Three Films Make A Post: An All-New Chiller for Halloween!

La Influencia aka The Influence (2019): As you know, only Spanish filmmakers have the good taste to try and adapt Ramsey Campbell. Alas, Denis Rovira van Boekholt’s adaptation of a very fine novel isn’t as strong as it could be. The director is certainly great with the more technical aspects of creating a creepy mood and uses that bane of contemporary horror, the jump scare, sparingly, but he tends to overplay his hand increasingly the longer the film goes on, betting on the creepy and loud image where a calmer and softer touch would work much better, often ignoring perfectly obvious avenues for the kind of psychological horror asked for here and instead going for shouting “HORROR!” into the audience’s faces. The script has some curious weaknesses too, becoming unspecific in the most inopportune moments, and having some trouble organizing certain plot threads (watch who knows what and when about a certain medallion, for example). And while there is strong, horrific imagery in the film, van Boekholt isn’t quite the stylist yet to pull through on this alone.

The Monkey’s Paw (1948): Before I randomly stumbled upon this adaptation of W.W. Jacobs’s classic story directed by Norman Lee and “associate directed” by Barbara Toy, who also co-wrote (and would go on to become a Land Rover based exploration writer), I didn’t know it existed. Not that I missed much: this is a typical case of a film that takes a small, short gem of a story and tries to bring it up to film length (in this case only an hour, but still) by adding lots of uninteresting business that distracts from the core of the tale and more background material that’s no use either, as well as by making changes to the source material that lessen it. Only in a couple of scenes do the directors find a moment or two between thrilling in the rambling of an elderly Irish rogue and listening to drawn out scenes of people repeating things we already know when things become somewhat creepy – the final sequence is moody, if still worse than the one in the story.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981): And because this is clearly, Three Halloween-Ready Films Seen By A Grump, why not end on me being down on what for many a person with good taste and style is one of the great TV horror movies? And it’s not that I don’t see the craftsmanship in Frank De Felitta’s direction and J.D. Feigelson’s script, or can’t abstractly admire how much atmosphere they get out of little.


It’s just never been a film that grabbed me, and my recent re-watch didn’t change that fact. I think my main problem with the film is that I’m not that fond of the part of the horror genre that’s all about horrible people getting their comeuppance. That approach to horror just has too much of the old testament and fire and brimstone preachers to ever make me really happy. Not that Dark Night is all fire and brimstone, mind you, it’s really a focussed and calm film, all considered. It’s just not for me.