Most small children are disturbed and frightened by movies they were too young to have ever watched. I, on the other hand, had shaking nightmares simply about the VHS box for The Brotherhood of Satan, creating a dreamworld of horrific visions that recently came back the other night after I viewed the flick for the first time ever — and still about that damn VHS box!

In case you never saw the box, it was released on cheapo label GoodTimes Home Video sometime in the late ’80s. The cover featured the head satanist handling a knife as a couple of absolutely catatonic kids stood behind him, if I remember it correctly. It was one of the worst images in my fragile mind for a long time, only because it seemed so real, thanks to parents who put the fear of Satan deep in me.

Although the movie has a few solid Luciferian chills here and Mephisto-friendly spills there, it’s too bad there was no way for it to live up to the prepubescent expectation of downright fear and absolute loathing. I should have known better.

Playing out like a big-budget retelling of Manos: The Hands of Fate, a road-tripping family is caught in a small town when their car breaks down; as they try to find help, children drive voodoo-inclined army tanks over anyone entering city limits. I’m not sure how these travelers got passed them, but as they try to convince the yokel cops that something strange is afoot, their small daughter suddenly disappears.

Turns out a group of elderly satanists are trying to possess the kids, if only so they can live another some-odd hundred years. Truthfully, if I had to stay in that shitty small town, I’d just let the Lord take my soul because I ain’t doing another century of that.

Helmed by television director Bernard McEveety and surprisingly produced by character actors L.Q. Jones and Alvy Moore, The Brotherhood of Satan has a trace of a frighteningly good idea here — one fraught with my own childhood fears of who we’re taught satanists truly are. For all of their dark intentions, they just can’t pull it off.

If you ever hear about a documentary regarding spooky video slipcases and the nightmares they invoked in kid, please point it my way. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

It’s Friday night at the offices of the cash-strapped Click Clique website, where the employees have been summoned to a pitch meeting. For Halloween, with layoffs looming, they’ll run a clickbait listicle on the 13 most frightening viral videos, so the staffers take turns passing the wireless keyboard around the conference table to queue up their ideas, and What Happens Next Will Scare You.

In this unique anthology of caught-on-camera moments, “influencer” claptrap and other streaming bits of ephemera, those clips include a ghost ruining a little girl’s birthday party, a DUI traffic stop gone very wrong, a vinyl recording of Native American death song, a clown’s video dating profile, a cryptozoological interruption of a local-yokel fishing show and something that may be the worst fetish ever.

Other videos are longer and more complex, for reasons eventually apparent. In this category fall an Italian Catholic priest reviewing the rites of exorcism, a 911 call from a panicked funeral home director reporting resurrected corpses, a speculative paranormal show on a stuffed teddy bear named Scraps and, in a four-parter broken up across the running time, a mean-girl teen vlogger detailing her encounters with a “troll bitch” at school.

Because What Happens Next comes from Chris LaMartina, director of the immortal WNUF Halloween Special, it’s an incredibly creative mix of horror and comedy. As with WNUF, “story” is less important than structure, and early details gain meaning as the movie progresses. Transitions are often ingenious, and the more attention you pay, the greater your rewards. That refers not only to spotting direct ties to the WNUF world — performers and characters — but the grains of throwaway background gags, such as a screen thumbnail labeled “2 Screwdrivers. 1 Urethra.” —Rod Lott

Get it at WNUF Big Cartel.

In indie horror’s digital DIY era of today, everyone who wants to make a horror movie can and does. This floods the market with dreck — and because even dreck has a minute’s worth of good parts to craft an appealing-enough trailer and inspire an eyeball-grabbing cover — the market is rewarded with rental dollars from viewers left wanting. They’re Outside offers the opposite experience: File the trailer and poster art under “no great shakes,” but the movie itself is that increasingly elusive, rough-’round-the-edges gem.

Combining folk horror with found footage, the UK film follows pompous YouTube psychologist Max Spencer (Tom Wheatley, Piglet’s Big Movie) and camera-operating girlfriend (Nicole Miners) as they shoot an episode on agoraphobia. This primarily entails traveling to the middle of the woods, where former nursing student Sarah Sanders (Christine Randall, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong) has lived in a little house — and only inside it — for years and years. She’s so terrified to take one step past the threshold, Max assigns himself a 10-day challenge to change that.

Why so scared, Sarah? It all has to do with “Green Eyes” – not the Civil War legend, but folklore nonetheless. As a prologue explains, Green Eyes is rumored to have abducted a child, resulting in a parental mob burning his home, Freddy Krueger-style. As the story goes, he lives in the woods and is identifiable by his wooden mask, cape of leaves and, yes, vacant emerald orbs. Look, glowing eyes in the dark of night is the cheapest kind of scare to make … and when done correctly, as co-directors Sam Casserly and Airell Anthony Hayles have here, ridiculously effective.

