The Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge for today is 1 2 3 4 CLIVE. Clive Barker was born on October 5th. Celebrate any of his gruesome cinematic deeds.

I decided to go with the unfairly maligned Nightbreed, a movie that I haven’t seen since it played in theaters in 1990. Directed by Clive Barker and based on his 1988 novella Cabal,  this movie was a commercial and critical failure. Barker has always claimed that the producers tried to sell the film as a run of the mill slasher, when it is anything but. In 2014, he finally was able to release a director’s cut that fixed many of his issues.

Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer, Fire in the Sky) dreams of a place called Midian where monsters are accepted. His girlfriend Lori has convinced him to start seeing a psychotherapist named Dr. Phillip Decker, who is ably played by David Cronenberg of all people. All along, Decker has been setting Boone up for the murders that he’s been committing, giving his LSD instead of lithium and filling his head with details of the murders.

Decker urges Boone to turn himself in, but he’s hit by a truck and sent to the hospital where he meets Narcisse, another man who knows about Midian. He explains to Boone how to get to the hidden story while he cuts off his own face.

Boone makes his way to Midian, where he meets the creatures who make it their home like Kinski (Nicholas Vince, the Chattering Cenobite from Hellraiser) and Peloquin, a demonic creature who smells Boone’s innocence, letting him know that there’s no way that the murders could have been his doing. He bites Boone, who runs into a police trap led by Decker and is shot and killed.

He’d be dead if it wasn’t for Peloquin’s bite. Soon, he returns to life in the morgue while his girlfriend decides to come looking for Midian herself. Boone becomes part of the Nightbreed thanks to their leader Dirk Lylesburg (Doug Bradley, Pinhead himself) and from the touch of their god, Baphomet.

What follows is a battle between the police and clergy versus the Nightbreed, ending with Boone rallying the supernatural creatures and destroying their home to stop the attacks. Decker is stopped, Baphomet discusses that this was all part of the prophecy and he renames Boone Cabal.

There are two different endings of the film, depending on the original and director’s cut that change the story significantly. One raises Decker from the dead while another places Lori into the Nightbreed. Both set the stage for further adventures that never happened, sadly.

Barker wanted this to be the Star Wars of horror films and envisioned a trilogy of stories. But the film wasn’t marketed well and never made back its budget. Barker said that the producers expressed a concern that “the monsters are the good guys,” to which he replied, “That’s the point.”

Marvel’s Epic imprint put out several comic books and there were serveral video games, but soon the film slided away into obscurity, Luckily, with the excitement around the director’s and Cabal cuts of the film being released, SyFy, Morgan Creek and Barker have announced an entirely new series based on the movie.

Interestingly enough, Filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky spoked well of Nightbreed, calling it “the first truly gay horror fantasy epic”, as he saw the movie being all about the “unconsummated relationship between doctor and patient.”

There are plenty of music ties in this film, as the role of Ohnaka was first intended for singer Marc Almond and Suzi Quatro was in the film, but her scenes were cut. It’s also one of the first films that Danny Elfman scored after Batman. Barker stated that “The most uncompromised portion of that entire movie is the score.”

Nightbreed has more than held up, reminding me of the convention season of 1990 when you could see buttons and shirts of this movie everywhere. My excitement was at a fever pitch and I thought, “This is going to be huge.” Shows how smart I was.

Day 4 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is Franchise Day. Pick something from any franchise that has four or more entries. Bonus points if it has a fast food eating scene in it – have it your way.

There was no choice other than 1988’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. I bought two collections of these films last year with the intent of doing a WATCH THE SERIES post of them (which I still fully intend to finish). I’ve often written off all of these films after the first three — one being the originator, two being a strange metaphor for growing up gay and the third being a bravura Dokken soundtrack sporting thrill ride that was amongst the first slasher films I ever watched.

The thing is, part four is slick and as commercial as it gets, but isn’t that what you want? Aren’t we all wistful for the movie theaters of thirty years ago, when films like Bad Dreams, the Chuck Russell remake of The Blob, Child’s Play, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Fright Night II, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Phantasm II, Poltergeist 3, Pumpkinhead and so many more graced the silver screen? This is a movie made for teenagers to devour in the same way that they chow down through a pizza — more on that in a bit.

After the final battle in the last film in this series — Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors — which was intended by Wes Craven to end the franchise. With original protagonist Nancy sacrificing herself to stop Krueger, the rest of the Dream Warriors have been released from the insane asylum and are back to being normal teenagers.

However, Kristen (Tuesday Knight, replacing Patricia Arquette) believes that Freddy isn’t dead, drawing Joey, Kincaid and Kincaid’s dog Jason into her dream, where they show her that Freddy’s boiler is cold. There’s been a rift between these former friends, as the boys are seen as freaks and Kristen has joined the popular crowd with her martial arts practicing boyfriend Rick (Andras Jones, Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama), Alice, Sheila and Debbie.

