13 Nights of Shocktober: The Addams Family (1991)

by A.J.

Night 13: Happy Happy Halloween!

“We danced the mamushka while Nero fiddled. We danced the mamushka at Waterloo. We danced the mamushka for Jack the Ripper. And now Fester Addams, this mamushka is for you.”

The Addams Family (1991)

Around Halloween time at Vulcan Video, I and the rest of the staff typically spent a lot of our time recommending scary movies and helping customers track down horror movies (part of why I started this blog). However, it was a bit more difficult to help parents find something they could watch with their children. Kids, especially around 12 and under, want to feel like they are watching something spooky without actually being scared. One of our favorite movies to cover this problem: The Addams Family.

Of course this is not a horror movie; it is a spooky themed comedy with a macabre but fun sense of humor. I remember when I was a kid and the reruns of the 1960’s The Addams Family and The Munsters TV series would come on Nick At Night. I admit that I didn’t like The Munsters because they were monsters, but The Addams Family were just a bunch of fun weirdos. The 1991 big screen version is a big ball of kooky, spooky fun even now in 2025. It’s actually probably more fun to watch now that I’m 40 and notice jokes like when Morticia tells the unemployment agent that her major was “spells and hexes” and the unemployment agent shrugs and puts down “liberal arts.”

The performances are really what make the whole movie work. Anjelica Huston and the late great Raul Julia are perfectly cast as Morticia and Gomez Addams. Huston is great at playing Morticia as a lowkey character. She is the opposite of Raul Julia’s high energy Gomez, yet they are a perfect match. They have great chemistry and it’s nice to see how absolutely in love their characters they are. Raul Julia really stands out as Gomez. His enthusiasm is infectious for other characters and the audience. Julia had an incredible career on film and on the stage and Gomez Addams ranks among his best work. Of course Christina Ricci also stands out as the deadpan Wednesday Addams, who more than any other character has become a fixture of Halloween. 

For this movie, Gomez’s long suffering lawyer, Tully (Dan Hedaya), concocts a scheme with a conwoman for her strange adopted son, “Gordon” (Christopher Lloyd) to impersonate the long lost Fester Addams and gain access to the Addams Family vault. Of course, the odd, macabre charm of the Addams family, especially Gomez, wins Gordon over. Christopher Lloyd, forever Doc Brown of Back to the Future, does a great job portraying another distinct memorable character.

The humor is dark and macabre but it is never grim, inappropriate, or mean spirited. Nothing about the Addams family is mean spirited; they do things their own way and have no problem with others being different. The only time when they come close to being judgmental is when the family goes to Wednesday and Pugsley’s school program. Gomez is bored out of his mind watching a class perform a showtune. Wednesday’s teacher talks to Morticia  about the class “heroes” assignment and expresses concern that Wednesday picked an ancestor who was burned at the stake. Other children picked people like President George H.W. Bush and Jane Pauley. Morticia replies with, “Have you spoken to her parents?” The humor follows the simple formula of it’s-funny-because-they-do-the-opposite-of-what-you-expect. It might take a bit for young kids to catch on. I told my 6-year-olds that the Addams family are like cartoon characters that live in the real world; which makes sense because The Addams Family began as a cartoon strip by Charles Addams, which I admit I only learned about after I started working at Vulcan Video.

It feels strange to call a movie from the 1990’s a classic, especially when it’s one you watched as a kid, even more so when it is such a silly movie, but the 1991 version of The Addams Family is a classic. I am happy to report that it holds up (unlike many movies I saw as a kid in the late 80’s and early 90’s). It’s fun for grownups and a great way to introduce kids to spooky sensibilities. In short, it’s a perfect Shocktober movie. Happy Halloween!

The Addams Family is available to stream on Paramount+ and free on Kanopy. It is also probably on DVD/Blu-ray at your local library.

13 Nights of Shocktober: The Bride of Frankenstein

by A.J.

Night 1: Classic Horror Night

The Monster: You…make man…like me?

