The Halloween List: Blumhouse's Halloween (2018), the Best Since John Carpenter's Original

Previously: the classic Prom Night.

This is the best made of the Halloween sequels. Halloween 2 in 1981 attempted to tell what happened immediately after the original film, and Halloween H20 attempted a soft reboot to address the kind of trauma Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was still processing. Both were equally unsatisfying in trying to expand on the simplicity of the original.Blumhouse's Halloween surpasses them by naturally playing with the archetypes of the original. Laurie has grown into the new Dr. Loomis, a reclusive gun nut waiting for the night her attacker might return, and has left a failed family in her wake. That gives us a cast with their own suburban lives to be turned upside on another fateful Halloween night.

The Halloween List for 2018

Happy October, everyone! This is my favorite month of the year. The leaves are turning, the air is fresh, and pop culture is overrun by spooky things. Today I'm hanging a ghost named Gus on my front door, and revealing this year's Halloween List.

The Halloween List is my annual blogathon reviewing scary movies. The rule is that every movie has to be a first-time viewing for me. I spend most of the year saving these films up. Each year is packed with interesting scary movies between Hollywood, domestic indies, and international film, but I'll also try to cover some things from Horror's past, like Kwaidan and the original Haunting. It all kicks off on Wednesday with some titles you probably recognize.

Wednesday, October 3: A Quiet Place & Emelie & Hereditary

Friday, October 5: Mandy & Slice & Summer of '84

Monday, October 8: The Meg & Pyewacket & Hold the Dark

Wednesday the 10th: Thelma & Annihilation & The Endless

Friday the 12th: A break from movies for two special miniseries: Ghoul & Erased

Monday the 15th: Unfriended: Dark Web & Office & Calibre

Wednesday the 17th: The Lobster & The Killing of the Sacred Deer

Friday the 19th: The Evil Eye & What Have You Done to Solange? & Tragedy Girls

Monday the 22nd: Upgrade & Suicide Club & Short Night of Glass Dolls

Tuesday the 23d: Blumhouse's brand new Halloween (2018)

Wednesday the 24th: Prom Night

Thursday the 25th: My Friend Dahmer & Suicide Club

Friday the 26th:  Kwaidan & The Haunting

Monday the 29th: Veronica & Veronica, the strange case of two movies from the same year with the same title and nothing in common.

October 31st, Halloween itself: The Mummy (1932), The Mummy (1959), The Mummy (1999), and The Mummy (2017). A special four-part feature on all four iterations of the classic Mummy franchise.

What looks good to you? What are you watching this October?

Click here for Day One, with A Quiet Place, Emelie, and Hereditary!

The Halloween List: Sadako Vs. Kayako (AKA: The Ring Vs. The Grudge)

Sadako Vs. Kayako (2016)
If you were expecting reviews of two modern classics, I've got a surprise for you! This isn't contrasting the two films. It's a review of the much-overlooked movie in which their monsters actually fight. This is a real movie that really happened.

This is a campy and totally amusing crossover that’s almost as perfect as Freddy Vs. Jason, and has very similar sensibilities. If you enjoy the two franchises, it’s a blast to see people thrust through the paces of both hauntings, trying to survive both having seen the haunted tape and trespassed in the forbidden house.

Some people said Sadako (Samara in the U.S.) and Kayako aren’t in much of the movie, but both show up early on, and neither franchise has ever been about the two being lingering on-screen presences. They are slow hauntings that lead towards huge catastrophes. What our heroes have to do is cross the streams – to get both ghosts to follow them, and clash, in the hopes to destroying each other and sparing the living.

The Halloween List: The Green Room (AKA Patrick Stewart?!)

Patrick Stewart plays the leader of a ground of backwoods skinheads trying to kill a Punk band.

Patrick Freaking Stewart. Captain Picard. Professor X. On his evilest day he was Captain Ahab, which was fine because that guy came out of a classic novel. The moment that Stewart walks into The Green Room and casually asks for the situation before instructing his fellow skinheads on the best way to break into a locked room and kill off the rest of the witnesses, it is jarring. This is Stewart barely changing his accent, just dropping a little of his warmth to fit in with the other drug runners.

The simple plot follows a never-gonna-be Punk band playing in the least popular venues. After doing an afternoon show at a taco hut, they drive into the woods for a rural bar. In a movie with several awkwardly funny moments, they open their set with a song deriding Nazis, while skinheads in the crowd check their swastika shirts and SS tattoos. I don’t believe in blaming victims, but at a certain point you might be asking to be the victims in a Horror movie.

Under the Skin Vs. It Follows (Vs. Sexuality)

Today's is going to be a long post. Instead of just writing independent reviews of the two hot-topic films, I want to talk about them in relation to each other. If you haven’t gotten to them yet, I won’t spoil the third act of either. But Under the Skin and It Follows are very interesting Horror movies to have come out so close to each other – they’re both films about victimization, but from opposite sides of it. They’re both about predators hijacking sexuality for their own unknowable ends.

But most people I know like one and loathe the other. When they condemn whichever of the two they dislike, they label it sex-negative. I disagree with that reading for either film. Rather, both feel rooted in Horror’s history of finding something desirable and finding a way to make it terrifying. Friday the 13^th did that with cabin vacations; Jaws did it for swimming; and it’s easy to forget, having grown up with John Carpenter’s Halloween, that the holiday wasn’t always so blood-soaked, but rather that movie helmed a change in cultural attitudes around the holiday.

