The Weird Western was born out of the very myth of the West itself. In American lore, the frontier of the Southwest was never not an invitation to mythologize and a call to speculate. Its material reality was both shot through with and held up by an imaginative topography that cast its expansive eye on to the nation’s iridescent understanding of itself. Already in the 1860s, Edward S. Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies’ suggested the paradox of mystical machinery in the West: frontier living was a nominal revolt against civilizational order that was, finally, a harbinger of it. By the release of Curse of the Undead in 1959, nearly a century later, the Western frontier had thoroughly suffused the American mindscape, and the Weird Western understood the West as a mental canvas on which America’s vision of itself could be shot through a dark carnival mirror.

But the Weird Western signaled no default orientation. Its logic was a poetics of amplitude. The sacred frontier of untampered moral, spiritual, and economic progress could become a bastion of interstellar possibility in the Space Western. On the other hand, America’s history of genocide and material extraction could malevolently rematerialize as a cruel and unforgiving terrain wracked by violence and spectral presences of uncertain origin in the Gothic Western.

The latter, as a subset of the Weird Western, was still a rare breed in 1959 though, an  uncommon wraith haunting the cinematic scenery, so much so that Universal Studios, near-monopolistic purveyor of horror cinema in the U.S. during the Old Hollywood era, nearly waited until their own demise to cast their shadowy eye on the American West. One ought not be surprised. While Westerns were perennial features of the Old Hollywood landscape, even the most sober, critically-minded work in the Old Hollywood genre seldom exposed the metaphysical terrors that doubled as the negative side of the desert’s eternal strangeness. If the Wild West promised an otherworldly poetics of dreamy becoming, it was also haunted by a netherworld of settler brutality.

The original cinematic adaptation of Children of the Corn was one of the early casualties of the early Stephen King explosion. Like a good many of the man’s early texts, the story is a crazy-quilt of different fabrics and textures, an uncanny divorce from reality tethering together themes and questions without always trying to develop them. King’s story is a vision of corruptible children and generational trauma that also examines a wheezing, necrotic marriage and triples as an early exploration into a genuinely cosmic horror. In its short span, though, you mostly get the sense that King himself simply wasn’t sure about settling down into the pleasantly banal domestic sphere that, the story suggests, was at once a conduit for unholy forces and a way of denying them.

The presence of so many themes does not, as it would in another author, suggest a truly deliberate mind exploring the interweaving truths of many seemingly separate terrors. Rather, if they remind us that King could turn almost anything into horror, they also suggests that horror, somehow, wasn’t what he was most interested in after all. King was not a man tormented by suggestions of otherworldly forces, as say, H.P. Lovecraft was, or terrified by humanity’s capacity to channel them, as was, say, Mary Shelley. This was a man deeply bruised by alcohol and unsure of his relationship with the people who ostensibly loved him most. “Horror” could, for all the man’s reputation as a hell-raiser, often simply be window dressing for essentially sentimental stories that happened to channel emotions that slipped into the darker side of the world and didn’t pay too much attention to the reality principle. What, precisely, was horrifying is whatever happened to enter King’s mind that day. If parts of Children of the Corn could be filed next to Cujo as among King’s most quotidian horrors, its abutment of the inexplicable and the mundane are also indication enough that the author was willing to treat the genre more as a playground, or a toolkit, than a mission statement. His horror was, finally, an act of bare survival, not an existential vision.

“Alleged horror,” remarks a youtube description of the long-forgotten, once-lost Incubus. The poster seems to intend this as a criticism, but the film itself begs to differ. Incubus seems to delight in not being very upfront about the horror it wishes to unleash, including, quite literally, having to convince a Church that they were not making one in order to get the film made. It’s as though the film itself is afraid to call itself horror, or perhaps doesn’t want to be, all the more potent for a text feeling itself out in the moment, and that doesn’t want to stick around to let us figure it out. It’s a subterranean film, so much so that the actor playing the titular demon awakened late on, and who seems none too pleased about being back on this earth, would be back in the grave before the film’s release.

