"This is no dream! This is really happening!"

In the landmark case of Roe V. Wade way back in 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that abortions within the first two trimesters of pregnancy are a constitutional right under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, and that settled that little matter once and for all.

I'm kidding, of course. People have blown each other up over this shit.

Just last week, an Oklahoma state legislator proposed a bill that would require the father's written permission for a woman to get an abortion.

But what if the father is a rapist?

What if I'm the father?

What if the lady's husband is so desperate to advance his acting career he conspires with satanist neighbors to drug the lady so I can rape her while a bunch of naked, old people stand around singing and she thinks she's on a boat the whole time because she's tripping balls and now she's pregnant with the Anti-Christ?

I'd probably sign off on it because either way, I win. I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Rosemary's Baby.

This 1968 Roman Polanski film is about a good Catholic girl named Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who never even considers an abortion, no matter how sick her pregnancy makes her or how much evidence mounts that she is the object of a witch conspiracy to use her body as a vessel to bring a demon into the world and usher in a new age of all-encompassing evil. John Cassavetes plays Rosemary's douchebag husband guy.

Short on gore, but long on suspense, it's a true classic. Don't get your hopes up about getting a good look at that baby, though. It's just not that kind of movie. My hands look cool, though.

Rosemary's Baby streams on Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus.

"Don't you know what's going on out there? This is no Sunday school picnic."

It's hard to believe it's only been a year since last Black History Month. So much has changed. America has its first white president since its first black president, and the Oscars are no longer so white.

However, I do feel it is my duty to point out that racial equality in scary movies online still eludes us. Three of the four horror films I reviewed last year have been taken down. I swear last February I spent a whole week watching Pam Grier escape from prison on Amazon Prime just so I had context in which to discuss Scream Blacula Scream, but now if you want to watch those kind of movies, it costs extra. And not one service has tried to replace these movies with Abby, William Girdler's blaxploitation knockoff of The Exorcist.

You might get the idea that the streaming services are promoting a white nationalist agenda, but I don't want to spread fake news. Maybe a cameraman is just standing in the way of the movies and that's why you can't see them.

Luckily, the movie that remains is an indisputable classic. It's one of the first films to feature a black man as the hero and might be the first movie that was actually scary. It's one of my favorite films with the words "of the living dead" in the title.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Night of the Living Dead.

I consider it a great honor to once again review this 1968 George A. Romero film since last year's review was eaten by Nazi mailer-daemons trying to suppress the achievements of African-Americans in cinema. That, or I accidentally deleted it. It matters not, because like a schoolkid who re-writes the same report about George Washington Carver every February, I remember the gist. (Peanut butter is delicious, and we should be thankful.)

The dead en masse mysteriously rise from the grave and start eating the living.It sounds like a trope now, but this is the first movie that happened in.

A truck driver named Ben (Duane Jones) has been forced to seek refuge in an abandoned farmhouse to avoid the swarms of ambulatory non-living persons, but gets stuck inside with the most useless white people you'll ever see this side of C-SPAN. They can't even put gas in a truck without blowing it up. Ben's got to take charge of the situation if he's going to survive. Can he hold out until rescue arrives?

It's one of the must-sees of the horror genre. That means if you haven't seen it, it's time, and if you have seen it, it's time to see it again.

Night of the Living Dead streams on Amazon and Shudder, and there's a color version on YouTube.

"You cannot be both virgin and vampire."

Your radio advertising has called to my attention to the fact that Valentine's Day is coming up. By the sound of things, a lot of you are planning to celebrate with your sweeties -- making reservations at fancy restaurants, taking out second mortgages to afford to give each other shiny pebbles that have been dug out of the earth by children. You will likely buy these trinkets from a guy who boasts about eliminating middlemen, so we can only assume he's taken to whipping the kids himself.

Honestly though, most of you are going to "Netflix and chill" and to you I offer an alternative called "Shudder and fuck."

This week's Thursday Thriller is Requiem for a Vampire.

This 1971 film is just one of a handful of films by French director Jean Rollin, who made a bunch of movies that could be best classified as vampire softcore porn. I picked this one because it's an especially strange work, even in its own niche. 

