Halloween Horror Reviews

Here’s some stuff I watched this month in the spirit of Halloween. I know this first entry isnt really considered a Horror series, but it should be. It certainly contains a reasonable number of horrific acts, along with plenty of gore, and just because it has an over-arching social theme, it shouldn’t be ruled out of your holiday viewing. All the rest of these though…are pure Halloween carnage.

Squid Game

I am one of five people who has not watched beyond the first episode of Squid Game, not because I think its bad, but because I’m at a point right now where I’m not particularly interested in that type of television. I simply don’t have the emotional bandwidth for it right now. However, I did discuss the series with, of all people, my little sister, who from this point forward we will refer to as “The Millennial”! This is the mother of The Potato, and I don’t talk about her here a lot because even though we don’t live very far away from each other, we don’t get to see each other as often as we would like. We lead very different lives, but apparently she still has more than enough nerd in her character to watch the series.

She loves it. In fact, she raved about it to me, the family geek, who hasn’t been watching it!

As for that first episode, I realized I didn’t have the bandwidth for it when I started getting frustrated and angry with the lead character’s lack of moral character. Its not that he is a bad man. He is simply a man of very weak moral character, who loves people, and means well, but keeps getting broadsided by his own worst character traits. Its frustrating watching him make the same mistakes over and over again. He simply doesn’t learn, but I suspect the series is about his growth as a person, so we have to start him off at his lowest point.

The basic gist of the show is that a bunch of people desperate for a million dollar cash bonus willingly subject themselves to a series of fatal games on a secluded island. The highlight game, and the one which sets the standard for all the following games is in the first episode, and called Red Light, Green Light, in which a giant doll is the Master. If she catches anyone moving after she says Red Light, the offender is executed via headshot. I was pretty good at this game when I was a kid, so I think I could probably master this one, but my sister says the other games are much more difficult, and that the players also have to deal with internal drama, and various alliances.

I have no intention of finishing the series, but if you liked stuff like The Hunger Games and The Scorch Trials or whatever, you probably should give this one a try. Yes, its in Korean, and there are subtitles, but that doesn’t matter for a good show. Just be aware that wanting to slap the lead character very, very, hard is not an option for the viewer.

V/H/S 94:

VHS 94 is one of a series of found footage Horror anthology movies that I’ve enjoyed in the past. This one gets mixed feelings from me. Some of the stories I liked, but a couple of others were not particularly satisfying.

Unlike some people I’m not especially tired of the found footage trend. I like it okay. Some of it is good and some not so much, but one of the reasons I don’t bitch and whine against trends in movies is because I don’t watch everything in a given genre, and some things ain’t got nothing to do with me. I don not and never will understand people who loudly hate on a particular method or genre of film, and always call for the elimination of them, especially when its failry harmless. Yeah I’m tired of movies about Black pain and trauma, and wish they would make other things but I’m not calling for the elimination of movies like 12 Years A Slave. We need those Black pain movies. They’re cathartic, and someone is watching them. I just wish that movies rooted in such trauma weren’t the only ones getting made, is all. its okay to make (and watch) movies that are fun, and funny. We need those too.

Anyway, this movie consists of four stories, surrounded by a framework of a SWAT team who come across a bunch of videos playing in a house, and this is loosely tied to a couple of the other stories in the film. I liked the first story which was short, to the point, gory, and monstrous, about reporter who stumbles across a group of Rat God worshiping sewer people, while chasing a story. The story makes its point, and keeps it moving. There,s bllod, gore, mutants, cults, and was kinda fun, and disgusting.

I wanted to like the second story, but the murky footage, and sometimes unintelligible dialogue made things hard to understand. I eventually got the point of it ,but it was frustrating to watch, as much of it takes place at night, in the dark, during a thunderstorm. A young woman is basically babysitting a corpse in a funeral home, when the corpse suddenly comes to life and starts chasing her around the room. I initially thought this was a zombie story, but it turns out to be something a little bit different. Its not bad, but some of it is unclear, which is not a good thing for such a short story.