Incubus is a work that makes a virtue, or demon, out of necessity. It stalks our pretensions of perfect cinema. Written on the fly so that Leslie Stevens could keep up the momentum of the recently cancelled television masterpiece The Outer Limits, the brilliantly exploratory show that he unleashed upon the world and that, more importantly, conjured cinematographer Conrad Hall right out of nowhere and on a path to redefining color cinematography. To thin the membrane between cult American television and European art house cinema, it was filmed entirely in Esperanto, an entirely artificial language with no organic connection to any lived community, and it was framed as a folk horror film despite the “folk,” in this case, not existing. While other critics have pointed out this paradox as a simple curiosity, it’s really more of a thesis statement. While the “folk horror” genre purports to channel a group’s fears, Incubus almost – if you squint right – investigates the very idea of the genre: it implies an organic effusion of a single culture’s growth, but it, in fact, reminds us that “single culture” itself is entirely constructed object.

In announcing his status as a young director to be reckoned with, Dario Argento couldn’t have picked a more provocative opening gambit, one that unapologetically, if surreptitiously, seeds his future career into one scene. Witnessing a silent murder attempt in an art museum, protagonist Sam Dalmas (Tony Muante) runs to the aid of the wounded woman, only for the would-be murderer’s ghostly-gloved hand to push a button, trapping him in between the two glass panes in the museum entrance. Neither in the museum nor outside, all he can do is hopelessly watch an imminent demise he cannot even hear. Both of these people do leave the scene of the crime alive, but for the moment, Argento lets us linger in a liminal zone between reality and art, life and death, sound and silence, helpless and unwitting voyeurs to a killing that appears to be posed for him – and painted like an art object for us – but which he can only tenuously interfere in.

Positioned between Mario Bava’s earlier Hitchcock riffs and Lucio Fulci’s (and Argento’s own) later, lurid arias of psychedelic blood, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage also feels like a liminal realm for Italian horror in general. In 1970, Argento was clearly a director poised to move the genre from hell to purgatory, from brutally experimenting with society’s sins to exploring the very limits of narrative consciousness in a miasmic middle-ground. But Bird is not as demonic, nor as speculative, as his imminent, genre-transforming works. He’s still the lizard cleverly stalking his prey, not the shape-shifting chameleon daring us to join him in the abyss of cinematic solidity itself. The opening’s portrait of embroiled masculinity and helpless passivity obviously recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and The Bird with the Crustal Plumage never quite escapes the Hitchcock obsession of the earliest giallos (and the likes of Brian De Palma), nor achieves the infectiously fractal vision of a completely broken world that Mario Bava unleashed with Bay of Blood one year later.

Yet Bird, like many great horror films, is already marvelously holding a knife to its own throat, achieving a kind of perverse self-awareness about its own debt to cinema history and the limits of its moral imagination. This is a film that knows how troubled it is, that senses its own participation in modernity’s foibles all too well. It opens with a man witnessing a helpless woman about to be murdered, framed as an art object worthy of the classics, and it closes with a reminder of just how blind he truly is. If the film, too, is myopic in many ways, it also exhibits the genre’s gleefully cruel ability to remind us that we, after all, are the ones who clicked play. The film, like most giallos, seems like a sledgehammer or a machete. We don’t notice it sneaking up on us with a scalpel, hellbent on disfiguring both its genre and our viewing habits, reminding us of the consequences of our inattention.

Night Train to Terror is undeniably trash, but its pleasures, paradoxically, are entirely intellectual. In its own unintentional, mercenary way, it severs the tension cord linking high and low art. It is, finally, only really valuable as a theoretical exercise, a strange cinematic mad science experiment (a connection that runs deep in cinematic history) in which several unfinished older films have been sliced and diced to pieces and reassembled into walking corpses of their ostensibly living selves. Born out of the forgotten remainders of unfinished horror pictures, this is an avowedly monstrous exercise in revivifying films that, as Frankenstein’s Monster himself once said, “belong dead.” That the film itself admits that this undertaking may itself be an immoral act – “bodies for money,” one character remarks in the first short film – is simply part of the fun. Night Train to Terror is a strange kind of cinematic meta-archive that salvages films while also working as proof for both the argument that this very salvaging is a heroic act and, conversely, that the films should have never been salvaged in the first place. It is, in the most literal possible sense, hack work.

All of this is to say: Night Train is probably an un-reviewable cinematic object. It feels like outsider art, so anything like a conventional standard of textual coherence or roundness seems essentially meaningless for parsing it or accessing its soul. Make no mistake, though: this is no labor of love. Its only investment is ensuring that scraps of lost and found footage might make a few dollars when unleashed on the unsuspecting, or on those who have deluded themselves into thinking this is a real movie, or on people like me who, apparently, hate themselves. For director Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, this is self-evidently an attempt to salvage a collection of films that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cohere the first time around, footage that, as if by some demonic force, simply would not coagulate into a stable form.

