🎃☠️Hooptober 2020: Film 16/67💀🎃

For 1933, this was far less campy and way more brutal than I was expecting. According to the web, this has a kill-count of 122, and though most of those deaths happen from one large-scale event, the rest of this film is filled with gleeful murder which was pretty shocking for a film that’s 87 years old.

Not only was the violence surprisingly vicious, this was also a lot funnier than I thought going into it. I legitimately laughed out loud a couple of times and was just kind of taken aback at how much they let a truly evil villain relish in his atrocities. The scenes of Griffin just fucking with people because he could was a ton of fun and still technically impressive even by today’s special-FX standards.

I’ve always been aware of the Hays Code of 1934 and how it censored films, but after this, I’m going to do a bit of extra digging to see what other shocking pre-Code gems have been hiding.