Welcome to the July 6th edition of Creepy Catalog’s daily horror digest. Today’s movies make for an odd double-feature, but that’s how I watched them! Let’s get to it.
Movie of the Day
Over the past few years, a good portion of my classic-horror viewing is dictated by Svengoolie. If you’re unaware, Svengoolie is a horror host, presenting older horror movies and popping in with skits and bits at the commercial breaks. His show has been available on MeTV for more than a decade, and I’ve been watching every week since around 2021. All this is to say, the movie I watched last night was chosen not by me, but by Svengoolie. It is the 1960 chiller Village of the Damned (yes, I’m a couple of weeks behind on Sven’s show), and I’m glad I finally sat down and watched it.
Village of the Damned is one of those movies that I know about, and I was sure I’d seen it ages ago. But within the first few minutes I realized I hadn’t. Or I’d just forgotten about the plot other than just “creepy kids with a telepathic bond and glowing eyes.” The story begins with the entire population of a village passing out at the same time. It’s an effectively spooky way to begin a movie. When they wake up a few hours later, the women in the village slowly realize that most of them are pregnant. Anyone biologically able to have a baby is going to have a baby. The births occur unusually quickly, and they result in eerie kids with emotionless demeanors, telepathic anger, and white hair.
I won’t spoil the rest if, like me, you haven’t seen it. What I will do is highly recommend Village of the Damned. Horror turned a corner in 1960. Movies like Psycho and Peeping Tom get a lot of deserved credit for their roles in shaping what scares us, but Village of the Damned is right up there with them. It’s tense, dramatic, chilling, heartbreaking, and extremely interesting as a sci-fi and psychological story. You can rent it on Prime Video.
Related Movie Recommendation
Considering what I just wrote about, you’d think I’d recommend either Children of the Damned (1964) or John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned (1995). I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m using Svengoolie as the connection. The same night Village of the Damned aired on Sven’s show, Day of the Dead (1985) aired on House of Svengoolie (a spinoff featuring a trio of awesome horror hosts). So that’s my related recommendation, George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead.
I haven’t always been the biggest fan of Day of the Dead. It’s my third favorite of Romero’s Dead movies by a pretty significant margin. But, I appreciate the gore immensely, and there are things I like about the story. The main doctor, Logan, is awesome, especially in his dealings with Rhodes. I also love the friendship between John and Bill. Everyone else is so serious and angry, but John and Bill are just living in their trailer getting drunk (well, Bill is getting drunk).
I will say that watching Day of the Dead on MeTV was a little strange. I know the movie very well, but even if I didn’t know it so well I would have recognized that parts of it were chopped up due to cutting out gore and language. They occasionally had to blur the gore and silence the language as well. So, not ideal, but the hosts of House of Svengoolie made up for it. If you want to watch Day of the Dead, it’s currently streaming on Peacock.
Birthdays
Janet Leigh starts off today’s birthdays! Born July 6, 1927, Janet’s best movie is, of course, Psycho as Marion Crane. She didn’t appear in a ton of horror movies after that, but she was in Night of the Lepus (1972), and she appeared in a couple of horror movies with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, The Fog (1980) and Halloween H20 (1998).
Eva Green was also born on July 6th, in 1980. Eva’s horror credits include a starring role in the series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), the 2012 movie remake of Dark Shadows, and Nocebo (2022).
Also born on this day, in 1951, is Geoffrey Rush. His horror resume is very limited, but quite memorable. He played Stephen Price in House on Haunted Hill (1999), and he was the subject of John Lithgow’s torment in The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024).
Events on This Day
On July 6th, 1998, the first episode of Serial Experiments Lain aired in Japan. This is one of my favorite anime series ever. The plot isn’t easy to succinctly describe, but the overall story follows a young girl who becomes increasingly absorbed in an online world. The show is incredibly atmospheric, and the blending of genres is amazing.
Also released in Japan on this day, in 1996, is the film Organ. The movie is rather gory, and it’s about organ thieves who are pursued by police.
And finally, July 6, 1963 is believed to be the date when Blood Feast was released (I tried confirming the date with no luck). Blood Feast is a significant movie in the realm of splatter cinema. Though the term “splatter” wasn’t coined until much later, Blood Feast is considered to be the first in the genre.
There’s no news to catch up on today, so that’ll do it for July 6th!
