Since the entirety of October is officially Halloween this year (shut up, you!), we at Psycho Drive-In have decided to attempt to fill the month with thirty-one recommendations for horror-related movies, comics, books, TV shows, toys, games, and everything in-between. It’s gonna be a grab-bag of goodies we feel you should be exposed to, whether you like it or not! But don’t expect your standard suggestions for Halloween fun, we’re digging into some stuff that we love in the hopes that you might make this October a little bit weirder than usual.
Weirder in a good way. Not like what’s going on outside in the hellscape of 2020.
I can still remember the feeling I got, sitting in a darkened theater in 1996 watching From Dusk till Dawn for the first time, when Salma Hayek’s Santanico Pandemonium finished her albino python dance (not that feeling, perverts!) and after a brief violent outburst from Richie Gecko (Quentin Tarantino) – followed by a tense standoff at gunpoint between Richie and his brother Seth (George Clooney) with a group of angry Mexicans (lead by Cheech Marin) – turned into a snake-faced monster and leapt onto Richie, biting him in an explosion of blood. Seth shot her dead (or so they thought), and things grew quiet for a moment as Richie died in his brother’s arms.
Then people started changing into vampires and the bar erupts in total chaos that barely lets up for the rest of the film. There’s so much non-stop violence and gore that From Dusk till Dawn was banned in Ireland until its video release in 2004!
The film was groundbreaking in the way it shifted tones so dramatically into a schlocky gorefest from what had been a tried and true crime drama as Richie and Seth tried to get to Mexico after a particularly brutal and bloody bank robbery. They’d taken a bank teller hostage, but she doesn’t last long in Richie’s rapey and murdery care, so the brothers kidnap a pastor undergoing a crisis of faith (Harvey Keitel) and his teen children (Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu) who are then forced to smuggle them across the border to the aforementioned bar, The Titty Twister.
By this point, the film felt like another stylized criminal masterpiece from Tarantino, who wrote the script. The direction by Robert Rodriguez, who at that point had really only directed two feature films, El Mariachi and its sorta-sequel Desperado, was on point, building a massive amount of tension in scene after scene (particularly in the film’s opening, where Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (played by the iconic Michael Parks) chats with liquor store clerk Pete Bottoms (a young John Hawkes) while Seth and Richie are hiding in the store with hostages.
On a side note, though Ranger McGraw wouldn’t survive this outing, Michael Parks would return as the cool-as-ice Texas Ranger in Kill Bill, Planet Terror, and Death Proof, as well as star in the ill-fated direct-to-video sequel, From Dusk till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter, playing fabled writer Ambrose Bierce, the author of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and The Devil’s Dictionary, who, in real life, mysteriously disappeared in Mexico 1913 after traveling there to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution.
On a side-side note, both of the direct-to-video sequels are not worth watching really. Unless you’re a completist or just love Michael Parks (like me). Although, to be fair, The Hangman’s Daughter is at least competent.
On a side-side-side note, all three seasons of From Dusk till Dawn: The Series, which ran on Rodriguez’s El Rey network from 2014 to 2016, were consistently entertaining, reimagining and expanding the world of Mexican vampires. There was a lot of character building and a very interesting dip into Mesoamerican mythology to explore the culture of the snake-themed vampires.
Meanwhile, back in the original From Dusk till Dawn, we have cameo appearances by Fred Williamson, Danny Trejo, and horror make-up artist extraordinaire, Tom Savini, with creature effects designed by young up-and-comer Greg Nicotero, the man responsible for most of the best parts of The Walking Dead. Seriously, this is a splatter-fest of practical effects (with some CG touch-ups here and there) that holds almost nothing back once the festivities kick off.
From Dusk till Dawn is one of those few movies that I am compelled to watch to its conclusion whenever I stumble across it on TV, no matter how far into the film we are. There are just very few films with so much coolness stuffed into literally every scene. And who knew at the time that TV heartthrob George Clooney (you know, from The Facts of Life and Roseanne), could pull off such a bad-ass character as Seth Gecko?
In a world filled to overflowing with vampire movies, going all the way back to the dawn of cinema to next year’s Sony Marvel anti-hero living vampire, Morbius, From Dusk till Dawn still stands tall as one of the most exciting, bloody, experimental, sexy, and violent bloodsucker films of all time.
And if that wasn’t enough to entice you to check it out, there was also this: