31 Days of Halloween: Week 2 Round-Up.

Welcome to the (approximate) halfway point in 31 Days of Halloween!  We're at the spooktacular point of no return and it's been a hell of a week, which has awarded us the opportunity to ruminate on and study horror and the meaning of Halloween.  I've got a couple tricks up my sleeve to announce today just after our daily rundown of movies, so let's get right to it.

Day 8: Silent Hill: Revelation

Video-game-to-movie adaptations usually flop, or are at least abysmal efforts at transposition.  While Revelation certainly had a couple more problems than its predecessor, Silent Hill, it definitely works as (if nothing else) entertaining fan service for games like Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill: Origins.  I also wanted to watch it as an example of continuing a successful horror franchise, which can sometimes manifest as beating a dead horse or milking a cow for all it's worth.

Day 9: Last House on the Left (1972).

Last House on the Left is an early effort from both Wes Craven (of the Nightmare on Elm St. series) and Sean S. Cunningham (producer of Friday the 13th).  It's also one of the most disturbing and uncomfortable films I've ever seen.  It truly excels at delivering prolonged, unsettling torture visited upon the innocent at the hands of inhumanly cruel killers.  Craven's genius moves us to a place where we want the victims' horrific ordeals to be over with so badly, we actually pray for their deaths to come sooner.  It takes serious bravery to commit to the type of darkness that Craven has the killers show throughout the film, to the point that the victims pass the point of no return and all we can hope for for them isn't a miraculous escape, but a quick and merciful end.

The other grisly element of the psyche these killers exhibit is how their mood changes once they're done committing their vile deeds.  In the moment, they laugh, tease and cajole, happy to victimize innocents and see them reduced to nothing.  Immediately afterwards, however, they find themselves depressed, silent, and eager to forget.  Their game is over, they come down from their "high" and for just a moment, see the world through crystal clear lenses.  It's difficult to stomach, but an effective and brilliant portrayal of human evil.

Day 10: Puppet Master.

File this under "confronting childhood fears," which will also be the case when I watch Ghoulies later this month.  Puppet Master is a great off-the-wall movie about puppets coming to life and murdering humans - and, contrary to Child's Play, none of them are children's toys or puppets that resemble dolls or Cabbage Patch Kids.  The puppets in Puppet Master have no aesthetic purpose besides killing humans and scaring audiences.  One wears a black trenchcoat and fedora, with a hook for a hand a knife held in the other.  Another has a working drill replacing the top half of its head.

Day 11:  Battle Royale

In Battle Royale, the government has passed a law to control a working-class rebellion by holding an annual contained bloodsport fought by randomly selected children.  The children fight to the death in an arena and the final combatant is the winner, allowed to go home and be a hero to the nation.  If one clear winner isn't determined after three days - if, for example, all the kids refuse to fight - all the children will be killed by those who run the program.  Elected officials and the super-rich place bets on the winner of the game, as all children receive backpacks with different weapons at the onset.  If this sounds familiar, feel free to join the years-long discussion debating whether or not The Hunger Games plagiarized Battle Royale.  At any rate, this terrifying film is a daring and horrific look at the worst that people are capable of - even people as young as children.  42 students participate in the Battle Royale program in the film.  Only two are actively interested in killing their classmates, while many others attack others out of sheer panic and pre-emptive self-defense.  Some kill themselves, believing their victories to be impossible; others are determined to hide and wait it out, believing an alternate answer will come.  Similar to Lord of the Flies or The Mist (see below), Battle Royale is an experiment in the tolls that lawless panic take on seemingly normal people.  Brilliant film, based on an equally brilliant book.

Day 12: Silent House

I make it a point every year to roll the dice on a few new titles I've never seen, and on the 12th day of 31 Days of Halloween, I did so with the Elizabeth Olsen home invasion piece Silent House.  Elizabeth Olsen is the younger sister of the infamous Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley, but it seems that their last name is where the similarities end.  She competently pulls off this 80-minute piece about a young woman flipping a house with her father and uncle.  She finds herself alone and scared quickly enough, as someone breaks into the house and knocks her father unconscious before dragging him off to an unknown part of the house.  The filmmakers chose to present the film as one flowing 80-minute take to better emphasize the tension and flow of time.  This also means the film proceeds in real time, taking place over an 80-minute period of one evening.  Some sources claim the film was shot in 10-minute segments and edited to appear as one take, though in my viewing I didn't notice a possible break in shooting for the first 45 minutes of the movie.  I was, I admit, more impressed by the presentation of the film and its execution than I was by its screenplay's third act, which fell flat on a horror cliche of which I've never been a fan.  Even still, the long takes, clever scares and amazing use of the setting - 99% of the movie takes place in the house without ever feeling boring - are very much to be commended.

Day 12 Bonus Round:  Busch Gardens (Williamsburg, VA) Howl-O-Scream

For a company outing, we toured Busch Gardens' haunted theme park Howl-o-Scream, which boasts six haunted houses and several frightening paths to walk through in the park.  Park employees dress as horror creatures (vampires, mutants, zombies, etc) and stalk park attendees throughout the grounds or jump out at them from well-hidden spots in the haunted houses.  The haunted houses included Dead Line, an Italian metro zombie motif; The Haunted Cove, a spooky pirate area; Bitten, a vampire haunted house; Root of All Evil, a mutant greenhouse; 13: Your Number's Up, a haunted house exploring 13 phobias from enclosed spaces to clowns; and Catacombs, a classic underground/skeleton haunted house.  All six had dark designs and great scares, never once delving into the cheesy or unimpressive.

Day 13: From Dusk Till Dawn

This horror-comedy from screenwriter Quentin Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez is a great predecessor to their 2007 double feature Grindhouse.  There's nothing I can say about it that hasn't been said earlier, better and by smarter people, so I'll leave it alone and only mention that it's one of the funniest and most quotable movies of its time.  It's a prime example of the '90s indie film scene.  And hey, Tom Savini is in it!

Side note for Day 13:  On October 13, the new season of AMC's The Walking Dead premiered, which was released the following day on iTunes.  While it may focus more on drama, I firmly believe it works great as a horror show as well.  If you're enjoying horror with us this month - especially if your collection is running on fumes before Halloween - feel free to incorporate some Walking Dead for your count!  It's a great show, and even if it were 45 minutes of sipping tea and discussing Eastern philosophy, it would still be doing so amid the zombie apocalypse, so knock it out!  We're watching too!

Day 14:  The Mist

As we traverse 31 days of celebrating horror, I become more and more inclined to write open love letters to some of my favorite selections, and The Mist is at the top of the pile for a multitude of reasons.

First and foremost, it reminds me of my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone - "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street."  In "Monsters," a regular American cul-de-sac descends into mass hysteria and murder after their power and phones are cut.  Why?  Because as they grow ever more fearful about their lack of contact with the outside world, they give over to panic, witch-hunting and violence.  The episode ends with the neighborhood in utter chaos, which pans all the way out to a flying saucer on a hill.  Two aliens watch the mayhem and one turns to the other and says (and I'm paraphrasing here), "See?  When we invade, we don't have to lift a finger.  If you simply remove one or two basic elements of their civilization, the humans will do the work for us of tearing one another to bits."  Like the aforementioned Battle Royale and Lord of the Flies, Stephen King's The Mist celebrates that idea by enclosing a group of 30 or so Maine residents in a grocery store with some thick alien fog outside.  They become aware of strange creatures roaming the mist and within 48 hours, their pragmatic tribe descends into religious zealotry, human sacrifice.  Some characters even discuss this process in dialogue - humans are basically good, but that may be contingent on communications working and our ability to dial 9-1-1 in case of emergency.  On the other hand, if you lock people in a small area with no lights, no rules, no contact with the outside world and so on, they'll rip each other to shreds.  One character says "As a species we're fundamentally insane.  Put more than two of us in a room and we'll start dreaming up reasons to take sides and kill each other.  Why do you think we invented politics and religion?"

Second, the creature design throughout the film is simply perfect.  From the implied-but-not-seen tentacle monster in the beginning of the film to the crab/mantis in the strip mall parking lot, these are truly frightening beasts.  A series of football-sized fly-like bugs with skulls for heads make an appearance, as does a four-winged pterodactyl look-alike, but it isn't until the very end of the movie that my favorite creature shows.  Remaining as spoiler-free as I can, I'll only say that the sense of scope in the film is laid out as more of the outside world (beyond the grocery store) is shown, and amid the widespread mist calamity is a 100-foot tall behemoth that walks on four legs.  It has a back like a turtle's shell and fleshy hooks dangle from its abdomen.  It resembles an imperial walker from the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, and it's all the more frightening that it's alive and also roaming free along a New England freeway.  If, at any point while watching the movie, you ask yourself "Well how bad could things really be out there?" this last big creature provides the answer.  Its freedom, slow movement and unimaginable genetic history speak volumes about the nature of the event.

