Beginning in the mid-’80s, I’ve been attracted to steamy, sultry redheads, with lusty firecracker Tawny Kitaen constantly on cable television. From hair-metal videos by Whitesnake to raunchy flicks like Bachelor Party, that crooked smile and ample, um, talent made her this young person’s dream girl — or one of them.

But when my parents brought home Witchboard — then a new release! — that crush reached its youthful erectile zenith. And while I find the horror flick to be somewhat boring today, I can honestly admit that Kitaen, though not in the movie as much as I remembered, is still a welcoming presence, David Coverdale’s penis be damned.

Linda (Kitaen) is throwing a party and her boyfriend, Jim (Todd Allen), decides to get wasted and be the world’s worst significant other — at least that’s what I’ve been told from my own mirroring actions. When a partygoer whips out his Ouija to contact the small child he’s been talking to — already weird if you ask me — strange things begin happening, like building sites caving in, metal barrels collapsing and masked men with axes splitting dudes right in the skull.

While the sight of a possessed Kitaen clad in a men’s suit and mimicking a middle-age male voice is both tantalizing and worrisome for a variety of reasons I should probably see someone about, the mostly boring film does offer three explosive finales I didn’t see coming. So thanks for that, director Kevin Tenney: I liked the wedding one best!

Two years later, Tenney directed Night of the Demons. I only saw it recently, because when it came out, my mother forbid me to rent it, because in her words, watching it would “invite the devil in the house.” —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

I’ve had a long, storied history with Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia — better known in America as The Day of the Beast — than I care to admit. Having been a strange lover to his Acción mutante since my bootleg-buying days, sometime in the summer between high school and college, I ordered a VHS copy of Beast from the back of some zine I don’t even remember.

Since that 10th-generation dupe, I’ve had the Trimark VHS I got as a previously viewed tape from one of the many video stores I worked at, as well as a washed-out DVD transfer with no subtitles numerous years ago from eBay, all in a pathetic effort to watch what I now consider to be the finest horror flick ever made.

Thinking that was the best I was going to get in my viewing life, it’s a miracle from God that Severin Films released it in a most proper format: Blu-ray and 4K, in a transfer where I can see what is going on and, through much-needed subtitles, finally understand what is going on instead of just inferring it.

Ordained priest Angel (Álex Angulo) has one night — Christmas Eve — to become as terrible as possible to find where in Madrid the son of Satan will be born. Through a series of horrifically comical events, he befriends metalhead José María (Santiago Segura) and television psychic Cavan (Armando De Razza) to help him on his quest, almost a diabolical variation of the Don Quixote theme.

With an acid-tripping scene that inspired a few personal nightmares, not to mention a brutally evil ending where the devil appears in the flesh, de la Iglesia manages to invoke every single Catholic fear — especially of the Spanish variety — to craft a frighteningly dark view of not only the end of society, but the end of the world and the followers of such wanton destruction.

Of course, through a jaundiced eye of black comedy, The Day of the Beast manages to wring as many soul-wrenching laughs out of the infernal goings-on as it does skull-piercing frights from the satanic horror that, I can thankfully say, once again, make this my favorite horror film of all time, no contest. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.