• Seven Samurai (1954)
• Blood River (2025)
• The Death of Stalin (2017)
• The 1990's Gamera reboot trilogy:
  • Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995)
  • Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (1996)
  • Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999)
• Reincarnation (2005)
• The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
• Gankutsuou (2004)
• Galileo (2007) (season 1)
• The entire AT VOTOMS franchise (I think):
  • Armored Trooper VOTOMS (1983)
  • Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Last Red Shoulder (1985)
  • Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Big Battle (1986)
  • Armored Trooper Votoms: Red Shoulder Document - The Roots of Ambition (1988)
  • Armor Hunter Mellowlink (1988)
  • Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Brilliantly Shining Heresy (1994)
  • Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Pailsen Files (2007)
  • Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Phantom Arc (2010)
  • Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Case; Irvine (2010)
  • VOTOMS Finder (2010)
  • Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Alone Again (2011)
• Coming Soon (2008)
• After the Rain (2018)
• Future Diary (2011)

So first off, last month I somehow forgot to mention that I also watched I Saw the TV Glow (2024) in October. That movie was a lot. I'm just gonna link to a review I already wrote of it because I think if I think about it too much more it's gonna upset me. It's uhh, powerful though. I would encourage people to check it out without looking too much into it beforehand, with the caveat that you've gotta be ready to sit with some potentially very uncomfortable questions about identity.

So anyway, onto more "normal" fare, Occult (2008) is Koji Shiraishi's found footage follow up to Noroi, and further intensifies that film's concern with the authorial voice in documentary. This time Shiraishi didn't even both with a proxy and just put himself in the movie as a documentarian who sets out to investigate an unexplained multiple murder at a resort town years ago, and discovers that Shohei Eno, an unemployed man who survived the attack, has been experiencing supernatural phenomena in the aftermath. This leads Shiraishi and his team to begin documenting Eno's life in a sequence of decisions that quickly begin to test the bounds of morality and legality. It's a fascinating and uncomfortable exploration of obsession and the narrative hand of the director that seems at the same time to push back on any attempt to consider it as a typical horror movie to an extent that borders on satire.

Breaking from horror season, I finished Paradise Kiss (2005), Madhouse's anime adaptation of Ai Yazawa's manga. It's a pretty great coming of age drama set in the lead up to a high school fashion show, as protagonist Yukari Hayasaka falls in with a group of weirdo design students and agrees to model for their upcoming event, being forced to confront in the process her ideas about herself and hopes for the future. It's got a great cast and dabbles in some interesting mixed media animation techniques. I guess maybe Ai Yazawa is so famous because she's like, a really good writer or something, who knew.

Next I decided to sort my library by release date and watched Nosferatu (1922). I don't think there's much I can say with authority about German Expressionism, but it's a pretty neat film. Despite obviously existing in an entirely distinct dramatic milieu with regard to what was expected of screen actors, big chunks of it still hold up as a film, and if you're familiar with Dracula it's doubly interesting to consider as a work of adaptation, as it diverges from the original story in ways both large and small to, I think I'd argue, its ultimate benefit. It also rather forces the viewer to consider the stages of mediation that exist especially with media of this age and provenance, since this is in many ways pretty far removed from the "original" film—having the score recorded with the film, different color tinting, different intertitles, likely even a different framerate. You're certainly not watching the film as it was in 1922, but it raises the question of what that even would mean. (Indeed, there have been so many releases of Nosferatu that have built upon each others' work or made different adaptive decisions; I have been meaning to annotate the film in Plex with the specific edition of the film that it is just as soon as I... figure that out.)

Finally, we closed out with a couple of more modern Thai horror films, 2024's The Cursed Land and 2011's Laddaland. These were both very cool and both ultimately concerned with the influence a specific place can exert on us (see they both have "land" right there in the title; I am very good at media analysis). The former stars Ananda Everingham (of Shutter fame) as an engineer struggling with the recent death of his wife who moves with his teenage daughter to a rundown old home in a Muslim-majority suburb of Bangkok, and soon runs afoul of an ancient curse as the result of his religious prejudices and unprocessed trauma. This one was perhaps more interesting than it was deeply affecting, but I really enjoyed seeing a Thai perspective on religious tolerance and the historical oppression of the Muslim Malays in southern Thailand (though this latter subject may be of limited legibility to a Westerner without a bit more reading). It also works largely as a result of some great performances, especially from Everingham and Bront Palarae, who plays the family's shady new neighbor, Heem.

Laddaland, meanwhile, is probably one of the bluntest films I've ever seen about the sublimated violence of suburban patriarchy and it is fuckin' great. It's also very scary, perhaps not the scariest of the season but the only one we ended up having to break up over two nights. Saharat Sangkapreecha plays Thi, a beleaguered would-be patriarch who, thanks to the benevolence of his new job, has just signed a mortgage and moved his family into a picturesque home in a gated suburb of Chiang Mai called Laddaland. It soon becomes clear that things might not be as ideal as he hopes however: his job begins raising a number of red flags, he increasingly struggles with his rebellious daughter Nan (Sutatta Udomsilp) who resents being taken away from her friends and grandmother in Bangkok, and it seems something is going on with the cleaning lady he hired to take care of their new home. What follows is an increasing cavalcade of disasters that is partly supernatural in origin, but ultimately the ghost just serves as a wedge to force the issues of exploitative jobs, gossipy neighbors, and toxic gender roles to a crisis point. I would probably critique some of the specific scares as sitting a little uneasily with the overall narrative; at times it almost feels like they have dropped a slightly more formulaic "scary scene" into the movie here and there just to break up the pacing, but those scary scenes certainly are scary and the rest of the movie around them is pretty great too. This is one of the movies of the spooky season that I would most strongly recommend, alongside The Medium and Noroi (and I Saw the TV Glow, with the above caveat).