A horrifying trend?

It's the just prerogative of a cynical cinephile to talk about how dumb a particular horror movie was and how little it scared them.

For this particular cynical cinephile, though, it's becoming increasingly less common.

And I can't tell if that's due to a decrease in my cynicism, or an increase in the quality of horror movies.

Or maybe I'm just becoming a wuss.

Anyway, the raw materials of this discussion is that I've noticed myself becoming increasingly receptive to horror movies, even the ones most people think are terrible. That probably requires some rephrasing. I've always been receptive to horror movies, as being scared is one of my favorite emotions to experience during a movie. But I've frequently been disappointed by horror movies' actual ability to do that.

Not lately, though. I'm not sure how far back this goes, but a couple prominent examples in recent months were what prompted me to start writing.

The first was Dark Skies, which I watched back on August 14th and ended up writing about here. I had known this one was not particularly well received, but I watched it out of a general curiosity and a specific appreciation for the work of Keri Russell. I ended up getting the willies scared out of me, in part because of the influence of another horror movie I watched last Halloween, The Nightmare (as discussed in more detail in that post). I gave Dark Skies four stars on Letterboxd, grading on the general quality of the film (it was good!) but particularly on the quality of the fear it generated in me. That was at least two stars more than anyone else gave it.

Then earlier this month I watched Sinister, another film I talked about (here) because of its generic adjectival name, which was a trend back in 2012. Sinister also threw me a loop. It features pretty standard ingredients for a modern horror movie, especially one produced by Jason Blum -- scary kids, old movie footage and a demon insinuating himself into those videos, the minds of the scary kids, and the hallways of the protagonist's house. Yet I watched this movie with what seemed like a constant chill. Again I gave this film four stars, and again that was an outlier in terms of the average critical take. Then again, the Blum-produced The Gallows really creeped me out last year, and someone I greatly respect selected it as his worst movie of the year. (Maybe it's because both films feature footage of someone being hanged on tape or in 8mm. Maybe that's one of my triggers.)

Then last Saturday night we started V/H/S, and I finished it in the wee hours of this Saturday morning. (And I'm talking really wee -- after I fell asleep on the couch from about 10:30 to about 2, I finished it between 2:30 and 3:30, which certainly improved the scare factor. Starting to have too many scary movies to watch before Halloween, and too few nights to do it.) I suppose the general critical reception for V/H/S is a bit better than to either of the previous two films I've discussed, but V/H/S has also seemed to get kind of lost in the recent trend of found footage and horror anthology movies (like The ABCs of Death, which in general I did not like -- which did not prevent me from laboriously ranking the 26 short films in this post. Meanwhile, the current post quickly becomes an anthology of my previous posts.) The quality varied very little in the five (or six, if you count the framing story) short films contained here, and each had something about it that I found pretty disturbing. This time I reined myself in and gave it only 3.5 stars.

Oddly, it was the prestigious horror movie I saw this month -- Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak -- that did very little for me. (And again, here's a link if you want it.) Though I did think it had a few scary moments in terms of the sheer effectiveness of the ghost character design.

So do I scare more easily than I once did? Or am I just more forgiving about films in general?

I've discussed a number of times how much more likely I am to give out ratings in the three- to five-star range than I am to give out ratings in the one- to three-star range. Part of that is, of course, self-selection. You never intend to watch bad movies -- except when you do, of course -- and I think the more movies you watch, the better you are at determining which ones will reward the decision to watch them. Most movie fans surely like more movies than they dislike, because curating your viewing experience is more likely to occur among people who are not critics and who are paying for every movie they see.

But horror movies have often been a genre where I opt in, even if I think there's a good chance the movie will disappoint me. So I should be seeing as many bad ones as good ones. Lately, though, it seems I'm seeing only good ones. And it's worth wondering if this is just a good period of selection for me, or a lowering of the bar for what I consider a good movie.

I suppose I require further research on the topic. Which means I'll have to keep seeing plenty of horror movies, even when it's not October.

I guess it's a good thing that I'm actually getting scares from the few horror movies I've seen in an October where I've ended up having a variety of non-horror demands on my viewing schedule. If I'm only going to see a few, best that it's a scary few.

A Nightmare on Curran Street

Curran Street being the name of the actual street I live on, and The Nightmare being the name of the scariest documentary I've ever seen.

It had been the obvious candidate to watch all week -- for a couple weeks, actually -- when planning out a Halloween night viewing. We hadn't even vetted any of the hundreds of other available candidates on Netflix. But always bothering me slightly, whenever I thought about it, was the fact that it was a non-fiction film. And it was still supposed to be incredibly scary.

I'd have to see it to believe it. Now that I've seen it, I believe it.

I'm not even sure if I can think of another documentary that I've seen that was scary at all, let alone possibly one of the 25 scariest movies I've ever seen. I mean, I've seen scary behavior in a documentary. But it was something that was under investigation, something reported dispassionately in the context of the type of research that goes into preparing any documentary. Not something that I thought would give me nightmares.

Well, I'm writing this right as I'm going to sleep, so I can't say for sure about the nightmares. But my wife is already sure she's going to have them. In fact, she's sure she's going to talk herself into the same type of sleep paralysis that is the focus of Rodney Ascher's film, which in fact is described at one point as something that people can talk themselves into -- or rather, something people hear someone else tell them about, then discover themselves having as well because the suggestion was placed into their subconscious. It's like some kind of STD of nocturnal torment.

So I should tell you a bit about this movie. It does indeed deal with a condition affecting some people that has been deemed, for want of a better term, "sleep paralysis." The reason this is a problematic term is that it's not actually a physical condition that is affecting them. People who experience this sleep disorder only think they are actually awake, only think they actually can't move. However, as anyone who has experienced a particularly vivid dream will attest, thinking you're awake is often the mental equivalent of actually being awake, given the similarities in the way your brain processes the things happening to you and feels the corresponding emotions. Once you're actually awake, it's easy to say, "Oh, that was just a dream." But when you're in the dream, no such distinction is possible.

So what seems to happen is that the person will fall asleep, but not realize they've fallen asleep as their dream essentially picks up where reality left off. In other words, it starts out as the world's most realistic dream, essentially creating a seamless bridge between the waking state and the dreaming state, which in turn convinces the dreamer that he or she is still awake. What starts to happen to these unaware dreamers is that they start perceiving things happening to them, right there in their bedroom -- a disturbingly similar set of things. It often starts with what seems like a hallucination of colors in front of them, as well as a tingling in their bodies and a sense of vibration around them. But things only get more sinister from there. People suffering from sleep paralysis usually report hearing something tapping at their bedroom window, or actually feeling a presence that they usually describe as evil in the room. If that weren't enough, they then usually see this presence, which some describe as the three-dimensional shadow of a figure entering the room and coming closer to them, or others compare to that popular image of the alien with the almond-shaped eyes.

