Five Films for Halloween

By Christopher Stewardson

Like many others, I try to seek out new horror films each October, usually crossing some amazing films (and a few duds) off my watchlist in the process. When selecting these films, I think variety is key. Here I offer a handful of films for your own October rotation, from giant mutants and ghosts to kaiju and aliens. I’m sure you’ll have seen a few of these before, but I think a good seasonal selection also includes a few revisits. 

Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)

Personally, no October lineup is complete without at least one 1950s creature feature. Of course, 1959’s Attack of the Giant Leeches isn’t necessarily one of the best, with an unimaginative story concerning giant leeches mutated by radioactive material – emblematic of how exhausted the American giant monster film had become by the decade’s end. Nevertheless, its monsters, setting, and atmosphere are all creepy enough to warrant a closer look. 

Attack of the Giant Leeches plays out across isolated swamps and marshes, places where something really could grab you from your boat and nobody would ever know. The leeches themselves are (sadly) seldom seen, mostly gurgling at the water’s edge as characters pass by unknowingly. But when they attack, the leeches look appropriately slimy and sinister. This is especially so when we visit the leeches’ underwater grotto where they feast upon their victims. One brief shot shows a man being practically devoured by two of them at once, accompanied by appropriately gruesome sucking sounds. The murky depths of the grotto are also complemented by Alexander Lazslo’s organ-heavy score, itself recycled entirely from director Bernard Kowalski’s prior sci-fi/horror: Night of the Blood Beast (1958).

In the early 1960s, Attack of the Giant Leeches featured in several “Bug-a-thon" or “Bug-o-rama" marathons run by various American drive-in theatres. In April 1963, the North Drive-in of Waynesboro, Virginia, played Attack of the Giant Leeches alongside Earth vs. The Spider (1958), The Fly (1958), and The Deadly Mantis (1957) in its “Bug-a-thon" lineup. Meanwhile, in September that year, the Watsonville Starlite Drive-in of Santa Cruz, California, ran a “Bug-o-rama" marathon which had almost the same lineup, albeit with Tarantula (1955) instead of Earth vs. The Spider. Indeed, another means by which we can appreciate Attack of the Giant Leeches is through drive-in lineups like these which placed it directly amongst its giant invertebrate contemporaries. 

The Twilight Zone: Night Call (1964)

TV episodes can helpfully offer shorter chills if you’re just home from work and can’t quite manage a full feature. With that in mind, The Twilight Zone (1959-64) is an obvious choice with its wealth of compelling stories. For this selection, I’ve chosen Night Call from Season 5. It’s a story of misunderstanding and isolation, the distance between two people stretched beyond life and death. An elderly woman named Elva (Gladys Cooper) is plagued by mysterious phone calls. At first, nobody answers when she picks up. Then, a ghostly voice wails incoherently, before endlessly calling out “hello”. The voice next asks, “where are you?”, and lastly a grim revelation of the caller’s identity clarifies how far away (or perhaps how close) they really are.

It’s a profoundly upsetting piece. One party reaches out in a desperate attempt at connection, and the other cannot understand them until it’s too late. Elva herself is as misunderstood as her mysterious caller. Nobody, not her carer nor the telephone operator, is willing to believe her when the calls begin. In her own words, to them she is just “an old biddy”. Age and disability, life and death, all become focal points of disconnection and misunderstanding; and the telephone, something which should be a literal means of connection for a vulnerable old woman, becomes a means of further isolation. 

Delivering these ideas is Cat People (1942) and Night of the Demon (1957) director Jacques Tourneur, who entrusts several lingering closeups to Cooper, whose eyes convey an interiority unrecognised by those around her. All of this is externally packaged in a taut horror format, wrapping its ideas in an old house, a nearby cemetery, and crashing thunder and lightning. 

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

What I love most about Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires is its atmosphere. From the moment that spaceships Argos and Galliot touchdown on the planet Aura, something is wrong. The planet is a nightmare vision of fog and gruesome silhouettes. A constant wind howls away like some roaring thing hidden in the wasteland; perhaps that’s what it really is. The feeling that the crew is never alone is palpable and oppressive. Even after other lifeforms (or what remains of them) are eventually found on the demon planet, Aura’s look and sound seem to suggest that we’ve only glimpsed what lurks there. The planet itself is a monster, refusing to reveal its secrets and punishing the crew for trying to understand them.