The third story was my least favorite, because it mostly involved people being chased through rooms by robot/human hybrids created by a mad scientist. I’m not a fan of mad scientist stories in general because I find them frustrating. Mom and I are always having medical issues that require we be poked and prodded by various doctors, so movies about medical experimentation are not fun to watch.

The Fourth story is a little more interesting because…vampire! A bumbling group of American militia members have captured a vampire and intend to use its blood (which has explosive properties) to commit various acts of terror. Since the vampire didn’t actually consent to any of this things become a helluva lot more difficult for them when it gets loose and starts hunting each of them down. I was prepared not to like this one, but the militia men are so stupid, and so deserving of what’s coming to them, that the gory body horror elements were kind of fun.

The surrounding story was kind of disappointing because I expected a little bit more than what I got, which were just human beings being monstrous to one another.

Overall, i kind of enjoy the franchise, and I’m not tired of it yet, even though I dint care very much for the last two of this five movie series. Of all of them the first and second were the best, and maybe I’ll talk about them at some later date, but if you don’t mind watching more found footage movies, check this one out on Amazon Prime.

Halloween Kills

I know there are some people who were disappointed in this movie, but I was pleasantly surprised. There was a lot I liked about this, and a few things I found deeply frustrating, which I’ll get to in a moment. I found the movie deeply entertaining. Unlike some people, I don’t watch these types of movies for the killing. I don’t count how many people die, or marvel at the various ways in which they died, or any nonsense like that. I watch movies like this for the characters, the mood/atmosphere, and any deeper themes which may be present in the narrative, and there is a theme here.

If the last version, released in 2018, was about surviving and dealing with trauma via Laurie Strode, than this movie’s primary theme was about Regret. We start the movie exactly where we left off the last one. Sheriff Hawkins, who was stabbed by Michael Myers’ doctor, was left to bleed out in a field, and is stumbled upon by Allison’s boyfriend, with whom she had broken up, in the last film. We catch him in the middle of leaving a message to his best friend about the breakup, not knowing that the best friend he’s calling was killed by Michael just a short time ago.

Right away, we re introduced to an element of pathos that will follow us throughout the rest of the film. A sequence of just missed chances, or people trying to do the right thing and failing horribly. He finds the Sheriff’s body and from there we go into a flashback of the Sheriff as a young officer, and his first encounter with Michael, when he had the chance to let Michael die, but stopped Dr. Loomis (Michael’s first doctor) from shooting him, preferring to capture Michael alive. Hawkins expresses open regret at having allowed that to happen.

As the movie moves forward, we meet many different characters, several of whom we’ve met before, like the little girl and boy from the very first movie, whom Laurie spent trying to protect from Michael. They’re all grown up and we see them and the townsfolk, many of them are the friends, and family, and of people who were killed in the 1978 film. They are at a Halloween party celebrating Laurie’s long ago heroism, when the news reaches them that not only is Michael free, he has been killing people in Haddonville all night. The way the movie plays out, every single character we meet has a moment where they regret past decisions they made, or rethink some choices they wished they could take back, from the charming gay couple who bought Michael’s old house, to Laurie’s daughter who regrets never believing her mother’s declarations about Michael, to the mob of townsfolk who corner and attack Michael in the street.

What was disappointing for me was the character’s doing the usual stupid things people do in slasher movies. People have guns but often never get a chance to fire them, or sometimes they have the opportunity to run away from Michael, or leave the vicinity (preferring to hunt for him through dark rooms instead), but don’t. A lot of the kids in this movie simply cannot act. Of curse its frustrating for me to watch this because I know that Michael is very probably not human at all, and will always win, and that all the characters are operating as if they are dealing with a regular human being. Another frustrating thing is there’s not much of Laurie in this movie. Since she was stabbed by Michael in the previous movie, she sits most of this one out, and the slack gets taken up by the townsfolk, Laurie’s daughter, Karen, and her granddaughter, Allison, now dealing with fresh trauma of her own. This movie is a loose remake of the 1981 Halloween 2, which takes place mostly in the same hospital, as well.

