Day 12 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is Too Soon: Kids 12 or less meet an early demise. Geez, grim. Who Could Kill a Child seems like a pick that everyone would pull out, so I decided to go 80’s.

The best thing that I can say about this movie is that nearly every person in it is a horrible person. There are cops that don’t do their jobs well, expectant mothers that smoke and other parents that could care less if their kids have come home yet. Even the nice people in this movie only exist to be snuffed out. This is the blackest of comedies and also the most nihilistic of films.

Jim and Slim, a couple of workers at the Ravensback chemical plant decide to finish work early and head to the bar, neglecting the pressure gauge warnings and allowing a cloud of yellow toxic smoke to escape.

That yellow cloud finds its way to a school bus full of innocent children who are so well behaved that they even sing a song to compliment their bus driver. Suddenly the bus passes through the yellow cloud and the kids get turned into zombie-like monsters with black fingernails.

The townspeople only think the kids have disappeared, so they shut the town down and try and keep out any outsiders until things clear up. Boy, this town…there’s Billy the local sheriff, who is in over his head. There’s Harry his deputy who only seems to want to get it on with Suzie (and who can blame him, what else is there to do in a small town?). And then there’s Molly, who runs the general store and is also the police dispatcher, because that makes sense. She’s played by Shannon Bolin, a singer who was once known as The Lady with the Dark Blue Voice in the 1940’s.

Even though this was made in 1980, it’s both woke and exploitation enough to give zombie Tommy two mommies. One of them, Dr. Joyce, is among the first to be burned alive by one of The Children. Not the last — as the kids all come home, they burn their parents and most of the town alive.

I guess John is our hero and his wife Cathy is pregnant (and pats her stomach and says, “Sorry…” before smoking a cigarette), so he’s obviously worried about her. That’s when this movie shifts into one that totally lives up to today’s theme. Kids get killed left and right with impunity. Roasted in closets, zombified hands chopped off, shotgunned…it’s pretty much open season on children. And when The Children die, it sounds like a cat in heat.

After all that, John falls asleep and wakes up to deliver his wife’s baby. We get a peaceful scene of the many, many dead bodies with the children all lying there looking peaceful and not dismembered. That’s when John noticed that his newborn child has black fingernails.

Director Max Kalmanowicz only has one other credit, the weirdo sex comedy Dreams Come True, where “a young couple masters the supernatural art of astral projection which allows them to travel through dreams, explore their fantasies and make a whole lot of love.” Hopefully nobody cuts off a ten year old’s hand in that movie.

You can watch this for free with an Amazon Prime membership.

Day 11 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is 11. That Soundtrack Though. One where the soundtrack is more impressive than the movie itself. And while I really love Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, I can also admit that I think the soundtrack is way better than the movie it plays during.

Unlike the HBO series and Amicus film, this story isn’t based on an EC Comic. Instead, it was intended to be Tom Holland’s follow-up to Child’s Play, then it was passed on to Pumpkinhead writer Mark Carducci, Pet Semetary director Mary Lambert and Charles Band’s Full Moon Features. finally, it was optioned by Joel Silver as one of three Tales from the Crypt spin-offs (the other two, Dead Easy and Body Count were never made).

Due to its low budget, two versions of the script were written — one with and one without demons! In the non-demon film, the Collector was a Bible salesman with “killer yuppies” as his henchmen. Luckily, that one never made it to the silver screen.

One night in the desert, The Collector (Billy Zane, chewing the scenery like no one else) is chasing after Frank Brayker (William Sadler, one of my favorite character actors). After a car crash, Frank escapes to a deconsecrated church turned boarding house thanks to town drunk Uncle Willy (character actor par excellence Dick Miller). And that boarding house is filled with even more great acting talent for such a small film: owner Irene (CCH Pounder), Wally the postal clerk (Roger Rabbit himself, Charles Fleischer), ex-con Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith), prostitute Cordelia and Roach, the cook (Thomas Haden Church, again, another incredible character actor).

