All right, let’s get through the last of the October horror-thon.

First up is two Joe Bob movies. The first is Elvira’s Haunted Hills, which is less horror and more horror comedy. Except, kinda not even straight comedy, because what it’s doing owes less to Mel Brooks than it does to campy drag sensibility. If you’ve ever watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, you know that they do a thing where they put on a humorous skit at one point in the season. Well, now imagine that skit extended out to feature length as a period Central European horror movie. It’s full of innuendos, all of the acting is over the top and mannered, there’s a musical number, it will break the period context for a joke with reckless abandon, and it’s just in general campy as all get-out. Not my thing, but I can certainly imagine why it would have been a cult classic when it was made.

The second is Popcorn, which is a movie with a remarkably convoluted (and silly) plot, which is basically an excuse to have a spooky movie theatre showing four horror movies-within-a-movie while a horror story plays out within the theatre itself and the crew putting on the show. The performances in the main plot are great, in a hammy kind of way, but the real fun is the movies-within, each of which is a kind of different old-school horror subgenre, and which have some good scenes in them. It’s not a great movie, but it has a kind of charming sincerity to it. (Also, it was filmed in Jamaica, and even though it’s allegedly set in Southern California, it is full of reggae music, so they didn’t try very hard for the authenticity of the setting…)

Next is The Lair of the White Worm, which is on the Criterion Channel’s “80’s Horror” collection. This is a British movie and it’s very supernatural horror, bordering on fantasy. There’s an old local legend about how a knight slew the great white worm (that’s “worm” in the fantasy “idk like a dragon or snake or whatever” sense), but there are also hints that maybe this isn’t all in the past. The movie features a young Hugh Grant as a posh lord, a very young Peter Capaldi as a Scottish would-be archeologist, and then actresses who aren’t famous, but do great jobs as a local sultry noblewoman and country girls whose parents died in mysterious circumstances.

It veers between complete mythic seriousness and humor, but in a way that actually works and doesn’t turn it into a farce somehow. The plot is a slow burn, but the characters all along the way (particularly the noblewoman with her plummy innuendos) are a delight. I’d never even heard of this movie before, and it looked silly from previews, but I’m going to put it down as surprisingly good.

Finally, we come to a movie from 2022, Barbarian. This one starts off with a woman arriving late at night at an Airbnb, to find out that there’s already a guy there. From there… well, I think the thing everyone says is not to read anything about it before you see it, and okay, I’ll go along with that. It’s a movie that has a kind of theme to it, stated earlyish; I think it’s not quite as clean with that theme as it could be, but it does lean into it to effect both horrifying and amusing. There are some logistics that don’t quite make sense, and a few mysteries that are never sensibly explained, and honestly it’s a lot tenser than I would prefer. But my main criticism is really just that its portrayal of Detroit is eyeroll-worthy. Not a bad movie, but I think it kinda comes in at “replacement level modern scary” — it’s not a Blumhouse movie, but it could be one if you know what I mean.