Last October, there was no theme. I felt the absence of it. My viewings were random strays selected only after multiple stultifying marches through my streaming options, and ended up being about as satisfying.
So I decided to do a theme again this year, knowing that'll really only mean five to eight movies, as I will probably only watch them on the weekends while trying to keep up with my normal obligations during the week.
I don't know how I landed on this year's theme, but this is the upshot of it:
My quest for watching horror is always to be scared out of my mind. I regularly consult lists of the scariest horror movies of all time, though sadly, by this point I've seen most of them, and many of them don't earn the designation. At least I'm comforted by the fact that there are some out there I just haven't been able to access due to their rarity, but hope to do so at some point in the future.
Sometimes, I hit. I saw one of the scariest movies I've ever seen earlier this year when I watched Skinamarink, an experience I may repeat this October if I can convince my wife to bunker down for that film's unusual and patience-requiring approach.
But since being scared to death (like Jessica) is, in fact, such an infrequent occurrence, I decided just to set aside that ambition this October and go for some laughs.
So this year, I will be aiming to watch what others have considered the best horror comedies I haven't yet seen.
After having gone through a few less than ten different online lists yesterday, I compiled a Letterboxd list of 48 potential candidates. Seven or eight of these titles came up multiple times, so they are the ones I'll most likely be targeting, with the understanding that some of even the most popular options may elude me.
In my part of the world, for example, I was a little surprised to find I have no easy access to Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which is also known as Braindead. I searched both versions of the title on all my streaming services yesterday, even Disney+, and came up empty. There was not the option even to rent them through iTunes or Amazon.
I hope to find Dead Alive before October is over, but in the meantime, I've started in on the films I can access for free or for only a $3.99 rental.
Wes Carven's 1991 film The People Under the Stairs was a case of the latter, and also a mild disappointment in how the series started.
The disappointment didn't come from the movie itself, which I found demented in ways that pushed the boundaries of 1991 mainstream horror. It has a great teenage hero in Poindexter a.k.a. Fool, played by Brandon Adams. And it contains only the eighth screen appearance for Ving Rhames, which would be the second earliest among those I'd seen (he's also in 1990's Jacob's Ladder, a personal favorite).
No, my problem is that I didn't really find the movie funny -- nor did I think it was particularly supposed to be.
The villains are a pair of racist, sadistic slumlords, played by Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, and their villainy approaches glorious levels of camp. And there's a world-weary, put-upon aspect to the characters played by Rhames and Adams, which are in the neighborhood of the mildly humorous "I'm too old for this shit" perspective of Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies. There's an overall lightness of tone, I suppose, that prevents it from seeming as though Craven's primary goal is to scare you -- even though plenty of grisly things happen. (The journey of one particular corpse, as it gets increasingly torn apart, is particularly gruesome.)
So I think more than being disappointed by the "comedy" aspect of the genre title "horror comedy" for The People Under the Stairs, I have to adjust my perspective to understand that this genre title is employed in a sort of "know it when you see it" manner. The standard should not be whether you produce guffaws when watching the movie, since honestly, I don't really think that's what I'm going for with the movies I watch this month. I'm not looking for the next Scary Movie. (Not that this is an example of hilarious comedy, just obvious comedy.) I'm probably really looking for movies where horror genre tropes are occasionally leavened by absurdity, world-weary gallows humor or, yes, camp.
I also enjoyed The People Under the Stairs for its role as social satire, another way you can interpret comedy as insinuating its way into horror. Get Out was one of the titles that appeared regularly on these lists, and I don't really think of that as comedy. However, both of those films do interrogate and incorporate the racism of whites in a specific sort of horror as it would be experienced by Black people. The People Under the Stairs joins Candyman as early 1990s horror that brought familiar horror tropes to the projects, and though this one isn't quite the success that Candyman is, it was close enough to be mentioned in the same breath.
There's one other funny thing I wanted to mention about Craven's movie, which gets into the camp angle of the villains. McGill's "Daddy" character -- he's known as "Daddy" on Wikipedia and "Man" in the credits -- periodically dons a full-on Gimp costume, three years before we would learn to think of it as such in Pulp Fiction. So that marks twice in the early 1990s that Ving Rhames was forced to tangle with a Gimp.
Okay, probably try to watch a second one of these tonight, and write about it tomorrow.
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