What all sufferers have in common: They want to move, but they can't.

They can't roll. They can't shimmy. They can't even twitch. And they certainly can't talk or scream out for help.

It gets worse for some of them. Sometimes this creature talks to them, even screams at them. Other times it appears to climb on top of them. Still other times it causes a sensation of actual pain, pain they say they can still experience upon wakening. It never does anything like transform into a full-on boogeyman with clear features, or start to inflict any actual violence on them. But maybe that's all the worse, because it keeps things on the level of mental torment. In other words, pure fear, none of it based on the practical concern about being sliced in two by an axe or torn limb from limb.

So how, you ask, is this a documentary?

The Nightmare is constructed as a series of interviews with about six people -- mostly from the U.S., but one from England -- who recount their experiences with sleep paralysis, many in eerily similar details to each other. But that doesn't mean this is the entirety of the film's content. Nope, that in itself would be pretty tame.

What Ascher does to terrify us is that he creates visualizations and reenactments of what they're describing, using first-rate special effects to give their words a physical embodiment that is both spine-tingling and palpable.

Is that cheating for a documentary?

No way. Never once does Ascher try to pass this off as anything but a reenactment. That may be a rather obvious statement, but it's probably worth stating clearly. Just because a movie is a documentary does not mean it might not feature actors acting out scenes that are specifically staged as reenactments. The problem is that the use of such a tool is often ineffective, since the reenactments are not usually directed well and come across as clearly artificial. These aren't like that. These are anything but cheesy.

And what's so scary about these reenactments is not the images themselves, which would make effective additions to almost any fiction horror movie but are not in and of themselves original images. In fact, that's kind of the point, that some of the described images may somehow be embedded in the shared unconscious of the human race, and may have in fact helped inspire the monsters that have appeared in the oral, written and cinematic traditions of cultures around the world.

No, what's so scary about these reenactments is that they are things that people said have really happened to them. They weren't just dreamed up by a screenwriter. To these victims, what we see in this movie is real to them. They told Ascher that this is what the figures they saw looked like, and Ascher created figures that looked exactly like that. And now we're seeing those figures.

It would be like if you were describing the guy who mugged you to a police sketch artist, and the artist drew a photorealistic image of what the guy actually looked like.

And once you know that people out there, sane people, have seen frightening images that looked almost exactly like these, or possibly worse -- and that this could potentially happen to you -- well, that's not only going to send a chill down your spine. That's going to send a chill down the chill that's already going down your spine.

What's most horrible for these people is that they don't have just one or two episodes of this. They have one or two episodes a week. Or sometimes they have it occurring nightly for weeks on end, or periodically for years on end. Some of the people interviewed in this movie have suffered the condition their whole lives, and now they are adults.

They know that this stuff is a dream -- they do. In one very clear-cut case of that, a guy describes an experience in which he was not actually paralyzed, and shattered his phone when weird shit started happening to him during an episode. When he awoke a moment later, he discovered his phone still intact by his bedside, and only two minutes having passed since he first started trying to go to sleep.

But just because they know it's not "real" does not make it any less real. If you are scared shitless every night, it hardly matters if what's scaring you is real or not. What matters is that you can't control it, you can't stop it from happening, and you can't stop fear from being the primary emotion that accompanies it. Over time, that's enough to drive the sanest person insane. And when you consider the similarity of the things these people experience reporting, you probably have to ask yourself: Well, isn't it real on some level?

Now the question I'm asking myself is: Is this going to happen to ME? Tonight?

The answer is, "I don't know, but I'm about to find out."

I've written what I've written so far in about the 45 minutes since I finished watching The Nightmare. I guess what I should probably do is publish it now, and write a comment in the morning to tell you if I'm still alive. But I expect that comparatively few of you will read this in its first eight to ten hours live online, so you won't be sitting there, holding your breath, just waiting for me to confirm I survived the night. It would be cool if you were, but let's be real about it. It'll probably be all the same to you if I just include my follow-up in the body of this piece, and it'll save you the work of having to jump to my comments section. (Though if that encouraged you to comment, I guess that would be a happy byproduct.)

So instead I'll just give you a row of asterisks to separate the writing I've done on Halloween night and the writing I hope to do on the morning of Sunday, November 1st.

Because I don't really think I will sleep paralyze myself to death tonight ... do I?

Do I?

                                         ************

Hey there. It's the next morning and I'm okay. I did sleep horribly, though.

The thing is, the reasons for my horrible sleep seem to have had nothing to do with The Nightmare.

They didn't even have anything to do with my nearly two-year-old, who is usually the culprit when my wife and I wake up the next morning more bleary-eyed than usual.

Nope. It was just a shitty night's sleep.

At 1 a.m., I woke up thirsty and too hot. My stomach was also slightly bothered by our pizza dinner. I'd known it was too hot when I'd gone to sleep, but got to sleep anyway. To try to abate the heat, I opened one of our windows, but it was also too windy out. (That's a thing in Melbourne -- being both hot and windy -- though the heat in this case was something that was trapped inside our house.) With the extra wind, the blinds were rattling against the window, which was too noisy. (But did not contribute to a sense of fear that I thought one or both of us may be experiencing.) Still, I ultimately fell asleep again.

At around 3:30, I woke up again, drenched in sweat. My wife had closed the window, and I wasn't about to open it again. So I moved myself to the living room, where I could prop open the living room door and be cooled that way. But I didn't get to sleep immediately. A lot of tossing and turning was first required.

Time to dig our fans out for the season, I guess.

In short, no strange colors. No tingling sensations. No dark figures moving toward me.

Do I sound disappointed? Yeah, I guess a little. But only because that's what a good scary movie does to you. You want to stay in its grip for a little while after you finish it. And I was definitely in The Nightmare's grip in one way or another, even if it was only manifesting itself in me not being able to find that ideal comfy angle in which to repose my body.

If you think a restless night under the covers is the least way you can honor Halloween -- and you've still got your Halloween night viewing ahead of you in the U.S. -- then The Nightmare is available for streaming on Netflix.

I am the killer, and other Maniacal thoughts

The ultimate test of how much a movie disturbs you is whether you have nightmares about it.

It's not, however, the ultimate test of how good it is, as we shall see.

Maniac, a remake of a 1980 movie of the same name that I had never heard of, stars Elijah Wood as a man who restores mannequins for a living, and kills people as a hobby. Not just people, but women. Not just women, but women who remind him in some way of his slut of a mother, who came home with a different man and a different drug habit every night when he was a child. And not just kill them, but scalp them and leave their bleeding hair atop the heads of his mannequins, where it attracts more flies than he can ever shoo away with a can of aerosol spray.