Doctor Pretorius: No. Woman. Friend for you.

The Monster: Woman?

The Bride of Frankenstein

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the release of one of the greatest and most influential movie sequels of all time: The Bride of Frankenstein. Naturally, after the success of Frankenstein in 1931, directed by James Whale, Universal Studios executive Carl Laemmle Jr. was eager to follow up with a sequel, but Whale was reluctant. Laemmle was wisely reluctant to do a sequel without Whale. When the sequel finally arrived in 1935, it proved to be worth the wait. Not only was The Bride of Frankenstein a hit and influential on later horror movies and filmmakers, its scenes and images have become iconic and part of the landscape of Halloween. 

There is a lot going on in The Bride of Frankenstein, which is impressive because it is only 75 minutes and never feels rushed. In a delightfully amusing prologue Mary and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron are gathered together again to celebrate the success of Mary’s novel, Frankenstein. Bryon summarizes the book, which serves as a recap of the first movie (though that movie bears little resemblance to Shelley’s novel). Then Mary Shelley reveals the details of a second volume deemed too shocking to publish. This is The Bride of Frankenstein. The story of The Monster and Frankenstein picks up right where the first movie left off and we learn that they both survived the fire at the windmill. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is at first unrepentant and wants to get back to experimenting, that is until he is approached by the truly mad Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) who wants them to combine discoveries in a new creation. Meanwhile, The Monster (Boris Karloff reprising his iconic role) wanders around and is abused and harassed by everyone he encounters, even after he saves a girl from drowning (perhaps a callback or attempt to make up for the infamous lake scene in the first movie). Then he encounters a kindly blind man who shows him friendship and teaches him to speak. Eventually though, he ends up with Frankenstein and Pretorius.

As far as mad scientists go, Dr. Pretorius, with his wild hair and nonchalance toward the macabre, puts Dr. Frankenstein to shame. Frankenstein comes across as a man who became lost in obsession. Pretorius, on the other hand, delights in being so mad that he was booted out of his university for “knowing too much.” When he shows Frankenstein his own creations, living miniatures of a king, queen, bishop, and more, he does so with all the flair and scripted delight of a magician putting on a show. When Pretorius finally meets The Monster his reaction is so understated that it makes him seem even more insane. 

One of the movie’s most famous scenes, perhaps one of the most famous of classic cinema, is The Monster meeting the blind hermit. This is where The Monster learns to speak and develops his iconic speech pattern: “Fire…No good!” Many horror fans and movie monster fans find The Monster to be exceedingly sympathetic and that is in large part because of this movie and this scene. The other iconic scene is the creation of The Bride, with the elaborate laboratory, lightning storm, and, of course, the Monster’s Mate herself. At first she looks like a mummy wrapped in bandages; then a dissolve shows her in her iconic look: a flowing white gown, high-top black hair with a silver jagged streak on each side. She shrieks and hisses and does little else, yet her striking visage has had such a profound impact that she has become a figure, a totem, of classic horror movies and Halloween in general. Her look has been reproduced and parodied in countless TV Shows, movies, commercials, cartoons. This all the more impressive considering how little screen time she has, only a few minutes, and appears in no other Frankenstein movies. I am always surprised by this; I think that I was mistaken about the last time I watched and she appears more; nope. 

The Bride is played by Elsa Lanchester, who also plays Mary Shelley, and while there is no significance in this, I have always enjoyed the coincidence. She only receives credit as Mary Shelly. The “Monster’s Mate” is credited with a question mark. This is fun marketing but is a disservice to her; at least she is known as the Bride now. She underwent 3 hours of make up and the iconic hairdo which wrapped her hair into the wig and was uncomfortable to say the least. 

The argument over whether “Frankenstein" refers to the monster or the doctor is not new (it refers to Doctor Victor Frankenstein, changed to Henry Frankenstein in these movies for no reason) and is at least as old as this movie. The title itself is the perfect example. Dr. Frankenstein has a fiancé and later wife, Elizabeth, but the title clearly does not refer to her. The credits refer to the creations as the Monster and the Monster’s Mate. Most confusing of all, when the Monster's Mate comes to life, Pretorius calls her “the Bride of Frankenstein” perhaps sparking off this whole what do you call the monster debate. 