Third, there is the inclusion of Melissa McBride as a mother of two.  McBride, best known for playing Carol in AMC's The Walking Dead, is in the supermarket in the beginning when the mist befalls the town.  She explains with utter determination that she must leave and get home to her kids, who shouldn't be alone for more than a few minutes.  Some citizens beg her to stay indoors and not risk her life, and she asserts through tears that she simply can't leave her children.  Her role in the film is only three minutes, and she owns the film for the entirety of her time on-screen.  She quietly walks out of the supermarket and her fate is unknown.  It's a masterful performance in the smallest of roles, and it's easy to see why she was brought by The Mist's director and first boss of The Walking Dead, Frank Darabont, from one project to the other.

Finally, we used to marathon certain types of movies on Halloween night in college with the familiar suffix "-palooza."  Zombiepalooza, UFOpalooza, B-moviepalooza etc.  This year we're commemorating Stephen King from October 14th to about the 18th with "Kingapalooza," by watching movies in our blu-ray collections and on Netflix Instant that are based on works by the oft-known "King of Horror," culminating with the remake of Carrie starring the amazing actresses Chloe Grace-Moretz and Julianne Moore.  We officially started with The Mist (even though we watched Children of the Corn last week) and we've got Pet Sematary, Misery and The Shining in line before Carrie.  We don't have time to run through the entire TV series of Dead Zone, and we watched The Langoliers this spring.  We may or may not watch Bag of Bones and The Golden Years, too.  If you've got any good horror marathons to watch (see also our "Surprises" below), mention them in a comment or on our Facebook event!

Surprises:  Friday the 13th and Hellraiser

As a special bonus run for 31 Days of Halloween, I spent September 30 to October 12 watching one film a day each in the Hellraiser and Friday the 13th franchises.  Hellraiser was the first film I watched for this year's film celebration, and Friday the 13th was next.  Starting October 2, I watched one film from each franchise per day until they ran out.  Nine Hellraiser movies and 12 Friday the 13th's mean I finished catching up on the 9th and 12th of October, respectively.  How do classic horror franchises age over 30 years?  The results were compelling tales of Hollywood and immortal slasher villains.  Let's take a look.

Paramount released nine Friday the 13th movies over the course of 13 years, with the 9th likely intended to be the last in a canonical series (it is, after all, called Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday).  Minor chronological mulligans aside (no fewer than 15 years pass between 1980 and 1987), Paramount offers a steady stream of reliable slasher films - Jason Voorhees kills a bunch of marijuana- and sex-obsessed teens in a feat of stealth and systematic cruelty before anyone catches on and kills him again.  In fact, I'm working on a separate blog post about Jason's many returns to life that will be uploaded soon.  There's brief nudity, quick violence and frequent impalement.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  They're a series of fun and consistent horror movies, if not a bit monotone.  Some say they jumped the shark when it came to 2001's Jason X, which saw Voorhees board a spaceship in the year 2455 and slaughter young people there, but after watching the entire series in less than two weeks, it seemed more to me like a franchise that allowed itself to let its hair down and have more silly fun with itself.  Even the following film, Freddy Vs. Jason, was like a pro wrestling match between two of 1980s horror's favorite slashers: Freddy Krueger and Jason.  In the booklet "Crystal Lake Memories," which accompanies the complete Friday the 13th collection on blu-ray, there's a quote from Robert Englund (long-time actor portraying Freddy) who says that as far back as the mid-'80s, fans would ask him who could take who in a fight: Freddy or Jason, so for him it was a fun opportunity to put the rumors to rest.  After 1993's Jason Goes to Hell, the subsequent sequels (and the 2009 reboot of the franchise) comes across more as a self-aware celebration of jump scares and "immoral" teens than a campy joke.

Hellraiser and its first two sequels relied largely on the uncomfortable juxtaposition of Judeo-Christian theology and BDSM sex.  While the villains and demons explore the Biblical Hell and punishment for sin, they also wax on about incorporating pain into sexual pleasures and wearing slick black leather outfits.  The Cenobites, or demons, only appear when someone solves a mystical puzzle box.  This puzzle box is usually sought after as a mystical means to merge pleasure and pain, sex and violence, life and death.  Often, people looking for "the extremes of experience" find the box and solve it as part of their carnal desires and are punished, in a Faust-meets-goth fashion, with chains and hooks and blood-addled 1980s nightclub depravity.  The only real problem with the series arose when it moved from theatrical releases to straight-to-video.  Beginning with its fifth film, Hellraiser: Inferno, the series saw a noticeable dip in production quality, which wouldn't be a problem - Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi was filmed for $7,000 - except that the fifth through eighth films in the franchise weren't written as Hellraiser films.  Apparently, Miramax - who owned the rights to the Hellraiser universe - picked up other, unrelated horror scripts and had screenwriters make hasty rewrites to incorporate franchise favorites like the puzzle box and the series' lead Cenobite, Pinhead, into the films.  The end result on Inferno and the subsequent Hellseeker, Deader and Hellworld are movies with only tenuous relations to the franchise.  Only the most recent sequel, 2011's Hellraiser: Revelations, is based on a script intended from its genesis to be a Hellraiser movie.

