Thursday, October 10, 2019

Thursday Movie Picks #274: Teen Horror





This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. There's still three more weeks until Halloween, so there's a lot more horror to get to. This week, the theme is Teen Horror, which I assume isn't meant to mean acne or finding that your steady is dumping you. I had to think quite a bit to come up with three movies that fit the theme this week, but eventually did so:

The Seventh Victim (1943). Kim Hunter plays a student at a boarding school (Hunter was actually 20 at the time, but being a student I'll assume she was playing a character still in her teens) who finds that her sister in the big city has gone missing and stopped paying the tuition for the last six months. So she goes in search of her sister and finds that the sister sold off her profitable beauty salon and joined what seems to be a satanic cult, which leaves big sister's life in danger. This is one of those Val Lewton-produced horror films at RKO that rely more on the viewer's own imagination than showing blood and gore.



The Blob (1958). 27-year-old high school student Steve McQueen (yeah, I know, but again a high school student implies teenager) finds a meteorite that's actually some sort of alien space craft containing a life form that looks like pie filling. The alien life gloms on to human skin, killing the humans in the process and becoming bigger, until threatening to take over the whole town. And the darn teens can't get the responsible adults to believe the town isn't in danger. The special effects look silly nowadays, but it's actually a fun little movie.

House (1977). A Japanese schoolgirl gets a letter from her grandmother in the country whom she hasn't seen in a long time asking to come and visit. The girl goes with several of her classmates, and the girls find there's something up with the house, which seems to be killing them one by one. The production design is garish and stylized with the "horror" being deliberately over-the-top, but that makes the movie more fun.

3 comments:

thevoid99 said...

House is a masterpiece. I saw the film a few years ago and again a week ago as it's one of the most-fucked up I had ever seen. I love it.

Brittani Burnham said...

House sounds really interesting. I'll have to look for that one. I haven't seen any of your picks this week, though I'm familiar with The Blob.

Birgit said...

Love that music...hahaaaa. The Blob is a fun movie which i would like to see again. I have not seen your other 2 picks but would like to see the first pick of yours since I like Val Lewton