Editorials
Five Demonic Horror Movies to Stream This Week
This Friday brings the release of Malum, a demonic new reimagining of 2014’s Last Shift. It seems to kick off a month-long trend dedicated to demonic horror, with April releasing The Pope’s Exorcist and Evil Dead Rise. So, we’re getting into the Halfway-to-Halloween celebrations earlier with streaming picks dedicated to the horror that unleashes demonic mayhem. Some bring the laughs, while others get under your skin and refuse to leave.
Here’s where to watch these five titles this week.
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
The Convent – AMC+, freevee, Pluto TV, Roku, Shudder, Tubi
The Convent is what happens when you blend director Mike Mendez’s sense of humor, a colorful UV light aesthetic, and influences from films like Evil Dead II, Demons, and Night of the Demons. And it features Adrienne Barbeau refusing to put up with any demonic bullshit. In the film, a group of college co-eds sneaks into an abandoned convent to leave their mark and get high, and a run-in with Satanists leaves them all battling demons for their lives. And souls. A splatstick horror comedy full of blood, guns, and demon nuns ensues.
The Dark and the Wicked – AMC+, Shudder
Bryan Bertino, a filmmaker known for bleak horror, creates unrelenting dread and evil in the vacuum of loss here. His latest is rife with suffocating dread, disturbing visuals, and a haunting atmosphere. Siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) return to their childhood home to say their final goodbyes to their dying father, much to their mother’s disappointment. She’d warned them not to come, and it won’t take long to figure out why; an evil presence has taken root on the family’s rural land, and it wants them all. Ireland and Abbott Jr. deliver tremendous performances. The horror is intrinsic to a family coping with grief and loss, but it’s heightened to a horrifying degree thanks to Bertino’s distinct style and twisted vision of evil. It makes for a volatile, frightening viewing experience steeped in nihilism.
Dark Waters – AMC+, Screambox, Shudder, Tubi
Director Mariano Baino’s first and only feature-length film, Dark Waters sometimes makes little sense, but it’s visually stunning and weird. A surreal atmospheric horror film that feels like a throwback to the earlier works of Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava, this dreamlike story follows a woman who travels to an isolated island to find out why her father funded a monestary there before he died. Occult horror with a demonic presence, it’s a dream logic nightmare filled with unforgettable imagery and a wild ending.
Demons – AMC+, Mubi, Night Flight, Plex, Shudder
A large group of people invited to attend a screening of a mysterious horror movie quickly find themselves living in one when locked inside with ravenous demons. A rocking soundtrack, ’80s energy, and a lot of gruesome demonic fun under Lamberto Bava’s direction makes for one hell of a good time at the movies. They will make cemeteries their cathedrals, and the cities will be your tombs. They are… the Demons.
The Taking of Deborah Logan – AMC+, Prime Video, Screambox, Shudder, Tubi, Vudu
For her Ph.D. thesis on Alzheimer’s disease, Mia Medina (Michelle Ang) thinks she’s found the perfect subject in Deborah Logan (Jill Larson) for a documentary. In desperate need of the money, Deborah’s daughter Sarah (Anne Ramsay) allows Mia and her team to set up cameras in their home to record and study Deborah over the next several months. As the days progress, it becomes apparent that something more sinister might be at play than Deborah’s illness. Co-written by Gavin Heffernan and director Adam Robitel, this found-footage gem knows how to craft effective scares. It’s incredibly creepy, oozing with atmosphere for days. This pick is for those in the mood for major chills.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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