To say that Planet of the Vampires foreruns Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) in its production design and plot elements is obvious, but it also undersells just how unique and singular Bava’s film is. Rather than a mere footnote, an antecedent to a more famous titan of the genre, Planet of the Vampires delivers a unique and slow-burning nightmare. The vampires of the title are ghosts of light glimpsed only in one’s periphery, emptying the crew’s bodies of personality to gain corporeal existence and thus a means of perpetuating themselves beyond Aura. Bava presents a malevolent planet in full colour, where one group of beings and their foolish explorations are overtaken by another, whose expansionist desires for conquest and colonisation are merely more overt. 

When released in the US in 1965, American International Pictures paired Planet of the Vampires with Die, Monster, Die!, a Lovecraft adaptation by Daniel Haller, Roger Corman’s regular art director. Together, this pairing offers haunted spaces in abundance, from gothic mansions over which Boris Karloff presides, to ghostly worlds infested by vampiric creatures beyond our physical comprehension. 

Akakage: 3D Adventure Film (1969)

1966-67 witnessed the peak of the kaiju and special effects boom across Japanese media. The SFX films produced by Toho had achieved immense popularity by the mid-1960s, regularly released on double bills with entries from the studio’s other flagship series like the Young Guy and Crazy Cats movies. In 1965, Daiei jumped in with Gamera, the Giant Monster, and 1966 was even bigger. On the big screen, Toho delivered War of the Gargantuas in July and then Ebirah, Horror of the Deep in December; Daiei contributed its first Gamera sequel via Gamera vs. Barugon, as well as their Daimajin trilogy; and Toei joined in with Watari, the Ninja Boy, The Golden Bat, and The Magic Serpent. On the small screen, Tsuburaya Productions gave both Ultra Q and Ultraman (1966-67), P-Productions delivered Ambassador Magma (1966-67), and Toei produced the creepy Akuma-kun (1966-67). These are just a few examples from 1966 alone. Monsters and special effects were everywhere!

With the success of Watari, the Ninja Boy, Toei planned a television spinoff series. However, Sanpei Shirato, upon whose manga the film was based, was displeased with the film adaptation. So, Toei asked Mitsuteru Yokoyama to pen an original story which would then serve as the basis for a television series. The result was Masked Ninja Akakage (1967-68), which became Japan’s first colour special effects period drama. It followed the titular ninja Akakage (Yuzaburo Sakaguchi) and his comrades Shirokage (Fuyukichi Maki) and Aokage (Yoshinobu Kaneko) fighting strange cults, weird creatures, and other ninjas. 

In 1969, the first part of the series was compiled into a theatrical movie: Akakage: 3D Adventure Film. In turn, the film can serve as a decent introduction to the series. Eagle-eyed viewers will recognise the giant toad suit from The Magic Serpent, which was repurposed for several Akakage episodes; the first of which was then included in the film. The film also boasts new 3D sequences, adding further novelty for kids seeing the series blown up on the big screen in 1969. Looking ahead, TV Asahi recently announced a collaboration with Toei for a new Masked Ninja Akakage series with Takashi Miike at the helm. It’s therefore the perfect time to check it out. 

Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)

The kaiju and SFX boom had slowed by 1969, but there were still a few entries in release. Gamera vs. Guiron marked the fifth entry in Daiei’s Gamera series, at which point it was comfortably aimed at children. In the 2010 book, Daiei Tokusatsu Movie Chronicle, singer-songwriter, author, and UFO enthusiast Kenji Ohtsuki begins the entry on Gamera vs. Guiron with a brief point about alien abductions. He notes how most testimonies from abductees recall strange surgeries and/or mysterious technologies. He then connects these testimonies with the film’s story, which follows two young boys, Akio (Nobuhiro Kajima) and Tom (Christopher Murphy), as they board an empty flying saucer and are transported to a mysterious planet. The boys then face both giant monsters and two alien women who are determined to eat their brains! 

Ohtsuki makes the point that the film’s events are far more outlandish than even the strangest alien abduction stories, and indeed that this makes for a very entertaining picture, akin to a child’s dream unfolding before us. The mysterious world on which the two boys land is a fantasy amusement park of geometric shapes, alien technology that commands even the flow of water, and monsters which can slice through their opponents like butter. Ohtsuki’s comparison with a child’s dream is more than apt! 

In a media landscape that had been saturated with both imaginative kaiju stories and remarkable kaiju designs, Gamera vs. Guiron still manages to stand out from both its predecessors in the Gamera series and the wider kaiju boom as well.

Whatever you choose to watch this October, have a very happy Halloween.