31 DAYS OF DREW - DAY 8: THE FRIGHTENERS

Every horrorhound's favorite month is upon us, and to celebrate, I'll be dishing out a personal pick from the genre for every day in October. Some will be obvious and rather unoriginal (sorry that I like movies other people like), while some will be a little more oddball and off-the-wall. Some may even challenge your idea of what constitutes a "horror" movie. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the month with some good movies, even if they aren't ones I recommend!

Today's Pick: The Frighteners (1996)

Before defining the fantasy film forever with his interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson was a pioneer in the horror-comedy genre, crafting trashy classics such as Bad Taste and Dead Alive a.k.a. Braindead. When his chance to hit the States came, he gave us a movie that perfectly captured the feeling of walking through a haunted house attraction: a bit of unease mixed with moments of shock, but all in the name of good fun and lots of laughter. That film is The Frighteners, and I adore every ectoplasmic second of it.

31 DAYS OF DREW - DAY 7: SOCIETY

Every horrorhound's favorite month is upon us, and to celebrate, I'll be dishing out a personal pick from the genre for every day in October. Some will be obvious and rather unoriginal (sorry that I like movies other people like), while some will be a little more oddball and off-the-wall. Some may even challenge your idea of what constitutes a "horror" movie. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the month with some good movies, even if they aren't ones I recommend!

Today's Pick: Society (1989)

If there's one thing I unabashedly love about genre films from the 80's, it's the abundance of off-the-wall practical effects that became so commonplace that you expected them in almost every horror film. Some films could even get away with being terrible but remain watchable as long as they splurged on the effects budget (a perfect example of this would be 1986's Spookies). Society certainly isn't terrible, but it also isn't spectacular when it comes to its narrative. However, its effects are so insane and extravagant that they more than make up for any other flaws the film has.

31 DAYS OF DREW - DAY 6: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

Every horrorhound's favorite month is upon us, and to celebrate, I'll be dishing out a personal pick from the genre for every day in October. Some will be obvious and rather unoriginal (sorry that I like movies other people like), while some will be a little more oddball and off-the-wall. Some may even challenge your idea of what constitutes a "horror" movie. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the month with some good movies, even if they aren't ones I recommend!

Today's Pick: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Horror movies and music seem to make good companions when they (rarely) join forces. Everybody is aware of the cult infamy The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but while the music, performances and B-movie homages in that film are great, the actual story and plotting of the film is noticeably lackluster. Luckily, there's a fantastic alternative to be had in Brian DePalma's secret masterpiece, Phantom of the Paradise, which not only features all the positives I listed for Rocky Horror, but has an excellent story that draws inspiration from two of horror's most classic tales: The Phantom of the Opera and Faust.

31 DAYS OF DREW - DAY 5: TREMORS

Every horrorhound's favorite month is upon us, and to celebrate, I'll be dishing out a personal pick from the genre for every day in October. Some will be obvious and rather unoriginal (sorry that I like movies other people like), while some will be a little more oddball and off-the-wall. Some may even challenge your idea of what constitutes a "horror" movie. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the month with some good movies, even if they aren't ones I recommend!

Today's Pick: Tremors (1990)

Everybody loves a good monster movie, especially when the tone of the film is fun and light-hearted. Tremors might just be one of the pinnacles of this particular sub-genre. It's got a great cast, a simple set-up and features one of cinema's most inventive and plain ol' awesome creatures.

31 DAYS OF DREW - DAY 4: RESOLUTION

Every horrorhound's favorite month is upon us, and to celebrate, I'll be dishing out a personal pick from the genre for every day in October. Some will be obvious and rather unoriginal (sorry that I like movies other people like), while some will be a little more oddball and off-the-wall. Some may even challenge your idea of what constitutes a "horror" movie. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the month with some good movies, even if they aren't ones I recommend!

Today's Pick: Resolution (2012)

If there is a common criticism a majority of horror movies suffer from, it's that the characters often take a backseat to the plot or concept. Some horror movies can support themselves this way (see yesterday's pick), but most don't have the imagination, momentum or sheer insanity to do so. Resolution recognizes this and turns the expectation around 180 degrees. It's a movie that is solely about the characters, and it utilizes the idea of stories as something far more mysterious and ultimately terrifying.

31 DAYS OF DREW - DAY 3: LAID TO REST

Every horrorhound's favorite month is upon us, and to celebrate, I'll be dishing out a personal pick from the genre for every day in October. Some will be obvious and rather unoriginal (sorry that I like movies other people like), while some will be a little more oddball and off-the-wall. Some may even challenge your idea of what constitutes a "horror" movie. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the month with some good movies, even if they aren't ones I recommend!

Today's Pick: Laid to Rest (2009)

Being a horror fan means learning to manage your expectations. The majority of horror cinema is either derivative, shoddily made, or worst of all, boring. However, horror fans are able to accept certain flaws in a film if other aspects strongly shine through. Laid to Rest is a textbook example of this. The movie is nowhere near perfect, but the things it does right are so right that it makes up for most of its weaker elements. And if there's one thing it deftly succeeds at, it's feeding the viewer's juvenile bloodlust.

31 DAYS OF DREW - DAY 2: NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

Every horrorhound's favorite month is upon us, and to celebrate, I'll be dishing out a personal pick from the genre for every day in October. Some will be obvious and rather unoriginal (sorry that I like movies other people like), while some will be a little more oddball and off-the-wall. Some may even challenge your idea of what constitutes a "horror" movie. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the month with some good movies, even if they aren't ones I recommend!

Today's Pick: The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The Halloween season is the perfect time for a fresh audience to glance back into the yesteryears of cinema and discover some classic chillers. While the Universal monster cycle of the 30's, 40's and even into the 50's should be mandatory viewing, there is a subsection of older horror films (usually given the shame-distancing sub-genre title of "psychological thriller") dealing with human monsters that shouldn't be ignored. Some great examples would be 1962's Cape Fear (remade in better-than-average fashion by Martin Scorsese in 1991), 1959's variation on the famous Leopold-Loeb murder case, Compulsion, or Alfred Hitchcock's golden standard, Psycho. One of the best of this breed has to be The Night of the Hunter, the solo directing effort of Charles Laughton, who played one of fiction's greatest monsters, Quasimodo, in the stellar 1939 production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.