There’s some camp value to The Bride of Frankenstein in the frantic energy of Colin Clive as Frankenstein and the over-the-top reactions of Una O’Connor to seeing The Monster. This only adds to the movie’s overall entertainment value, which is still strong 90 years later. It’s hard to convey the influence, both direct and indirect, of The Bride of Frankenstein. Clips of it turn up in everything from Weird Science to About a Boy. Mel Brooks’s brilliant Young Frankenstein parodies and pays homage to The Bride of Frankenstein, it even used some of the same props. “To a new world of gods and monsters!” Pretorius declares as he lifts his glass to toast Frankenstein after their devilish bargain is struck. The Bride of Frankenstein did indeed usher in a new world of horror cinema. 

Bride of Frankenstein is available to stream on Prime Video and will air on TCM on Halloween at 5:30 CT.

13 Nights of Shocktober: Beetlejuice

by A.J.

Night 13: Happy Happy Halloween!

“There’s a word for people in our situation: Ghosts.”

Beetlejuice 

Even though I've recommended well seen, popular, and classic movies for Shocktober before, I hesitated at including Beetlejuice for those very reasons. If you haven't already rewatched Beetlejuice because of the sequel released just last month, there's a good chance you've already watched it or are already planning on watching it for Halloween. However, if it's been a while since you've seen it or even if you just watched it, you can't go wrong with combining this horror comedy classic and Halloween. 

There's a certain fondness for this movie from people that grew up in the late 80's and early 90's. It's not really a family movie or a kids movie, but it is zany and silly and very funny. There is certainly horror movie imagery, including unsightly creatures from the beyond, but it’s not really a horror movie either. The heightened, cartoonish atmosphere makes everything about this movie, from the look to the subject matter, easier to take and easier to enjoy than if it had a serious, straightforward tone. Director Tim Burton’s distinct surreal, goth macabre style is fully on display and is really the only explanation for a lot of things in the movie. 

It's strange that Beetlejuice begins like a pleasant, wholesome movie about pleasant wholesome people living in a country house, and somehow ends as a movie about wholesome, pleasant people living in a country house, but some of the people are now ghosts. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play the pleasant and wholesome Maitlands, who are surprised to find out after a car accident that they are in fact dead. The real shock for them comes when their house is sold to a nouveaux riche couple (Catherine O’Hara and Jeffery Jones). Their death obsessed goth daughter, Lydia, can see the ghosts and she finds more sympathy with them than her father and eccentric stepmother. The ghosts are horrified by the changes the new owners are making to the house, a sort of avant-garde post modern look to match the stepmother’s sculptures, which are bizarre but perfect for a Tim Burton movie. They can’t scare the new owners out (because possessing them and making them dance around to “Day-o” is actually pretty fun for everyone), so they turn to a “bio-exorcist” named Betelgeuse. Of course, Betelgeuse isn’t trustworthy to say the least and has ulterior motives. And yes, even though the title of the movie is spelled BEETLEJUICE, the character’s name is spelled like the star, Betelgeuse. Since he can only be summoned by saying his name three times, this becomes a running gag with Baldwin calling him Beetlegeist and Beetlemeyer. 

It's crazy that Beetlejuice has not one but two signature performances for performers with impressive careers: Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder. Keaton’s Betelgeuse is gross and decaying and obnoxious and lascivious, but Keaton also plays him like an undead Groucho Marx: fast talking, wisecracking, and scheming. He lets Betelgeuse really enjoy being Betelgeuse and that adds a very strange charm to the character. Maybe it is because of how he is introduced that we don’t really hold it against him. When he starts causing chaos after the Maitland’s summon him, your reaction is more along the lines of, “well what did you expect?” Winona Ryder does not have as much screen time as you might remember but she really brings substance to her character so she’s more than just a moody kid. She’s still mourning the death of her mother and is even contemplating suicide so she can join her ghost friends. The scene where they have to talk her down is brief but surprisingly poignant. 

