I Worry We Are Losing Touch With The True Meaning Of Halloween (avoiding The Fairies)

i worry we are losing touch with the True Meaning Of Halloween (avoiding the fairies)

@leggeteconme whenever I see someone badmouth Wagner, I think of you

If it sounds like the composer is trying to blast you with the orchestra until you're as deaf as he is, it's Beethoven.

If it sounds like the composer might be a vampire, it's Bach.

If it sounds like the composer is trying to set the violins on fire, it's Vivaldi.

Halloween Film Frightstival Day 2: The Purge (2013)

Instead of post-movie thoughts, here’s a real time stream of consciousness while I was watching:

Okay first thoughts: this might be an interesting investigation of classism, Ethan Hawke’s character is kind of a chauvinist, and no shit the boyfriend snuck in to kill him, why are teenage girls always so stupid in movies?

Maybe I’m too good at horror movies but I knew Charlie’s hidden compartment was definitely coming back into play, so far this could not be more predictable if it tried

I just got an ad for security cameras lol

So I thought maybe this would be an interesting statement of class and race, but rich white people victimize a homeless Black veteran is kind of too real, idk maybe that’s what makes it an appropriate dystopian horror but it kind of just seems like what happens everyday in real life

Also why is the first thought everyone has in the purge mass murder? Not an interesting crime. Rob a bank, get rich for life, fund charities to help people who will be victims of the purge, take over the government

The lead bad guy is genuinely scary but mostly because I think he actually exists and is probably a politician

The neighbors coming to help is kind of a vibe, although I’m still not getting enough eat the rich out of the premise

OH SHIT I FUCKING KNEW IT I THOUGHT IT WAS THEM WHO SHOWED UP IN THE MASKS IN THE FIRST PLACE I KNEW ITTTTT

The way Mary didn’t send them home and made them sit around the table thinking about their actions until it was over is kind of a badass move

Also purge insurance must be an expensive as fuck nightmare, is there life insurance? Who cleans up all the dead bodies?

What was up with the flowers? They didn’t really establish that. Was it like a blood above the door at Passover type of thing? Like look we’re patriots please don’t kill us

Anyway the action was good, but it felt more like a dystopian action movie than a horror movie. Overall that was just fine 🤷‍♂️, I don’t know that I’d watch any of the sequels

Halloween is a time to be absolutely terrified

That’s why this October I’m teaming up with mental illness, sleep deprivation, and misleading refrigerator manuals to…

Flood my kitchen!

Halloween Film Frightstival Day 6: The Evil Dead (1981)

Okay so I’ve been wanting to watch the original Evil Dead for fucking ever and it’s finally on a streaming service (it’s on tubi rn) and during spooky season too!

I watched the 2013 one several years back when I was a horror wimp, but still enjoyed it as an early foray into the actually scary stuff (I specifically recall enjoying making fun of the characters for doing immensely stupid shit like opening and reading aloud from a cursed book that has warnings written all over it)

Okay I was gonna try and just watch instead of keeping track of a running commentary but 10 minutes in and I just noticed one of the characters is wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt, alma mater mention! It’s fitting cause MSU is haunted as shit (well so is the entire state in general but)

Ooh the creepy exterior shots looking through the windows are goood, in fact a lot of the cinematography was good, I liked the interesting uses of angles and zooms for unsettling atmosphere. There were even oblique angles which is one of the only things I remember from the film class I took in high school and that’s the only reason I mentioned it

~ This is movie is exactly why the woods are scary, if you’d shown me this as a child who was afraid of the woods and any suspiciously woods-ish groups of trees I would’ve shit bricks ~

They all have such old people midcentury names (random thought I had because I can’t watch movies like a normal person and have to constantly make fun of the characters)

The prosthetics and makeup are soo fucking good though (the fakeness of the gore kind of throws it off sometimes, but to some degree it’s what I would expect a Sumerian demon killing coeds to look like in real life)

I think it’s interesting that they subvert the final girl trope with the order of killings, I knew enough about the franchise going in to know that there wasn’t a final girl but to have them all go first was different. I guess with Ash as the main character there’s more implications of the difficulty he’d have killing them since he has a girlfriend and a sister there

I also found it the tiniest bit campy with the wild kind of silly things that happen and the disregard for physics vis-à-vis chopping a head off with a shovel

Okay and the stop motion, while useful for what they needed to do and executed well, is not the vibe imo (I’m not the most fond of stop motion in general but that application of it brought the scare factor down for me)

The ending scream into upbeat credits music was a vibe though, I love when they put peppy music at the end of horror movies it’s so silly

Anyway I very much enjoyed that, it’s my favorite era of horror movies and borders on my favorite subgenres, I think I might have held it to too high a standard while watching because it was lower budget than probably a lot of the other horror movies I like (I just looked it up and it had like half the budget of Friday the 13th) and taking that into account it seems like even more of an impressive film. I’d probably say that was my favorite so far this week, I’ll probably check out the sequels sometime 👍