Haida is the language of the Haida people, which is spoken only in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of Canada and on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. This endangered language, which once had 15,000 speakers, has just 24 today. Today, nearly all Haida people use English, but there are efforts to revitalize this language before its too late.

Edge of the Knife — SG̲aawaay Ḵ’uuna in its true native tongue — was made with input from Haida Gwaii residents and University of British Columbia professor Leonie Sandercock with the goal of preserving and teaching the language. The budget was raised with the help of the Council of the Haida Nation, the Canada Media Fund and Telefilm Canada and this was created primarily by indigenous people, including the co-directors, a mostly amateur crew and the Haida cast, who were taught to speak Haida at a two-week training camp, as none of them could have a conversation in the language before making this.

Directed by Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown, this is all about the legend of the Gaagiixiid, a monster who becomes consumed by hunger. As two families gather to fish, Adiitsʹii  (Tyler York) causes the death of his best friend Kwa’s (Willy Russ) son Gaas. He runs into the woods to hide, overwhelmed with guilt. Somehow, he survives the harsh winter and becomes the Gaagiixiid. The families return to try to bring his old self back, but Kwa wants retribution.

There’s nothing like this movie, which is at once an educational lesson that will preserve and teach Haida to future generations, but also a film shot with a small budget in a rough location, using words that have never been filmed before. That alone requires a watch. That it’s a well-made movie with an interesting legend in its soul makes it worth telling others about.

Edge of the Knife is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including commentary with directors Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown, a feature on making the world’s first Haida-language feature film and two shorts, Haida Carver and Nalujuk Night.

You can order this set from Severin.

Before this, I don’t think I’ve watched many Finnish movies before, much less one with a werereindeer, which I didn’t even think was something. You learn something new every day and movies help you do it.

At the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, this movie won Best Fairy Tale film from a Jean Cocteau-led jury. I also didn’t even know there was a Best Fairy Tale award.

This is probably the only movie out there based on pre-Christian Finnish mythology and Sami shamanism, so enjoy it. Mirjami Kuosmanen — the wife of director Erik Blomberg; she sadly died young from a brain hemorrhage — plays Pirita, a bride who misses her husband Aslak while he’s away herding reindeer.

She wants to ignite passion in her life and keep her husband home, so she visits a shaman. In turn, he turns Pirita — who was born of a witch — into a shapeshifting vampiric white reindeer. All she had to do was sacrifice the first thing she saw when she returned home, which ends up being the baby deer that her husband has brought her as a gift.

Now, she is irresistible to all men, men who she lures as the reindeer into the woods and then drains them of their blood.

The White Reindeer is the kind of magical movie that slowly finds its way into your mind and then takes a place inside it.

The White Reindeer is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including The Projection Booth episode about this movie, featuring Mike White with Kat Ellinger, author of Daughters Of Darkness, and Talk Without Rhythm‘s El Goro. It also has three short movies, A Witch Drum, The Nightside of the Sky and With the Reindeer.

You can order this set from Severin.

Manly Wade Wellman worked in so many genres — historical fiction, detective tales, Western stories, juvenile fiction, comic books, non-fiction, science fiction and fantasy — and had his stories become episodes of The Twilight Zone and Monsters but he’s best known for the fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains near the North Carolina he loved so much.

Perhaps his most beloved character is Silver John or John the Balladeer. He may be a simple country man who has just returned from Korean, where he was a sharpshooter, but he has a high degree of knowledge, mostly of the occult. He carries John George Hohman’s Long Lost Friend, a book of Pennsylvania Dutch spells, talismans and remedies. Most importantly, he has a guitar with strings of pure silver. There’s also some spiritual link between him and John the Baptist.

Beyond these stories being filled with the legends of the Carolinas, the songs that John sings throughout are all true. I love this quote about these tales: “Whereas Tolkien integrated Northern mythology into his mythos, and C.S. Lewis the European Fairy Tales of yore, Wellman’s stories are drenched in the folktales and songs of old Americana; the haunting stories of the slaves and the tall tales of the Revolution, strange beasts, witch-women and dark apparitions.”