The special effects and makeup are still impressive. The stop motion creature effects might seem dated at first, but this artificial animated look, then and now, adds to the movie’s surreal nature. The monstrous worm from Saturn is pretty unsightly and even frightening but impressive so you can’t look away. The score by Danny Elfman, a long time Burton collaborator, with its booming horns is very memorable. It’s likely that whenever you think about Beetlejuice, you’re also hearing the score in your head.

I don't think it's a stretch to call Beetlejuice a classic, neither the movie nor the character ever fully left the pop culture consciousness. It still feels as wild and zany today as it did in 1988. I was cynical about the sequel–which so far has gotten very good reviews from critics–thinking that the original would be buried or swept aside, but there is no need to worry about that with this movie. It will be around for as long as there are misfit kids, people that love spooky things, and people that love creative, crazy movies. Happy Halloween.

Beetlejuice is available to stream on Max.

13 Nights of Shocktober: Thanksgiving

by A.J.

Night 12: Holiday Horror Night

“This year there will be no leftovers.”

Thanksgiving

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving began as one of the fake trailers that played in between features in the Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino double feature spectacular Grindhouse (2007). The Thanksgiving trailer was the best and funniest of the fake trailers (the others were Robert Rodriguez's Machete, Edgar Wright's Don’t, and Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS, all of which are pretty funny). After Robert Rodriguez made a full feature out of his fake trailer, Machete, it seemed that these comedic trailers only work as fake trailers. However, the feature length version of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is a solid movie and is easily Roth’s best film in a long time. The key to the success of the feature length version is the approach taken by Roth and screenwriter Jeff Rendell. Instead of making a parody, like the trailer, they took a serious approach to the material and the result is a great modern slasher movie.

Set in Plymouth, Massachusetts on, you guessed it, Thanksgiving, a prologue shows us a gruesome and deadly riot at Ritemart, a big box store, that happens after the obnoxious teenager friends of Jessica (Nell Verlaque), daughter of the store owner, who got in early, tease and taunt the massive crowd waiting outside. The crowd charges the store and mayhem and carnage ensue. One year later, the greedy store owner has decided to open his store on Thanksgiving night again but this time he will hire more than two security guards. Jessica and her friends are being tagged in cryptic social media posts. Her ex-boyfriend who mysteriously disappeared after his arm was mangled in the riot–ending his hopes of a baseball career–mysteriously returns, embittered loved ones of the people killed in the riot are protesting the store, a restaurant is handing out masks of John Carver, first governor of Plymouth, and the stage is set for a slasher movie.

If you guess who the killer is way ahead of the reveal, and you just might, that doesn’t spoil any of the fun. It makes sense narratively and Roth and Rendell are more concerned with crafting a good story and entertaining the audience instead of outsmarting them. This is a bloody, gruesome horror movie, so if the violence you see in the riot is too much, then find a different Shocktober movie because the violence only gets more graphic and over the top. This movie does not cut away for effect or leave things up to the viewer’s imagination. We see the gruesome elaborate kills start to finish. And the kills get quite elaborate. The killer dunks one victim in a restaurant sink then sticks her face to the door of the walk-in refrigerator and eventually ends up running her over in an alley so that she is bisected by a dumpster. Yet, Thanksgiving definitely does not have the atmosphere of doom and dread that were a major part of Roth’s Hostel movies and the love it or hate it Cabin Fever. This is like a rollercoaster or amusement park dark ride: the goal is to excite and thrill and even scare you and then deliver you back to the ground where you can laugh off the scares and enjoy the experience you just had.

