Since it’s October, I’m taking a quick dip in the horror pool.  Over the course of the next four weeks, you’ll find reviews for a few horror movies as well as an episode of the podcast guest-starring Michael Bailey about one of the most popular and influential horror films of 1999.

Now, I should say that I’m not a horror aficionado.  I’ve seen my fair share of slasher and zombie flicks, but for the most part, I steer clear of the genre, choosing to watch the occasional horror movie trailer on IMDb and then read those films’ synopses on Wikipedia.  It’s not that I don’t like horror films–in fact, with the exception of the “torture” movies like Saw, I’ll try any horrror movie–it’s just that if I have a choice, I’ll often try another genre first.

Still, this is the month for horror and I do like to spend at least one night in October watching a scary movie, so I’ve lined up a few.

And to get us started, I have these two promos from WPIX-11 that aired throughout the early 1990s.  During this month, channel 11 would spend its nights airing science fiction and horror movies that it had stashed in its vault, some of which weren’t exactly scary (not sure how Star Trek: The Motion Picture made its way into the rotation) while others were fairly recent classics (The Lost Boys, Phantasm) or insanely shlocky B-movie fare (Leprechaun).  I rarely had the chance to sit through one of those movies, choosing to watch whatever sitcom I was addicted to at the time or maybe even the baseball playoffcs, but the promos ran endlessly throughout the afternoons when my sister and I would be watching our daily dose of Charles in Charge, Saved By the Bell, and Cheers.

So presented mostly without commentary are two Shocktober promos as a way to take us into a month of what will hopefully be some frightful film reviews.