CineLinkr #214: The Story Behind the Puzzle

In Theater of Blood, Vincent Price plays a Shakespearean actor who murders critics using deaths from the plays. A terrible approach to feedback, but an unusually thorough reading list. For Halloween, I can't think of anyone better equipped to turn a bad review into a production meeting.

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🟢 Easy: Vampire horror

Movies: Near Dark · 30 Days of Night · Blade · Daybreakers

Daybreakers puts its vampires in a world with a blood-supply crisis. Most humans have become vampires; the remaining humans are farmed for blood while scientists seek a substitute. A creature that used to lurk outside the window now has a resource-management emergency. Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill inhabit this deeply unappealing future.

30 Days of Night offers an Alaskan town a month-long polar night and then introduces vampires to the arrangement. Near Dark follows a young man drawn into a nomadic vampire family, with Kathryn Bigelow giving the horror a Western shape. Blade supplies Wesley Snipes as the hunter with vampire strengths and human advantages. The shared supernatural condition survives the differences in setting and action; nobody has to wear the same cape.

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🟡 Medium: Attempts to revive the dead go wrong

Movies: Re-Animator · Frankenstein · Flatliners · Pet Sematary

Herbert West's reagent in Re-Animator and Henry Frankenstein's assembled body make deliberate reanimation the experiment. Pet Sematary replaces the laboratory with a burial ground that brings the dead back changed. Each method produces a result its operator really should have read the small print on.

Flatliners needs a more precise explanation. The medical students deliberately stop their hearts and have classmates resuscitate them; the film explores clinical death and dangerous experiences around their returns. Nelson's final rescue finds him described as dead for nine minutes before another shock brings him back. This row includes that resuscitation premise alongside supernatural resurrection. The link is the attempted return and its consequences, not a claim that all four films use the same medicine or magic.

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🔵 Hard: Recorded images transmit a lethal threat

Movies: The Ring · Sinister · Videodrome · Antrum

The cursed videotape in The Ring gives its viewers seven days. Sinister uses discovered murder films, with an explanation that images of Bughuul can summon him and expose children to possession. Seeing the thing makes you part of the danger. Having a projector suddenly feels like an alarming hobby.

Videodrome takes the threat through a broadcast signal, with tumours and hallucinations inside Cronenberg's body horror. Its media danger is doing physical work, so merely appearing on a television isn't enough to describe the connection.

Antrum adds a fictional-documentary trick: it presents a supposedly cursed film from 1979 inside the actual 2018 feature. That cursed-film history is the story's framing, not a real warning about an old print. The pleasure of the row is recognising a common route into harm across VHS, home movies, broadcasts and the movie-within-a-movie. The image carries the trouble to the viewer.

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🟣 Tricky: Vincent Price horror performances

Movies: House of Wax · The Abominable Dr. Phibes · Theater of Blood · The Masque of the Red Death

Price is the face connecting the 1953 wax-museum story to these later horrors. The Abominable Dr. Phibes makes his character's vengeance against a medical team spectacularly elaborate. The Masque of the Red Death puts him in a prince's castle while plague threatens the people outside. He has range, provided you don't ask him to make the room less unsettling.

Theater of Blood is my favourite angle on the set. Price and Diana Rigg counted it among their own favourite films, and its Shakespearean revenge gives the actor room to be grand, ridiculous and vicious. Its British title uses "Theatre"; the American "Theater" spelling on this board names the same 1973 film.

The click comes from the performer, not a shared monster or murder method. Once Price appears in your mental cast list, the decades and different horror styles line up. He's the sort of actor who can make an introduction sound like it should have legal representation.

I'll take Price's stagecraft over the cursed-film group's home-entertainment setup. At least his terrible evening has a script.

For Halloween on the other screen, PixelLinkr's October 31 puzzle has witches, surveillance feeds and rituals that let you do something about the supernatural problem.