31 Horror Films To Watch This October

Desperate to finance a picture to shoot alongside Basket Case 2, Frank Henenlotter improvised Frankenhooker’s plot in a pitch meeting, riffing on The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1963) and bringing it into the 90s with the protagonist now an employee of New Jersey Electric who loses his beloved to a souped-up, out-of-control lawnmower.

Thank goodness Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is “Sort of a surgeon in his spare time” because he can stash his fiancee’s severed head in his lab and read it poetry in between attempting to procure a new body. This he does by window-shopping Times Square’s working girls, searching for the one he can make a new woman out of, which allows Henenlotter to depict New York’s scuzzier elements in much the same way as he did in Basket Case (1982).

Lighter in tone and more cartoonish than Henenlotter’s previous films, Frankenhooker stood out on release by virtue of not being a slasher sequel, but the blending of horror, comedy and gross-out setpieces works better here than in Basket Case 2 and besides, how can you hate a film with the tagline, “A terrifying tale of sluts and bolts!”