William Castle wasn’t a natural artist, but he was certainly an organic showman of the P.T. Barnum tradition, a skillful and wily craftsman with a populist’s canny sensibility for manipulating without upsetting the status quo to his liking and a magician’s eye for how to do more with less and play in the realm between appearance and reality. Case in point, Strait-Jacket, a self-evident Alfred Hitchcock knock-off with no new ideas, and which doesn’t even try to pretend like it has any actual ideas, but whose successes still, through some magical sleight-of-cinematic-hand, somehow feel entirely its own.

Strait-Jacket is certainly a copy-cat, but then, the writer Robert Bloch did write the story upon which Psycho was based, so it’s hard to criticize him for that. Plus, while Strait-Jacket shares Psycho’s lurid morbidity and fascination with the darker regions of America lurking beneath the facades of normality, Castle’s film mostly wants to play with us rather than to play us, as Hitch always essentially did. This is an essentially democratic film. Rather than exercise a cruel, conniving, beautiful mastery, it invites us in to a strange corner of America for a little while and then lets us leave. Straight-Jacket’s raison d’etre, certainly, is the sudden success of Psycho, which sent a dark chord down the spine of an already decaying Hollywood and threatened America with the sudden fragility of notions like “protagonist.” But Castle’s soul was that of a playful huckster just delighted to show us how he can, technically, show several heads being lobbed off in 1962 because they look cartoon-y enough to get by the censors, who don’t really seem to care when the film is this off-brand. That may be a gross reduction, even a debasement, of Hitchcock’s seminal masterpiece, but it isn’t exactly a rip-off.

First things first: a film that begins with a thank you to the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia, immediately propositioning the audience with a fantasy of verisimilitude and access, and then immediately cuts to a totally opaque, ethereal non-space while an elderly John Huston, fresh off of voicing Gandalf in the animated Rankin & Bass The Hobbit,  appears as an unknown prophet on an alien planet that looks like Mos Eisley, isn’t ever going to lose me completely. We seem not to be in Kansas anymore, and this high up in the sublime tornado of chaotic-evil cinema, we’re probably doomed to fall.

Yet, amazingly, The Visitor holds up its end of the bargain. It is only when we cut to a basketball game that the real mystery of the film reveals itself: how is it that essentially unknown director Giulio Paradisi never made another horror film, and his subsequent two films were apparently easy-going Italian comedies, before he unceremoniously never directed again?  The Visitor’s opening basketball game is a beautifully opaque textual object, a killer opening to a film that is a bricolage of genres and textures and uncanny thematic and technical juxtapositions revealing a director of real mettle and a vision of extraordinary curiosity. This is a stupendously unsettling game of hoops, a cut-up event in which the camera floats around with haunting observational acuity, like a deconstruction of a sporting event from a ghost’s alienated perspective.

Perhaps even more interesting: a latter combination gymnastics event/bullet-removal surgery sequence (you know, one of those type-deals) clarifies that much of The Visitor is an experiment in mobilizing giallo-style filmmaking for primarily non-kill sequences. While some of the set-pieces do technically result in dead bodies, as in a phenomenal bird-in-a-car dive bomb, even they are far-removed from the giallo’s usual stalking ground. Instead, we explore everything from public sporting events to overcrowded hospitals to an abandoned apartment building to the innards of machinery scaffolding, each of which the film turns into a genuinely ethereal cinematic experiment in sheer observation.

Twenty-five years after his last genuinely worthwhile non-animated film, it’s hard to not see any Tim Burton film, even the best ones, as anything other than a walking corpse on an inevitable path to the director’s premature artistic demise. Burton’s style has become a transparently corporate product, an obvious manifestation of Hollywood’s ability to cannibalize anything that might challenge it. Burton’s story is really a tragedy. One year after 1988’s Beetlejuice, his box-office-bludgeoning, trend-setting Batman would reveal that beneath the oddball hell he could raise and the anarchy he could unleash, he always really, only, just wanted to be loved by the masses. Love, the desire for beauty, would kill the proverbial beast in him.

