The Twenty-Eighth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY-EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 5 page 3 of Writhing Harvest

The Twenty-Seventh Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 4 page 3 of Writhing Harvest

The Twenty-Sixth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY-SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 3 page 3 of Writhing Harvest

The Twenty-Fifth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 2 page 3 of Writhing Harvest

The Twenty-Fourth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 1 page 3 of Writhing Harvest

The Twenty-Third Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY-THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, the full second page of Writhing Harvest

The Twenty-Second Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY-SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 5 page 2 of Writhing Harvest

The Twenty-First Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 4 page 2 of Writhing Harvest

The Twentieth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTIETH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 3 page 2 of Writhing Harvest

The Nineteenth Night of Halloween

ON THE NINETEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 2 page 2 of Writhing Harvest

The Seventeenth Night of Halloween

ON THE SEVENTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, panel 1 page 2 of Writhing Harvest

The Fifteenth Night of Halloween

ON THE FIFTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, the full first page of my comic, Writhing Harvest

The THIRTEENTH Night of Halloween

ON THE THIRTEENTH (!!! 🦇🐈‍⬛🦇 !!!) NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I am posting this, the seventh panel of my horror comic, Writhing Harvest

The Twelfth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWELFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I re-watched James Gunn’s Slither (2006). Okay, a lot of people love this movie. And given Gunn’s recent mainstream icon status, Slither is held up as proof of his authentic indie chops. My problem is that watching it now, the script does not work. I think the idea was to do a pastiche of 80’s movies like Night of the Creeps, which was already a 50’s pastiche—so a pastiche of a pastiche—but to ground it in the human character drama of its central love triangle. But the human character drama is actually terrible by today’s standards. Nathan Fillion’s protagonist sheriff is a pining “nice guy” who can’t get over his ex. And the ex, played by Elizabeth Banks, is grievously underwritten, doing no more than performing the function of being longed for by Fillion and being unhappily married to Michael Rooker’s local rich jerk. So, the two lead characters we are supposed to sympathize with—and, somewhat uncomfortably, are supposed to hope get back together—are both passive and pathetic. Meanwhile, the most interesting corner of the triangle is the antagonist, who, because he’s played by Rooker (“Henry Portrait of Serial Killer” himself), is delightfully monstrous and inexplicably terrifying, even before the alien mind-control slug he discovers in a meteor infects and mutates him, so as to employ him as a Typhoid Mary for taking over the rest of the town with its wormy spawn. 

At the same time, once again, this movie ignores the lessons of Cronenberg’s Shivers about how to create psychological depth with this subject matter, even as its sole gesture toward originality is to try to introduce greater human stakes. As a result, the main pleasure to be gleaned from Slither lies in its peripheral details: the magnificent practical creature effects, which are an inspired fusion of Rob Bottin’s work on The Thing and Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond; a number of memorable lines, the best probably being the absurdly larvae-swollen Brenda James’s “Something’s wrong with me”; and a handful of particularly well-composed shots, such as the bathtub attack. 

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And so, with that, we have now completed our review of the entire canon of notable cinematic works in the micro-genre of sci fi horror about intelligent mind-control parasites bent on infiltrating humanity (besides a few edge cases, that is, along with a number of TV instances, including episodes of both the original and the revival Outer Limits, various 90’s-era Star Trek runs, and miscellaneous other sci fi series). As I think I’ve made pretty clear, my main conclusion is that within this canon, only Cronenberg’s 1975 masterpiece Shivers really stands as a significant work of art worth watching and rewatching.

Watch Shivers! It’s free to watch on Tubi!

https://tubitv.com/movies/447847/shivers

The Eleventh Night of Halloween

ON THE ELEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN, I am posting this, the sixth panel of my horror comic, Writhing Harvest

The Tenth Night of Halloween

ON THE TENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I watched The Faculty (1998), directed by Robert Rodriguez. This is a post-Scream take on the mind-control slugs micro-genre, where snarky teens must battle their parasite-piloted high school teachers. It’s really well-crafted, with clever editing, efficient characterization, and deep genre savvy (including direct callouts to Heinlein’s Puppet Masters). And its cast is stacked. It stars a pre-Frodo Elijah Wood, a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart, a pre-Jean Grey Famke Janssen, and a post-T2 Robert Patrick. The choice to have the teachers infected first works particularly well, as it leaves the vulnerable teens with no one in authority to believe them. In fact, this aspect could haven been mined for much more interesting psychosocial horror than the superficial if accomplished thrills The Faculty offers. And that’s what prevents this movie from being great rather than just solid: once again the same narrative is retold, albeit juiced up with late 90’s sass, without learning from Cronenberg’s profoundly unnerving innovations in Shivers.  

One note though: I have no complaints about the parasite in its larval stage, which Jon Stewart’s biology teacher describes as “mesozoan.” 🤌

The Ninth Night of Halloween

ON THE NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I watched the 1994 adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel, The Puppet Masters. Although there had been previous instances of mind-control parasites in weird fiction, with the earliest (according to Stack Exchange) being “Brain Leeches” by Edward S. Mund in a 1935 issue of Astounding Stories, The Puppet Masters is really the master text for this sci fi horror micro-genre. And it would go on to inspire the most famous work of alien infiltration and imitation, 1957’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The novel established all standard components: intelligent slimy little creatures that attach themselves to the human nervous system to pilot us; a clandestine takeover of human society beginning in idyllic Rockwellian small town America and spreading to the highest echelons of power; and paranoia-inducing revelations involving secretly possessed characters. But it also includes a number of bizarre unrelated elements due to its retro-futuristic setting, including not only ray guns and flying cars but also various products of Heinlein’s personal hang-ups, like the universal adoption of temporary marriage contracts and the widespread use of sleep-cancelling drugs. 