Not just kill them, but kill them from the perspective of you, the viewer.

See, almost the whole movie is in POV. Director Franck Khalfoun does abandon the technique every once in awhile when necessary to give a clearer idea of something the character is doing, which wouldn't be obvious when looking through his own eyes, or (to be honest) so that Elijah Wood can make more appearances on screen than just his voice and his reflection in mirrors. But the extent to which Khalfoun et al stick to the gimmick is impressive, given how tricky it becomes at times.

What's more, the gimmick never takes on the worst connotations of that word, which is to become laughable. In fact, just the opposite. From the first disturbing kill -- filmed with his face just inches away from hers, a knife sunk into her head from the underside of the jaw upward, the light fading from her eyes as one of the eyes becomes bloodshot -- I felt like I was more in the world of a killer than I had ever felt before.

It was downright discomfiting, needless to say.

What struck me about the POV was not just the most obvious ways it put you in a killer's shoes, as in, seeing what it feels like to kill through his eyes. Some of the most effective uses of the POV made me understand lesser details of the life of a misfit, like the way people's expressions change when they realize you are someone creepy or otherwise distasteful. I've been lucky to live my life without many people looking at me in revulsion, so this perspective was interesting to have. I also felt I understood the failure of the moments when his facade slips away, effectively having the moment he had where a carefully constructed lie suddenly contradicts itself.

Yep, at times, I was the killer indeed.

And if I had any doubt, I needed only to retire for the night. I had a restless night's sleep, a fact my wife confirmed this morning when we awoke. I kept on believing I had brought something into the house that would harm my family if I turned my back (fell back to sleep) for too long.

In short, I was afraid of myself.

And I'm pretty sure Maniac is the first film that has ever caused that kind of reaction in me.

However, I'm not sure how that makes me feel.

You could argue that if a film sticks with you -- and Maniac may be clinging to me like gum on the bottom of my shoe for a good week now -- that alone is an objective argument for its quality. But the other thing in life that sticks with you is images you can't unsee, and many times wish you hadn't seen. Those can be argued as objectively bad.

So which is Maniac?

Until I've figured this out, I can't give Maniac a star rating on Letterboxd or rank it with my 2013 films. I know it's an exceedingly powerful use of the tools of cinema, but I don't know if it's a repugnant use of those tools that I should be shunning, or a value-neutral bit of invigorating brilliance.

To add a layer of complexity to this whole "you are the killer" aesthetic, a gruesome bit of coincidence can be found in the fact that the movie's awful protagonist and its director are both named Frank. Sure, they spell it differently -- the character is Frank Zito, the director is Franck Khalfoun -- but it's a bit chilling anyway. And it is only coincidence, since the character in the original 1980 film is also named Frank Zito. Unless you want to believe that Khalfoun was hired to do the job because of his first name, though I think you'd have to be crazier than Frank Zito to believe that.

Some other Maniac thoughts ...

The creepiest guy on the block

At first blush, Elijah Wood playing a serial killer seems a bit like stunt casting. "How could a guy who looks so innocent, who has such a baby face, be a cold-blooded murderer?"

Does Wood look so innocent, though?

It seems like casting directors have been seeing the inborn psycho in Elijah Wood for years now.

If you want examples, you can go all the way back to 2004 with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Wood plays a technician in the business of wiping people's memories, who steals information that has been wiped from Kate Winslet's mind in order to seduce her. Pretty creepy.

The following year, Wood plays one of the most bizarre and unsettling characters in Sin City. I remembered him as some kind of rapist, but Wikipedia tells me the character is a murderer and a cannibal. (Maybe one of those two titles presupposes the other.) I just remember him being gross and off-putting.

For the past couple years, Wood has been starring in the TV show Wilfred, in which he plays a suicidal young lawyer who imagines he has a relationship with a talking dog. He's the show's protagonist and is often portrayed in a flattering light, but you never really forget that this guy is probably crazy, and may be a danger to himself and others.

Considering this, Maniac is not such a surprise, is it?

Sure, Wood has a baby face, but he also has those bug eyes that can be twisted for nasty use. You might even say that his most iconic role, Frodo Baggins, makes use of the crazy Wood. Several times, and in particular at the end of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, he is gripped by the all-consuming power of the ring, and those bug eyes light up with demented fury.

The next time I find myself walking toward Elijah Wood, I may just cross to the other side of the street.

Same song, same vibe, different movie

Early on in Maniac, Wood's Frank Zito is on a blind internet date with a cute alt chick, and back at her apartment she turns on the song "Goodbye Horses" by Psyche. You know this date isn't going to end well.

Don't recognize that song by name? How about by context? It's also playing in Silence of the Lambs when Buffalo Bill does his little dance in front of the mirror, hiding his manhood between his legs in order to appear to himself as a woman.

At first I thought it was a ripoff, an attempt to steal the power of a highly effective scene from a classic psycho killer movie, and use it to achieve the same sense of dread in this film. Eventually, though, I just decided it was a nice homage, and didn't worry about the apparent theft because it had an end positive result for this movie's mood. That song just gives off a sense of moral decay.

It got me thinking about some other songs that have been reused for similar purposes in multiple movies, and whether the second use works (feels like a homage) or doesn't work (feels like a theft). In this discussion I'll exclude some of the go-to drug songs ("Cocaine," "Sweet Jane"). They have been used so many times to illustrate drug use on screen, that to give that kind of lack of creativity any further ink is a disservice to all thinking filmmakers.

"Oh Yeah" - Yello. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and The Secret of My Success (1987)

You know -- "Bowmp bowmp, chick-a-chick-ahhh!" Both movies use it when someone is examining something gorgeous and impressive -- a Ferrari in Ferris Bueller's, a sexy rich woman in Success. It's certainly a theft by the lesser Success, but I didn't experience it that way when I first saw it, for the simple fact that I saw Secret of My Success before I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Theme song. Badlands (1973) and True Romance (1993)

Sorry to not have the exact name of the song, because they are actually listed as different songs, but they are almost exactly the same and are clearly intended as an homage by Tony Scott/Quentin Tarantino to Terrence Malick. (Actually, I don't know whose homage it is -- it seems too cool for Scott to come up with, but why would the screenwriter be involved in the music?) Anyway, this theme played on some kind of wood xylophone (that's how it sounds, anyway) was one of the primary reasons I didn't come around on True Romance as quickly as others did, though I'm there now. Homage, I guess.

Well, that was kind of a non-starter. I imagined myself having a number of examples here, but ran out after two. Lame. Well, I started this over 12 hours ago, and now I just want to publish it.

Still haven't chosen that star rating yet, though.

