Each morning I’ve been checking to see what horror films have released that day in horror, and while the month started off strong it sort of tapered off. Until today.

October 10th was a pretty great day in horror history, bringing us David Cronenberg’s 1975 Shivers (They Came from Within). Released in the States in July of 1976, the film follows the residents of a suburban high-rise apartment building who are infected by a strain of parasites that turn them into mindless, sex-crazed fiends out to infect others by the slightest sexual contact. This was Cronenberg’s first foray into body horror and would eventually lead to him terrorizing horror fans with films like Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers and even The Fly. With Shivers, Cronenberg won “Best Director” at the 1975 Sitges Film Festival.

Wiki notes some interesting controversy I wasn’t aware of:

The Canadian journalist Robert Fulford, writing as “Marshall Delaney”, decried the content of Shivers in the pages of the national magazine Saturday Night. Since Cronenberg’s film was partially financed by the taxpayer-funded Canadian Film Development Corporation (later known as Telefilm Canada), Fulford headlined the article “You Should Know How Bad This Movie Is, You Paid For It.” He called it “crammed with blood, violence and depraved sex” and “the most repulsive movie I’ve ever seen.” Not only did this high profile attack make it more difficult for Cronenberg to obtain funding for his subsequent movies, but Cronenberg later said Fulford’s article also resulted in him being kicked out of his apartment in Toronto due to his landlord’s inclusion of a “morality clause” in the lease.

Another interesting addition to October 10th in horror history is Roger Spottiswoode’s Terror Train, which would star Halloween‘s Jamie Lee Curtis. The 1980 slasher film was part of the early masked-slasher horror boom, and follows the members of a college fraternity who played a cruel prank on a shy kid named Kenny Hampson. Years later, they are having a costume party on a train; unbeknownst to them, someone has boarded the train with them and is killing them all one by one. According to Wiki, FOX acquired the film and put $5M into P&A only to have the film gross $8M. Not the booming success they had hoped for.

Also released on this day, Tony Malanowski’s 1978 Night of Horror, which would eventually open in the States in 1981.

In 2003 Uwe Boll would break onto the scene with his horrid video game adaptation, House of the Dead, which would bomb at the box office. Still, the film garnered a “director’s cut” so Boll could show what he really intended to release. It was just as terrible. The new version “features new dialogue, alternative takes, pop up commentary and animation from the original video game.” He produced an equally awful direct-to-video sequel. In the adaptation of the SEGA game, a group of unsuspecting teens stumble upon the living dead in an old house. When one of them dies during a rave at the house, the others band together to get revenge.

Lastly, the Dowdle brothers got behind the camera for the 2008 Quarantine, a found-footage remake of [REC] that starred “Dexter’s” Jennifer Carpenter as a television reporter who is trapped inside a building quarantined by the CDC after the outbreak of a mysterious virus which turns humans into bloodthirsty killers. It was surprisingly good, considering the original was an instant horror classic. It too spawned a very awful direct-to-video sequel.