Meanwhile, Sheriff Tupper (John Schuck from TV’s McMillan & Wife) and his deputy Bob meet The Collector near where he crashed. He convinces them that Brayker is a dangerous thief and that he needs their help. It seems Brayker has an important artifact, but when the cops confront him, they arrest both men for stealing cars. The Collector responds by punching the sheriff through the brain.

Brayker uses the key to drive The Collector outside the boarding house, so our antagonist uses his own blood to call upon demons. Now, everyone is trapped and must wait out the night. He then tells everyone in the house exactly what is going on: After God created Earth, demons used seven keys to steal the power of the cosmos. That’s why God created light, which scattered them and their keys across the galaxy. However, the demons have six of the keys now, with the artifact that Brayker holds being the last one they need to reclaim their power. At the Crucifixion, God had a thief named Sirach fill it with Christ’s blood and become the first guardian. Each guardian remains immortal while they hold the artifact, refilling it with their blood when they die. As proof, Brayker explains that he’s been alive since World War I, when his commanding officer passed the artifact to him.

What follows is a night of terror with the Collector pitting everyone against one another. At the close, there’s a new protector of the artifact and a new Collector, who walks away whistling the theme from the HBO series.

At the end of the closing credits, the Cryptkeeper returns to announce the next film, which ended up being Bordello of Blood, which has nothing to do with Demon Knight other than a scene where the artifact appears.

You know, Demon Knight isn’t horrible — it’s a cable TV late night watch, but the promise of a new Tales from the Crypt movie was ruined by having this be only one story (although the Crypt Keeper does interact with a slasher played by an uncredited John Larroquette).

But hey — enough about the film. Let’s discuss the soundtrack!

With Pantera’s closest thing to a single “Cemetery Gates” to “Hey Man, Nice Shot” by Filter, you get two songs nearly everyone knows. But then the soundtrack expands to include industrial stuff like Ministry, heavier metal from Biohazard, Sepultura, Megadeth and all over the map stuff like the Melvins, Rollins Band and the Gravediggaz. It reminds me of the great soundtracks to Spawn (which took the Judgement Night trick of combining metal with another genre, here with metal vs. techno, giving us Filter with the Crystal Method, Marilyn Manson with Sneaker Pimps, Slayer with Atari Teenage Riot and more) and Escape from L.A. (a movie I actually like, but the soundtrack boasts appearances by Tori Amos, Ministry, Clutch and the Deftones).

You can grab this movie from Shout! Factory.

Postscript: I absolutely adore this print from Gallery 1988!

Day 10 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is Unhead Until…It’s too late! Your last second will be your loudest. We’re looking for the quietest non-silent movie or one where the enemy hunts by sound. It seemed like most people would just pick A Quiet Place and since I’ve been using this month to discover new movies, I again reached out to help. Bill from Drive-In Asylum and Groovy Doom was, as always, gracious and full of knowledge. He also knows just how much I love Ingrid Pitt.

In the Greek countryside, archaeologist Dr. Pete Asilov and Professor Andre are trying to find a treasure in an abandoned cave. This uncovers a reptile-like creature that soon vanishes.

Andre’s housekeeper Calliope warns him that there are curses and angry spirits and monsters in the cave, but he doesn’t listen. When the rest of his business partners arrive — bringing Ingrid Pitt in her first screen role — he keeps pushing, despite further warnings, the decayed body of a cavewoman, a set of bones and one of the men being killed by the creature. Soon, they’ll be more worried about staying alive than they are as to whether or not they get the gold.

For a movie that bills itself as an SQ Picture (Shiver and Shake, Quiver and Quake), this is a pretty silent affair. That is, until the girls just randomly decide to dance for the boys. Oh yeah — the professor’s niece Maria is played by Jess Franco’s muse Soledad Miranda, so that makes this movie a million times better than it would be otherwise.

There’s a great near-silent sequence where Calliope is stalked by the reptilian monster (which could also have fit into yesterday’s there). And hey, look at that lobby card! So I guess perhaps there’s a little more going for this film — like the tension when everyone is barricaded in the house and the allusions to the atomic age — than just Ingrid Pitt and Soledad Miranda.

