Total Skull: August, 2026

Things that brought me delight in August: At the beginning of August I made a big Indian feast of saag paneer, bhindi masala, methi roti, rice, and samosas...and was the perfect movie to accompany it. ) is a Bollywood horror flick, complete with the requisite song and dance numbers. It is also an incredibly wild movie; I was not expecting the scene where bandits randomly show up on horseback and get their asses beat by the heroes. Yeah, there is a supernatural menace at work in this movie, but far more sinister is the rapist cousin lurking about! I've written before about how I regard Laura Purcell as one of the modern masters of Gothic novels set in the Victorian era, and just adds further evidence in support of my claim. Purcell is incredibly adept at loading a novel with tons of nineteenth-century Gothic oddity; this one's got silhouette cutting, seances, and phossy jaw. (Do not image search phossy jaw if you don't know what it it, it might ruin your day.) The ending of could have gone in many directions; the course it did take was a pleasant, and disturbing, surprise. The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave The number of times I almost took The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave home from the video store back in the day is astronomical, but somehow I put off watching it until now. In a way, I'm glad I had this little grimy cinematic treasure waiting for me the whole time. The film begins like a grindhouse giallo: Alan, a rich aristocrat, lures a series of red-haired sex workers to his chateau so he can murder them to purge his lingering feelings of animosity toward the red-tressed (though now dead) wife who cuckholded him. The film then veers into Gothic territory when it appears that the deceased Evelyn's ghost is haunting him. Lurid stuff, to be sure, but beautifully lensed and not afraid to be sadistic. It is essentially a book of NPCs, with no stats--just their histories, motivations, etc.--which may have left it as a strange book with limited utility in that game's line, but I'm sure enterprising "Storytellers" were able to do something with the prose. (It's also an oddly oversized book; it was clearly not meant for the table.) The real draw is gorgeous, moody black and white art throughout. I actually has a copy of this supplement when I was a teenager--even though I think we only ever played twice--so it was nice to take a walk down memory lane with it again. It's not exactly a secret that Xandria's vast catalog of albums varies greatly in quality, an effect fueled by the fact that the project tends to operate on a revolving door of singers. That said, the Gothic symphonic metal formula hits right on their new one, . The songs are compelling, the singer on point, and the addition of metalcore-esque breakdowns to add a bit more heaviness to the proceedings makes this a great album to throw on when you're driving around--you get the soaring beauty and the brutal chugs of a downtuned guitar, what more could you ask for? Western + Fantasy - Guns = ??? Honestly, it's a tough brief to fulfill, but Joe Abercrombie makes it look easy in is about a young woman who comes back to her farmstead to find tthe place burned to the ground and her brother and sister abducted--so she sets off with a hired hand (who is not what he seems) to get them back. It's got the grit, the violence, but it's also got heart to it. Imagine two hulking Northmen staring each other down across a dusty streets, their hands on the pommels of their swords, Ennio Morricone playing in the background--that's the vibe in There was something about the poster for that compelled me to give it a try. In couple get attacked in the woods by a killer wearing a baby doll mask; the woman is imprisoned in a creepy house and made to play the role of a baby. This is definitely a low budget slasher movie, but I thought it was actually quite fun; it's got a certain charm and there's a nice chunk of some gross stuff here. I can appreciate a movie like that keeps things "classic," never really getting too meta or attempts to deconstruct the genre. This film felt like it was born to be played at a late-night drive-in. Once in a while, I like to dip back into literary fiction for a change of pace. And with Julia Leigh's is a terse novel about a man sent into the wilderness to capture the DNA of the last living Tasmanian tiger. This is not an action-packed novel by any stretch; rather, it is a masterpiece of interiority. The push and pull within the main character--his professionalism versus his savagery, his cold rationality versus some part of him reaching toward the divine--that's the real ebb and flow of the book. This is such an interior-focused book that I can't imagine how they made a movie adaptation from it. I guess I'll have to seek that out and discover it for myself, eh? Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma , a young film maker tracks down the star of a slasher franchise in hopes of talking her into taking a role in the reboot she's helming. , I wouldn't call it a horror movie; it's more like Jane Schoenbrun is great at using the language of horror movies to make other kinds of films. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma s...maybe more like...a queer rom com dressed up as horror. I really enjoyed this one--it's laugh-out-loud funny, with tons of deep-cut references, and Gillian Anderson absolute tears the screen up with her quietly charismatic performance. is an album to get lost in. There are a lot of sonic elements at work here, but you have to dig through the waves of despair and loneliness to get to them. There are touches of Gothic country, blues, piano balladry, and even some heavier quasi-doom moments. But predominant above it all is a wash of ethereal sadness that turns the entire song cycle into one lengthy walk through decaying fields in insolation. I picked up this new blu ray set from Kino mostly because of what I knew about , but now having watched both of the films on the disc in sequence--I am perplexed. They're both erotic (and definitely not softcore) European period dramas, with the same director, and the same principle actors playing characters with identical names in both films. The events of the two films mostly line up in a way that would suggest that one is a sequel to the other, but the details are just off enough that they don't 100% line up--but it's so close. And yet, I can't find anyone talking about their congruence online?? Wild stuff. Of the two, I did prefer , which flies its psychosexual Gothic flag proudly. When a man who designs window displays for a department store returns from his honeymoon and is promptly murdered at work, everyone in the store is a suspect! Was it the woman he jilted? The coworker who was passed up for a promotion? The disapproving father-in-law? The unhappy new wife? A mysterious figure from the past? is a fairly ridiculous novel, but it's also incredibly fun. One noteworthy element: nobody in the book trusts the cops, so they're basically all withholding crucial information from the investigation. Kinda can't blame them, really. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has this experience: a band you like slips an album past you, but when you discover it later you realize you've really been missing out because it is excellent. Such was the case with me and Federale's has a perfect conceptual premise: it's the soundtrack to a giallo spaghetti western that doesn't actually exist. (You have to ignore the fact that there is an Italian horror film that does use that name, okay?) This is a pitch-perfect album: all the reverb and tremolo you could ever want is here! Dixie Ghosts: Haunting, Spine-Chilling Stories from the American South is an anthology of Southern ghost stories; the authors collected here run the gamut from big names like Madeleine L'Engle and Manly Wade Wellman to lesser-known authors or forgotten tale spinners. Overall, this is a well-curated book. Mostly, it sticks to folksy ghost stories, but then--you get hit with George Guthridge's "See the Station Master," a surprisingly grimy story about a pedophile child murderer that comes screaming at you out of nowhere. You have to admire the placement. Also noteworthy was Jack Cady's "Ride the Thunder," a strange tale of a cruel trucker with a load of tortured poultry and the price he paid on the highway, and Richard Hardwick's "Wish You Were Here," which had all the charm of those old stories published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.