Okay, I’ve gotten behind. For obvious October-related reasons, we’ve been watching a lot of horror (like, even more than usual), so let’s just do a quick round-up of those things.

Demons 2 is the sequel to, well, Demons. The first movie featured demons that came out of a movie screen, and this one features demons that come out of TV screens, Videodrome style. The basic structure of it is that it’s following a big cast of characters in an apartment building, kind of giving you each of their different stories in pieces as they start to come together. It’s a really cool structure, but alas, it wasn’t executed super well, so it’s not as good as you’d want it to be.

Sleepaway Camp is an ambiguously homo-erotic summer camp slasher movie. It’s from 1983, and it’s extremely of its time, with a very early-80s trashy feel to it. It’s successful in getting the kind of vibe that you want, but its plot suffers from being so confusingly set up that twists feel unearned — okay, sure, that was surprising, but only because earlier in the movie I was like, “wait, but I thought…?” and then assumed that I must be wrong because the movie was just blithely going onward in a different direction.

In the Mouth of Madness is a John Carpenter movie, but it feels more like David Cronenberg. The conceit is that there’s this really successful horror author whose latest book is apparently driving people mad, so Sam Neill goes out to find him… and does so in the fictional New England town where the fiction is set. (The author is not named “Stephen King,” but let’s face it, you can’t make a movie about a successful horror author in 1994 and not have everyone think of Stephen King.) From there, you get into a bunch of reality-bending what-lies-beneath Lovecraftian horror, which is creepy and weird. Enjoyable stuff, and Sam Neill brings his ability to go over-the-top here. (All that said, the most surreal thing to me was an early scene where a trade paperback was selling for $5.99; I remember 1994, and trade paperbacks would have been $12.95 or more, nice try movie.)

Event Horizon is another Sam Neill movie, this one where he gets into a bunch of reality-bending what-lies-beneath horror in space. So the funny thing about Sam Neill is, before I saw him in Possession (the absolutely wild Polish horror film) I really mostly knew him as a very staid, bland leading man type from Jurassic Park and idk maybe other things. But now this is the third movie I’ve seen him in where he’s just driving full on into surreal horror madness. This movie has a kind of low-key Solaris vibe going on, but is much more straight horror than that. (The biggest horror, though, is maybe the scenes with fast lightning strikes that are like super-intense strobes. This probably wasn’t super-annoying in previous releases, but HDR makes it way too intense to even be watchable.) Not great, but enjoyable.