Now, even though I don’t count the deaths, or prioritize the deaths of the character’s, that doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention to them. The deaths in this movie are spectacularly gruesome even for Halloween. There is a lot of action in this film.There is a lot of blood and gore, there’s a lot of death, some of which feels, and I know this may sound weird, considering this is a slasher film, oddly gratuitous, starting with the deaths of the friefighters who were there to douse the fire Laurie started to kill Michael. But then as I’ve mentioned before, as I’ve gotten older, and become more aware of the ways my body can become broken, (all those missed accidents and deaths start to take a toll, I think), I’ve also become a lot more squeamish. Some people love the gore, and I used to when I was a teenager, but not anymore.

My mom watched this one with me, and I don’t think she was especially impressed. She said, and I quote, “It was stupid!” Which is the description of any movie she finds displeasing, and I wasn’t able to find the time to question her on why she thought this. I’m not inclined to give her review too much deep analysis as she was half asleep during some of it, the constant flashback kept getting on her nerves, and the idiotic behavior of the characters bothered her more than it bothered me. But as I said it took me a minute to figure out that the characters in the film don’t know that Michael isnt a human being. He gets slashed, stabbed, pitchforked, and shot multiple times, and keeps getting back up, as if nothing had happened. The characters know there’s something wrong but they don’t know what and continue to believe they can easily defeat him, and of course there are several characters who are simply goofy, and they end up taking each other and themselves out, so there’s that.

That said, this movie was highly entertaining, and just deep enough. I suspect I’ll get my wish, and see more of Laurie in the third and final film, Halloween Ends. I think the last movie should be a little more like Halloween H2O, in that it should be a cat and mouse game between Michael and Laurie, because really, that’s what these movies have been about since day one. If you go back to the first movie, Laurie is asked by one of her teacher’s about the nature of evil, and the movie is pitting the innocence of this one girl (now a woman) against the personification of death.

Chucky (TV Series)

This was the first episode of the Chucky series, which I saw on YouTube for free. I don’t know how much longer this free episode will be available, but if you’re curious, than check it out. I didn’t much care for it, even though I was sort of looking forward to watching this because I enjoyed the first film of what became a massive franchise of over two hundred movies (or at least that’s what it felt like). My initial thought was who the f*** thought this would be a good idea for a TV series. It’s not a bad series, its just not to my particular tastes because it contains unlikable teenagers, awful parents, dodgy acting, and a couple of moments where I just didn’t want to deal with the emotions of what was happening onscreen. To be fair, most of the things I catch a glimpse of, or try out, are not necessarily bad (although yeah, sometimes they’re pretty bad), and this show is very pretty to look at.

There are of course the usual tropes of the supernatural avenger narrative. A much put upon teenager, who is beset by nasty and bullying authority figures, and peers, who finds solace in his Chucky doll, who comes to life and begins taking out anyone with whom he has a beef ,and I’m too tired to care very much about this type of plot, especially when most of the other characters in the series aren’t likable, and I’m also kind of tired of the idea that unlikable people must be killed. I’m in the mood for a plot where unlikable people try to solve their grievances by talking them out, I guess.

Horror Movie Themes: Women Directors And Monster Women

Women who direct horror movies are few and far between. They are simply not telling stories in significant numbers in the genre for critics to say there’s an overwhelming theme being tackled, but there are enough of them that a pattern is beginning to emerge.

 

Ostensibly, the stories women tell cover the same subjects as male directors,  but there are sometimes subtle differences, and most of that has to do with women’s perspective on the same topics. There is plenty of vengeance, serial killers, and  ultra violence, but where movies with male directors often focus on the spectacle of violence  against women, without questioning it, female directors often make women the total focus of the plot, as both victims and perpetrators. There are also  fewer otherworldly monsters in female directed movies. Often, in such films, the monsters are very  human, and sometimes those monsters are, in fact, the women.

There are exceptionally few horror movies directed by women of color, and the bare handful of movies that were, like Beloved, fall into the category of personal hauntings, that tackle issues that resonate with other women of color. The majority of women horror filmmakers, are White women, and they tend to focus on issues that are of importance to them, and one starts to notice a pattern in the themes of the movies they make.

If White men work out their personal anxieties through the types of horror they create, then so do White women. It is not that women of color cannot relate to these themes, it’s just that for them, such themes may not be a priority, and tend to carry less resonance for them.

