31 Movies in 31 Days 2023

Posted byNicholas RadfordPosted inUncategorizedTags:, , , , , ,

Another year has come and gone, and with it, another October where I watch a spooky movie for every day of the month. 

A tradition that started–I think– half a decade ago has become an integral part of my spooky season celebration, and was especially difficult to keep up with, in conjunction with wrestling and training for my first ever 50K (a whole blog on that coming soon). Gone are the covid times that allowed for 61 Movies in 61 Days, because I had nothing else going on. Now, more than ever, I’ve found my yearly movie marathon to be necessary to catch up with all the more recent horror movies. Outside of October, I think I only watched three spooky offerings this year: Scream VI and Evil Dead Rise (both stellar entries in their respective franchises), plus Skinamarink (a movie that I didn’t enjoy in the moment, but haven’t been able to stop thinking about since). It truly feels like we’re living through a horror renaissance with all the new horror franchises cropping up.

But enough about scary movies I didn’t watch in October! Let’s take a look at the movies I did watch:

Now, let’s dig into them! I’ll try my best to avoid spoilers, but I may have to touch on some, so be warned–MINOR SPOILERS on all the movies listed!

First up, X and Pearl were the movies I was most excited to finally check out. I’d heard many good things, but fortunately, I went in relatively in the dark regarding what was going to happen, and they did not disappoint. Pearl was truly exceptional. The story was a little less interesting than X, but Mia Goth’s performance as the titular character was truly phenomenal. There were three separate instances throughout the film where I thought to myself, “I am watching a true performer create ART right now.” To be clear, X and Mia Goth’s performances in it are also great. I highly recommend both movies and think it’s most beneficial to watch them in order of release. I’m very excited for the conclusion to the trilogy–MaXXXine–to come out soon!

Speaking of Mia Goth, I saw a lot of her this year, as I finally got around to Infinity Pool, from Brandon Cronenberg—son of famed body horror filmmaker David Cronenberg (more on him in a moment). This one had an interesting premise and soon devolved into utter madness with strong Purge vibes, due to similar social commentary themes. Brandon’s father, David Cronenberg, also showed up on this list, as I watched Crimes of the Future, which felt a lot like Blade Runner in mood and messaging. It’s one of those films that, while I don’t see a need to rewatch it, I’ve been thinking about it a lot since seeing it—which I call the Skinamarink effect, as I didn’t enjoy my time with that movie, but it’s been on my mind regularly ever since. 

Circling back to my original point about how many great, really fun horror movies have come out in the last year or two, I finally checked out M3GAN, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and The Menu. M3GAN was exactly as fun as I imagined it to be, and I’m hyped for anything else in that universe. I think I heard that a sequel was greenlit shortly after the original came out, due to its success. Don Mancini, the creator of the Child’s Play/Chucky series, recently teased some sort of crossover when he was asked about it, which just makes sense. The Chucky brand has hit a peak since making the shift to TV from straight-to-DVD/Streaming releases. The series has been a welcome addition to the challenge that comes with watching so much content in October. Bodies Bodies Bodies, like M3GAN, was a movie that I meant to watch last year, and just couldn’t fit into my October. At first, I was worried that I would hate this movie because all of the characters are kind of insufferable, but you figure out pretty quickly that you’re not meant to like any of them because we’re about to watch a lot of them die in an extremely fun take on the whodunit genre. The ending might be the most satisfying reveal I’ve seen in a horror movie. The final “fun” movie I want to talk about in this section is The Menu, which could be argued is not a horror movie, but it’s my game and I make the rules, so I’m including it. It’s also VERY fun, as I’ve heard, is a great lampooning of “chef culture,” if that’s even the correct way to describe it. Anyway, I highly recommend these three.

Unfortunately, not all of those movies I heard a lot about from the past year lived up to the hype. Men, while it had some very scary moments and should be commended for its use of one actor playing multiple roles, really didn’t do much for me aside from making me think, “What the actual heck?” It was a big swing that just didn’t quite land for me. I appreciated the story and the message they were trying to convey, but I think other horror movies have grappled with the concept of misogyny much more successfully (see: Fresh from last year’s marathon).