R for feaR, or "If I were 13 I'd piss my pants"

The most sustained period of dread I've ever experienced in a movie theater was back in the mid-1980s, when I saw Poltergeist during what must have been a re-release. (I was young, but there was no way I was only eight, when the film had its first run in 1982.)

What I remember was of course fear, but more than that was the feeling that I couldn't escape from it -- that it surrounded me. It was not only the current fear, and the fear I'd already had, but the sense of the fear I still had waiting for me. I remember feeling a distinct sense of relief during the sequence in the middle of the night, when nothing is terrorizing the living hell out of the family and they just sit there, bonding in hushed whispers. I knew for at least five or ten minutes, I could relax.

The PG-13 rating did not yet exist when Poltergeist came out, but I really wish it had been there to save me. I was too young to see Poltergeist, even if I now consider it the top horror experience of my long and distinguished career.

Just as today, I think the R rating should have saved some 13-year-olds who weren't much dissuaded by Mama's measly PG-13.

Simply put, this is a scary fucking movie. At times, anyway.

But movies are not rated based on how likely they are to scare you. Movies get an R because of explicit sex, violence or language. (Which means that this post has already done enough to earn an R.) Mama has none of these things, but it can still scare the living shit out of a person.

A person over 17, methinks.

It makes me wonder whether the MPAA follows the letter of its own laws, but not the spirit.

If the point of a rating is to prevent children from being traumatized by things they shouldn't see, then the MPAA needs to give itself the leeway to be more flexible. I didn't think you'd ever see me advocating more stodginess on the part of the MPAA, but here I am.

The MPAA needs to have a sort-of sniff test about what should get an R. Yeah, I know they've got generic descriptors like "intense images" and "graphic images" and "adult content," but do they use them? It would seem like Mama would have been a perfect chance to do so.

You probably want to know at this point why I think Mama is so scary. Why don't I let the short film that Andy (Andres) Muschietti wrote and directed, before expanding it into a feature, speak for itself:

Were you a little chilled by that? Were you a lot chilled by that? Do you think at age 13 you'd want to watch that?

Now imagine a whole movie of that. And imagine feral children who scamper across the ground like spiders.

I suppose that Mama is not nearly the only example of a disturbing horror movie that got the lenient PG-13 rating, which provides almost no obstacle to maximum potential box office grosses, but it's the first movie I've seen that I remember causing me to wonder whether it wouldn't be just too much to handle for the average 13-year-old. And don't forget that those younger than 13 are almost certain to see it. The PG-13 rating is as much a guideline as anything, and I'm sure 10-year-olds are finding their way into this movie.

Let me pause in my prudish stance to assure you of something: I am not in the least critical of Mama itself. In fact, Mama scared me like I haven't been scared in the theater in some time. Even if the film weren't exceptionally crafted and acted, that alone would prompt me to give it a full recommendation.

I just wonder if the nearly 40-year-olds of 2040 won't be wondering whether they should have seen Mama when they did.

Then again, if they loved it as much as I (ultimately) loved Poltergeist, maybe that won't be a bad thing.

Up and running

Mama is the first movie I've seen released in 2013, which means I've just finished creating my two new Microsoft Word documents devoted to the films I see in 2013.

Always a fun moment. Glad to be back on the horse after putting 2012 to bed.

The Chastain Wing

Upon coming out of the theater where I saw Mama last night, I noticed that the only other movie playing in that wing of the theater was Zero Dark Thirty.

Making that the Jessica Chastain Wing of the theater.

And this wing shows you just how much this woman can really do. If you popped back and forth between these two theaters, you'd get the same terrific cheekbones and the same determined chin. But the Chastains you'd see would be entirely different.

In Zero Dark Thirty, you get Maya, an intensely focused CIA officer who is hellbent on finding the world's most wanted terrorist. She's headstrong and she plays with the big boys, but there's something hesitant about her, a softness at her core that leaves her not-so-secretly squeamish at what she and her government have to do to find Osama bin Laden. She's the consummate professional and she dresses the part, her fiery red hair acting as the sole sartorial hint of her rebelliousness.

In Mama, you get Annabel, a tattoed rock chick whose dark brown hair is cropped short with bangs at the front. She plays guitar in a hard rock band that might dabble in metal, though she wears Ramones t-shirts, tipping off her punk influences. She's tough and unsentimental, yet she demonstrates the same seriousness of purpose as Maya -- she won't abandon her boyfriend (boyfriend only!) when he decides to adopt his two nieces, who have spent the last five years living in a cabin in the woods.

Damn, can Chastain act.

Don't read this section if you haven't yet seen Mama

But then come back and read it once you've seen the movie. Don't forget!

It's a pretty common tactic to end a horror or thriller with the wounded survivors huddled together and finally safe, having survived their ordeal, knowing on some level that what lies ahead of them will be comparatively smooth sailing.

Not in Mama.

Oh yeah, the movie ends that way. But the future sailing hardly seems likely to be smooth.

For starters, you've got the minor detail that one of the two sisters dies. Although it's not spelled out in so many words, that's what the ending implies, and you have no good reason not to believe it. So, there's that.

But then what about the other dead bodies?

The therapist who had focused his entire career on the two feral girls has been killed, and so has their aunt, who actually fought their uncle (a brother, not an ex-husband) for their custody. How are you going to explain that to the cops, since there isn't a shred of evidence of the corporeal spirit who actually did the killings?

Add to that the fact that their uncle, who survives the ordeal, is the brother of a man who was wanted for murdering three people five years earlier, and was widely considered to have had a mental breakdown. This guy and his punk rock girlfriend are still going to be able to keep the surviving girl, even though the events that transpired (including the death of one of the girls) would have only confirmed the general suspicion that a judge was wrong to leave the kids in these people's hands in the first place?

So yeah, good luck with rest of your lives, folks.

Spawning the next generation of horror fans

I have a friend with an eight-year-old son who's been into ghoulies and goblins over half his young life.

You name it, he loves it. Ghosts. Skeletons. Witches. Jack-o-lanterns. Eyeballs. Fake blood. Even severed body parts don't faze him, though they would have to be the kind that looked pretty fake.

I'm sure that at least some of this has to do with having watched The Nightmare Before Christmas at a young age, and then seeing Jack Skellington and friends at Disneyland. But the joke was that he would start preparing for Halloween sometime in May. The best part of the joke was that it wasn't really a joke. He does start preparing in May -- or at least he used to. He'd probably start even earlier, except there has to be some amount of preparation that just qualifies as ridiculous -- even if our definition of what constitutes ridiculous might be different than his.

My friend's son is not alone. It seems that one of the chief ways for a young kid to assert his budding adulthood is to test his limits when it comes to fear. Even if this stuff is not all that scary, and the horror characters are pretty PG version of what they represent in reality, it still says something that young kids prefer things intended to scare them than things intended to be cute or make them laugh.