In movies like Carrie by Kimberly Pierce, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, by Ana Lily Amirpour,  and Jennifer’s Body by Karyn Kusama, the theme is not just the Monstrous Feminine, but femaleness itself as monster. There is no coding of femininity as  horrific in these movies. It is a  woman who is a horrible monster, who feeds on men, or  destroys the human body, with a thought, and she is like this, because she is female, as that is an integral part of the horror in the film.

Carrie and Jennifer’s Body  also tackle issues that are of specific relevance to women, like puberty, menstruation,  friendship, and sexual trauma. In female directed films, there is less emphasis on the disruption and restoration of order, or the status quo. Often, their films don’t actually have any resolution, or the emphasis is on the disruption, and restoration, of relationships, or cathartic punishments, instead.

Themes about monstrosity, in such movies, often revolve around body horror, and consumption, as dieting, and the non/consumption of food, and women’s relationships to food, make up the bulk of the personal anxieties in the privileged classes of women who sometimes make these films. In Julia Decournau’s Raw (2016),  a vegetarian girl develops a craving for meat after she undergoes a hazing ritual involving the eating of raw animals. In the 1999 Ravenous,  by the late Antonia Bird, Guy Pierce develops a taste for raw meat after he is nearly killed during the Mexican – American War, and in Jennifer’s Body, a young woman has to save her high school friend, after she realizes her friend has become a flesh eating demon. (There is a lot to unpack, in the movie Jennifer’s Body, which we will discuss later.) Many middle-class, White, Western women have a love/hate , and a fear/disgust, relationship with food, dieting, and  consumption, and we see that play out in these films, as eating, (usually blood and meat), becomes the primary focus of the horror.

Female directed movies often tend to be more intimate, focusing on the horror of relationships, or the topic of motherhood. What mothers are willing to do for, or sometimes to, their families is the subject of the 2014 movie, The Babadook, where a mother fears she may kill her son, when she is haunted,  and then possessed, after reading about the titular character.

In the anthology XX, many of the stories revolve around the horrific circumstances that can occur when a mother loves her family. Motherhood, already a source of real world anxiety, is a frequent topic in films made by women. In The Box, the themes are also loss, helplessness, and non/consumption, as a woman loses her entire family, when they starve themselves, after her son views the contents of a mysterious box. It is a secret that kills them, and which they refuse to share with her, so that when they are gone, she spends the rest of her life riding the subway, hoping to encounter the man with the box again. The story, Her only Living Son, directly tackles sacrificial motherhood, as a woman sacrifices her life to save her son from his Satanic destiny.

Sex is a huge component of female directed horror movies, but unlike films directed by men, that mostly just feature the spectacle of  women having sex,  or being raped, the focus from women directors is on the danger, and vulnerability of intimacy, and often based on a young woman’s fear of sexual activity, and fear of the loss of innocence, that may be the result. In the film, A Girl Walks Home Alone, a nameless female, Iraqi  vampire hunts men. This movie is groundbreaking, not just because of its setting, and plot, but character. The sexual forwardness of Iraqi women isn’t often featured in film, let alone as a night-stalking blood drinker. The director, Amirpour, is not White, but the themes of consumption, and blood as a euphemism for sex, still find a way into the story.

Blood plays a huge part in a lot of the stories told by women, from Carrie, to Raw, to Jennifer’s Body, with the theme being  linked to  femininity, fertility, and/or sex. The movie, Carrie, begins and ends with blood. Based on the novel by Stephen King, it chronicles a young woman’s perilous navigation through high school. At the beginning of the story, the onset of her menses signals her introduction to adulthood, and heightens her telekinetic abilities. The story ends with the killing of her entire graduating class, after a bucket of pig’s blood is dumped over her during the school prom, an act which was informed by the opening events of the story, when she has her first period in front of her bullying classmates.

Blood and flesh are especially popular topics of these films, in that many of them contain cannibalism and/or vampirism. In the movie Raw, relationships, and adulthood rites take center stage, as a young woman, who has a contentious relationship with her sister, gets turned into a cannibal after an initial hazing at her sister’s college, that turns out to be an initiation, not just into a sorority, but also adulthood. In Blood and Donuts (1995), a vampire who has just awakened from a long sleep, is introduced to the modern world, via the night shift worker at a local bakery. Over the course of the evening, the young lady figures out who and what he is, and the two of them engage in a push and pull attraction, as he decides whether or not he should prey on her.