The dark sexual fantasy starts off as a car chase. Some men in one car seem keen on killing Marie and Michelle (Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent, respectively), who are wearing clown costumes. People in both cars are shooting at each other, and the man driving the girls takes a bullet. Michelle manages to steer the car down a dirt road to evade the pursuers, and she and Marie set the car, along with their dead driver on fire and take flight on foot across the countryside. They wash their makeup off in a stream and find a busted-down, old house to change out of their costumes. They emerge from the house in tiny clothes and pigtails, which you'll no doubt enjoy if you're into the whole barely legal thing. They get on a motorcycle and drive til they find a food truck, at which point Marie teases the proprietor until he abandons his station to chase her through the woods and forces himself on her while Michelle steals lunch. 

Don't worry. Marie gets away.

Then when the girls are hiding out in a cemetery Michelle falls into an open grave and somehow gets buried alive by highly inattentive grave diggers. Marie pulls her out and they wander through a forest of giant bats before they find a castle. They don't find anyone at home and are obviously quite tired, so they lie down in the upstairs bedroom for some nude snuggling. 

I can hear you already: "But Devil, when does this movie get weird?" 

About the halfway point, after the girls discover the castle is home to vampires and their henchmen, they run away, then get caught and dragged back and shown around the sex dungeon. It will be a tough scene for you to get through if you're off turned off by simulated rape or women who don't shave their armpits. They don't shave their crotches either, but if you're put off by that, all I can tell you is grow up.

What happens after that? Who cares? You should be bumping uglies by that point.

Requiem for a Vampire streams on Shudder and YouTube. 

"Ghosts galore. Headless horsemen, horseless headsmen, everything."

I hope I didn't overstate the importance of Texas Chain Saw Massacre last week. It's a great movie, a true classic, a groundbreaking effort, but no single movie can define the direction of a whole genre. By 1974, movies like Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Last House on the Left and The Exorcist had already started the dynamic shift in the content and subject matter of horror.

A shift from what, though? Well, for instance, there were a lot of Gothic period pieces coming out of Europe at the time. It had been hanging around since the late 1950s when England's Hammer Studios landed a hit with The Curse of Frankenstein. By 1973, Hammer's formula had started to stale, but imitators had sprung up and mutated. Mario Bava was doing similar work in Italy, but with an even sexier edge. In France and Spain, the whole form evolved into a weird sub-genre of vampire porn, (more on that next week).

And right there in England, Amicus International had established itself. I could do hours of research to explain the whole relationship but between these two companies, but I'd rather get this written quickly so I can get back to watching vampire porn so I'll leave it at this: I like to think of Amicus as the Cracked to Hammer's Mad.

Now you know me, I'm a big fan of everything I've mentioned in the preceding three paragraphs, and that includes the fine films of Amicus International. That said, this week's Thursday Thriller is Amicus's And Now The Screaming Starts!

This 1973 Roy Ward Baker film is the kind of movie that takes place in a haunted castle with a bunch of creepy, old portraits on the walls.

Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) has moved into the House of Fengriffin to marry her betrothed Charles, a rich douchebag from a long line of rich douchebags. In giving Catherine the tour, Charles leaves her for a moment to marvel at the portraits of his forebears and she's transfixed by the portrait of grandfather Henry. While she stares at the painting, a bloody hand bursts through it and tries to grab her.

And then the screaming starts!

And then it dies down for a couple minutes.

And then it starts again.

And then it gets real loud.

And then it looks like Catherine might pop out of her corset.

And then the screaming tapers off for a good long while.

And then Peter Cushing shows up.

And then the screaming gradually picks back up as the movie nears its conclusion.

Seriously though, Catherine is haunted by a bloody apparition of a man missing both eyes and one hand. Sometimes the hand follows her around. On the young couple's wedding night, Charles escorts Catherine to the bed chamber and instead of immediately taking her to pound town, he steps into another room to change into his fancy jammies, during which time the apparition assaults her. When later she tries to unravel the secrets of this ghostly mystery, she learns she is pregnant.

So gentlemen, please, when you get your virgin bride home, get down to business and don't dither about tying your sleeping cravat.

And Now The Screaming Starts! streams on Shudder.