Movies
[Book Review] Small Press Roundup: Serial Killers, Zombie Cats, And More!
For every major release in horror fiction, there are dozens that fall through the cracks. The e-book distribution model cuts both ways––while it’s easier to access small- and self-published novels than ever before, the big cheese publishers still seem to be benefiting more than anybody. Part of it may be due to the overall low quality of self-published horror fiction, but there are undeniably a few winners out there. You just have to dig a bit. Not every book gets table space at Barnes and Noble.
Beyond the break you’ll find a fistful of capsule reviews of small press offerings, including Zombie Cat, Video Night, Ted’s Score, and the second edition of Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide. I know that many B-D readers aren’t the type to shy away from indie horror in any form––be it book, comic, video game, or movie. So if you’ve read any good small press horror this year, drop a note in the comments. I’ve received several excellent horror fiction recommendations from our readers in the past, and I’m always looking for more.
Zombie Cat: The Tale of a Decomposing Kitty, by Isabel Atherton, Illustrated by Bethany Straker
Skyhorse Publishing
For parents looking to introduce their little ones to the world of zombie lore, this 32-page picture book might be just the ticket. When Tiddles the cat is attacked by an infected field mouse, owner Jake is forced to adapt to the changes in his feline friend. The simple story is good for a few smirks, but Straker’s pleasantly grotesque illustrations are what sets this one apart. A solid Christmas present for your gramma who got into The Walking Dead out of nowhere.
3.5 out of 5 Skulls
Video Night, by Adam Cesare
Samhain Horror
More of a gory supernatural thriller than a horror novel, Video Night channels the “latchkey kids” of the 80s as two teenage buddies try to arrange a “video night” with a couple of single ladies…on the same evening a host of alien parasites take over the local townsfolk. With punchy dialogue and crackerjack visuals, Cesare’s second novel is a breezy pleasure, but his decision to give his monsters dialogue and personality drains away any potential tension. Call it “the Freddy Krueger problem”. Still, horror nerds looking to relive the magic of VHS-powered movie nights could certainly do worse than this monster mash.
3 out of 5 Skulls
Ted’s Score, by Daniel B. Coughlin
Comet Press
The first few chapters of Ted’s Score hint at another bleak torture porn entry, but Coughlin, the screenwriter of 2007’s Lake Dead, is smarter than that. Instead of sticking with the mundane details of survival horror tradition, he cranks his plot through a Habitrail of riveting twists that make the pages fly by. When Ted, an aging serial killer, crosses paths with a pretty blond teenager, a collision course is set for the upcoming Spring Formal. But like Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, the plot of Ted’s Score is powered by the unforgiving inevitability of coincidence, and its greatest strength lies in its unpredictability. In his own dark, twisted way, Coughlin reminds us that under the right circumstances, anyone is capable of murder.
4 out of 5 Skulls
Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Second Edition), by Glenn Kay
Chicago Review Press
Oh man, do you guys remember 2008? It was a halcyon time when American pop culture was so smothered in zombies, you couldn’t throw a dismembered arm without hitting some form of entertainment based on the living dead. That’s also the year Glenn Kay published the first edition of Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide, possibly presuming (like the rest of us) that we were approaching the beginning of the end of zombie oversaturation. I guess not much has changed. Due to the dozens of zombified cash-ins that have been released since 2008, Kay has been compelled to release a Second Edition of his zombie movie encyclopedia a mere four years later.
With the exception of a few omissions, Zombie Movies covers the vast majority of zombie films released since 1932’s White Zombie, most with a simple capsule review. Kay is a knowledgeable writer with a dry sense of humor, and while he offers some genuinely keen observations regarding the evolution of the subgenre, some readers will vehemently disagree with his individual ratings. (He lavishes praise on 1980’s The Fog while taking a desecrating dump all over 1989’s Pet Sematary). It’s also worth noting that the book is printed in black-and-white, a serious disappointment when you consider the number of posters, photos, and lobby cards included. Luckily, Kay was savvy enough to include an 18-page color spread, which serves as a redemption of sorts. While it’s not perfect, Zombie Movies is superior to most of the “zombie encyclopedias” currently on the market, and a straight-up necessity for the zombie superfans among us.
4 out of 5 Skulls
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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