The week of October 30, 1993, saw Mariah Carey hanging on to the top spot of Billboard’s Hot 100 with ‘Dreamlover.’ It was the last of eight weeks that song would spend atop the chart.
Right behind it was a song that would ascend to #1 the following week and spend five weeks there: Meat Loaf’s ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).’ This was Meat Loaf’s first-ever #1 hit, and his last. He died last year at age 74.
Throwing back to the week of October 29, 1983, we find Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton topping the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Islands in the Stream.’ The duet spent two weeks at #1, and gave each of the country legends their second chart-topper on the Hot 100. (Bonus points to any commenter who can name the previous #1 for one or both artists).
‘Islands in the Stream’ was written by the Bee Gees as an R&B song but it got a pop country makeover when it landed with Rogers and Parton. The song was released on Rogers’ album Eyes That See in the Dark, on which every track was written by Barry Gibb (most with brother Maurice).
My final horror sub-genre is a kind of movie that crosses all the other sub-genres I’ve covered — the Comedy Horror. These movies can be about monsters, demons, slashers, you name it… what sets them apart is that they are just as interested in laughs as scares.
Last year gave us two great examples in The Menu and Bodies Bodies Bodies, the former a darkly humorous psychological horror about a high-end chef whose disdain for his customers is revealed in increasingly murderous fashion, and the latter a Gen Z satire in which a group of friends are trapped inside during a hurricane with a possible killer among them.
One horror sub-genre I’ve mostly stayed away from is the splatter film, more recently characterized as torture porn. These are movies that put the gore front and center and revel in the destruction of the human body.
I don’t need to watch that. And, perhaps more important, there just haven’t been many good ones. If the Citizen Kane of splatter films is out there, I’ll give it a shot. But these movies are more interested in pushing the envelope, risking censorship, and drumming up publicity.
The most fun I had in my year of horror movie immersion came when I went down the rabbit hole of Giallo Cinema.
Previously, I knew the term, and knew it was associated with the work of Italian director Dario Argento, but I didn’t know anything more than that. This project was my opportunity to remedy the blind spot.
Giallo is Italian for “yellow,” and it is the name given to a certain kind of hard-boiled murder mystery (in both book and movie form). The name derives from the bright yellow covers of pulp novels published in Italy starting in 1929. Think of the American “pulp fiction” novels that inspired the title of Quentin Tarantino’s movie.
Meet Me In Montauk 