Nell Verlaque as Jessica Wright is a good “final girl", without feeling like she has been constructed as such. Among the other teens, Tomaso Sanelli as the obnoxious jock Evan deserves recognition for playing a character so believably crass and hateable, but still you don’t really want him to die. Gabriel Davenport as Scuba is also another stand out because he is a hothead who even buys an illegal gun, but then doesn’t know what to do with it. Among the adults, Patrick Dempsey is the stand out and pretty much the star of the movie as the town sheriff. Rick Hoffman is great as the greedy store owner and his redemptive turn midway through the movie is believable. You end up not wanting him to die too–which is impressive since it’s clear he is to blame for the entire fiasco that spawned a revenge driven killing spree. There is a lot of death and a lot of blood but the body count is relatively low. Nothing feels like a foregone conclusion so you never feel like you’re just watching a line up of teenagers/victims die elaborately.

Slasher movies are simple and are something of an oddity as a subgenre. If they are done well they are effective and memorable horror cinema. If they are done poorly they can be just as entertaining, maybe even more so. Thanksgiving is not a parody or a copycat. It does not seek to transcend or redefine the genre, and this is a welcome thing. It is effective, thrilling, gory entertainment in its own right while also being an homage to the genre.

Thanksgiving is streaming on Netflix.

13 Nights of Shocktober: Doctor X

by A.J.

Night 11: Classic Horror Night

Out Thrills Them All!

Doctor X

In the early 1930's, to compete with, and cash in on, the success Universal Studios had with Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), Warner Bros. released Doctor X in 1932. It is a very peculiar horror film. Unlike Universal’s monster movies which were based on famous 19th century novels and involved castles and period settings, Doctor X was based on a play and has a contemporary, urban setting. It also has more of a mystery plot than a horror plot. The director is Michael Curtiz, who would become famous for directing classics like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942). It's interesting to see his name on a horror movie the and skill he brings to a genre picture. The most peculiar element is its look. It is not a black and white film but it is not exactly a color movie either. It was shot on two strip technicolor film which used shades of only two colors: orange and green. The result looks like an eerie colorization of a black and white film or a faded color picture. This look works in the film’s favor giving it an eerie, mysterious atmosphere in every shot.

Doctor Xavier (Lionel Atwell), a renowned pathologist and researcher is assisting police in the investigation of the mysterious cannibalistic “moon killer” murders. Clues point to the killer being someone at Doctor Xavier’s research lab, where everyone is some degree of creepy or suspicious. 

All kinds of different research is done at Doctor Xavier’s lab. There are experiments that involve large machines and also psychological experiments. Doctor X is able to convince the police to let him conduct his own investigation to find the killer. For the sake of the plot, the police commissioner agrees. Complicating things as much as helping the investigation is a reporter played by Lee Tracy. He is basically comic relief but also one of the main characters. Fay Wray plays Doctor X’s daughter, and it’s only appropriate that her first line is a startled scream–she is the original scream queen after all.

The contemporary urban setting is unusual for a horror movie of this era and would be until the late 1960’s with the release of Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby. Warner Bros. was known for its urban gangster movies so it makes sense that their horror movie would have the same setting and aesthetic. The city setting and mystery story give this film an almost Noir-ish feel with green tinged backgrounds and skies substituting for stylistic shadows. There is also more of an edge than you might expect. Since this was a Pre-Code movie it was able to get away with some more gruesome visuals and disturbing subject matter for the time. By far the most memorable and shocking visual is the killer applying a mask of “synthetic flesh” giving them a truly monstrous and scary looking face. 

Doctor X’s experiment to determine the killer’s identity is very reminiscent of a famous scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing. The doctor restrains all of the suspects in a row while they watch a reenactment of the murder so he can gauge their reactions. When the real killer pops up, everyone else is trapped and struggles to get free. 

Fay Wray’s character could be more developed. She ends up being the screaming damsel in distress, but her screen presence makes up for lack of character depth. The reporter character is funny, but not very charming so his romance with Wray feels forced and obligatory. This movie isn’t scary but it is creepy and eerie and entertaining. Like many classic era horror movies it is also pretty short (76 minutes) and it's impressive how much it gets done in that time. If you’ve seen all of the more famous horror classics, I highly recommend Doctor X for an eerie Shocktober night. 