Naturally, the movies have taken notice.

Hotel Transylvania, opening today, is the middle of three high-profile animated movies released in a span of less than two months that seek to feed the macabre to children. Last month we got ParaNorman. Next month we'll get Frankenweenie.

Each of these movies actually appeals to me in some way, though it's unlikely I'll see any of them in the theater. At least they aren't just another movie featuring animals who team up for crazy adventures.

As discussed previously, the "fear" peddled here is very mild. My guess is that most of the characters in these films are comic relief, and their voices will be goofy if not actually cute.

Of course, this trend is nothing new -- it's just thrusting itself into the forefront of my consciousness because of the timing of these three movies. I'm not even sure there will be another movie aimed at children released during their two-month reign (unless you count Oogieloves. And really, do you?). Which means that if parents wanted to take their kids to the movies between early August and early October, they needed to test their children's tastes for this PG horror -- if their kids weren't already begging them to go, that is.

But like I said, it's nothing new. Allmovie.com has a very useful feature on each of its movie pages, which is to list similar movies -- a godsend when writing a post like this. The similar movies for ParaNorman include Coraline, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (the word corpse in the title of an animated movie?), Igor, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 9, James and the Giant Peach, Monster House, Beetlejuice, Alice in Wonderland, and of course The Nightmare Before Christmas, among others that don't advance my thesis in any useful way. Oh, and of course Hotel Transylvania and Frankenweenie. For Frankenweenie's page, you can add to those titles Edward Scissorhands (not really a kids movie), Where the Wild Things Are and some other rather inexplicable choices, including Midnight in Paris and When in Rome. (Hey, I never said the algorithm was perfect.) Transylvania's page also offers us Monsters Inc. (that should have come up earlier), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Addams Family.

So, "scaring" kids has been a big business for years.

In fact, you could argue that a film in which there isn't some kind of intense antagonist is dramatically limp. Think of how far Disney has gone portraying its variety of witches and wicked queens over the years. It would be easy to say that some of those baddies are more intense than they really need to be. But clearly, having something that's genuinely at least a little scary raises the stakes for kids.

Since Hotel Transylvania stars the voice of Adam Sandler, I'm going to say there's a ceiling on how scary it will actually be. However, I'd bet you a hundred bucks there will be at least one character who can remove some or all of his limbs, and possibly even his head.

As long as it doesn't look realistic, I guess.

My scariest movie

Somewhere along the way, I forgot exactly how much Poltergeist had scared the pants off me when I was a kid.

Monday night's Halloween viewing -- my first in a decade or longer -- reminded me quite effectively.

In fact, I now recall that when I saw it in the theater as a child, I emerged thinking that my parents should not have let me see it.

I mean, who says that? If anything, it's the other way around -- you always think your parents are being overprotective.

But if I saw it on its initial run, I would have been only nine years old -- possibly only eight years old. It's more likely I saw it on a re-release, maybe a couple years later. But it surely wasn't more than a couple years later, leaving me no older than 12 at the time.

It's fair to say I was haunted by Poltergeist for weeks. And it wasn't just the iconic imagery I don't need to remind you of here. I believe I saw it at a time when I was struggling with the concept of death for the first time, so I was even disturbed by things like Carol Ann's bird dying. (Which, incidentally, is the only "character" who dies in the whole movie -- and since the bird actually dies off screen before the narrative begins, you could say that the Poltergeist body count is actually zero.)

Zero dead bodies, in what may be the scariest movie I have ever seen.

(You don't count those corpses in the swimming pool, either, because they died years ago.)

At some point over the years, however, my perspective on Poltergeist changed from "that movie scared the shit out of me" to the more dispassionate "that movie is an effective horror classic, which perfectly encapsulates the Spielberg-ian themes of small-town USA turned on its head."

Monday night reminded me how much more intimate and immediate and primitive it really is.

Even though I would guess that was my fifth time seeing the movie, I still spent a large part of the movie in chills. Neither were the regular, intense chills my only physiological reaction to the movie. During the film's emotional climax, I felt myself get choked up several times -- and not even the times you'd think I'd get choked up, like the touching scene of ectoplasm-soaked reunion between the Freeling parents and their daughter, somehow still intact in her corporeal form, in the family bathtub. The rest of the time, the sheer intensity of it was enough to push tears to the brims of my eyelids. The climax has the same kind of tension as the end of Raiders ("Don't look at it Marion! Keep you're eyes shut!") with a ton more emotional involvement. Simply put, it slayed me.

But the emotional climax is not the end of the movie.

And here's where Poltergeist goes sort of wrong.

As I was watching the first 3/4 of Poltergeist, I was asking myself if this movie deserves to be considered among my top 20 films of all time. It's that good. Sure, the scares and tension are sustained with the skill of a master, but as good as that are the subtleties that allow you to believe these characters and instantly immerse yourself in their lives. One of my favorite scenes is our first real introduction to the parents, when they're talking casually in bed. Diane is smoking a joint (love the casualness of her drug use, which never makes you think she's a bad parent) while Steven is pantomiming a dive off the bed in the master bedroom. Their interactions are so natural, and you immediately believe that this is a real married couple who are, quite wonderfully, still delighted with each other after 15 or so years of marriage. I also love that when she first discovers that they might have ghosts, she's overjoyed just to be able to demonstrate a chair moving on its own from their kitchen into their dining room. She jumps up and down like an excited cheerleader. The movie has no need to go through all the machinations of various characters not believing that the house might be haunted -- it's got bigger fish to fry, and wants to get on to frying them.

For the record, my Flickchart ranking is still very generous -- I have it ranked 59th out of 3319 films. But the reason I don't have it ranked higher is the dubious third act.

Now granted, some of the things we remember most from Poltergeist occur in those last 20-25 minutes. But that doesn't mean there isn't a structural problem with this script. The real emotional climax is when the miniature mystic (played wonderfully by Zelda Rubinstein) does battle with "the beast" and coaxes Carol Ann back to the world of the living with the assistance of an exceptionally brave mother and father. But the movie is not over by then, not by a long shot.

The last section of the movie, after the primary tension of Carol Ann's survival has already been deflated, feels like a grab bag of things they wanted to get in somewhere. Let's suppose they shot the scenes chronologically, although that almost certainly didn't happen. It's like either Steven Spielberg or Tobe Hooper (more likely Spielberg) gathered the crew together and said "Wait! We still have to do that bit with the clown. And the bit where Jobeth climbs the walls of her bedroom. Oh, and the part with the corpses in the swimming pool. Shit, let's not forget the part where the coffins pop out of the ground. And that mouth we drew up in the bedroom closet -- that thing's awesome, we have to do it. Oh! And I almost forgot the skeletal beast that prevents Diane from entering her kids' bedroom. Guys, we've still got to fit all this in."

