By Rob Fagin
TIS' THE SCARY SEASON
Luke Evans in Dracula Untold, out October 10th
Halloween movie month begins October
3 with Annabelle, the prequel/spin-off of the
surprisingly creepy hit The Conjuring (Hide &
Clap!). Dracula Untold follows on October 10
with a sweeping, Lord of the Rings-style story
that combines vampire mythology with the
historical origins of Vlad the Impaler. The
Book of Life (Oct. 17), a 3-D computer-animated adventure comedy, looks to be a more
exuberant spook-fest in the vein of The
Nightmare Before Christmas, but with a
refreshing, Mexican vibrancy. All Hallows'
Eve (Oct. 31) brings us Horns, the latest stop
on Daniel Radcliffe’s journey to distance
himself from Harry Potter while still
embracing his bewitching roots.
All of these seem at least a little bit interesting, but it's strange to me that this fantastically atmospheric season doesn’t harvest
more intoxicatingly ghoulish tales. In fact,
this month's most thrillingly dark releases
don’t have a thing to do with the holiday:
Gone Girl (Oct. 3) - Directed by the current
master of rivetingly bleak sagas, David
Fincher, this looks like it could offer
macabre satisfaction to the legions of fans of
this chilling international bestseller.
Fury (Oct. 17), wrritten and directed by
David Ayers (whose End of Watch was a
swaggering adrenaline rush) stars Brad Pitt
as the sergeant of a platoon gunning their
tank into the heart of Nazi Germany.
52 illinoisentertainer.com october 2014
Festival hit Birdman (Oct. 17), directed by
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel, Amorres
Perros) starring the great, under-appreciated
Michael Keaton, looks like it could be a jawdropping, rip-tide mixture of dangerous
comedy and otherworldly hallucination.
Finally, the Halloween night alternative
will be Jake Gyllenhaal’s descent from a
low-life opportunist to a grotesque crime
reporter in writer-director Dan Gilroy's
Nightcrawler.
It's possible, actually, that these flicks
might be far better suited for the horror season than most of the releases that are traditionally tailored to the genre…which
inspires this month's Double Feature.
First Up:
There Will Be Blood (158 min.)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007
Availability: DVD/Blu-ray; Netflix
In one of this movie's most memorably
hellish scenes, the ground spews forth violently pressured gas, lumber shreds to splinters and a boy's eardrums burst to deafening
panic. Daniel Plainview - played by Daniel
Day-Lewis in a performance that needs no
further exclamation, the self-made "oil man"
and monster of this particular horror story is helpless to do anything for his son as he
watches a pillar of fire and smoke turn the
sky to black. You can see him changing, see
him becoming; something ghastly is blossoming inside.
He seems to have been borne from the
blistering, barren rocks where we meet him
in the beginning - alone, wordless, mining a
desolate wasteland for gold and fe