The movie adaptation cuts all of the more idiosyncratic aspects of the novel but fails to replace them with anything but stale 90’s thriller cliches. The result is something that looks and feels like a cable TV-movie despite being a big budget theatrical release. After a relatively tense opening, it falls off a cliff into dull predictability. I did like the stunt casting of Donald Sutherland, Keith David, and Yaphet Kotto, though, all veterans of far, far better alien parasite movies.

The Eighth Night of Halloween

ON THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I watched Night of the Creeps (1986), an attempted pastiche of 1950’s atomic horror creature features. In fact, it opens with a black-and-white flashback to the 1950's involving not only a pod full of mind-control slugs landing in the woods but also a teenager being attacked by an escaped ax-murderer while her boyfriend investigates said pod. The ax-murderer scene is one of many threads that are never picked up again, along with an undoubtedly expensive pre-credits shot where full rubber-suit aliens are fighting amongst themselves in their ship and eject the slugs to earth. There’s also the revelation that the infected boyfriend has been held in a cryogenic suspension lab until the movie’s present-day mid-80’s, when bumbling frat pledges release him. Why not just have the slugs land in a meteor and free up the resources spent on the aliens for more consequential plot points? Why not have the slug-controlled boyfriend murder the girl instead of the superfluous ax-murderer? Why not have him be infected and go on his rampage in the present, avoiding the need for the superfluous cryogenic suspension? 

On the other hand, all of these dead-ends would have been welcome if the movie had continued to drop in more zany sci fi chestnuts as callbacks, in a Joe Dante-esque spoof. But instead it grinds to a halt and pads out two-thirds of the runtime with dull campus melodrama involving characters that are both unsympathetic and incoherent. By the time it finally gets to the point in the last 15 minutes, when a hoard of slug-controlled frat boys lay siege to a sorority, it still hasn’t managed to establish any coherent stakes. Worse, despite how fun this climax might sound, it still manages to be sluggish (pun maybe intended, I guess) in the execution. Its one gracenote is Tom Atkins’ gamely hammy performance. 

I know this movie has a small cult following, and watching it after the unparalleled genius of Shivers, which makes the best possible decisions on all the same questions, does it no favors-- but “thrill me” (Atkins’ catchphrase) it did not.

The Seventh Night of Halloween

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN, I am posting this, the fifth panel of my horror comic, Writhing Harvest

The Sixth Night of Halloween

ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I re-watched David Cronenberg’s first proper feature film, Shivers (1975).

I love this movie.

Its incredibly efficient opening-- a serene promotional video for a self-sufficient, pseudo-luxurious apartment high-rise-- is one of the greatest stage-setting sequences ever. For the viewer who already knows Shivers is about an infestation of mind-control parasites, this opening sets up dozens of narrative traps that will each spring gruesomely over the coming hour.

After this clinical introduction, though, Cronenberg demonstrates his genius for horror filmmaking by taking the least obvious but most rewarding path forward. Rather than a clockwork progression of building chaos, as seen in other infestation movies from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Gremlins, Shivers lurches messily and unpredictably in fits and starts, from a baffling murder-suicide to cinema verité scenes of uneasy placidity to an eruption of intestinal slugs and back to incongruous domestic bliss. This leaves the viewer in the dark, with a more naturalistic worms-eye perspective, so that there is never a full picture of the current status of the parasites’ takeover or the greater ramifications of their biology. And this anxious state of ignorance about a blossoming pandemic delivers a more potent and paralyzing psychological horror than what can be achieved by the rational birds-eye view of other infestation movies.

Of course, Cronenberg’s most (im)famous innovation on the mind-control parasite involves his version's explicit exploitation of the human libido: it turns its hosts into sex-crazed maniacs who spread its offspring through compulsory public orgies.

The Fifth Night of Halloween

ON THE FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN, I am posting this, the fourth panel of my horror comic, Writhing Harvest

The Fourth Night of Halloween

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I watched The Brain Eaters (1957), a janky B-movie about mind-hijacking (and weirdly fuzzy) slugs invading a little town. Befitting its title, The Brain Eaters has a bombastic and clumsy style with frequent comedic moments that would be skillful if they were intentional. This and the way it resolves all of its mysteries immediately upon posing them, while leaving many questions it hasn’t thought to ask eternally hanging, make it an entertaining watch, at least. The most notable thing about it is that Robert Heinlein successfully sued the filmmakers for plagiarizing the plot of his 1951 novel The Puppet Masters, which is the most seminal early exploration of the mind-control parasites trope. All of the flashes of creepy paranoia the film manages to achieve, by revealing ostensibly trustworthy characters to in fact have had throbbing neck slugs steering them, are lifted straight from Heinlein’s novel.

The Third Night of Halloween

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN, I am posting this, the third panel of my horror comic, Writhing Harvest 

The Second Night of Halloween

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN, I am posting this, the second panel of my horror comic, Writhing Harvest

The First Night of Halloween

ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN, I am posting this, the first panel of my horror comic, Writhing Harvest

Writhing Harvest preview, pages 1 & 2

 (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2025

Writhing Harvest preview, page 2, panels 4 & 5

(c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2025 

Writhing Harvest preview, page 2, panels 2 & 3

  (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2025

Writhing Harvest preview, page 2, panel 1

 (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2025

Writhing Harvest preview, page 1, panels 6 & 7

  (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2025

Writhing Harvest preview, page 1, panels 4 & 5

 (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2025

Writhing Harvest preview, page 1, panels 2 & 3

(c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2025

Writhing Harvest preview, page 1, panel 1

 (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2025