In the 1987 movie, Near dark, a young man is inducted into a nightmare lifestyle, where he has to kill to live, when he meets a pretty blonde girl, at a bar one night. Vampires, since they, like blood, are often a euphemism for sex and adulthood, are the focus of women’s stories, such as Fran Rubel Kazui’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Buffy went on to answer deeper questions about girlhood and monsters, in the TV series, which lasted from 1997 to 2003. In fact, these themes are so prevalent, that they often seem to be having a dialogue with each other, or with movies of the same genre, made by men.

There is a lot of narrative overlap, for example, between Near Dark, Ravenous, and the movie, Afflicted, which cover not just the same themes, but sometimes the same talking points, of the male protagonist’s empathy making them unfit to live the kind of lifestyle that requires killing others. There is also a great deal of narrative overlap in the movies Carrie, Raw, and Ginger Snaps, more films in which menstruation, and flesh eating, are the signals that a young woman has reached full adulthood.

Now let’s talk about Jennifer’s Body.

Jennifer’s body is a great encapsulation of some of the themes and topics that women address through horror. The themes of friendship, female ally-ship and support, revenge, sexuality,  and patriarchy are part of this narrative.

Jennifer’s Body was released in 2009, written by Diablo Cody, and directed by Karen Kusama. Jennifer Check, as played by Megan Fox, is the high school hot girl. She is the sassy, beautiful, popular, cheerleader, that all the  high school boys lust after. Amanda Seyfried plays Amanda “Needy” Lesnicki,  her quiet, bookish,  best friend, since elementary school. Jennifer gets possessed by a demon, after she is sacrificed to Satan by a local rock band, in exchange for fame.

Already there are themes of the sexuality of women being exploited for male gain. The band, called Low Shoulder, thinks she is a virgin, and their sacrifice was successful, but since she was not actually a virgin, she became possessed instead. After she has killed two young men, Amanda figures out that she is a succubus that is impervious to harm after feeding on her victims. Jennifer attacks Amanda’s boyfriend, who then attacks and eventually kills her. However, bitten by Jennifer, Amanda has now developed some of the Demon Jennifer’s abilities. At the end of the movie, she hunts down  the band Low Shoulder, and kills them.

Throughout the movie, we are  privy to some of the more interesting conversations that women have when men are not present, and this is something that will only happen in a movie that is written and controlled by women. Not only will there often be more than one woman in a movie, but their relationships and conversations often have more depth. The film is informed by two women in front of the camera as well as the two women behind it. It is the relationship between Amanda and Jennifer that is integral to the plot of the film. If we don’t buy their friendship, we cannot become emotionally invested in their plight, most especially in Amanda’s dilemma at having to kill her best friend.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/08/206237/jennifers-body-review-defense-female-revenge-movie

Amanda isn’t just killing Jennifer to save the lives of the young men she might feed on, but to save Jennifer. too. I talked in an earlier post about how Horror is basically the disruption of the status quo by the unknown, often the paranormal, and yes, Jennifer as a demon is a disruption of the status quo,  but the status quo, does not necessarily mean “good”. The status quo is Jennifer’s humanity being disregarded  by  men who were willing to  sacrifice her life for their own gain. That Jennifer, and then Amanda, become demons is a necessary disruption, especially as part of the revenge narratives that are also prominent in women’s horror. Not only are revenge narratives common for women directors, they are often very cathartic for the creators and audiences.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/03/carrie-stephen-king-brian-de-palma-horror-films-feminism

Kimberly Pierce’s Carrie, from 2011, is another movie that appears to be having a dialogue with Jennifer’s Body, as it covers many of the same themes, of women’s relationships, both supportive and toxic, and the revenge narrative. Although the story was originally written by Stephen King, and the original movie was directed Brian De Palma, I talked at length about how the mood and emphasis of the film is changed, as Pierce  focuses more on the women’s tangled relationships with each other, rather than on spectacle.

