I decided to try to find a horror movie I haven’t seen for every day of October 2026. I expected a lot of shit by approaching it this way and a lot of shit was what I got. However, there were bright spots.
First problem: I have seen a lot of movies, horror included. Sure, there’s also a lot of movies out there, especially horror, but they might not be readily available for me. So, a lot of what I saw was just random garbage lying around I had never gotten around to. But not everything.
1: Empire of Passion (Ai no bôrei, 1978). I just went to MUBI and watched the first horror movie on they had I hadn’t seen before. I had seen most of what they had available, but there’s still some out there. This was a decent ghost story. It was actually a bit funny in modern context in how it depicted certain things.
2: Vampires of New Orleans (2026). I watched this as soon as I could. I liked the director’s previous effort, Sudbury Devil, quite a bit, and he is an independent filmmaker who made his previous films in a cooperative, which I appreciate and I assume this one was made as one as well, letting his cast and crew profit as well if the movie is a hit. However, I doubt it will be. On the other hand, they probably didn’t use a whole of money here, so maybe they will make some out of this. Anyhow, it’s a mix of documentary talking head stuff combined with a vampire story, weirdly getting deep into the heart of folk horror by giving us both a horror story and the tales its based on, even if they are relatively modern.
3: Cold Storage (2026). I saw a trailer for this many times at the theater, but in the end it wasn’t even released here in Finland (despite starring Liam Neeson, but I don’t even recall seeing him in the trailer), except for getting a release on Cineast, a service specifically for libraries to make movies available for their customers for free. I’m glad I didn’t pay for this. It’s not awful, just kind of messy and uninspired.
4: Bloody Hell (2020). This is freely available on YouTube. My strongest memory of this is the weird sounding Finnish. First I thought it might be Estonians, as it kind of sounds like Estonian, but it turns out that it’s actually Australians recounting Finnish dialogue without any knowledge of Finnish. Anyhow, it’s a about a guy who gets famous by stopping a bank robbery, after which he becomes famous, and attempts to escape that fame by going to Finland, where he immediately gets kidnapped. As one does. Not very good, which is probably why it’s on YouTube for free, but I could occupy myself by trying to figure out what was going on with the language.
5: The Nun (2005), but not that The Nun (as you can see from the year of release). About 20 years ago, this small company in my hometown, owned partly by a guy I used to know, used to release a lot of genre movies on DVD, and when they couldn’t sell enough, they would sell them in collections of 12 for like 30 euros, so quite cheaply, which is why I have five of those collections on my shelf. The first one was great (it had like Halloween, Creepshow, Texas Chain Saw Massacre), but they quickly got worse, with the third one being just bulk, like this one, but I also found out this company that made the boxes was also a producing partner on this movie. Was it worth it? Hard to say. The movie is quite boring.
6: Don’t Look at the Demon (2022). A movie based on some banned religious rituals. Is this supposed to be an argument against the bans? I don’t know. The name is definitely intriguing. For a while I thought it might be pretty good, but it gets pretty stupid by the end.
7: Eaten Alive (1976). The movie Tobe Hooper made on the coattails of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, although based on the release models of the day, especially for B-movies, Texas Chain Saw Massacre might well have been still on the road building its reputation. Well, this isn’t nearly as good as Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Maybe this worked for the drive-in crowd of the late 70s, but not much cultural impact to be had here. In a true drive-in manner, it has plenty of alternate names different small markets used: Brutes and Savages, Death Trap, Horror Hotel, Horror Hotel Massacre, Legend of the Bayou, Murder on the Bayou, Slaughter Hotel, Starlight Slaughter. Here’s my strongest memory of this movie: It opens to a crotch of man in close-up then moves to a less than enthusiastic sex worker and then we see the face of the guy and I’m like “Hey, that’s Robert Englund!”
8: Jigsaw (2017). This was just a bad movie. Feels desperate. Like a straight-to-DVD movie. So, of course it made over 100 million in box office… (At this point I feel I’m becoming overly negative in my comments here, but these are mostly movies I haven’t bothered to watch previously, so it’s kind of understandable that these might not be the hottest items.)
9/31: Bodom (2016). I’ve joked before that you can’t make a Finnish movie without either Alma Pöysti or Tommi Korpela in it. I saw two Finnish movies on this day, one of them had Pöysti in a prominent role, this one managed to squeak Korpela into in by letting him dub a line or two. Anyhow, a movie based on stories around the most famous unsolved murder in Finland. Took some unexpected turns. Marketed itself as the first international quality horror movie from Finland. That’s not saying much…
10/31: Other Mommy (2026). Not that bad, actually. Like usually when a movie gets horrible reviews (18% right now on RottenTomatoes), I can see why, but not here. It seems like most people are just kind of just below lukewarm on this. Maybe people are reacting to putting a kid in danger? Weirdest moment of the movie: There’s a moment they go and see someone who has been brought up on multiple occasions by that point. The camera implies that this is a cool reveal of an actor they got. Well, it’s Karen Allen. No disrespect, but I hadn’t seen her in anything since Sandlot (1993), so it took me a while to realize who she was and the camera trickery here kind of took me out of the movie for a while.
11/31: Orgy of the Dead (1965). Wow. Someone bought a script from Ed Wood based on Wood’s own book. I wonder what the book was like, since the whole movie, and I promise you I’m not exaggerating here, is just topless women dancing one at a time for maybe five minutes or so. Some of these are clearly specific kinks, but most are just kind of boring. Of course, 60 years ago this might have been titillating. Again, how is this based on a book? Well, actually, according to Wikipedia, the movie came first and then the novel, but the movie says otherwise.