Jason's and Pinhead's franchises are two lifetime case studies of keeping and discarding various elements of groundbreaking horror films.  While some of their entries are, at best, forgettable, I find it endlessly fascinating to see the transformations that culture, money and history influence.

It's been quite a bloody week, and I thank you for enjoying some of these silly ruminations on horror films with me.  We're just about, essentially, more or less, kinda, pretty much halfway through our celebration of terror and it's going swimmingly.  Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming tongue-in-cheek look at Things that Will Not Kill Jason Voorhees, and next Tuesday for our week three roundup!  Until then, stay spooked and watch some horror movies!

31 Days of Halloween, Week One Roundup.

We've had a great response to our "31 Days of Halloween" event on Facebook.  Friends, fans and strangers have checked in and started conversations with one another, logging their month-long progress with all the zeal and pleasantness we could hope for.  So we'd like to take this opportunity to do a quick review of how our week has gone.

Day 0:  Hellraiser*

I had the opportunity to pre-game our own event by getting an early start on the Clive Barker classic Hellraiser, thanks in part to its availability on Netflix Instant.  There are a number of elements in the first three Hellraiser movies that just plain weird me out to this day, and that's one of my favorite aspects of horror: the discomfort.  In Hellraiser, Clive Barker mixes a dark representation of Judeo-Christian mythology (with specific attention to the ideas of Hell, souls and torment) with a 1980s-inspired visual motif of kinky sex.  Straps of black leather, hooks on chains and flayed flesh mix filthily together with a heady air of dialogue about the indistinguishable nature of pleasure and pain, BDSM and carnal knowledge.  Talk about discomfort - as the revived, skinless body of Frank Cotten lures murder victims to his old attic to feed off them, the black leather trenchcoat-clad Cenobites lecture his innocent niece about their time dwelling on the most extreme experiences of gratification and agony.

Day 1;  Friday the 13th (1980)*

Growing up, Friday the 13th was always my favorite slasher franchise.  I'd stay up until dawn watching TNT's Joe Bob Briggs host monster movies or listening to Gilbert Gottfried bleat his comedy during pre- and post-commercial blips on USA's Up All Night.  As they hosted classic horror flicks on the weekends, nobody's were more fun than those of Jason Voorhees.  I've had more nightmares about Freddy Krueger, who seems infinitely more creative in his sadism and impossible to stop, but I'll never get sick of seeing that lumbering behemoth in the hockey mask stab and hack at this year's batch of horny stoners with a machete.  Of course the first movie has a great twist as to the identity and motive of the killer, and its gore/creature effects were produced by now-legendary fx master Tom Savini.

*  Stay tuned next Saturday, October 13, for a special blog about these two franchises.

Day 2:  Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead is my favorite horror film of all time, tied with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Dawn of the Dead features Tom Savini on its gore effects, just as the first several Friday the 13th films did, and he also has a small part as a biker near the end.  Anyway, I love Dawn of the Dead partly because it has some great social commentary on mall culture and consumerism from the zombies and the survivors both.  I'm also a fan of every other aspect of this film, from the Goblins-composed score to the contributions from legendary Italian horror master Dario Argento.  For those unaware, this film also has an incredible reach over pop culture.  Not only did it spawn a very competent remake by Zack Snyder, it also had its dialogue and music sampled and reworked by Gorillaz, White Zombie and Robot Chicken among others.   

Day 3: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

John Larroqutte narrates the opening for this amazingly disturbing horror film by Tobe Hooper.  Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of several horror films to be inspired by the real-life killer and madman Ed Gein.  Gein, a hunter in Wisconsin in the 1940s, lost his mother and was unable to cope.  He dug up her grave and those of many women in the same cemetery and turned them into decorations, props, models and objects of pleasure around his house.  Gein would pretend that he had conversations with his mother, and dress himself up in her clothing, which led to the creation of Norman Bates and Hitchcock's immortal Psycho as well as Ted Levine's character in Silence of the Lambs, and of course Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The family of psychos in Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains one of the most haunting in horror, from the near-dead grandfather who sucks blood off Sally Hardesty's finger to the chainsaw-wielding, cross-dressing, skin-wearing hulk Leatherface.  I bootlegged a copy of this on VHS when I was 14 and haven't been without a copy of it since, in one format or another.

