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Wow! Five different movies that I would totally go see at some point, all coming out in a single weekend. This obviously can't last all month; you should probably save one or two of these for New Moon weekend.

The Box: When I first heard that Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales was adapting a Richard Matheson short story that had also been a Twilight Zone episode, it all seemed strangely simple. Why would Kelly, whose two movies have so entertainingly (if puzzlingly) overflowed with insane ideas, focus so intently on a story that can apparently be told in under an hour? According to the trailer, the answer is apparently that a simple short story provides a study handle from which to fly off. Kelly's version of the story, in which a financially strapped couple is given the option of pressing a button that will anonymously murder a strange for a payment of one million dollars, seems to go off in his customary crazy-ass directions, with a half-faced Frank Langella and lots of dead-eyed minions and a chilling Cameron Diaz attempt at a Southern accent (that said, she's an underrated actress). Obviously I am way on board. [Jesse, you will not be disappointed, which is to say good luck being this cogent about the movie after you've actually seen the damn thing. -Ed.]

Here's some great selections from the barrage he unleashes on the movie:

Buñuel frequently uses stories of survival (or the lack thereof) as political commentary, and though his targets have spanned the gamut of social classes, his favorite victim by far is the bourgeoisie. Whether it is the party guests that can't even manage to sit down to dinner in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) or the manage to leave the living room in The Exterminating Angel (1962), Buñuel makes clear their lack of resourcefulness even within the limits of their own domain. If they can't survive in the deceptive comfort of their own homes, how could they possibly last out in the jungle, with no food, no guide, no map, and the military on their trail? Therein lies Buñuel's straight-faced humor: taking the adventure scenario absolutely seriously adds to the subversive undercurrents.

This has been especially true lately: as I wrote in my review of A Perfect Getaway, “each in their own way, to varying degrees of success, Vacancy, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead and Quarantine have [grappled with] the relationship between the camera and the viewer, between screen and spectator.” (Add to that Paranormal Activity and the superlative French thriller Them.) But it’s also been the case for decades, though perhaps in a less conspicuous manner.

One motif that runs, historically, through the horror genre is the wheelchair-bound character, who appears in films from at least the 1950s through The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), The Changeling (1980) and Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), as well as many others, some of which are discussed after the jump; more often than not, this person serves as an audience surrogate. After all, who is more like the movie watcher, stuck in their seat, than the paraplegic? Or the broken-legged?

Like wearing a costume directly on your brain, this New Wave-playful Japanese nutbar deserves a slot on your Halloween itinerary. Seven BFF teens named Gorgeous, Fantasy, Kung Fu, Mac, etc. visit a spooky auntie’s country house, overseen/possessed by a white Persian cat. A Beetlejuicean assortment of things come alive—chandeliers, logs, mattresses, piano—and fly around, change colors, or eat people. Best of all is the pre-Evil Dead, proto-80s-MTV filmmaking—a scissoring together of hyperventilating gloss, collaged camera effects, stop-motion, pink painted sunsets, fake wind, and oddly cut shorts. Not aiming for coherence, this occasionally scary, always on-the-edge effort was the full-length debut of a director who shot experimental reels, commercials, and eventually quite popular features.

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The first and funnier of the two early-60s teamings of the so-called triumvirate of terror (Vincent Prince, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff), Roger Corman's The Raven (screening tomorrow and Sunday at Anthology Film Archives as part of an extensive Corman series beginning tonight) represents the comedic center of the director's 8-film Poe cycle. While other entries in the series veer toward the humorous, with this 1963 offering, Corman places the horror setting at the strict service of the comic. Starting out in an atmosphere of dense gothic brooding, with Price intoning the opening stanzas of the eponymous poem in the study of a gloom-sealed castle, the opening's moody self-seriousness (and by extension that of the earlier films in the cycle) is quickly subjected to a rude deflationary poke. When the raven appears gently rapping at Price's chamber door (or, in this case, window), he asks the bird if he shall ever see his lost Lenore. "How the hell should I know," replies the creature, sounding suspiciously like Peter Lorre. "What am I, a fortune teller?"