And Steven, don't forget the part where the house crumples up into a ball like a piece of notebook paper, and tumbles away into oblivion.

Perhaps the best example of the filmmakers' misunderstanding of how to play the last act is when the daughter, Dana (Dominique Dunne), returns home and screams "WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?" A great individual shot that must have been gangbusters in the trailers. But the fact remains that when she speaks this line, her entire family is in a car right behind her, about to permanently escape harm for the final time. All tension has pretty much dissipated at the point of the movie's most bat-shit crazy line.

However, I don't want your lingering impression of this piece to be that I have real criticisms with Poltergeist. It's still the movie that left me in a constant state of dread more than any other. I remember how much I loved the scene in the middle of the night at the house, when the team of paranormal investigators are first monitoring the house's spiritual activity. No one's really asleep but everyone is quiet, and they connect with each other in hushed, whispered conversations. I remember grabbing on to that wonderful scene as a lifeboat in the midst of terrifying chaos.

For at least one, fleeting moment, everyone was safe.

Ten movies not to watch when you're pregnant

Although we'd talked about how it looked creepy, and just original enough to be different, my wife admitted to me this week that she doesn't want to see Splice in the theater.

She didn't have to tell me the reason. I knew it was because she's six months pregnant.

See, Splice, the latest film from Cube director Vincenzo Natali, is about a couple scientists who recklessly create a hybrid of human and non-human tissue in their laboratory. The result is a fast-growing spawn that sprouts wings and has a nasty habit of disemboweling people. Or something equally unpleasant.

If this creature came on the scene as a full formed entity, that would be one thing. But it starts out as the slightly mutated newborn you see above.

Even if she'd had a completely uncomplicated pregnancy, I could forgive my wife for not wanting to see this movie before the baby is born. But there have been complications -- what pregnancy doesn't have complications these days? Thankfully, we seem to be past them, but I can certainly understand her being gun shy.

So that got me thinking about what other movies a person might avoid if they are great with child. When you're on an airplane, you don't want to watch movies about crashing airplanes; when you're pregnant, you don't want to watch movies about horrible things happening to babies. And there are some doozies out there.

Warning! Spoilers to follow! Read at your own risk!

Here are ten of those doozies:

10. Rosemary's Baby (1968, Roman Polanski). Even if you've never had sex with the devil, you still might want to avoid this story about a woman who is impregnated with the spawn of Satan. At least it has a positive lesson: If you should happen to give birth to the Antichrist, you should at least be a good mother to him. (See also -- or, also don't see: The Omen, The Bad Seed)

9. Trainspotting (1996, Danny Boyle). This probably taps in more to early parenthood fears than pregnancy fears, and probably only if you are addicted to smack. But there are a couple moments in this film a mother would never want to have to think about. Lesson: If you don't feed your baby, it will die. And possibly crawl on the ceiling.

8. The Butterfly Effect (2004, Eric Bress). This would-be trippy horror is more laughable than it is spooky, but one of those sort-of laughable parts is something an expectant mother would probably rather not see. Thinking that his life has caused nothing but pain for the ones he loves, the character played by Ashton Kutcher "reshuffles" time so he's a baby in his mother's womb. To prevent this harm to his loved ones, the fetus Kutcher strangles himself with his own umbilical cord. Hey, I suppose it's what we'd have Hitler do if it were possible.

7. Total Recall (1990, Paul Verhoeven). Having a baby on the inside of your stomach is one thing. Having it on the outside is quite another, even if your external stomach baby is as wise as Kuato, the external stomach baby growing out of Marshall Bell's George in this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle.

6. Alien (1979, Ridley Scott). But what if that baby on the inside wants to become a baby on the outside? A pregnant woman probably wonders if that isn't the baby's intention, kicking at the walls of her womb and trying to burst through to the open air. Kind of like the nasty little alien (aren't all babies "alien," in a sense?) that rips its way through John Hurt's chest at the dinner table in Scott's masterpiece.

5. Freddy Got Fingered (2001, Tom Green). There are a hundred reasons not to see Freddy Got Fingered, regardless of your reproductive status, but pregnant women in particular will probably not enjoy the part where Tom Green severs an umbilical cord with his teeth, then uses it to swing the newborn around his head like a lasso.

4. Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier). Although Rosemary's Baby is about an Antichrist baby, this is a whole different kind of Antichrist. Like Freddy Got Fingered, there are a hundred reasons not to see Lars von Trier's latest cinematic controversy (genital mutilation, anyone?), but the most salient one for expectant mothers is the opening scene. Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, distracted by graphic black-and-white sex, pay no attention as their infant son climbs to an open window and plunges to the street below. At least it's all very artistically done, with an orchestral score, dreamy slow motion, and a big grin on the face of the plunging baby.

3. The Fly 2 (1989, Chris Walas). The Fly 2 is the only film on this list I haven't seen, but I thought I should include it, because the reason I haven't seen it had everything to do with the process of delivery a baby. I remember seeing a trailer for The Fly 2 in which there was the horrifying suggestion of Geena Davis giving birth to a giant maggot, or something to that effect -- a mini Brundlefly. Perhaps this is one of those fears I need to confront (see this post). Though I'm sure the film is terrible, perhaps this one scene will really get me. After the baby is born, of course.

2. Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch). There may be no more chilling incarnation of the concept of "child as alien" than Lynch's pyschologically scarring masterpiece. The couple gives birth to what looks like the offspring of Admiral Ackbar, and the baby, which is really just a head swaddled in blankets, emits strange gurgling laughter and spits up funky liquids. Parents, beware -- you are bringing something into the world that is strange, and not always wonderful.

And the #1 movie not to see when you're pregnant ...

(spoilers ahead)

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007, Cristian Mungiu). Most of us will never be in the position of trying to get an abortion in Soviet-controlled Romania, but that doesn't mean it's not a terrifying prospect. The worst moment in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days -- an absolutely brilliant film in most other contexts -- is when the abortion is successful, and the camera pans downward to an aborted fetus lying on the bathroom floor, quite realistic looking indeed. Yes, they really go there.

Honorable mentions: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (elderly babies?!), Children of Men (infertile wombs?!), A Cry in the Dark (babies eaten by dingos?!)

If you know of any other movies my wife and I should avoid in the next three months, please don't hesitate to leave them in the comments section.

Bonus:

Best baby-in-peril fakeout: Speed (1994, Jan de Bont)

One of my favorite moments in an incredibly tense cinematic experience (my second favorite action movie behind Die Hard) is when a woman starts crossing the road pushing a stroller, and Annie (Sandra Bullock) can't avoid hitting the stroller with the bus. "Oh no!" she screams and covers her mouth, and we in the audience think the same thing as the stroller hurtles through the air.