Unfortunately Halloween also helped cement tropes about sexuality in Horror. The tropes are unhealthy, and even baffling when you find the liberal attitudes of their screen writers and directors. John Carpenter and Wes Craven were startled when people confronted them about things latent in their work. It's why Craven went out of his way to subvert some of those tropes in Scream.

So when Horror turns sex into an actual theme, it has to be mindful. Slasher Movies didn’t originally intend to punish teen sexuality, but it became a tradition, and one that It Follows deliberately fights back against. Under the Skin goes for something weirder.

Let’s look.

The Halloween List: The Guest

The Guest s another of those movies I watched knowing nothing about. It's such a pleasure to take recommendations from friends and find out the premise of a movie as it unfolds. This is a particularly nimble film with a very sticky opening, and if you want to just dive into a Thriller this weekend, The Guest is a good shot.

My vague first paragraph out of the way: The Guest is about a family mourning the death of their oldest son, and are interrupted by a mysterious stranger who says he deserved in the military with him. He quickly ingratiates himself with stories and awkward politeness, and whenever their other children get in trouble, he's there to help. Except in breaking up a fight, he's surprisingly vicious. Often we catch him watching the family with dead eyes, like everything he's doing is an act. But if it is, then why is he here?

It feels like a piece of 80's B-cinema, a worthy successor to The Stepfather, except the dangerous man is this time filling the empty role of a brother. It's greatly helped by a synth-heavy soundtrack that tickles at the Stranger Things part of your brain.

He's not just a stalker - he intervenes with a school principle, local drug dealers, and a misbehaving boyfriend as though he really has the family's best interests in mind. But he'll kill to preserve those best interests. You're waiting for either a secret malice or his overprotectiveness to boil over when the family's daughter calls the military. Just one phone call scrambles people through the chain of command, until Fringe's own Lance Reddick shows up to rein the mystery man in. It's a lot of fun pretending the movie is a secret episode of Fringe.

You can go back and forth over whether this is Horror - it's more of a cheesy Thriller with moments of high intensity, and that happens to take place on Halloween. But by the end, it completely validates itself as an October watch. We have to hunt a bad guy through the school's freaking Haunted House display!

Eleven Horror Stories with Happy Endings (Obviously, SPOILERS)

The other night, a friend of mine said I should've expected SOMA ending grimly because "it's Horror." It bugs me when people talk like that, because Horror doesn't have to end badly. It's actually dangerous to the genre if the endings are predictable. That's why the best Twilight Zone episodes challenge our expectations.

I've written before about not particularly liking either Happy or Sad endings. Sometimes an ending fits a particular story, and often Happiness is a surprisingly good fit for Horror. They're natural compliments to each other: go through the tumult of a scary story for the relief of an ending. It reminds me of Jack McDevitt once yelling at a WorldCon, "I'm not reading five hundred pages just to read the hero died at the end!"

Yet I love Horror, which feels more inclined every decade to end with everyone dead, or at best, doomed. So join me for a few scary movies that end well for the heroes. Maybe we'll learn something.

I'll even start with the most obvious entry so that if you've clicked here by accident, you'll only have the end of a hundred-year-old novel spoiled.

1. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)

Not Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, which has a runtime more decadent than its costume design. But the formative vampire story for generations had the good guys triumph. It's an old-fashioned monster story: we find a monster, it scares us, and then we win. Life expectancy was lower in 1897, so endings went easier on us.

But seriously, read that ending. The evil sisters go down, Quincey and Harker shank Dracula, and Mina and Jonathan have a baby and live happily ever after. Stoker originally made their victory so overwhelming that Dracula's own castle died and fell apart.

Ultimately, Stoker decided killing the evil real estate was too much.

Bathroom Monologue: Black Cat Monologue

 

"This penguin is good and thoroughly conquered! Typically, were I to best a bird, it would be properly devoured, yet this, this flightless failure among feathered creatures yields a grain of companionship. There is something to resting atop her, without complaint or wrestling, as though she needs my companionship as much as I need her pillowy nature. If there other cat asks, I will have to execute her. I hope the other cat does not ask. I'm fast taken to having this bed of bird."

For Elephant’s Child

It's Incorporeal Vengeance Week!

Reminder: October 28-October 30th is an open “vengeance” period for all licensed incorporeal entities. Any human beings or related physical entities who have run afoul of the dead or generally incorporeal are advised to make good on all pacts and make reparations for all indiscretions by midnight of October 27th at the very latest.

Due to the sequester, local governments will not be providing any assistance or clean-up related to such massacres.

For non-physical entities who cannot rise from the crypt or claw their way into reality for vengeance by October 30th, there is an additional grace period extending to November 28th. Applicants must have at least two signed evaluations from the government-recognized Spiritualists and Theologians List in order to qualify for the grace period. The government apologizes for the grace period closing on November 28th, but we need those department stores unhaunted for Black Friday.

To our citizens of fleshy substance, remember:

• Practice respectful rites!
• Make good on your pacts!
• Avoid unnecessary transgressions against the memories of the arcane!
• Get a costume together for the Halloween Parade of Relief on the 31st! We sure hope to see you there!

Halloween Calendar.

Bathroom Haiku: Horrorku Romantic Ad

Single white male, tall

seeks fem, MUST be resourceful

kinks: Asphyx, Closets