So I want to talk now about horror movies. I’ve alluded to it before here, I think, but there’s this show on Shudder called The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs. It’s basically a modern updating of one of those “hosted horror” shows that were on UHF channels late on Saturday night back in the day, where like Elvira or whoever introduces a movie and takes it back from commercial and so forth.

In this case, the host is Joe Bob Briggs; this isn’t the guy’s real name, and I’m not sure how much of his old cranky Texan persona is him and how much is a character, but the part that must be real is that he deeply loves horror movies and the weirdos that create and love them. And so his host segments are jokey and whatever, but are also chock-full of behind-the-scenes context around the making of the movie, or about the careers of the people involved with it, or about the details of a particular scene or the historical import of a movie or really just about anything.

That’s lots of fun, but what’s also great is the breadth of selections the show highlights. It’s heavy on the trashy slashers, of course, but the show takes it for granted that of course someone who’s been watching a tits-and-decapitation movie like Frankenhooker is going to be interested in a black-and-white movie like Night of the Living Dead, or even a silent movie like…

Nosferatu. I’ve seen this before, and it’s a good movie, but also it is a silent movie. And so Joe Bob is popping in periodically dressed in an elaborate period-appropriate costume to dispense facts about F.W. Murnau and Bram Stoker’s widow (of whom he is not fond), but fundamentally they’re just asking the audience to stick around for two hours of movie from 1922, and expecting that they will. In a movie landscape that is absolutely resistant to challenging its viewers in any way, and dedicated to giving people more of what they already like — I believe “more of what you already like” might be the official Disney+ motto — this willingness to treat an audience like they are adults possessed of curiosity and broad palates feels almost as shocking as the execution in…

Black Sunday. So this is a Mario Bava thing, and you hear “Mario Bava” and think “giallo,” but this is actually not giallo — the first movie generally accepted to be giallo was by Bava, but it was in 1963. This movie from 1960 is still considered Gothic horror. And I get it, it has a giant creepy castle and a creepy cemetery and creepy paintings and secret passages and honestly, you can count Scooby-Doo as among the things that were probably influenced by it. But it does have that Italian style to it, and if it’s not a true giallo, you can see how Bava’s later work builds on the foundations here (including the quasi-nonsensical plotting). But so the movie Joe Bob paired this with was…

Def by Temptation, a 1990 Black horror movie starring Kadeem Hardison and Bill Nunn, with a Samuel L. Jackson cameo. Odds are you’ve never heard of this movie. Odds are that if you heard the punny title and a description of it — a woman in a bar is a succubus (reminiscent of the evil lady in Bava’s movie, which is where the Walpurgisnacht-themed pairing came from), and she kills/devours men who go home with her, and now Kadeem Hardison’s old friend, a preacher-in-training whose parents died when he was a kid, is coming to town — you’d think it was going to be pretty cheesy. But it’s not! It’s shockingly well-produced (a lot of Spike Lee-adjacent people were involved in making it), the characters are subtle and their interactions surprisingly realistic, the music is great, and it overall feels like something that should be a low-key classic. Yeah, sure, it’s maybe a little too explicitly religious, and the plot is looser than would be ideal, but there’s a lot to like here. Which is more than I can say for…

Slaughterhouse. Joe Bob’s intro to this one was “look, sometimes you just need a generic slasher” and okay, but maybe you also want that slasher to not be super-terrible? The movie has almost no tension to it, and most of the kills are extremely evitable, with people basically just standing around and waiting to get slashed. Essentially everyone apparently agrees that the most horrifying (and controversial) part of the movie is the opening credits, which show pigs going through an actual slaughterhouse. The footage they filmed was too graphic for a movie, and they had to edit it down to remove the most horrible bits, but it’s still super-intense in an unpleasant way. And of course, if they did those things to an animal for the purposes of making a film, they’d be breaking a zillion laws and would be drummed out of the industry to a huge outcry; but obviously those things are done to animals en masse every day for meat purposes, so yeah, not great. And doubly not great that the most memorable and interesting part of your movie is a bit that could be in a vegan-activist documentary.