When it hits the ground, it spews soda cans, waiting to be recycled.

"Cans," Keanu Reeves says with a huge grin and a sigh of relief. "It was just cans."

The Unoriginal

I was planning to write this post about a year ago.

Last January, two horrors with similar titles were released -- The Unborn on January 9th, The Uninvited on January 30th. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans was also released on January 23rd, making it a very Unusual January, but it's the two straightforward horrors, rather than the werewolf-vampire-fantasy horror, I really wanted to write about.

I didn't write about them at the time, because it was the first month of the blog and my head was practically exploding with things to write about, whether good ideas or not. I guess I'm still in the same boat a year later, as I sit here updating my blog for the sixth straight day. The difference now is that I've seen both of these movies in the past week, part of my mad dash to the finish line of ranking movies before my Tuesday deadline to close off my 2009 list. I'm happy enough to write about films in the abstract, but actually seeing them gives your perspective a bit more validity.

A viewing of each hasn't changed that perspective, though: These movies could both be re-titled The Unoriginal.

The fact that they both have titles beginning with the letters "Un" is really more of a cute detail, the kind of thing that inspires you to write a post like this in the first place. But both The Unborn and The Uninvited could be swapped out for a hundred other generic, interchangeable horrors that come out of Hollywood these days, all with more or less the same look, and many of which follow the same structure for their titles: The definite article (The) followed by some vaguely chilling or abstract concept (Unborn, Uninvited).

Consider, just from the last decade:

The Forsaken (2001, J.S. Cardone)
The Others (2001, Alejandro Amenabar)
The Ring (2002, Gore Verbinski)
The Grudge (2004, Takashi Shimizu)
The Forgotten (2004, Joseph Ruben)
The Cave (2005, Bruce Hunt)
The Fog (2005, Rupert Wainwright)
The Breed (2006, Nicholas Mastandrea)
The Reaping (2007, Stephen Hopkins)
The Invisible (2007, David S. Goyer)
The Eye (2008, David Moreau & Xavier Palud)
The Strangers (2008, Bryan Bertino)

And those are just the big Hollywood releases, the ones that most film fans would immediately recognize. The trend runs much deeper when you go straight-to-video -- not surprising, since straight-to-video takes its cues from (to put it generously) and/or rips off (to put it more truthfully) the Hollywood releases.

Also, this is to say nothing of the horrors that are this kind of movie, but don't fit the title scheme, such as One Missed Call (2008, Eric Valette) and Shutter (2008, Masayuki Ochiai).

Also, I'm listing only American remakes here. Half these movies were originally made somewhere in Asia, and you'd think those versions were a lot better, but in many cases, they're pretty much just as bad.

It's not a very surprising revelation that Hollywood likes to follow successful trends, even rehash cookie cutter versions of earlier movies with different actors and a different title. But it's fun sometimes to accumulate the evidence of just how similar they are.

The movies listed above are, of course, individual movies, some of which have actual merit. All of them, however, have at least one thing that I found in either The Unborn or The Uninvited:

1) Creepy child with voice that shouldn't be coming out of that child;
2) Person standing in the distance, visible to frightened victim looking out the window;
3) Image of bizarre creature that doesn't have anything to do, per se, with the plot;
4) Human body twisted in a way that violates the laws of nature;
5) Startle scare from thing that isn't there when the person looks again or tries to show it to someone else;
6) Image of person momentarily warps and becomes vaguely ghoulish;
7) Wide array of disturbing visual motifs that can't be thematically linked to each other, making them unable to justify their inclusion in the film beyond the director's interest to see what that thing looks like on film;
8) Major plot twist in third act of film.

I could go on.

Even the things that seem like they might be interesting in The Uninvited or The Unborn -- and there are a few -- are blatant rip-offs. For example, the poster I chose for The Unborn was one of three that were immediately available through Google images, and is not the one that's most commonly associated with that film. Perhaps I shouldn't have chosen it, because it gives a false sense of that film's value that flies in the face of the argument I'm trying to make. But it actually makes my argument for me, in a way, because the grotesque human who walks like a spider dates all the way back to The Exorcist in 1973. In fact, maybe we can date this whole trend back to the 1970s, when films like The Exorcist, The Omen and The Brood -- all films that fit the title pattern, in fact -- were released. (I'm conveniently ignoring the fact that titles like The Thing and The Blob came out decades earlier.)

Yet it's funny -- I don't think I watched either of these films just for a laugh. I genuinely thought there was a chance they might scare me. And I'd be lying if I said they didn't, sometimes, give me the creeps. The Unborn was the most effective in that regard, giving me chills on more occasions than I like to admit (some of the images were exquisitely bizarre, even if they didn't amount to a hill of beans). And I saved The Uninvited until late in the night on Saturday, in the hopes of increasing the potential scare factor.

I had my primary reasons for seeing these films -- namely, that they were released in 2009 and were easily available through passive means (The Uninvited through OnDemand, The Unborn from the library). I also had my secondary reasons, arising from an academic curiosity about whether Elizabeth Banks would make an effective villain (The Uninvited), or what the hell an actor like Gary Oldman was doing in such an uninspired genre film (The Unborn), or whether David S. Goyer (who also directed The Invisible, listed above, which I found sort of interesting) might be able to make The Unborn less of an uninspired genre film (only by a smidgen, if at all).

The third reason? Maybe, just maybe, these movies would scare me. As I've discussed before, fear is my favorite thing to feel during a movie, but I so rarely get it that I've become jaded about the very possibility.

Not so jaded, however, that I won't occasionally see a movie like The Unoriginal.

Diluting Halloween

I must not have much of a social life, because for the last five Halloween nights, I've been home watching a scary movie. Or at least a movie that was trying to be scary.

Up until this year, I have had a decent excuse. The previous four Halloweens fell on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. And yeah, you might go out for Halloween on a Friday night, but not if you're old, like my wife and I are. In fact, people less old than we are would go out any night of the week, and damn the consequences.

This year? Well, the Halloween party we usually attend was held on the previous Saturday, and my wife is in the midst of a really (I mean really) busy time. We did stop briefly by the Halloween bash being thrown by our next-door neighbors, which included karaoke, people who had flown in just for the occasion, and nearly 100% participation in wearing costumes. But we stayed for only 10 minutes, so I hardly think that counts. Besides, we had to get back to watch ... another scary movie.

