After a long and edifying journey, Jim (again) says goodbye to I Do Movies Badly and the friends he made along the way.

Alonso Duralde, podcaster extraordinaire and author of "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas," returns to IDMB for the annual tradition of Christmas recommendations - this time with a bloody twist. On brand for 2020, Alonso's recommendations for this year are Christmas horror films and they're not the ones you'd expect: Curtis Harrington's Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), Lewis Jackson's Christmas Evil (1980), and Chris Peckover's Better Watch Out (2016).

In the pantheon of IDMB movies that have befuddled me, there's Igmar Bergman's Person, Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror, Kim Ki-duk's The Isles, and now, there's Andrzej Zulawski's Possession.

House is uh...an indescribable film. Avant-garde haunted house horror-comedy, Obayashi's absurdist answer to Jaws is technically innovative, off the wall ridiculous, and a seeming deconstruction of horror archetypes. Also, boring and exhausting (unless you're Chuck Stephens)

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a darkly comic tale of moral and social rigidity in which an unseen act brings out the inherent darkness in its protagonist. The balance that Lanthimos strikes between absurdity and horror is superb, but does our protagonist deserve what befalls him?

Here's where you can find The Killing of a Sacred Deer review from RogerEbert.com by Brian Tallerico

Benny Krown returns to I Do Movies Badly for the November (and a little bit of December) theme of Highbrow Horror! The guest whose last appearance to talk about Abbas Kiarostami has equal pretensions on his mind, discussing his relationship with the horror genre, what it means to be highbrow/arthouse/pretentious, and recommending three horror films that exist well outside the mainstream consciousness: Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Dear (2017), Nobuhiko Obayashi's House (1977), and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981).

Ma is neither great nor terrible, though its quality would certainly lean more towards the latter if not for the casting of and rewriting for Octavia Spencer, whose portrayal of a character not written to be African-American lends a subtext of tokenism and how victimization perpetuates victimization.

After a discussion of the film, some news on the direction of the podcast for the remainder of the year (SPOILERS: it's horror).

What can be said about a film that in just 3 years has already been canonized as a classic and has inspired classes in academia? All I can really add to the conversation about Get Out are the reasons that I think it's an excellent horror film along with why it's a fucking absurd critique to say "if the protagonist was white, we wouldn't be talking about it."