Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 10: Asylum

Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 10: Asylum

The anthology format is perfect for horror. From Black Sabbath to Creepshow to any Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, they're always fun because the great stories never overstay their welcome and neither do the bad ones. Asylum is another one of these anthology horror films, and while it's certainly not one of the greats, it's perfectly acceptable.

The main story that frames the film is about a man who comes to a spooky asylum to apply for the position of psychiatrist. He's told by the owner that he can have the job if he listens to the scary backstories of four different patients. Written by Robert Bloch (the author of "Psycho"), the four stories are fairly unique and all have fun little twists at the end.

While it's got four fun little stories, the film as a whole is not that great. It's by no means a gore film, or even that violent, but there's a sort of gross, mean-spirited quality to the whole thing, perhaps caused by its fear of the mentally ill, which doesn't exactly hold up today (with good reason). It also feels like it's trying to be a classic Hammer horror film (going as far as to hire Peter Cushing), but it doesn't have that striking technicolor look or that feeling of excitement that something like Horror of Dracula possesses. The only moment in the film I felt truly exciting was when it opened with Mussorgsky's "A Night on Bald Mountain" (which I, like most people, know from Fantasia). The central problem, however, is that it's not that memorable, with none of the characters really standing out.

Overall, if you're looking for something obscure and underrated this is good for an acceptable evening of scares (it's even on Edgar Wright's Top 100 Horror Films list), but if you're looking for a really good horror movie to watch, there's much better ones to check out first.