A Cold Night’s Death, starring Eli Wallach and Robert Culp, might be the best TV horror movie of all time. They are scientists who are on this isolated mountain with a bunch of monkeys, studying the monkeys and trying to figure out what killed their colleague before they got there and had to take over the experiment that he had abandoned on account of being dead. There’s something messing with the tape recorders and the windows and doors, and it’s a character study of two people isolated in this snowy environment where you can’t go outside for more than 15 minutes because it’s 20° below.

Eli Wallach, right away, he’s playing against type. I’ve usually seen him as a heavy, and here he’s this neurotic scientist, while Robert Culp is playing the leading man, strong silent type. But it’s Wallach’s movie, and he lays out right away to Robert Culp’s character, “You’re going to be bored here, and I’ve got to always solve a mystery.” Culp agrees with him, and then they immediately swap roles: it’s Culp trying to solve the mystery and Wallach just spiraling because he doesn’t want to admit what’s going on and becoming more and more paranoid.

This is eco horror, but when you think eco horror of the 70s, you think giant insects or bears attacking people. This is more “don’t experiment on animals,” and an exaggerated version of this might happen, but also showing how humans are just primates—which we like to forget because we can talk. The best part about the whole package is the soundtrack by Gil Mellé. It’s this crazy synthesizer soundtrack that really got me into synthesizer music. So just imagine yourself being cold. It’s August, but we’re cold.

Iced came out in 1988, which was kind of in a down period for the slasher, but it’s a super fun example of the genre even if it’s by the numbers. It seems to be self-aware. It is a “revenge prologue, come back four years later, pick everyone off” type of movie. This guy Jeff, he’s getting bullied at the beginning for his claims of skiing in the Alps on a ski weekend with a bunch of friends. He’s not part of the group—one of the girls brought him along as a potential date for this other girl, Trina, who was the final girl, but they didn’t hit it off. She’s with this other guy in her hotel room, and Jeff bursts in and finds them not having sex, but arm wrestling, and he says, “You fuckers,” and he skis away into the night and falls on some rocks.

Someone invites the whole group of friends from the ski weekend to a new ski resort four years later and starts killing everybody, including Lisa Loring, who was the original Wednesday Addams, who gets it in a hot tub. At one point, they’re all sitting around the dinner table, and this guy brings up a trip to the drive-in that he had where he saw a movie that you didn’t care anything about—you didn’t even look at the screen unless somebody was getting killed or was naked. That pretty much describes the very movie that we’re watching, Iced. The real estate agent who’s trying to get them to buy this cabin at the ski resort is also the writer of the film, so I think that they probably had a lot of fun on this movie, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. You can find it online; I believe it’s on Shudder or Tubi. If you think you’ve seen all the 80s slasher movies, then maybe you should chill out with Iced.

If you like regional horror, the 1978 Screams of a Winter Night is a real treat. It was shot in Natchitoches, Louisiana, which is an old part of Louisiana that has its own legends. It has a frame story about a bunch of college kids going to a cabin where there’s a Native legend of a Catahoula spirit that’s the wind that comes and tears everybody apart. They get there and start telling ghost stories, so it’s kind of an anthology.

At first, the guys tell kind of stupid stories. One is an urban legend about something that happens to kids that are out parking that we’ve all heard, except that there’s a southern sort of kaiju because it’s got Spanish moss all over it, and then possibly a small person that bites people and ties them to a tree. The second part of the anthology was just a story about a fraternity prank that in itself was a setup for a prank, but then there’s a big prank that scares everyone.

Then the ladies start telling stories. First, there’s one about some kids investigating a cemetery for a witch’s grave that ends sort of gruesomely for one of them—that I think was maybe cut out of original home video releases of this. The fourth story is told by the girl who hated going to this cabin most; her name is Elaine.

Let me back up: it’s this terrible cabin that they have to drive hours to get to, past yokels, just to the middle of nowhere. Then they have to break in, and it’s gross and they need oil lamps. Of course, there’s the Catahoula lurking, but only the main two characters, John and Cal, even know that. John’s the creepy guy of the group. Every ensemble horror has people going on vacation and there’s one guy that doesn’t have a girlfriend—it’s him. I don’t know why they would ever go and do that; just go to a Holiday Inn or a vacation cabin or whatever. You know that this happened at the same time The Evil Dead was happening somewhere else, so there’s lots of wood spirit legends that can get to you if you start telling ghost stories.

The last story was told by Elaine, who I had liked because she was so grumpy until she basically made this story kind of blaming the victim of an assault. The best part about the production of this is that all of the actors in the frame segment play different characters in the four anthology segments. I won’t tell you what happens at the end, but it makes me wonder if the Catahoula was real or maybe it was a tulpa that was created by somebody talking about something creepy. They say there’s a John in every group that’s obsessed with horror stories, and if you don’t know who it is, then maybe… Oh my god, what’s that?