This Week in Film #03

Horror Week 1 of 2

Danny Maldonado

Oct 25, 2025

It’s Halloween season so, I went all in on the horror. This Week in Film - Horror Week 1 of 2

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Prince of Darkness (1987)

Director: John Carpenter

Starring : Donald Pleasence, Victor Wong, Jameson Parker, & Lisa Blount

God is a lie, the Demiurge is real, and his essence is imprisoned in a giant vat of liquid. An insane premise, but it somehow works. Teams of scientists from different fields meet at a church in LA set out to uncover what this liquid held in the church’s inner sanctum is.

The world around the church is corrupted. An army of destitute madmen begin to surround surround the church, drawn by the influence of the liquid god of ooze.

Not at all what I expected. The film ends in a beautiful tragedy.

Can there be a good ending after gaining gnosis of the Earth’s evil origins? This movie makes me see Nickelodeon slime in a new darkness.

A black pill in liquid form. Black Robitussin?

The Thing (1982)

Director: John Carpenter

Starring: Kurt Russell

Setting can make or break a horror flick, and in The Thing setting is king. Set in Antarctica, a group of workers, I’m not sure what they are doing there, take in a dog that is being chased and shot at by a group of Norwegians. After some investigation, it is discovered that the Norwegian outpost has been ransacked and everyone inside is dead.

Well, the dog is a mutating alien that turns itself into a doppelganger of its last victim, while its true form is revealed on occasion as a random assortment of flesh and appendages.

The setting raises the stakes of the film as the frigid environment becomes its own character.

The team quickly discovers the severity of their situation and the nature of the Thing and spiral into distrust and paranoia. It is a neat dynamic that, although I have seen it done in other films, is done to mastery here.

Also, I have a quick note on the lighting. The lighting in this movie is perfect. Just the right amount of shadow and light to capture the atmosphere.

My favorite scene was when McCready had all of the other members tied to a bench. He took samples of their blood and poked a hot metal wire into the sample to discover who was really human. At first, I did not even think it would work because I was convinced he was a replacement. Three men are cleared of being an alien when the fourth sample is poked with the hot wire. The blood explodes and attempts to escape. The member that the blood sample was taken from mutates into a fleshy abomination. The men tied next to him on the bench are freaking out, McCready is trying to burn the creature with a flamethrower, but it will not shoot, and the other guy with a flamethrower is being eaten in front of everyone. It was an intense scene that I cannot think of a way it could have been done better.

Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Director: Jonathan Demme

Starring: Jodie Foster & Anthony Hopkins

I always heard this movie was terrifying, but I didn’t find it to be so. It’s suspenseful and disturbing, not frightening. Anthony Hopkins crushed his performance as Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. He’s the kind of villain you secretly want to see succeed, even though you know you shouldn’t cheer him on. A serial-killing psychologist, pure manipulative evil.

I was prepared to dislike Jodie Foster, but I was wrong again. She was excellent. Her portrayal of an FBI agent in training felt authentic, and she still managed to give off an air of competence. By the end of the movie, I was fully on her side. I felt like she was completely capable of catching the serial killer Buffalo Bill. The anxiety didn’t come from doubting her ability but from how well the killer was written. I believed she would stop him while meeting a tragic end herself. I genuinely expected the film to end with both of them shooting each other.

It felt less like a horror movie and more like an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, and that’s something I will never complain about.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2019)

Director: André Øvredal

Starring: Emile Hirsch, Brian Cox, Olwen Catherine Kelly

What a great concept. This movie managed to create an environment where the film was disturbing before any supernatural elements were explored.

The picture starts with a massacre in a house where all the inhabitants are killed by a force that did not break in. The police are convinced it was a home invasion until they discover the body of a woman half-buried in the basement. She is clearly dead, but her body shows no sign of outer trauma. Of course, the mystery woman is named Jane Doe.

The movie cuts to two coroners. A father is mentoring his son in the profession, while dissecting the victim of a fire and analyzing the cause of death. It’s clinically gruesome. Not only is the act of seeing a body dissected disturbing, but the clinical manner in which they speak while cutting her open gives the scene an uncanny sense of desensitization.

Later the son leaves to go out with his girlfriend, only to ditch her and return to help his father perform an autopsy on Jane Doe’s body, which was brought in just as he was leaving.

Once they start cutting into the body, supernatural spookiness kicks off. I don’t want to spoil anything, but this story thrives in its setting. The plot is simple: autopsy a supernatural corpse. The mystery is decent, though not the most difficult to figure out. It’s the atmosphere that does all the work, and it’s done with mastery.

I can’t think of anything scarier than a mystery woman being dissected in a morgue, during a storm, while supernatural poltergeist activity is going on.

Wait, yes I can, zombies…

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Director: George A. Romero

Starring: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, & Gaylen Ross

Werewolves are my favorite horror monsters, just because I think they’re cool, but zombies are my most hated. Not because I think they’re lame, but because they actually terrify me. The one monster that beats zombies is “The Destroyer” from that one Xena: Warrior Princess episode. God, I hate that thing.

A good zombie movie always reminds me why I hate zombies. Ever since I played Resident Evil as a kid, especially Resident Evil 2, I’ve had a fear of them. I remember beating the game, then trembling under my blanket the whole night. An eight-year-old should have never played it. Dawn of the Dead brought that fear back from the grave.

It’s a simple setup, but an effective one. Since it’s only Romero’s second zombie film, it probably helped set the standard for what a zombie movie is. Four people join forces to hold back the hordes of the undead in a shopping mall and try to have moments of normal life while the monsters of both the dead and the living beat at their doors.

I did not like the Flyboy character at all. There’s nothing that upsets me more than someone who puts everyone’s life in danger because they can’t accept their role. Flyboy just couldn’t accept that he wasn’t a fighter.

The scale of this movie is much bigger than Night of the Living Dead, and the special effects were much more grisly. The blue zombies were odd but not that distracting.

Great movie, but now I’ll have to watch Day of the Dead. I’m just glad I don’t get nightmares.

Midsommar (2019)

Director: Ari Aster

Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, & Will Poulter

What was going on in 2019? It’s like everyone in horror could feel 2020 creeping up and decided to get it out of their system early. Both Midsommar and The Autopsy of Jane Doe carry this strange, slow-burning despair.

To be honest I’m not sure if I consider this film to be a horror movie. It’s suspenseful, and its disturbing, but it isn’t scary. Not scary in the traditional sense.

The scary come more on thinking back on this. What would it be like to step into a manipulative cult that smiles as they murder you? Or what I actually find scary, how people can cheer on the death of another.

Midsommar reminded me that almost every horror movie has at least one character that is such an insufferable person that you feel relieved at their death. I always wondered at why that was. Because it separates the violence from the horror. But the horror is the point of the genre so why is that such a common trope?

Because having the audience separate the horror from the violence for a moment of satisfying brutality is the point. When we see the insufferable character die, we become the monster. If I got anything out of Midsommar, it was that if we feel justified enough, we will condemn someone with the same smile Dani ended the movie with.

Closing Reflection

What is left of your soul after you have seen too much? When everything you knew has been torn from you or tainted, you have to decide how much of you was shaped by those lost things, and how much of you existed beyond them.

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