Soon, Kincaid has been killed in the junkyard from Dream Warriors, where Freddy comes back after a dog pisses fire onto him. Yes, that really happens. Then, Joey finds a naked girl swimming in his waterbed in a sequence that’s glossy, ridiculous and awesome all in equal measure. He’s soon dead and Kristen passes out when she finds out, bringing Freddy after her. She swears to get revenge, but once her mother gives her sleeping pills to ensure that she gets rest, she is felled by the “Bastard Son of a One Hundred Maniacs.” However, she is able to give her dream power to Alice which she’s gonna need because with each kill, Freddy gains the abilities and personalities of Alice’s dead friends.

Sure, these movies would get much worse, but if you’re looking for a movie that’ll make the middle of the night just fly past, you can’t go wrong with this one. I was surprised how much I liked it, which is kind of the point of this challenge, right?

This movie is filled with plenty of out there kill scenes and flip dialogue that finally makes Freddy the actual hero of the film. There’s a girl that gets turned into a cockroach and smashed into a Roach Motel. And then there’s the scene where Freddy shows Alice all of his victims on a “soul pizza” that must be witnessed to be believed.

Say what you will about Renny Harlin, but in this follow up to his American debut Prison, he really takes the series all the way into the surreal, basing each of the murders on actual nightmares that he had, as well as crazy moments that push the film into meta territory when Alice goes from a movie theater into an actual movie while the rest of the cast watches.

This was the highest grossing movie in the series until Freddy vs. Jason, which it earns with an all-star team of special effects artists, a soundtrack boasting bands like the Vinnie Vincent Invasion, Blondie, and the Fat Boys, and an ending that boasts a twenty foot tall practical model of Freddy being destroyed by the souls of those he has taken.

For even more fun, here’s a video from fast food lovers The Fat Boys that features them getting Freddy’s house as an inheritance and having to spend the night there.

I knew that day three’s challenge was going to be rough.

MATHS AND NUMEROLOGY: The plot must revolve around numbers in some way. Count on this theme to be a tough one.

It seemed like so many people would choose Pi or The Number 23, so I wanted to avoid those ones. And I’d already reviewed Suicide Cult, a blast of strangeness that combines astrology and biorhythms to determine the new Christ and Satan for the next century sometime in the 1970’s. That’s when I discovered 2013’s Banshee Chapter.

How does this fit the ask? Well, a big part of the movie, which touches on a number of conspiracy theories, deals with numbers stations. These shortwave radio stations broadcast formatted numbers, which some believe are coded messages to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries. The majority of these stations use speech synthesis to vocalize numbers, although audio tricks like phase-shift keying and frequency-shift keying, as well as Morse code transmissions, are not uncommon. These stations may or may not have set schedules and channels — there are a lot of variables.

I first learned about numbers stations thanks to the incredibly influential book Big Secrets by William Poundstone. From the initiation rituals of lodges and secret clubs to backmasking, subliminal messages, fast food recipes and, yes, numbers stations, this book took me from an inquisitive 15-year-old to an absolute maniac desperately searching for hidden knowledge — kind of like the characters in this film.

Another place that people first discovered numbers stations was on Wilco’s album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” which uses samples of various stations.

Banshee Chapter is the directorial and writing debut of Blair Erickson, who based this movie off the H. P. Lovecraft short story From Beyond, which in turn inspired 1986’s From Beyond.  In addition to numbers stations, it also has threads taken from MK Ultra, a series of hallucinogenic drug experiments performed by the United States Government, and the gonzo adventures of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Starting with stock footage of President Clinton and others talking about MK Ultra, we meet James Hirsch, a young man whose research has led to him taking the drug used in the experiments, dimethyltryptamine-19 (DMT-19). Soon, he becomes able to hear strange music, voices and numbers from a nearby radio before he anxiously says that something is coming to wear him as a large shadowy figure causes the footage to stop.

That’s when we meet the real protagonist — Anne (Katia Winter, Dexter) — a friend of James who wants to discover where he has disappeared to. She soon learns that the broadcast that James heard is a phantom numbers station that can only be heard in the desert at a very specific time of night. She tries to find it, only to see a monstrous form that she runs from.

A reference in James’ notes to “Friends in Colorado” is all about Thomas Blackburn (character actor extraordinaire Ted Levine), a Hunter S. Thompson analog. He tricks her into taking DMT-19 and begins to bring her along on his adventures. One of James’ friends, Callie, is part of his orbit and she slowly becomes controlled by the shadow creature. They soon learn that DMT-19 allows otherworldly creatures to broadcast signals directly into human bodies and take them over after a certain amount of time. Even worse, MK Ultra was actually created by these entities, aided and abetted by pineal tissue from a reanimated dead woman.

Being so close to the number channel generator — the dead woman who is the primary source — makes James vomit blood, as he’d been an MK Ultra test subject in college. He shoots himself rather than allow the entities to take him over. Anne finds James’ clothing, suggesting that something was wearing his skin, before setting the test facility on fire.

Taken into police custody, Anne relates the movie’s events to a friend. Although she learned that Thomas never gave her the drug, it turns out that the ability to hear the numbers station comes through human touch. Anne passes this along to a co-worker who comes to visit as she begins to hear the station again.

Banshee Chapter was a surprising find and a great watch. That’s been my goal with the Scarecrow Video Psychotronic Challenge, to discover some new films that I would otherwise never watch and share them with you!