Day 9 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is Unseen Terror. You barely see it but it still terrifies you. This one was really rough, as I didn’t want to cover a Predator movie as that was just too simple. So I reached out to Bill from Drive-In Asylum and Groovy Doom for help. I’m using this challenge as a way to see movies I’d normally never watch, after all!

Based upon Amelia Reynolds Long’s 1930 short story “The Thought Monster”, originally published in the March 1930 issue of Weird Tales magazine, this independent British film played in the US on a double bill with The Haunted Strangler.

U. S. Air Force Interceptor Command Experimental Station No. 6 is a long-range radar installation located in the fictional town of Winthrop, Manitoba, Canada, which is a farming village that’s been plagued by unexplained deaths. It turns out that people are being killed with their brains and spinal columns being taken. The townies are up in arms, as they feel that the radiation experiments are to blame.

That leads Air Force Major Jeff Cummings starts to investigate the murders and quickly fingers Professor R. E. Walgate as a person of interest. Turns out that the Professor has been experimenting with telekinesis and thought projection for some time. That said — the radiation from the base has turned his thought projections into an entirely new life form that is attacking the locals and using them for host bodies. Of course, those bodies are mostly invisible, but also show up from time to time as moving brains with spinal columns with eyes at the end of extended eye stalks. They’re creepy as hell and led to a public uproar after its British premiere, with the public and critics angry over the films horrifying levels of gore (for the time, at least).

When this movie debuted at the Rialto Theatre in New York City, it came complete with a sidewalk exhibit of a “living and breathing Fiend” that moved and made sounds. The crowds that gathered to watch the caged Fiend created large crowds that the NYPD had to disperse.

It’s a pretty effective picture. Maybe that’s not even due to the film’s director, Arthur Crabtree. He believed that science fiction was beneath him and walked off the set at one point, with star Marshall Thompson finishing the direction of the movie.

If you like 1950’s atomic science fiction, scenes of people boarded in a room trying to hide out from pulsating brains and stop-motion blood and guys, well, this is the movie for you.

The Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge for today is THE EYES HAVE IT. This pick must have an eye specific scene. I’ve already covered the granddaddy of all eye torture, Fulci’s Zombi, as well as his other paean to ocular decimation,The New York Ripper. There’s also Demonia, where nuns eat a dead baby’s eyeballs. And Cat in the Brain, with a whole plate of eyeballs. Oh, Fulci. You do love seeing the eyes get killed, as they have seen so much.

I already hit Dead and Buried, which has an eyeball impalement that upsets many. And Lamberto Bava’s Demonia, where a woman looks like a giant eyeball. So that leaves Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball, where a killer in a red raincoat kills tourists in Barcelona.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMw7VPJlJ4Y

It’s time for the creator of Ghosthouse, Nightmare City and Cannibal Ferox to show us how he does giallo (to be fair, he also created Spasmo, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Orgasmo,  and So Sweet… So Perverse).

Any of the main characters could be the killer, one with this amazing motive: “I was like you… before this friend of mine ripped out my eye playing doctor with me… leaving an empty socket!” That means with each kill, the killer keeps an eyeball.

Unlike most giallo, the killer is all in red, with red gloves, which is a rarity unless we’re considering The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. Like most giallo, it has the worst cops ever on the case. And for 1975. it’s pretty woke, considering one of the couples is an interracial lesbian duo.

Seeing as how this is a movie with an Italian director and a Spanish crew, you just know that the dubbing is going to be great. Witness this exchange:

“Spanish or Italian, it makes no difference to me. He made a terrible mistake. You don’t think America’s worth all that trouble do you?”

“Oh my God! You’re not a communist, are you?”

That said, I came off really enjoying this. There’s a lot of red highlights hidden in every scene, which for a Lenzi movie is as close as he’s going to get to art. Then again, I tend to love all of his films way more than most people.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd. 

The Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge for today is 7. HELL ON EARTH. Watch a post-apocalypse movie. Bonus if it has punks (see the Destroy All Movies definition of punk) in it. We’ve watched so many post-apocalyptic movies that it was hard to find one that we hadn’t had on the site. And punks made it an even bigger challenge. That said, we’re all about trying to find movies no one else is talking about. And that leads us to 1977’s Jubilee.

Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre, Son of Dracula, The Witches) asks her occultist John Dee (Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror fame) — an advocate of British imperialism that spent the last thirty years of his life learning the secret language of angels — and Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (David Brandon, Delirium, Stagefright) to show her the future.

That future? The no future of the punk rock era, a place where Queen Elizabeth II was killed in a mugging and a gang of punk rock survivors, including Amyl Nitrate (Jordan, the model who was of the creators of W10 London punk look), Bod (Runacre in a second role), Chaos (French singer, writer and tightrope walker Hermine Demoriane), Mad (singer Toyah Willcox) and Crabs (Little Nell from Rocky Horror, who even gets in the line “Don’t dream it, be it.”). When they’re not talking about boys or music, they’re talking about how history can be manipulated. And then Amyl Nitrite says that her heroine has always been Myra Hindley (Hindley and Ian Brady were responsible for the Moors Murders, which occurred in and around Manchester between mid-1963 and late-1965, claiming five child victims and inspiring the song “Suffer Little Children” by The Smiths).

Things making too much sense? There’s also Borgia Ginz, who shares a house with Hitler, runs the world and has transformed Buckingham Palace into a recording studio and Westminster Cathedral into a disco where Jesus performs.

Beyond the nihilism and lack of hope in this film, there’s also plenty of punk rock stars, like Adam Ant and Wayne County along for the ride and gamely performing songs, as well as blink and you miss it moments for Siouxie and the Banshees and the Slits. And hey — the music is by Ol’ Sourpuss himself, Brian Eno.

Director Derek Jarman may have based this movie in punk rock, but he was against the scene’s fascism fetish, as well as its love of stupidity and violence. Many punks weren’t pleased with the film, such as fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who created an open letter T-shirt that denounced the film because of how she felt it misrepresented punk.

Jubilee is definitely a time capsule of Thatcher-era England. It’s loud, obnoxious and strange, which are all wonderful things to be. I’m glad that I didn’t watch something easy like Cy-Warrior and chose this movie.

Day 6 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is here. The theme? 666. El Dia De La Bestia: The more Satanic, the better. Well, this one is a Satanic movie made by a pornographer, so why not pile all of our sins in at once?

That pornographer is writer and director Gerard Damiano (Deep Throat). This film was originally intended to be a hardcore movie, but he saw it as a mainstream opportunity and decided to turn the film into a straight-up horror film. That said, that opportunity may have been suggested by producer Lou Parish, better known as Louis “Butchie” Peraino, a member of the Colombo crime family.

Shot on a tight budget and starring unknown actors, the film briefly ran in theaters before becoming part of a grindhouse double bill with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blood (one assumes that Bryanston Distributing Company, which had rumored mob ties, had something to do with that).

Other than Sarah Peabody from Last House on the Left, who plays a cult member, there’s nobody recognizable in this tale of Maya, a young woman who a Satanic cult has picked to be their new leader. Fantasies overtake her daily existence, synthesizers play at the right time and everyone wears some wonderful 70’s clothes.

There are dream sequences, photos are burned between a woman’s thighs, a glowing sword appears, we witness a black mass, there are portentous (and pretentious) speeches and lots of gorgeous colors. But it’s all a mess. While filmed in 1972, it wasn’t released until much later. And Damiano would bring another better and more Satanic film — The Devil in Ms. Jones — to raincoaters soon.

Despite the budget, this movie looks way better than it should. There are a lot of gorgeous people on display but they really don’t do much for the hour plus running time.

If you want to watch it for yourself, it’s free with your Amazon Prime membership. You can find it right here.

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!