10 Offbeat Horror Films to Enjoy this Halloween Season (Part I)

We’re all familiar with the classic horror movies going way back to Universal Monsters that almost define Halloween. It’s a given that many horror and Halloween fanatics will revisit Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Wolfman at least once this October. Let’s not forget some of the more modern horror classics such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, Saw, and of course Halloween. But what about some of the more oddball horror films out there that will not likely be aired on TV any time soon? Let’s have a look at 10 horror flicks that may be a bit more strange and extreme than what mainstream audiences might expect from the genre. We’ll start with five and continue later this week with Part II.

Bloodsucking Freaks (1976)

Joel M. Reed’s exploitation picture pushes about every envelope you can imagine, especially for the time it was released back in 1976. It is a film which revels in its own nastiness and never fails to entertain if you’re in the right frame of mind. Bloodsucking Freaks is the story of “Sardu: Master of the Theatre of the Macabre” (Seamus O’Brien) and his dwarf assistant Ralphus (Louie DeJesus). Together they put on a stage show which “simulates” torture and dismemberment in the tradition of the old Grand Guignol theatre in France. However, Sardu isn’t quite clear with his audience about whether his subjects are merely acting, or if his “tricks” are actually on-stage murders taking place in a room full of unknowing witnesses. The special effects are quite shoddy in comparison to what can be seen in modern horror, but Bloodsucking Freaks manages to cram enough gore, sleaze, and nudity into its roughly 90 minute running time to keep any horror hound satisfied. We get cannibalism, limb and eye removal, drills through the head, decapitation, tooth extraction, even a severed head performing implied fellatio, among other highlights. There is also plenty of off the wall humor which blends well with the horrific acts of violence, so it’s impossible to ever take the film very seriously. You have to wonder though, if a movie this politically incorrect could ever get produced today.

I Drink Your Blood (1970)

David Durston’s 1970 horror film I Drink Your Blood prides itself on being the first movie to receive an X rating from the MPAA due to scenes of violence. The story centers around a cult of Satanic hippies led by Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) who travels into a town and terrorizes its residents. After they attack a young woman, her grandfather tries to step in but the cult members break the old man’s glasses and force him to take LSD. His grandson witnesses the bad trip and decides to get revenge by injecting some blood he extracted from a rabid dog into a bunch of meat pies, which he then sells to the hungry hippies at the family store. Before long the town is overtaken by ravenous, foaming at the mouth Satanists running around with axes and any other weapons they can get their hands on. Clocking in at only 83 minutes, I Drink Your Blood never really slows down and though the violence and gore may be somewhat tame by today’s standards, we are still treated to a decent amount of the red stuff including lopped off heads and hands and other atrocities. (Lynn Lowry from George A. Romero’s  The Crazies also makes an uncredited appearance as a mute girl who is a member of Horace’s cult.)

Flesh Eater (1988)

Okay, this one should be a Halloween staple. Directed by Bill Hinzman (Night of the Living Dead), the 1988 zombie film Flesh Eater takes place at Halloween and doesn’t have much of a plot, but hell if it isn’t one of the most entertaining low budget zombie romps of the 80s. Director Hinzman also returns as the iconic “cemetery zombie” from George Romero’s 1968 classic. Storywise, we basically have a bunch of dumb college kids who take a hayride in the woods, drink beer, screw, and then get picked off by the living dead. One by one the hayriders are transformed into zombies until only two remain, leading up to a conclusion that doesn’t make any bones about ripping off Night of the Living Dead‘s ending. There is plenty of gore on display here, and the special effects aren’t bad considering the film’s modest budget of roughly $60,000. Some of the highlights include axes to the head, pitchfork impalements, gunshot wounds to the face, heart removal, a bitten off nose, and various scenes of neck ripping, biting, etc. The acting is amateurish but that lends to the charm of the film. Hinzman even hired family members to fill some minor roles. There is also a great zombie attack scene which takes at a barn costume party, just to get you in that Halloween mood.

Hell of the Living Dead aka Virus (1980)

Italian director Bruno Mattei made a career out of ripping off American movies and seemingly did so without much shame. This time it’s a knockoff of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Hell of the Living Dead was originally released in 1980 and issued in the USA under the title Night of the Zombies in 1983. The film opens with an accident at a chemical plant which results in a series of attacks by powerful flesh eating zombies. After a SWAT team is called in to handle a terrorist threat, they accompany a TV news reporter and her cameraman through the jungles of New Guinea to find out what is behind “Operation Sweet Death”. The cover for this government program is that it was designed to solve the problem of starvation in poor parts of the world, but the team ultimately discovers its real purpose. “Sweet Death” was actually designed to eliminate the issue of overcrowding in the Third World by causing its population to eat each other. It was the program’s testing which caused the chemical leak in the opening moments of the film and naturally the zombie outbreak gets out of control in short order. What Hell of the Living Dead lacks in originality it more than makes up for in entertainment value. The movie lifts entire scenes from Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead and even uses the exact Goblin score featured in other films such as Contamination, Dawn of the Dead, and Beyond the Darkness. However the movie is fast-paced, never gets boring, and delivers the gore you would expect from an early 80s Italian zombie film.  The dialogue is also hilarious, as are some of the antics engaged in by the members of the SWAT team. Overall a fun way to spend 99 minutes if you have nothing more important to do.

Pieces (1982)

Juan Piquer Simon’s 1982 horror film Pieces is a Spanish-Italian co-production which combines elements of Italian giallo and American slasher subgenres. The result is a fun, albeit cheesy, splatterfest. Typical of slasher movies of the early 1980s, the film begins with a past evil which sets the stage for a series of violent murders set in the present. Pieces opens in Boston in 1942 where a young boy is putting together a puzzle of a nude woman. When his mother enters the room she is not pleased to see what the boy is up to. She demands that her son go and bring her a plastic bag so she can dispose of all his filthy material. The boy instead returns with an axe and proceeds to chop and saw his mother to bits before finishing his puzzle. Cut to present day where a police lieutenant named Bracken (Christopher George) is investigating a string of homicides on a college campus. Bracken enlists the help of an undercover policewoman (Lynda Day George) and one of the college students (Ian Sera) to try and put the “pieces” together. Some giallo elements contained in the film are the black-gloved killer, several red herrings, and a pursuit by the local police. Pieces is another entertaining horror flick which delivers ample amounts of gory murders and dismemberments, an interesting story, and probably one of the weirdest “WTF” endings you’ll ever see.