And because those previous Halloweens all fell on weekdays, I'd seen nothing but scary movies on Halloween since that 2005 starting point of the current five-year streak/tradition. (I started keeping track of the dates I'd seen movies in 2002, but didn't watch anything on Halloween in 2002, 2003 and 2004). By that I mean none of them were days when I realistically could have gotten two movies in, since I was working. I guess the notable exception there was 2006, when Halloween was my last day of freedom before starting my current job. I did watch a second movie that day, and while it doesn't quite qualify as a horror, it is pretty damn grisly -- the craptacular Caligula, which includes gruesome disembowelments and plenty of other violence. So I count that as sticking with the theme.

This Halloween was a Saturday, which meant I had a full day open for potentially watching movies. Errands? Around-the-house projects? P'shaw. (Actually, I did get my hair cut). And my wife was out all day with one of those many things that are keeping her very busy. Even more of an opportunity for a mini-marathon.

So I diluted my Halloween horror streak about as blatantly as I could, watching a romantic dramedy about a highly mischievous dog: Marley & Me.

I actually had a handful of choices in the scary movie category. I'd borrowed both Poltergeist and Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a 1971 horror I knew nothing about except the title, from the library. But I didn't know which one we might watch that night, and besides, I started watching Marley & Me with my morning coffee. Horror before 9 a.m. just isn't that scary.

So sometimes I just like to let the choices come to me randomly, to cherry-pick them off the selections available OnDemand. When I saw Marley & Me, I knew that was probably going to be the choice. I like both Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, and had read an A- review of it in Entertainment Weekly when it came out last December. So Marley & Me it was.

Since that was all I really wanted to write about today -- the not-as-interesting-as-I've-made-it-out-to-be "irony" of watching Marley & Me on Halloween -- I might as well make a short story even longer by giving you a quick rundown of the titles we've entrusted to scare us over the last five Halloweens.

2005: Saw (2004, James Wan). My love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the Saw series began on this date four years ago, my last Halloween that I lived alone. Perhaps it was being alone in the house that made this one creepier than it would have ordinarily been. After all, some of my friends left the theater laughing after Saw. But it worked for me, and got me excited enough about these films' potential for squirmy gore that I saw the execrable Saw II in the theater less than two weeks later.

2006: The Hills Have Eyes (2006, Alexandre Aja). Aja's High Tension has one of the most bogus endings you will ever seen in a movie, but up until that point, it was pretty freaking great, so I was interested to see what he could do with the Hills Have Eyes remake. (Despite not having seen the original.) I lived with my wife/then-girlfriend by this point, and she was okay with it too. Invigorating technique and some exquisitely graphic and disturbing scenes, but weird structure: Instead of killing off the innocents one by one throughout the movie, the ones that die are killed off within a ten-minute period in the middle of the movie.

2007: Cronos (1993, Guillermo del Toro). Pan's Labyrinth had whetted our appetite for del Toro's earlier work, and we'd heard this one was creepy. I honestly don't remember it that well, but his interest in bugs -- seen a few years later in Mimic, then regularly in the rest of his work -- was already present here. It was macabre and squirmy enough to do the trick on Halloween.

2008: One Missed Call (2008, Eric Valette). For the first time in this tradition, we did not prepare by renting something, so we let OnDemand dictate what we might watch. Bad move. One Missed Call came up massively short of the standards set by its predecessors, failing even to be as good as most bad Hollywood knock-offs of Japanese horrors that probably weren't as good as they were hyped to be in the first place. Please, I don't want to laugh on Halloween. I've got to learn not to let a good poster (featuring a ghostly face with two screaming mouths for eyes) hold undue sway over my better judgment.

2009: Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John Hancock). Ah, the 1970s. Back then they really knew how to creep you out -- no sophisticated gore effects necessary. I'm surprised I'd never heard anything about this film, since it absolutely gave me the willies for almost the full running time. A mentally disturbed woman, her husband and one of their friends leave the city for the countryside in order to try to clear her head, but end up in a mansion that's known to locals as the potentially haunted home of a woman who drowned in the lake behind the house in the late 19th century. Hancock does more with a vacant look, a whispered voice and an eerie soundtrack than all the buckets of blood and startle scares used by hacks in the last 20 years of horror filmmaking. Highly recommended. An additional testament to the film -- even the fact that karaoke was blasting through our closed windows didn't break the mood. (On a side note, we were referring to it as Let's Make Jenny Scared all night because that's the title my wife absorbed from a quick glance at the DVD cover.)

Happy (late) Halloween, everyone.

Check one off the list

In a post I wrote earlier this year about confronting our cinematic fears, I wrote that I still cherished a primal fear I felt when watching the trailer to Lifeforce back in 1985. I was able to cherish that fear primarily because I still had not seen the movie. Watching it would, of course, reveal it to be some cheesy movie from the 1980s with as little power to scare me as Teen Wolf.

Yup.

In fact, this alternate poster I found for Lifeforce is about the scariest thing in the movie. There are some decent animatronic effects (considering it was 1985), and there are more than a couple decent shots and camera angles. A couple of the shots of one creature sucking the titular "substance" out of another were a tad spooky. But overall, for being a movie about vampires from space, it was pretty boring. If I had watched in 1985, however, I would have absolutely loved the high boob quotient. (Not that I don't still like boobs, just that I don't watch movie solely to see them.)

It was a perilous decision to push it to the top of my queue. After all, its potential to be scary was always more powerful than how scary it could ever really be. In fact, there's often a certain disappointment to watching movies that we think will scare us. If they don't, not only is that a disappointment in and of itself, but it also diminishes by one the number of potentially scary movies we haven't seen. And yes, I do see that as two separate things.

When my guests and I got through watching on Saturday night, it was late, and we were all losing the battle against our droopy eyelids. But I decided to stay up long enough afterward to watch the trailer, one of the DVD extras. Consider it one last attempt to recreate that indescribable horror I'd felt as a child.

Nope. Not only was the trailer itself not very scary, but it couldn't have been the one I saw, since the main naked vampire woman (Mathilda May) proudly displayed her naked vampire boobs. I'm pretty sure I saw the trailer on TV, and even if I hadn't, I think I would have remembered seeing boobs in a trailer. And then that's what I would have associated this trailer with, not with fear. Plus, the voiceover of the square announcer further removes it from the realm of something that could have scared me.

Oh well.

Where shall I turn now? What film I haven't seen will fill that quotient for potential terror?

Well, I still haven't seen Gorky Park. That's another trailer I remember having quite an effect on me, for some unknown reason. When I watched it at the drive-in in Cali, Colombia, where I was visiting a Colombian family who had returned home after a couple years living in my hometown, I remember being chilled -- quite literally -- by the dead bodies in the Russian snow. And that the title was pronounced something like "Gerk-way Park-way" in Spanish.

But looking it up now, I discover that it isn't even a horror -- rather, a detective movie.

Time to dig a little deeper ...