So for female horror directors, there seems to be less emphasis on spectacle (although that’s definitively present becasue these are horror movies), and more focus on symbolism, and the relationships between the characters. For me, this supports my supposition that the type of moves that get made are a reflection of the types of people who make them. If this is true of the Japanese, or British, then its equally true for the White men who run Hollywood, and are the primary creators in the horror genre. So, yes, I think that the types of films being made by White women (as these directors are primarily White) are a reflection of the things that are important to them.

There have not been enough Black and Asian-American filmmakers, in the horror genre, for certain patterns to emerge, but I’m going to give it a try in a follow-up post.

October Is Here!

I love October! Its what many of us Octoberites call Halloween month, the weather has changed, which is an especially good thing for those of us suffering from Summer allergies, or who just hate any temperatures above 80 degrees, and I get to knit lots of hats, sweaters, and scarves without looking weird.

Its also time for me to focus on Scary Movie Stuff (which is the technical term, probably). Of course I do this all year long, but I have the excuse now to drop everything else I’m writing and focus on things like the scariest short movies, and reviews of my favorite scary films.

So here we go, and I’m going to start the month off with my top five  favorite scary short films right now. There will be more of these as I fall down that rabbit hole of short, scary films on YouTube.

 

Tinglewood

This is a very effective, straight horror story with genuine emotional depth. It’s  about a family that goes camping, and ends with a fight for survival, when they meet with the unexpected.

 

 

 

Mannequin

I think I told you guys about my fear of inanimate objects coming  to life. This film worked for me just fine.

 

 

 

Happy Valentine’s Day

This isn’t scary so much as tragic, but I loved the style in which it was done. It’s been Gorgeously filmed, Backwards!

 

 

 

The Monster Under My Bed

This one startsed  off pretty scary. I too have that monster under the bed fear sometimes, but ultimately this turned out to be deeply cute.

 

 

 

Battleground

About twenty or so years ago, this video was in an anthology show of Stephen King stories based on his book, Nightmares and Dreamscapes. This specific story however is from his very first anthology, written in the 70’s, called Night Shift, and it’s also one of my favorite short stories, written long before the movie Toy Story. It’s both funny and deeply terrifying.

 

 

As an added bonus here are some  of the scariest movies to watch this month:

 

The Ritual

I talked about this movie in one of my short reviews. It’s still available on Netflix. It’s a lot deeper than it looks.

 

Radius

Although I was somewhat disappointed in the ending of this movie, I did get really caught up in this movie’s premise. It’s about two people, a man and a woman, who can’t be separated from each other for a certain distance. They have to remain in each other’s radius, or everyone else in their radius will die. The movie spends the first third with them figuring out what’s going on, the second third of the movie is spent putting them in intense and inevitable situations where they will be separated, as they try to solve the mystery of what happened to them and why.  I thought the final third of the movie was rather anti-climatic, but makes sense given the setup of the first part of the movie. This is also available on Netflix, and is for those of you who like suspense, but not a lot of gore.

 

The Monster

I thought this was a pretty terrifying premis especially since the monster is never explained. Which means of course that the monster isn’t really the focus of this movie, and is a symbol of something else.

A mother and daughter are fleeing an abusive relationship, I think, and their car breaks down on a deserted road, and they are menaced by a monster. This is pretty straightforward but the plot is complicated by the antagonistic relationship between the mother and daughter, which I found just as compelling as the danger provided by the monster.

Theres quite a bit of for in this one, and those of you who don’t like to watch children in danger, take warning. This movie is  free for Amazon Prime subscribers.

 

Seoul Station

If you’ve seen the Korean zombie movie, Train to Busan, then this is the animated prequel. It chronicles particularly of how the zombie plague in the second movie began and stars a different cast of characters. I discussed this in one of my mini-reviews. Like the live action film, it’s basically one long chase scene, but entirely animated. This is the first time I’ve ever encountered an animated zombie film, and it is a very intense film that is not for children.

This is also available through Amazon Prime’s Shudder subscription. Shudder has a monthly cost of 5.00. I got it as a gift for  my Mom because she absolutely loves horror movies.