Instead of pics from the movies I watched, here are some costumes from this year. First: The Addams Family

The last movie that had some hype last year on this list is Orphan: First Kill, but I had never seen the original Orphan and I was told to watch that one first to avoid the twist being spoiled, so I watched both! The original Orphan was pretty novel in concept and could have been accomplished without the surprise near the end—but I appreciate that they included it because it made the whole movie so much more heightened. It also set up the prequel, which had its own unique twist, so nicely! My favorite part of First Kill was all the Hobbit magic they used to make a woman, who was about twelve when they made the original and was now in her twenties, look like a nine-year-old. There were lots of scenes where she was clearly on her knees next to her costars, or there would be a shot of her and someone together from the front then switch to an anterior shot that was clearly an actual child standing in her place. So good! They weren’t my favorite movies this year, but deserve some honorable mentions.

Leading from one hyped-up duology to another, Terrifier is on track to become a trilogy when the third entry, set during the winter holidays, releases next year. I have mixed feelings about this series (and the series that came before it, which I’ll get to), but most of them are positive. Art the Clown is one of my new favorite horror movie villains. He’s extremely endearing and his switch from fun to menacing is something to behold. I’m also really glad he doesn’t talk and is shrouded in mystery. He’s just a weird supernatural clown who brutally kills people. I’ve heard that drag queens enjoy the original Terrifier and I think I can understand why. While it’s incredibly brutal at times, everything surrounding the gruesome murders is so steeped in camp that you can’t help but smile at Art’s antics. While the second film goes bigger in almost every way, the one area where the original succeeds and where the sequel fails is in runtime. Something that has become a big selling point for me over the years, especially when I’m running through over thirty movies in a month, is the ever-elusive tight ninety. Some scenes and moments felt unnecessary to the plot of the movie and felt like their only purpose was to pad the run time or check a box the filmmaker wanted to get in. Even the weird Chris Jericho cameo at the end (he’s right there in the opening credits, and I spent the whole movie wondering when he would pop up) felt like it dragged. Regardless, I enjoyed both movies, I just enjoyed the first a bit more.

During my Terrifier journey, I learned that my boy, Art the Clown debuted in the anthology film All Hallows’ Eve, so I decided to check that out too. I enjoyed this one a good deal. Art is like a background character in the first two vignettes before he gets a starring role in the third and eventually takes over the framing device. I had a good time with this one. Unfortunately, the sequel, All Hallows’ Eve 2 was not as successful. This one had like seven short films within it, which mercifully led them all to be shorter to fit within the film’s tight ninety (we love to see it) runtime. So, just as I was starting to get bored with one scenario, we moved on to the next. I only remember the first and last shorts, which is probably a boon to my overall opinion of the film. The less I remember, the better. Plus, I can’t be too mad, as I knew it wasn’t going to be great when I decided to watch it. Neither the original filmmaker nor Art the Clown played any role in this sequel.

The final series I worked my way through this year was Hell House LLC and its three sequels. The most recent sequel dropped on October 30th as a Shudder exclusive, which played a role in inspiring me to check these movies out. They’re found footage horror movies presented as a documentary (or remnants of found footage meant to develop a documentary), complete with talking heads, and I loved it. They may have even served as an inspiration for–or were inspired by–one of the other found footage films on the list: Lake Mungo, which was a great little story about a teenage girl who went missing, and the supernatural fallout that her family started experiencing after the disappearance. It was also presented as a documentary, complete with talking heads and the like—but felt a little more grounded and personal. The story of the Hell House series is about a fake haunted house that turns out to actually be haunted, which is a surprisingly obvious plot that somehow hasn’t been done before. Each sequel attempts to add more to the lore, with the most recent one fleshing out the “mascot, (for lack of a better term)— the creepy clown guy (if you google the movie, he’ll be one of the first images you see). I always appreciate when a decent but arguably thin premise gets fleshed out over time. It’s like what the animated–and now live-action–Star Wars shows did for the Prequel and Sequel trilogies. Lore, baby!

