Favorite Horror Film Polling, Jamie Uhler’s 2024 Horrorfest and White Bird on Monday Morning Diary (October 14)

The Substance (C. Fargeat… 2024) The most recent body horror buzz piece is remarkably redundant in plotting, but in obtaining and taking ‘The Substance’, that’s the entire point. You stick to the weekly infusions, you’re able to live normally in a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde hybrid where a young version of yourself can retain the glories of fame that your old self saw slipping from your media empire. Like every prized recent body horror, it gets compared to Cronenberg, but this hasn’t the brains his masterworks do, so its less Crimes of the Future or Videodrome and more the schlock of Society or Basketcase with an arty patina and a blood fury climax to rival Carrie. I had fun in the theater with it, because everyone was laughing like hyenas alongside me, but it’s over-praised by many.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (J. Green… 1962) A movie I wanted to see for quite some time, it being something of a landmark gore film, or at least one that helped push along the degrees of cinema bloodletting the censors would allow. You assume a lot of the oddities on display here—it’s about a brilliant young doctor who, like Victor Frankenstein has been able to animate parts of the body long since dead—is because its B (if that, it might be C) movie status. He’s got his MD father’s country house to amply muck about in, keeping his ‘experiments’ there; mainly a malformed gimp in the basement, and suddenly, after a horrific car accident now the loped off head of his fiancée. It becomes a race if he can get her a matching body as her brain’s only for 48 hours max, something of a weirdo DOA for the drive-in sci-fi set, and the peculiarities of the heavily monologued dialogue add an extra philosophical air. Given the time period and brisk run time, I’d really recommend this oddball for fans of this specific era of low-art genre movies.