Based on two of the Silver John adventures, “The Desrick on Yandro” and “O Ugly Bird,” this is nearly a portmanteau of many tales of John (Hedges Capers), as well as information on all manner of legends, including dowser Mr. Marduke (Severn Darden) explaining how important the devil is to Appalachian culture. Oh yes — a dowser is someone who uses a diving rod to find water, minerals or gold underground.

We also learn how John gets his silver stringed guitar from his grandfather (Denver Pyle) who decides to sing against the Defy, who is the devil around these parts. Their battle is so brutal that is literally breaks the film and ends with the devil triumphant, as American silver is not as pure as the money of the past.

Before John can outsing the dark one, he goes to a mountain where he meets Zebulon Yandro (Harris Yulin), whose grandfather once turned against a witch that he had been given gold by. He told her he’d be her lover for a year but took the treasure and ran to become an undertaker. Now that she still lives on the mountain and looks like a young, gorgeous girl (Susan Strasberg) but Yandro doesn’t get the good end of this deal. John does, as he’s pointed to the next stage in his quest, Hark Mountain, which is being mined by warlock O. J. Onselm (Alfred Ryder), followed by a sharecropper named Captain Lajoie H. Desplaines IV (Percy Rodrigues). Luckily, John has the help of Uncle Anansi (Chester Jones), who is related to the West African spider god.

Why does John help people who would sooner be afraid of him? Well, that’s just what he does. He’d probably be happier living with his woman, Lily (Sharon Henesy), sleeping in the warmth of the fire instead of outside in the mountains, getting to spend time with her and his dog Honor Hound. But heroes don’t get to make choices for themselves.

Directed by John Newland (who directed 96 episodes of One Step Beyond and the TV movies Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Crawlspace) and written by Melvin Levy, this takes a departure from the books by having John younger and way less sure of himself. It does have the benefit of “The Devil,” sung by Hoyt Axton, and that Hedges Capers was such a good singer himself. More for hippies than perhaps the audience for the books, this is still such a unique film, one I’d wanted to see for so long and quite pleased that it’s as magnificent as it is.

Who Fears the Devil is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including the alternate opening for The Legend of Hillbilly JOhn introduced by Severn Darden; audio commentary by Amanda Reyes; interviews with producer Barney Rosenzweig and actor and musician Hedges Capers; author David Drake remembers Manly Wade Wellman; occult historian Mitch Horowitz on the arcane texts of Wellman’s John The Balladeer stories and a trailer.

You can order this set from Severin.

The Enchanted is a Florida regional film that mainly played the South but still found its way to the CBS Late Movie. It was self-released on DVD by its filmmakers but the first blu ray release is on the new Severin All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2 box set.

This does have quite a budget for a regional film — supposedly over a million — and was made between 1979 and 1983. Why this was sold to TV and not to the video market — which was making big money at the time and was begging for product, much less horror and horror-adjacent product — is a mystery.

Booker T. Robertson (Julius Harris) and his dog Pete are walking the swamps of the Everglades when they come upon a trailer filled with people. Seeing as how Booker knows everyone, the idea that strangers are here is a bit frightening to him. On the way back home, he runs into the son of one of his dead friends, Royce Hagen (Will Sennett), who has decided to leave the world behind and move back home.

Royce is fixing up the family farm and has hired a family new to the area, the Perdys — Pa (John Hallock), Ma (Helen Blanton) and their children — who provide him with cheap labor as well as romance, as he’s fallen for their daughter Twyla (Cassey Blanton). Booker isn’t so sure about them, but his warnings go unheard.

That’s because Booker knows that in the woods there are two worlds, one for the living and the other for the dead, along with a “Hole In the Wall” where spirits can move back and forth. Once Twyla moves into Royce’s bed, Booker washes his hands of this.

The Perdys are all vegetarians and Twyla is quite strange. She’s somehow a virgin despite being past thirty, paints nature murals all day and is deathly afraid of cats. Meanwhile, as love blossoms, animals are being killed all over town by wolves.

