This year at The 34th Dimension we’re having the First Annual Valentine’s Day Horror Movie Marathon, including each of the four great films listed below. If you’re hard up for ideas of what to watch, here’s a great point to jump off from.
Valentine’s Day is great when you’re in a relationship. You get to show that special someone how much you care through gifts of overpriced novelty items that will be thrown out or put in storage by the following week. And, if you’re really lucky, you can also blow $70 on a single meal at a two-star restaurant like The Keg!
Meanwhile, if you’re single you get to complain about how stupid Valentine’s Day is and how it’s just another corporate holiday designed to suck money from the wallets of men. You probably also hate Christmas, birthdays and happiness.
Both situations suck, so why not make the most out of the day—whether you’re single or attached—by watching some of the best horror movies ever made? If you’re with a lover you’re guaranteed to receive plenty of scare-cuddles (and the amazing scare-sex that follows), and if you’re unhitched you can still get together with your single friends for an awesome night of the macabre.
Alien
Let’s begin the festivities with one of the greatest scifi/horror films ever created, released in 1979 and directed by Ridley Scott. The debate still rages on as to which film is better: Alien or Aliens, but to me this is a non-issue. The best is Alien3, hands down. It makes sense to start at the beginning of the franchise, though, so this year we’ll be watching Ellen Ripley’s first encounter with the xenomorphic race of xenomorphs.
What makes Alien so awesome to watch on Valentine's Day? It could be the original designs by artist H. R. Giger, which still inspire talentless schmucks today. Or maybe it’s the suspense of hunting down a man-killer born of John Hurt’s chest cavity. Nah, it’s gotta be the ending. Not when the alien is ejected into space, but when you totally get to see Sigourney Weaver in her underwear.
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| It took no small amount of ingenuity to photoshop an eyeless monster to look like it's winking. |
Willard
A film about a social outcast who takes murderous vengeance on the people around him, Willard is sort of like Revenge of the Nerds but with rats. And gore. Mostly rats, though.
This is one of those movies where you get to sympathize with the psychopath because, really, he’s not such a bad guy. He’s only what the world made him—and, also, that old bastard who gets eaten totally deserved to get eaten.
You can watch the 1971 version if you’d like, but I already own the 2003 remake with Crispin Glover. Did you know that he played Grendel in the 2007 version of Beowulf? Because I just found that out.
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| Best friends forever. |
Dark City
This movie is more effed up than horrifying. What if your identity could be swapped out at any time by a group of aliens who inhabit the bodies of dead humans, experimenting on us in order to find a way to preserve their own race? You’d get one of Kiefer Sutherlands best roles ever, that’s what.
That’s about all you need to know about Dark City. It’s very surreal and cool if you’re into that sort of thing, and it culminates in a fight scene straight out of Dragon Ball Z. Taken with The Matrix Revolutions and Master of the Flying Guillotine, that makes at least three movies with fight scenes that are more like Dragon Ball than all of Dragon Ball: Evolution.
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| "What’s the scouter say about his power level?" |
The Night Flier
This is one of Stephen King’s lesser known film adaptations. Long before The Mist, there was Richard Dees: a tabloid journalist tracking down a killer who styles himself after a vampire. Little does he know that vampires be real, yo. (They hang out in meadows and sparkle in sunlight.)
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen The Night Flier so I wanted to track it down again for old time’s sake. I’ve pretty much enjoyed everything I’ve ever seen Miguel Ferrer in, and this is some classic King—back when he still drew heavily from H. P. Lovecraft for inspiration and before happy endings were mandated by idiot film producers and audiences. If you’ve seen The Mist or the original ending to 1408, you know how depressingly Stephen King’s short stories can end.
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| Yeah, bitch. |
Now I’ve made myself really want to watch The Mist and 1408, but these four movies will definitely fill up my Valentine’s evening. Maybe next year we’ll do an all Stephen King themed marathon.
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