I've been making a concerted effort to watch horror films I hadn't seen yet this month. It's gotten busy lately so I had to slow down my effort, but I watched:
>The Mummy (Hammer)
6.5/10, which is unfortunately a pretty favorable score for a non Brendan Fraser Mummy movie. Such a cool type of monster that gets no real respect most of the time.
>The Howling
7/10. Pretty cool werewolf movie that was just a little too long in the tooth.
>Ginger Snaps
6/10 Too edgy for me at first, but ended up being somewhat fun
>Slither
5/10 - The effects were pretty good and the idea of an alien hivemind falling in love with the main female character was novel, but I couldn't help but alternate between feeling disgusted by the movie (a lot of that was intentional on the filmmaker's part) and bored. It had some signs of promise, but didn't sit right with me.
>The Thing from Another World (1951)
7/10. Better than it gets credit for, but not nearly as good as John Carpenter's remake. It was nice to see a movie where there wasn't diversity shoehorned in, the protagonists who did things were men (one woman was there as a secretary mostly to provide surprisingly sexually charged dialogue with the male lead). It was a really solid for a Sci-fi horror movie. The Thing itself was not particularly interesting, mostly just a shambling monster. The actors were all pretty effective at what they did.
>Sleepaway Camp
8/10 Great, surprisingly psychologically realistic slasher. Absolutely prophetic regarding the woman the kids lived with at the beginning of the movie. I think it's probably better than any of the Friday the 13th movies that I've seen. The only problem is that the romance(?) subplot between the young female camp counselor and the disgusting chain-smoking Jew who owned/operated the camp was handled in a totally baffling way. It would have been pretty realistic if he was coming onto her and that was unwanted, but instead she was the mover in that relationship and both apparently wanted it. The only thing I can think of is that it was thrown in to the movie to appeal to the shiksa whore trope Jews have. Considering the director is a lawyer from New York City who otherwise did not make movies, I guess it's not too surprising that disgusting trope would be present.
>Village of the Damned (1960)
7/10. Very odd movie. Essentially about aliens cuckolding an entire town. Sympathies through most of the movie are kind of confused, initially the villagers' hatred of the children seems unfair. I guess it makes sense for the dads as it looks like they were cucked (they're British, they should be used to that), but I think I recall the male villagers at the bar mentioning they were hoping the children would die in the womb (i.e. before the cuckoldry would be apparent). Once they came out as a bunch of unnaturally intelligent hivemind children, the villagers really should have caught on that no one man could have done all their women while they were all simultaneously knocked out. The symbolism is pretty weird, the children obviously have an Aryan look to them and the movie makes frequent references to the Soviets' response to the same problem (wiping a whole town off the map), so there's the implication that they represent national socialism or fascism or something along those lines (as opposed to the standard communism metaphor of the era). On the other hand, the lead villager who opposes the children when the villagers assemble an angry mob against the kids had a Hitler stache and was made to set himself on fire by the children. I get the feeling that the children are supposed to represent a reemergence of fascism in the youth of the post-WW2 world or the white race or something but I can't quite square the symbolism with the scene involving the man I take to be a Hitler stand-in. Ahead of its time for evil kid horror, though.