Writer Elizabeth Coatsworth created the story this is based on, starting with The Enchanted: An Incredible Tale and telling the Perdy story across four books. The family feels vaguely hippy and by 1979 when this was made, hippy meant Manson Family. Who faints when they see a chicken being served for dinner? But the twist — given away super early — is pretty great and I love the issues that everyone talks about in reviews as downsides. I see them as upsides: amateur acting, long glimpses of nature and animals instead of storytelling, odd editing choices. Add in Phil Sawyer’s synth score and you get a singular movie that presents the unknown within the known, the mystery and magic of a part of America gone unexplored and often forgotten.

The Enchanted is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including audio commentary by director Carter Lord And camera assistant Richard Grange, moderated by filmmaker/author Kier-La Janisse as well as a second commentary with Chesya Burke, author Of Let’s Play White and Sheree Renée Thomas, author Of Nine Bar Blues; an interview with composer Phil Sawyer; chracter notes by screenwriter Charné Porter and a trailer.

You can order this set from Severin.

Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? Maybe. Maybe not. But if you ask me, this combination of the occult and biker culture ranks really close.

Tom Latham (Nicky Henson, Witchfinder General) leads The Living Dead, a motorcycle gang that causes trouble and occasionally dabbles in black magic. The worm filled apple didn’t fall far from the tree — Tom’s mother, deceased father and butler Shadwell (George Sanders, All About Eve and Rebecca) follow the Left Hand Path. With their help, he learns how to die and come back from the dead — roaring from his freshly buried earth on his motorcycle (later Lemmy would do this in Motörhead’s “Killed by Death” video).

Soon, one after another of the gang commit suicide and return from the dead. Soon, the gang is killing cops and menacing babies. And their names! Gash, Hatchet, Chopped Meat, Hinkey and Bertram! This movie is about pure mayhem! I wonder, was all of England in the grip of Satan in the early 1980’s?

Director Don Sharp keeps things stylish and moving. This isn’t his first go-round with frogs in cemeteries, pacts with the devil, mysterious suicides and zombies. Check out his other film, Witchcraft. He was also behind Dark Places, Hammer’s Rasputin: The Mad Monk and the final movie in The Fly series, Curse of the Fly. This is his best work, though.

You should pretty much quit whatever it is you’re doing right now and go watch this.

Psychomania is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an introduction by film historian Chris Alexander; a commentary by Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, founding editor Of Hellebore Magazine; interviews with Nicky Henson, Mary Larkin, Denis Gilmore, Roy Holder, Rocky Taylor, “Riding Free” Singer Harvey Andrews and soundtrack composer John Cameron; the featurette Stone Warnings, in which Dr. Diane A. Rodgers discusses stone circles and standing stones in film and television and a trailer.

You can order this set from Severin.

Also known as Naked Space and Spaceship, The Creature Wasn’t Nice was directed and written by Bruce Kimmel, who is probably best known for his other movie, The First Nudie Musical, as well as his acting career. He’s also worked on numerous stage plays, written twenty-five books and even put on production of a musical, Levi, that was based on the story of Levi Strauss with a book by Larry Cohen and a score by the Sherman Brothers. He also came up with the idea for The Faculty.

Kimmel’s director’s cut was only seen twice before producers cut it to pieces. Kimmel loved the old science fiction movies but thought that slashers were evil and despicable.

Beyond Leslie Nielsen — which explains the Spaceship and Naked Space titles being named after Airplane! and The Naked Gun — this has a great cast with Cindy Williams, Gerrit Graham and Patrick Macnee, all of whom seem to be having a wonderful time. Along with Kimmel, they make up the five-person crew of the Vertigo, which is looking for new life when they must land on a planet.

Soon, a goopy red alien is on board and singing “I Want To Eat Your Face” and there’s also a series of parodies, like a cooking show and an elderly Dirty Harry. There’s also footage from This Island Earth and Spectreman, as well as a talking computer that was supposed to be played by Broderick Crawford.

It’s all over the place and frequently falls apart, but Cindy Williams is so plucky and Leslie Nielsen is always funny even in sub-zero parody films and this doesn’t reach those lows.

