Written by Nick Doermann

September has come and passed, and with the best weather of the year comes the very first drops of the soon-to-be flood of horror flicks in our theaters and streaming services. It also means my birthday has happened, which is really important, because as the king of horror, it's always the scariest day of the year. If you're reading this and want to wish the writer of the Haunted Horror Hour Blog a happy birthday, say “Happy Birthday, Nick” into your computer monitor out loud. Thanks. Nonsense aside, let's get to the horror news and reviews. Buckle up folks, because this blog is gonna make your spine tingle and legs tremble.

I'm gonna start us off with a fun little callback to the last blog where I wrote briefly about my expectations for a slimy little movie called Alien: Romulus (readable here). As this blog's countless fans surely remember, I had cautiously high expectations of this movie based on the trailers and other marketing. The greatest news in the horror scene at the moment is that it blew my expectations. Through its impossible-to-understand British nonsense accents, a beautifully horrific movie emerged, screeching to the stars. While it certainly didn't capture that gut-wrenching feeling I've pined for since the first Alien movie, through the whole runtime, it was unabashedly Alien. I don't want to detail any of the sequences too hard so as not to spoil the fun, but there were some excellent uses of the Xenomorph biology and life cycle that made for tense and fun sequences with action and stealth alike. The entire thing is a high-stakes rollercoaster as soon as they step foot into the Romulus Space Station, with a terrifying final sequence that echoed Ripley's original escape pod brawl. If you're a fan of Alien or just a fan of monster flicks, I recommend the hell out of Alien: Romulus.

Now, dear readers, I'm going to take you to the world of new stuff I haven't talked about. We're going to continue with my most recent viewing, my viewing of Tarot, created by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg and released in May of this year. This movie unfortunately drew me in with all sorts of promotional screenshots of outstandingly-designed monsters based on the various figures from tarot card decks. In case you didn't notice the first time, I wrote that this attraction was unfortunate. This movie had me smelling sweet nectar, but once I got to it, I fell into a big greasy pitcher plant. Of course, this is all a long-winded way of saying Tarot was not that good. The aforementioned tarot card monsters were totally awesome—I won't deny you of that. All of them looked cool, their kills were brutal and their sequences tended to be truly tense. 

All of that being said, these scenes only take up about 10% of the film's runtime, with each monster having a featured scene for around 5 minutes, and only 5 monsters being present total. As for every other scene in the movie? A bunch of unlikeable teenagers fumbling around a shoddy mystery and trying to contact an equally unlikeable magical helper. I think she's a shaman or something? Voodoo lady? Witch? It's kind of unclear. It's also unclear why they thought Ned from Spiderman could carry the cast. He doesn't. He's not that great at acting, and even if he did carry the cast, they remove him from half of the movie with a fakeout kill. So, Tarot is pretty much 5 awesome short horror films unfortunately packaged with a gift wrapping of your least favorite color and pattern. Were I to don my haunted Sherlock Holmes detective hat, I would wager that the directors of the film were very good at making horror short films. In a perfect world, perhaps they could team up with a writer that could give these parts a stronger backbone. 

Let's move away from the negative, shall we, and get into some gory positives, with the upcoming holly-jolly-bloody sequel, Terrifier 3 by Damien Leone. The last time I covered an upcoming film, I was hesitant to throw too much confidence at it. Maybe I'm allowing too much boyish wonder and childlike glee to affect my expectations, but I am fully excited for this installment in one of my favorite slasher franchises. Fully high expectations for this one, folks! We're going full-steam ahead! Getting back to actual analysis, I have a very good reason for continued excitement for the franchise. Terrifier just has a formula I think can work eternally. This formula centers around Art the Clown, an absolute menace who is as horrifically violent as he is entertaining to watch. Played brilliantly by David Howard Thorton, Art is a silent but deadly force, killing victims randomly in the most horrifying and realistic ways imaginable, laughing and honking his horn all the way, sometimes seemingly putting on a fun act for the audience. Of course, this act often leaves the characters of the movies in many different pieces. Terrifier 2 introduced Sienna, a guardian angel who defeats the angel of death as she battles Art, an introduction that, in my opinion, adds to this franchise's longevity. This time around, it looks like Art is going to try and ruin Christmas, and Sienna's gonna have to save it. I don't think Damien Leone could try and make that premise un-entertaining if he tried. I very much look forward to Art and Sienna's return, and hope their cheery Christmas battle is bloody and epic, and keeps reminding me that slashers will never die.

P.S. I think that the version of Sherlock Holmes that would wear the haunted hat would be a skeleton Sherlock Holmes, and he could detect ghosts along with detecting clues.

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