Speaking of found footage franchises, we also got our yearly dose of the V/H/S franchise with V/H/S/85. The naming conventions on these are so hard to keep track of, and they’re annoying to type, but I sure do love them. This one is probably lower on the rankings for me, but nowhere near as bad as V/H/S/Viral was. I still enjoyed it, but it didn’t have a standout like Raatma from V/H/S/94 or To Hell and Back from V/H/S/99. That said, this is still an amazing series and I’m glad we just keep getting more of them.

Moving from a series I LOVE to a series I’m not as keen on, Halloween (2018) continued the series’ trend of not holding my interest. I know it’s a really hot take, but Halloween is my least favorite of the long-running horror franchises. The only one that I really enjoy is Season of the Witch, which doesn’t even have Micheal Myers in it and I believe this illustrates why I keep bouncing off the franchise–the antagonist is the least fleshed out. Freddy and Chucky are such over-the-top, charismatic killers. Jason is basically a deadite. Micheal Myers is…just some guy. Sure, he’s a silly little prankster who loves to throw on a white sheet and pretend to be a ghost every once in a while, but he doesn’t even really speak. Plus, the confusing multiple timelines will always be a turnoff for me. I need a pretty stable canon to stick with a franchise this big. Anyway, I liked some things about this movie–the kids were written really well–but overall I was pretty lukewarm on it. I had intended to watch all three of the newer movies, but Halloween Kills wasn’t available to stream anywhere in the U.S. and I didn’t feel like hunting it down on a VPN or paying for it. Maybe next year.

Next, Over the Garden Wall.

There were a couple of horror comedies on this year’s list, too. Renfield, Haunted Mansion (2023), and Spirit Halloween are all exactly as good as you’d expect them to be. I enjoyed my time with Renfield and Haunted Mansion–they were perfectly middle of the road. Spirit Halloween was trying to be what The Wizard was for Nintendo, but less…successful, if that makes sense.

2023 was a big year for horror in general, and I’m glad I was able to keep up with most of the releases in my “marathon” this year. In addition to the previously mentioned additions to pre-existing series, there were several standalone releases that I had on my “must-watch” list and, most of them fortunately lived up to the hype. Totally Killer, Talk to Me, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster were all very enjoyable. I’m excited for more entries in the Talk to Me and Five Nights franchises in the future, and I could totally (eh? eh?) see Totally Killer being added to the oft-rumored Happy Deathday X Freaky crossover movie. I did a deep dive into Five Nights lore after watching the movie and, while I’ll probably never play any of the games, I’m very intrigued by all the mythos. Cobweb was, unfortunately, the exception, not grabbing me like the others could. I don’t necessarily think it was bad, but it was unfortunately one of my least favorites this year. 

On the other end of the spectrum, one of my absolute favorites this year was No One Will Save You—an incredible alien invasion horror story with a mainly silent protagonist and a wonderfully surreal resolution. Alien-centric horror films are some of my favorites in the genre, and good ones are so few and far between, so I was delighted with how this one started at a 10 and only ramped up from there.

Finally, my other favorite film of the thirty-one that I watched this past October was Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, which was a “remake” of Evil Dead by a Japanese bodybuilder who was just a huge fan of the original film and wanted to make his own. He wrote, directed, and starred in the movie about a guy whose house is haunted by an evil spirit and follows many of the key points in the Evil Dead formula, except this guy fights with his muscles and weights instead of a chainsaw. It’s super short–like only an hour long–and is on Shudder, so I think it’s a must-watch.

That’s all for this year’s 31 Movies in 31 Days! Thanks for joining me once again. Have you seen any of these movies? Do you have a different take than I did on any of them? Are there any movies I should add to my list for next year? Let me know!

THE WORLD IS YOUR BURRITO!

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