Ideally, They’re Outside’s opening card wouldn’t dole out the fate of each main character, but that’s the way of the found-footage film; ultimately, knowing the end does little to hamper enjoyment of the trip there, thanks to Wheatley and Randall’s respective grasps on performing priggish and peevish. For a first feature, Casserly and Hayles do more things right than most, from using subliminal imagery for an extra jolt of creeps to casting Nicholas Vince, Hellraiser’s chattering Cenobite, to deliver the backstory in film-within-a-film exposition. It would be easy to overpraise the movie — and I may have — but these days, “just fine” can be all we ask. —Rod Lott

Courtesy of Death Cat Entertainment, the horror anthology Grave Intentions presents a quintet of tales hosted by voodoo retailer Magical Madam Josephine (Joy Vandervort-Cobb). Before each, she spotlights a relevant product in her shop, including charm pouches, voodoo dolls, crystals, talismans and even a candelabra prestuck with a Rainbow Coalition of candles. Josephine addresses the viewer with lines like, “Most believe bravery is a good t’ing,” “Oh, I pray this customer uses puppet magic wisely” and “Are you the hero … or the villain?”

While Jocelyn and Brian Rish’s wraparound is new, the stories Josephine introduces are not, being unrelated independent short films as old as 2014. Moreover, coming from half a world away is Matthew Richards’ The Disappearance of Willie Bingham. Easily Grave Intentions’ highlight, the Australian short is a blackly comic look at a child killer (Kevin Dee) used by the judicial system as an experiment for scared-straight schoolchildren and other would-be offenders; rather than put Willie to death for his crimes, he is gradually relieved of appendages, limbs, organs and then …

Running a not-so-close second in quality is James Snyder’s Violent Florence, whose title character (Charly Thorn, 2020’s Relic) demonstrates why it’s not wise to mess with a stray black cat. Meme immortality awaits.

I wish the rest of Grave Intentions were as appealing as this pair. Lukas Hassel’s The Son, The Father … gets close, but its tit-for-tat scenario of a boy (Lucas Oktay) whose alcoholic mom (Colleen Carey) to die on his 11th birthday is more depressing than entertaining, despite good performances.

Another abused child is at the center of the final segment, Brian Patrick Lim’s Marian, which stands alongside the first, Gabriel Olson’s The Bridge Partner, as the portmanteau’s weakest links. Ironically, Olson’s film is the only one with star power, as sultry newcomer Olivia (NYPD Blue’s Sharon Lawrence, vamping up a European accent) vows murder to the Moss Harbor Bridge Group’s mousiest member, Mattie (Beth Grant, Southland Tales), unprovoked. I really expected to click with this, especially with the late, great Robert Forster (Jackie Brown) aboard as Mattie’s husband — but its ending is as flat as day-old Tab, and Forster appears only in one short scene. That minor and painless disappointment aligns with Grave Intentions being an overall mixed bag — neither hero nor villain. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Given how many times Richard Burton eventually married before his death (five!), more than a little irony exists in viewing Bluebeard today. From Superman producer Alexander Salkind and The Caine Mutiny director Edward Dmytryk, the film version of France’s felonious folktale casts Burton as cerulean chin-bristled World War I hero Baron Kurt Von Sepper, returning from aerial battle to only wage the war of the sexes on the ground by marrying — and killing — one beautiful woman after the other.

Bluebeard the movie’s first victim is Bluebeard the character’s sixth wife (Karin Schubert, The Panther Squad), felled by a bullet in an hunting “accident.” Before long, Bluebeard finds himself entranced by flapper girl Anne (future Happy Hooker Joey Heatherton). Despite all the red flags surrounding the guy — a one-eyed cat, a cobweb-strewn castle, a crazy old woman combing the hair of his mother’s corpse — Anne happily becomes Wife No. 7, the Jell-O to his jam.

When she finds his … let’s just call it a “scrapbook” of past wives, he confesses everything to her chronologically, doomed spouse by doomed spouse. Buckle in, viewers, because the result is an all-star panoply of acts of uxoricide, with Burton’s master of misogyny wearing more shades of purple than the Joker and Prince would find tasteful. Virna Lisi (The Statue) is seduced into a guillotine; Marilù Tolo (My Dear Killer) is drowned; and Agostina Belli (The Night of the Devils) takes a falcon to the face.

Most amusingly, Raquel Welch (The Last of Sheila) plays against type as a nun whose inventory of global dalliances angers Bluebeard into such a rage, he locks her in a coffin. Genuinely funny is how increasingly annoying he finds the gorgeous Nathalie Delon (Le Samouraï) for her endless baby talk and for naming her breasts “Jasmine” and “Sicumin.” When she hires a prostitute (Sybil Danning, Chained Heat) over to give her husband-satisfying whore lessons, Bluebeard catches them au naturel and penetrates them both … with a pointy-tusk chandelier, so get your mind outta the gutter.

If “prestige Eurosleaze” exists, Dmytryk’s Bluebeard is the default example, with Burton at his most bombastic. The Gothic gaslighter pops with color and delights with a campy tone, trashy sequences and an Ennio Morricone score that positively fucks. Bluebeard will tickle you pink, if you let it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.