A couple of masterpieces like Ed Wood and one nihilistic blockbuster in Batman Returns aside, Burton’s parade of cinematic renegades now feels like a procession of the damned, a carnival of once-living, gleefully-manicured monstrosities having become a wax museum.In this sense, Beetlejuice’s sympathies are perhaps a telling metaphor for Burton’s internal tensions. He obviously self-identifies with the protagonists of Beetlejuice, the Maitlands, two everyday people who take irrepressible joy in the capacity to tinker in the attics of America, who hide pleasure and play within the carbon-copy domiciles of suburbia. But it’s hard not to see him as the interloping Deetzes, so fascinated with a facsimile of weirdness and its capacity to be monopolized for personal gain that they sell their souls for a simulacrum of adoration. Burton’s soul is laid bare, two entangled forces warring in the same Hollywood house. Over the past quarter century, the man has become a corporate shell cynically selling the very thing he once genuinely loved. Viewing it from 2024, 1988’s Beetlejuice can be depressing stuff. 

In 1988 though? I mean, Jesus. Burton had already lovingly skewered mid-century iconography and narrative structure with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the most spirited tale of mid-century America’s love affair with vehicular culture this side of John Carpenter’s Christine. Looking forward rather than back, Beetlejuice feels much more radical, like an open canvas for a diabolical energy eager to be unleashed. Instead of seeing it as a prelude to Burton’s later misfires, it can be read along the likes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona, scions of another America, an alternative 1980s trying to escape from the corporate world around it. These pop versions of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas suggest a wandering America both trying to cut itself off from its past and hopelessly being drawn back. Rather than itself being trapped, Beetlejuice seems to recognize that we’re all trapped in an American dream that became a nightmare.

Def by Temptation is a self-evident labor of love, a film made by one man with no filmmaking experience and little money, a conspiracy between necessity and invention. The cinematic progeny of twenty-four-year-old James Bond III, who wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the film, Def by Temptation is an allegory of a young man dunked head-first into a world thoroughly alien to him. It could, with a squint, be Bond’s own tale, his fire-and-brimstone account of life on the other side of the cinematic veil. (Tellingly, while Bond plays Joel, an aspiring minister from North Carolina, his childhood best friend K is a film actor in New York). LikeBill Gunn’s masterful Ganja & Hess from seventeen years beforehand, another film by a lost voice of African American horror cinema unceremoniously ousted from the industry, Def by Temptation is a kind of poison pen love letter to the art form itself, a kind of baptism by fire in the cinematic world.

Def by Temptation, in other words, is a film that deeply appreciates the clarifying, messianic powers of the medium, the gift of viewing life darkly through a warped cinematic perspective, of using the weapon of art to transfigure life’s surfaces to reveal its true, awful self. Yet it is also a film that recognizes the dangers of playing with smoke and mirrors, that recoils at the cost to the soul of participating in, being tempted by the hope of success in, such a cruel and life-draining industry. Like Gunn’s film, it understands horror cinema as a hell and a home, asking us to seek sanctuary in the sacrilegious.

A cruel dispatch from the less traversed regions of the burgeoning late ‘80s video industry, Evil Dead Trap anticipates the much more famous Japanese horror explosion of the late 1990s and early ‘00s that cast such a frigid, despairing shadow on the international horror scene. Following the likes of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Evil Dead Trap is a brutal and deeply disturbed portrait of modern urban ennui that turns a videotape – nominally a flourishing frontier of futuristic possibility – into a rumination of the darker side of technological democratization. In director Toshiharu Ikeda’s film, industrial modification and media transfiguration become conduits for a world on the edge of something fundamentally other than whatever it might have been before. In its disturbing force and multi-media experimentation, it sometimes plays like the grimy, unholy B-side to the Japanese sequences of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, framing modernity as something almost alien to itself.

Evil Dead Trap wastes no time winding and rewinding us. After a series of dismembered close-ups of bodies typing, watching, and bruising shot on video tape, the film cuts to a long cinematic shot of TV station employee Nami (Miyuki Ono) walking through the bowels of her office building to a backroom in search of a monitor and VCR to watch a recently arrived video cassette, to discover what alternative view of the world hides within its tape. The sudden shift – from a montage of cut-up incisions to a winding image of connective tissue – not only generates a frictive charge but directly engages the transition from one medium to another. By sheer force of its insatiable need to search for new technological life, to propel modernity, the cinematic detective slowly inevitably approaches the destructive monster of videotape which may doom it but which it simply cannot avoid.