dungeons of Castle Vladislav due to the rising sun. This allows Mummy (Pamela Gordon) to use Michelle’s blood to revive the vicious Radu (Hove) so that he may continue his quest for the coveted Bloodstone – a magical artifact that perpetually drips the Blood of Saints.
Meanwhile, the dreamy US embassy agent Mel (Kevin Blair) agrees to help Rebecca plan a rescue mission, though they’re unaware that Radu has become infatuated with Michelle during his attempts to guide her growing bloodlust. This all culminates in a climactic confrontation meant to tie up all of the series’ loose ends in one of Full Moon Pictures’ most ambitious productions.
The Evolution of Radu
Like its predecessor, Bloodlust: Subspecies III was also warmly received by fans who argued that the series was an even bigger success than Full Moon’s other major horror franchise, Puppet Master. This praise wasn’t unanimous, however, as 1994 had seen the rise of a more modern breed of sexy vampire popularized by Anne Rice, with old-school Nosferatu like Radu being viewed as obsolete when compared to the likes of Lestat and Gary Oldman’s take on Dracula.
In a way, one might argue that Nicolaou’s film is something of a swan song for the classic vampire story, as Bloodlust combines all of the traditional elements we tend to associate with these tales into a single tragic yarn that ties a neat little bow on Radu’s story as well as the old-fashioned monster movies that he represents. The finale remains shocking despite the fact that this is the third time we see Radu get brutally killed onscreen, with the brief tease that he may one day return feeling more like a nod towards the nature of evil rather than sequel bait.
The film dabbles a bit in gothic romance and even explores the inherent power fantasy behind transforming into an immortal creature of the night, but the filmmakers never lose sight of Radu as a demonic force even when he’s willing to betray his beloved Mummy for Michelle’s sake. In fact, his twisted “love” for his fledgling makes him even creepier as we get the feeling that his passion comes from a dark and disturbing place.
Anders Hove is at his absolute best in this film, with the effects department boosting his moments of what the younger generation would call “aura farming” whenever Radu emerges from shadows like a 90s version of Count Orlok. There are even a couple of surprisingly effective jump-scares here, which is why I’d argue that Bloodlust cements Radu as one of the most memorable cinematic vampires of all time despite his humble origins.
Subspecies Saves Its Best For Last
Nicolaou and Vlad Panescu also saved the best for “last” (more on that in a bit) regarding the film’s visuals, with the cinematography and overall atmosphere of Bloodlust absolutely surpassing what we saw in the previous films. Everything feels appropriately climactic this time around (including the wonderful soundtrack that was co-composed alongside an authentic Romanian orchestra), and I appreciate how this is the fastest-paced entry in the trilogy since the film doesn’t need to waste time setting anything up.
Bloodlust still suffers from some of the same low-budget blemishes as its predecessors, but there’s so much creative passion here that no amount of wonky effects work or stilted dialogue can get in the way of appreciating the flick’s gothic grandeur. That’s why it’s not surprising that the movie’s definitive(-ish) ending would later be retconned as fans begged for more Radu.
Of course, the next entry in this series would be a different kind of vampiric endeavor altogether, with the filmmakers attempting to engage with the same trends that ultimately killed Radu and his antiquated kin. That, however, is a story for another time. For now, I’ll merely insist that Bloodlust: Subspecies III remains a highlight of Full Moon’s expansive catalogue and is definitely worth seeking out today.
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