Movies | Shane “Zero Days of Horror, Sad Face” Hnetka | October 21, 2021

This is the first time in many, many, many years that I’m not doing a 31 Days of Horror blog. After doing it for so long the break is nice, but it feels strange — like something is missing.

The question that’s really been bugging me is what this year’s topic would have been. I did pandemic films last year, so that’s out. I’ve done thrillers, horrors, monsters, classics, Hammer Horror, Canadian horror, horror around the world (one of my favourites) and a lot more.

There are a lot of themes that could’ve been used this year, but I find myself leaning toward When Nature Attacks. The obvious winner is 1975’s Jaws but other films could have included The Birds,Arachnophobia, Anaconda, Long Weekend, Alligator, Piranha, Monkey Shines, Black Sheep, Willard, Phase IV, The Pack, Cujo, Rogue, Crawl, Razorback, Wolfen, Day of the Animals, Black Water, Open Water, The Reef, 47 Meters Down, Grizzly, The Naked Jungle, Them!, Mimic, Tarantula, The Devil Bat, Black Zoo, Burning Bright and Dark Age.

There’s some good and some bad-but-fun films on that list. One thing is, there’s no good bee attack movies. They’re all pretty terrible. Still, it’s fun to watch nature attack — monster movies without a fictional monster.

Hard to Find

As streaming and digital have taken over as the main way people watch movies it’s amazing how many films are lost in limbo. Classics like James Cameron’s The Abyss, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Ron Howard’s Cocoon (you can watch the sequel on Disney Plus, but not the original, WTF?), Alligator and Dead Calm — just to name a few — are missing in action. You can’t rent or buy them digitally or stream them anywhere, that I can find anyway.

At least with physical media you can own it for life and rewatch it at your leisure than endure the horror of trying to find the movie.

Shane Hnetka is a made-in-Saskatchewan film and comic book nerd.