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!