Doctor X airs on TCM on Thursday, October 31st at 5AM CT.

13 Nights of Shocktober: From Beyond the Grave

by A.J.

Night 10: Anthology Horror Night

“All tastes catered for. Oh, and a big novelty surprise goes with every purchase.”

From Beyond the Grave

Horror anthologies, or portmanteau films, are maybe my favorite horror subgenre. Multiple stories of different kinds wrapped up for the price of one movie. Many horror stories, in fact most, no matter what kind (monsters, slashers, allegories, whathaveyou) work best in short form simply because there is less time to pick apart details or overthink a thin premise. In the late 1960’s and throughout the 1970’s the British production company Amicus specialized in horror anthologies. Their most famous film is Tales From the Crypt (1972). Their 7th and final production, From Beyond the Grave (1977) did not fare well at the time, but it is quite entertaining and makes for great spooky-not-scary Shocktober viewing. 

From Beyond the Grave has four separate stories following people who visit an antiques store run by none other than horror legend Peter Cushing. Each story is based on a short story by British author R. Chetwynd-Hayes and all have the same director, Kevin Connor, and cinematographer Alan Hume (later to shoot Return of the Jedi and A Fish Called Wanda), so they all have a similar aesthetic while also having just enough variety in tone to feel distinct. Every anthology movie winds up feeling uneven to a certain degree and From Beyond the Grave is no exception, but overall there is more to enjoy than not. 

The first story, “The Gate Crasher”, has David Warner purchasing an old spooky looking mirror. He has some friends over and one of them says the mirror looks like something a medium would have. This prompts someone to suggest they have a séance, so they do, because why not. This calls forth an evil spirit trapped in the mirror who hypnotizes Warner into luring people to his apartment and killing them. The premise feels familiar if you’ve seen enough horror movies but it’s a good start and probably the darkest of the four stories. 

The second story “An Act of Kindness” is probably the best of the four. It stars Ian Bannen as a put-upon office manager with an overbearing wife who befriends a peddler played by Donald Pleasence. The peddler invites the office manager to his flat for dinner and to meet his daughter (played by Pleasence’s real life daughter, Angela). Of course, the peddler and his daughter are not what they seem. This segment benefits from the added layer of the office manager seeming to be a proper gentleman but actually being an undignified, pathetic man (he steals a war medal to impress the peddler) and the lowly peddler actually have the dignity and self respect the office manager only pretends to have. It also benefits from a great performance from Donald Pleasence. This story ends with a twist that plays a bit like a joke and seems to come out of nowhere but it fits the tone of the story. 

The third story has a man switching the price tags on snuff boxes in Cushing’s store. On the train ride home a goofy psychic calling herself Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton) claims that he has a nasty elemental on his shoulder and gives him her card. When he gets home the dog won’t stop barking at him and his wife gets mysterious scratches, so he calls Madame Orloff to perform an exorcism. The exorcism is Madame Orloff giving him an insane shoulder massage while objects fly around the house. This is clearly a comedy and is a nice tonal switch up.

The final story is relatively straightforward. A young man asks to buy the extremely spooky looking door with a scary gargoyle carving. It’s crazy that this guy wants this; it’s even behind stuff that Cushing has to move out of the way. Perhaps the craziest thing about this story is that the guy uses this door for a simple closet in his otherwise average looking house. Of course later when he opens the closet he finds a big abandoned room covered in layers of dust and cobwebs. The room holds the spirit of a 17th century warlock who needs a body to finish a ritual and escape into the real world. There is not a lot to this story but the old room, lit with an eerie blue light and covered in cobwebs provides a good spooky atmosphere. 

There isn’t anything in From Beyond the Grave that will make you jump or cover your eyes, and there are more than a few moments that will make you laugh or even giggle. However, each story works well on its own and also as part of a larger anthology of people getting more than they bargained for and sometimes deserving what they get. 

From Beyond the Grave airs on TCM on Wednesday, October 30th and 6:15AM CT.