Season of the Witch

Am I the only one who will be singing this damn song all day?



Definitely the best of all the Halloween movies, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is senseless and unscary, but its goal--redefining the Halloween franchise as a Creepshow/Twilight Zone/Night Gallery style serial horror anthology--was an admirable one. For one thing, if it had succeeded, it would have spared us endless Michael-Myers-centric sequels, and even the John Carpenter fans among us (a.k.a. Charlie) have to admit that would have been a good thing. Of course, it did not succeed. No one is arguing that it succeeded.

Anyway, Happy Happy Halloween! Silver Shamrock!

Tis the Season

For making awful stuff

Carrie (1976)

I just rewatched Carrie last week. The weird part about watching Carrie is that I always forget about the whole telekinesis thing. I know it's sort of at the center of her character, but the images that stick with me from the movie are almost completely independent of the paranormal aspect of the story. For me, you could edit out the light-bulb-bursting, knife-hurling, door-slamming parts and have the same movie, or maybe a better one. The scary stuff is partly in Sissy Spacek's face, and mostly in Piper Laurie's intensity.

I suppose we're meant to view Carrie as a revenge movie. The popular girls mistreat the weird high school outcast, but they don't know who they are dealing with, so they get roasted alive in the gym. In fact, the gym scene comes off as very silly, while the scenes between Carrie and her crazy Christian mother remain unsettling and sometimes scary (okay, sometimes silly too).

Or is it just me? Is it just that I am terrified of weird Christians? (This would explain the time when Kristin and I were at Blockbuster in Urbana, and I was like "We should rent The Exorcism of Emily Rose! It's so scary!" And then we asked the guy behind the counter, and he was like "Dude, have you seen that movie? It's not even a horror movie. It's like, a courtroom drama. No, we don't have it." Sort of as if he had personally tossed it in the dumpster to save customers from having to watch such an unscary movie.)

Did everyone know a new Saw movie is coming out?

"I don't think any other producer in Los Angeles would make a movie whose main character is a serial killer with terminal cancer." - Mark Burg, producer of all 6 Saw movies.

Homework assignment...

After a long night of sulking and self-loathing, I was told I should write something about the women and horror class I'm taking to honor the blog's origins and the month of horror, October. What I would like to write about my class isn't fit for this blog as I respect the elevated discourse established by the writers and readers who contribute to the site. There is also my fear that any criticisms leveled at established academics will come back to haunt me at my future tenure defense.

Horror is a rather problematic genre for me mostly because I'm a snob. I hate the hokiness (hokeyness?), the gore, the predictability of the plot, but really what I hate is the idea that what I see on the screen should scare me. Heart attacks scare me, unemployment scares me, but a ridiculous puppet devising over-wrought methods of execution ala the Saw franchise does not scare me. Part of me realizes that this is my own shortcoming as a cultural critic and I hope to one day see just why horror is so good. The other part of me is shaking its head at that statement and wonders why this blog post isn't on Peter Greenaway's brilliant film about landscape drawing, The Draughtman's Contract.

Appropriately enough, my first horror review will be on one of the most cliched of all October films, Halloween. Today's in-class screening was the film that put Carpenter on the map and gave hundreds of scrappy, independent upstarts the incentive to make shitty movies. But what can I say about Halloween that hasn't been said in the film's nine 'sequels' or the dearth of scholarship written about the film or by people who put 'John Carpenter' in the same sentence with 'Alfred Hitchcock' when discussing great filmmakers? After racking my brain for minutes, I sadly came to the realization that perhaps Halloween should be dearer to me than I originally thought.

My favorite 'low' genre has always been comic books. Nerdy kids like to read and mostly we like to read about muscle-bound heroes with super powers that have earned the trust and respect of everyone around them. Namely, characters who represent everything we aren't. However, comic books see fit to mock their fanbase by having Captain Pectorial spend 30 pages using brute force to beat his foe, guy with brain/mental/doctor/professor/science in his name. To sum up, guy I want to be constantly beats up guy I am and I love him for it. But more on my self-loathing in a moment.

Ignoring the theory of the 'final girl' and gender studies for just a moment, I'd like to think about the film's views on education. Laurie escapes horrific death not because she's a frigid virgin, but because she's a nerd and smart people survive (to remain virgins) in the world of horror movies. What frightens Laurie early in the movie? Leaving her chemistry book at school and therefore losing scholarships that would get her a better education and thus a better job. Well, she doesn't come out and say that but a nerd knows a nerd by any other name would still dread bad grades. And who does Michael Myers kill? People who run rampant over the English language using 'totally' as flippantly as people today use 'literally.' And what greater confirmation do we have for the endorsement of education than having a doctor act as the arbiter of justice filling Michael Myers full of lead. That's right, a paunchy, bald guy with no less than three degrees gets to save the day. Is that me on the screen? Am I finally a hero?

So, thank you, John Carpenter but not for turning nerds into knights and finally giving me my place in the sun. That theory has more holes in it than any ten of your films. No, thank you for letting the horror-hating guy I am take a beating from the horror-loving guy I'd like to be. You've so brilliantly recreated my relationship to comics that I might have to give this horror thing a try...

Zombieland (pre-review semi-rant)

I've been trying to decide if I want to see Zombieland or if I want to be a zombie-snob and insist that the golden age of the undead is behind us (by "golden age" I mean "time of troubles"). Last week Tor.com ran an interview with the director, praising the movie more than I had anticipated, and quoting him as saying "Well, I really think the thing that informed it most was my music video background." Hm. I have yet to decide how I feel about that. We can all name some directors who do have done innovative work in both music videos and feature length films: Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, etc. I wasn't sure, however, what Ruben Fleisher's "background" entails. So, in the spirit of research, If found the following:

1. Fleisher is responsible for a number of commercials, including one of those creepy Burger King ads in which a plastic-faced king delivers someone a whopper on a silver platter. Probably a good history for someone interested in the consumer culture tendency to slap -land to the end of something and start selling tee shirts. Also, I think the title Zombieland is funnier than I gave it credit for. It seems to me a little bit more honest than Land of the Dead. As much as Romero may have wanted to slam consumer culture, zombies are the new franchise, and, frankly, Romero's cultural critique is about as plastic and marketable as counter-culture thinking gets.*

2. Fleisher's music videos are extremely concerned with vintage and kitsch, drawing extensively on American pop culture. "Vintage" here especially means old AV technology (hand-held cameras, manual focus, boom boxes etc.), and pulp media (print ad culture, the formulaic music videos of the 60s, cartoon-y reinterpretations of late-80s/early 90s street culture):




3. Fleisher has some short videos that seem to be in response to army ads, and which are pretty sarcastic about the military. That seems good for mocking the extreme survivalist bent of a lot of zombie movies. Bad for those sort of serious about post-apocalyptic survival. Which, I mean, isn't us obviously.

4. He says he grew up in DC, but I'd bet $10 he grew up in northern Virginia.

5. He's uses a lot of color. I like that.

So I think he's the perfect person to make a movie like Zombieland, I'm just not sure I'm the perfect person to like it. I like the meta-media stuff he does in his videos, but I don't always like how clever his videos think they are. I'm afraid Zombieland will be the sensory-overload answer to Shaun of the Dead--less funny and less watchable. I fear Fleisher will become another director to overlook the lesson of Romero: the yammering, shopping masses are funny until they vote you their beloved leader.

All that said, I don't normally pre-review, and I'm looking forward to seeing how solid my predictions are. I will see it, and trusting Tor I've decided to see it in good faith.

*I concede, there are some possible exceptions.

Happy Birthday, NTC

It's been a year...