This feels like if no one on Dark Star smoked grass.

Also known as Peony Lantern and by its Japanese title, Botan doro, The Bride from Hades starts at the Obon lantern festival, which is when spirits return to visit their relatives and the newly dead go to the afterlife. A man named Shinzaburo (Kojiro Hongo) meets a gorgeous woman there, Otsuyu (Miyoko Akaza), as well as her maid Oyone (Michiko Otsuka).

After the death of her samurai father, Otsuyu has had to become a sex worker to pay off the debts of her family. Shinzaburo falls in love with her, even though he has an arranged marriage planned by his family. Before she goes into the brothel for life, she wants to lose her virginity to him and does, yet his servant Banzo (Ko Nishimura) notes that she has no feet and therefore, must be a ghost. He uses symbols to close the home from the undead, but when his wife begs him to take the money they have offered, the spirit returns for one more night, taking his master to the grave.

The truth is that unless Otsuya makes love on this night, she will be alone for eternity. While a ghost story, this is just as much as romantic film. Director Satsuo Yamamoto makes this a serious film, more than the 1972 remake Hellish Love, which was part of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno series and concentrates more on the sex than the ghosts. In this take, love seems to triumph even when an entire village shows up to chant a specter out of having sex with you.

Past of the Daiei Gothic: Japanese Ghost Stories set from Radiance Films, The Bride from Hades has the following extras: an audio commentary by author Jasper Sharp, a new interview with filmmaker Hiroshi Takahashi, a trailer and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Filippo Di Battista.

You can purchase this set from MVD.

Director Nobuo Nakagawa is known for his takes on Japanese folk horror, including Kaidan hebi-onna, Jigoku, Onna Kyuketsuki and Borei Kaibyo Yashiki. This is his adaption of the kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan.

Umbrella maker and would-be samurai Iemon Tamiya (Shigeru Amachi) wants to marry Oiwa (Katsuko Wakasugi) and stands outside the home of her father Samon, beginning for her hand in marriage. He wants nothing to do with the boy, so he insults him, earning enough of his ire that he and his companion Sato are both killed by the samurai.

Naosuke (Shuntaro Emi) watched the whole thing and agrees to be quite if Iemon tells Oiwa and her sister Sode that their father was murdered by a criminal named Usaburo. He also asks for the samurai’s help in throwing Sode’s fiance,  Yomoshichi (Ryuzaburo Nakamura) to his death.

A year finds Iemon and Oiwa married, as well as her sister and Naosuke. Iemon is already tired of her and wants to move on in both beauty and status, so he hires a masseuse named Takuetsu (Jun Otomo) to seduce his wife, hoping she will give in and he can legally kill her as the result of adultery. Takuetsu fails, but she’s already taken the poison he brought, as her face breaks out in horrible blisters. She tries to kill him but only slashes herself, yet when Iemon returns, he kills the massage man and nails both of the victims to wood and sets it down the river.

That night, Iemon marries Ume (Junko Ikeuchi), the daughter of a rich nobleman. Just as quickly, the ghosts of Oiwa and Takuetsu appear. She finally attacks Iemon, who fights back with his sword, killing his wife and her parents. Hiding in a temple, he’s soon joined by Naosuke, who has also seen the ghosts. Oiwa tells her sister that Yomoschichi lives and together, they plan on revenge.

Iemon takes some of that by killing Naosuke, but when Yomoschichi and Sode arrive, the ghosts have so haunted him that he can’t defend himself. The movie ends on an image of Oiwa holding a child in the afterlife.

This has been filmed many times, but many say that this is the definitive version. It’s certainly bloodier and moodier than you’d expect for a movie made all the way back in 1959.

Past of the Daiei Gothic: Japanese Ghost Stories set from Radiance Films, The Ghost from Yotsuya has the following extras: a interview with filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a visual essay on the history and adaptations of the classic Ghost of Yotsuya story by author Kyoko Hirano, a trailer and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Filippo Di Battista.

You can purchase this set from MVD.