Day 4:  Let the Right One In

Like Dawn of the Dead before it, Let the Right One In continues our trend of amazing, thought-provoking horror that led to an at-least-decent remake (Let Me In).  In the original Swedish version, young svelte adolescent Oskar is bullied incessantly by his peers and neglected more often than not by his divorced parents.  He meets Eli, a mysterious girl who appears to be his age, and the two begin a friendship and relationship that is unencumbered by her necessity to feed off human blood to survive or her need to avoid sunlight.  It took me two years to watch this after it came out, because as soon as someone used the words "vampire" and "love story" in the same sentence, all I could think of was a sparkly Robert Pattinson and fortysomething suburban mothers screaming over Taylor Lautner shirtless.  However, I've never been more glad to be so wrong about a movie.  My wife, an integral part of A Carrier of Fire, watched it with me and enjoyed it despite her aversion to most horror.  Let the Right One In works just as well as an anti-bullying drama as it does a horror film, and offers the unique opportunity to get the overarching story of a life cycle as delivered from the middle to end first, then from the beginning to middle last.  It proceeds chronologically from start to finish, but one character finds himself (at the end of the movie) exactly where another does (at the first act of the film).  Beautiful.

Day 5:  Children of the Corn (1984).

Stephen King is often referred to as the master of horror, and it's easy to see how he earned his title.  We have no fewer than five King-adapted films in our queue for the month, but we're christening it with this.  Children of the Corn takes King's usual dark satire of extremist religious zealots (see also Carrie, Needful Things, The Mist and so on) and twists it by introducing a town in which children have murdered all the adults and taken over, regularly sacrificing people in the name of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, their monstrous god.  I'm always a fan of tongue-in-cheek movies that encourage people to listen more closely to children, e.g. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Children of the Corn will definitely make you cast a sideways glance at the next group of kids you see.

Day 6:  Cloverfield.

Cloverfield offers a Godzilla-esque monster rampage in New York while giving no explicit origin or cause for the creature.  Like The Mist, Cloverfield also features some of my personal favorite large creature designs in recent memory, alongside sharp dialogue, believable character actions and chilling depictions of mass hysteria and chaos.  The most memorable scene in the film, for me, comes early on when looters in an electronics store are suddenly shown stopped dead in their tracks as they watch some of the first live news footage of what's causing the terror.  Hypnotized like children, grown men and women with computers and stereos tucked under their arms all stare at a TV in the store with the same expression one would expect should the hand of God descend on Earth.

Day 7:  Silent Hill.

Among some other classics, Silent Hill may seem like an odd fit.  Video game-to-film adaptations rarely succeed financially or artistically, and Silent Hill is a very mixed bag of excellent fan service and fright amid awkward dialogue and nonsensical character action.  However, we've been thinking and talking lately about how many different kinds of horror movies there are - there are even different kinds of crappy horror movies, which we don't consider Silent Hill to be - and wanted to round out our first week without resorting to a third day of 1980s slasher shock.  Silent Hill is the very definition of divisive horror; I often find myself eyerolling at a couple lines of dialogue but reeling back in my seat from some of the eerier images and sounds.  I cheer for seeing some of my favorite monsters and hearing some of my favorite songs from the game series, and the movie holds a special place in my heart professionally as well.

In 2011, I and photographer Ashleigh Ellis visited Centralia, Pennsylvania, for a three-day expedition of research and adventure.  Centralia has had a coal fire burning underground for 50 years and 99% of its residents have abandoned it.  Ashleigh and I spent three days on-site and in local libraries to gather facts about the town's past, present and future which resulted in A Carrier of Fire's first official release, DisasterLand: Centralia.  With a 10,000-word story dipping its toe in photojournalism, creative non-fiction, feature writing and geology, DisasterLand: Centralia is one of our favorite projects to date.

Summary

The more we fight to Contain Christmas, the more we learn about ourselves and horror.  Why do we love to get scared?  Why do some of us look away from graphic violence when we know how fake it is?  At what point does a franchise jump the shark and venture beyond a point of redemption?  Why do so many horror villains end up in space?  What's the difference between "so bad it's good" and "just terrible?"  Stick with us for the next 3.5 weeks and join the discussion at facebook.com/ACarrierofFire under our "Events" section!  We've read entries by several others watching everything from Nightmare on Elm Street to Scooby-Doo and the Legend of the Vampire.  We expect to eat a lot of giblets next week when we start riskily dipping into movies we've never seen before, in our earnest attempts to expand our libraries and when we just watch terrible movies to cleanse our palettes from all this classic excellence.

Stay spooked and eat candy!