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Editor's note: If you're one of Henry's nine Twitter followers, you know that he's been getting himself into the Halloween spirit by watching lots of old horror movies. In this blog post, to put you in a similar frame of mind, he returns to the post-Trick or Treating, pre-drinking years of yore, when Halloween meant meeting up at whoever's parents' house had a furnished basement, drinking lots of sugary cola, and watching bad slasher movies on VHS.

Henry's born and raised in Brooklyn, of course, so these are not actually his memories. But let him join in the fun for once, won't you?

Saw VI: Probably one of the more morally appalling things about me is that I've seen all five Saw movies in the theaters. I have a weakness for horror movies, and Tobin Bell's Jigsaw is an interesting boogeyman, despite the fact that he's been dead since Saw III. Watching these cheap, frantically made profit machines is also a stupid but enjoyable form of cultural catch-up; my interest in horror movies didn't peak until well after the heyday of the near-annual Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies, which I've found don't play so well on video unless they're actually pretty good (which so far has applied to zero Fridays and one to two Nightmares). Unlike the often self-contradictory slasher movies of the eighties, though, the Saw series treats its continuity with ridiculous seriousness. You're actually expected, as a viewer of a Saw movie, to remember with crystal clarity what happened in all previous Saws, because the set-up to the new movie will inevitably be that the main character was in the background of Saw IV, and the plot twist will inevitably be that the current movie is taking place concurrently with Saws II and V. Yet for movies with painstakingly maintained continuity, the Saw pictures are also hilariously slapdash in terms of actual production. It's a bundle of contradictions left in a rusty bear trap chained to an industrial corn press slowly dragging you to its metal jaws unless you can dig out the bear-trap key buried in your own upper thigh. Happy Weekend Before Halloween!

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György Fehér's muddy, grainy Postman Always Rings Twice adaptation, Passion, co-written by Béla Tarr, takes place in a mountainous Hungarian region at an indeterminate time before the Second World War. The stooped characters barely speak to each other, even before the rot of guilt sets in. As ever, the Postman story concerns a love triangle with particularly sharp points—a wife, a husband, and his much younger live-in assistant, here all unnamed—and the getting rid of the inconvenient husband. The two surviving lovers go to trial, where justice is not served. Comeuppance, though, is forthcoming.

This bleak picture, screening this afternoon and next week as part of a MoMA series curated around Tarr's seven-hour Satantango, is a must-see for any fan of Tarr's, not only for his contribution to the scenario, but for its stylistic affinities with, and pointed departures from, the austere style he has developed over the last 20 years.

1. "I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt. It saves so much time."

2. "If you guys have an actual pissing contest, please page me."

3. "Tell your friend he’s getting fucked in the ass, and if he would stop squirming it wouldn’t hurt so much."

4. "In my life, every week is shark week."

5. "I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time."

6. "We have a big fire problem here. We take the pool water, mix it with Class A foam, and pump it out over the whole property. Everybody else just runs for the hills. 'Oh, my God!’ We sit and wait. Put on our yellow coats and our breathing gear and wait. And, you know what? It’s impressive. When these hills light up with a hundred-foot-tall wall of flames coming over the top of the hill there, you feel like it’s Armageddon."

7. "You call that a wildfire?"

8. “This film integrates my life’s achievements. It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.”

9. "The bottom line is that I make better sandwiches than all of you."

10. "Make me eighteen feet tall."

11. "Look at the gill-like membrane on the side of the mouth, its transmission of light, all the secondary color saturation on the tongue, and that maxilla bone. I love what you did with the translucence on the teeth, and the way the quadrate bone racks the teeth forward. It’s a sharky thing. As wacky as this creature is, it looks completely real. Maybe I’m getting high on my own supply... The banshee lives! He’s a fierce-looking sonuvabitch."

12. "Mars is one of your better planets... We should ultimately have colonies on Mars... We’ve become cowards, basically. As a society, we’re just fat and happy and comfortable and we’ve lost the edge."