12/31: Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla (1974 off the top of my head). The foremost thing I remember of this one is that the soundtrack was surprisingly jazzy.
13/31: A Tormented Woman (1977). This tries to be a titillating erotic horror movie, but it doesn’t really work. The characters are just very unlikable. I guess this is kind of ahead of its time based on how it presents the villain as sympathetic. Sort of. Still not worth a look.
14/31: Night Tide (1961). Dennis Hopper stars as a young sailor in the navy who finds out that his new girlfriend might be a siren. The twist is bad and made worse by how they did it.
15/31: 1BR (2019). A young woman finds a great apartment, but it turns out that the apartment complex is run by a cult and she was chosen to be brainwashed. It seems like they actually did some amount of research to figure out how you break people to make this more realistic. It isn’t exactly a masterpiece very different from what horror movies generally look and feel like.
16/31: Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013). Look. I’m all for making your villains sympathetic. Many movies have done this well. At the same time, maybe don’t try to make Leatherface the hero of the movie… Sure, local officials are often incredibly corrupt, because they don’t have much in the way of supervision, but it still feels odd to make the man who is iconic specifically for torturing people and using someone’s face as a mask, the person needed to save our main character. Also, 3D was stupid. So, of course it made 2.4 times it’s budget in box office revenue worldwide. (That’s not exactly a hit, but still likely profitable even taking marketing into account.) The timeline doesn’t really work here. Somehow our main character, who is supposedly in their 20s, is a cousin of Leatherface, who was an adult in 1976. Sure, this is possible, but doesn’t work very often. Or I guess ‘cousin’ is used pretty loosely in America.
17/31: Rapture (1979/1980). There seems to be some amount of confusion regarding the release date, which can happen with older obscure movies. This is a movie about a heroin addicted director made by a heroin addicted director.
18/31: Ringu 2 (1999). This was made at a time when they were desperate to ride the wave of Ringu. It certainly feels like a movie that came out only a year after the first one.
19/21: The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965). Cuckoo birds don’t build their own nests. Is that supposed to be the thing here? This is not a good movie. More of an artifact from a time when people didn’t know how to make horror.
20/31: Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004). A prequel, obviously. I actually kind of liked it. It might just be the chemistry of the two leads… who are somehow the same as in the original movie despite this being set in the 19th century, or maybe even earlier.
21/31: Bad Hair (2020). Okay, admittedly, as a white guy from Finland, I might not get all the cultural context here, but it isn’t a bad movie. I just might not get it. I do know hair holds great importance in Black culture and since I’m not part of that, I’m just going to leave that be. Still, some great visuals. They also have a lot of prominent people in small roles in this movie.
22/31: Destroy All Monsters (1968). All the kaijus have been awakened by an invading all-female race of aliens. The humans must now figure out how to control the kaijus to turn the tide. So, it’s a kaiju movie where they just brought the whole gang in.
23/31: Clayface (2026). Definitely not your standard issue superhero movie. At the same time, if you were given the task of writing a horror movie about Clayface, this is pretty much what you would come up with. It’s just that you need to get through the hoops of convincing a studio to let you make a movie about a B-list Batman villain and coming up with the idea to use Clayface specifically. I’m not saying this is a bad movie. Even if you can imagine the plot, there’s still artistry in how its presented.
24/31: Alice, Sweet Alice (1976). Or Holy Terror, or Communion, or The Mask Murders… also a 19-year-old playing a 12-year-old. Also free on YouTube.
25/31: Reeker (2005). You don’t often see movies work this hard to make sure you remember the names of very forgettable characters. They just hammer them in.
26/31: Wilderness (2006). An Irish movie about juvenile delinquents on an outing on an island where they are attacked and their antisocial tendencies don’t help either. Better than expected. i liked the final moment especially, although I don’t really find it realistic enough to fit the rest of the movie.
27/31: What Keeps You Alive (2018). People keep hating on this based on the characters making stupid decisions. That’s not necessarily negative for a film. After all, if everyone was rational, most stories wouldn’t happen. Yet, I would defend the characters, because relationships are complicated. I think the hate smells a bit like misogyny, but that’s just me.
28/31: Siberia (2020). Meeting your wife in a dream! What horror! This is on the weird side and I would listen to a reasoned argument on why this isn’t really horror… although I do think arguing that would be wrong.
29/31: Alpha (2025). Little bit of body horror, but not really on the level of the director’s previous efforts Raw and Titane.
30/31: Dracula (2025). A young director explores AI in this pretty wild movie. The young director is not the actual director Radu Jude, but a character instead. The movie makes it clear that Jude himself finds AI as a tool pretty worthless. With that in mind, seeing Dracula through the eyes of people from Romania is pretty cool, even if the end result is pretty out there (and I think Dracula was from Hungarian part of the country anyhow).
31/31: Going to Pieces (2006). I wanted something different to end this, so I chose this documentary the full title of which is Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film. Pretty good. Not really that illuminating here in 2026, but maybe many of these ideas were novel 20 years ago. Weirdly downplays Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but also includes so many of the sequels one way or another. But wanna know what the real horror of this movie is? Tom Savini talking about kickstarting the careers of the Weinstein brothers.
Will I do this again? Probably not. I would probably need to start preparing soon to get enough movies together. Too much planning. Or maybe get Cult Pix for a month.