In Honor Of Halloween Month, I Will Be Watching A Lot Of Horror Movies Till The Month Is Over.

In honor of Halloween month, I will be watching a lot of horror movies till the month is over.

Well.

I should probably say "Horror" movies. The primary categories of which are:

A handful of actual, fairly solid genuine horror movies with creepy vibes and not a lot of slasher gore-gore-gore.

Some very solid horror comedies, but an eclectic mix that definitely leaves out many of what most horror buffs would consider horror comedy staples.

A few movies that are technically billed as horror and have many horror elements, but also wind up being honestly kind of sweet comfort movies with happy (or at least happy-ish) endings?

A lot of delightfully weird, low-budget romps (where weird, here, very emphatically does not mean anything resembling 'artsy') that only classify as horror in the most technical of senses, such as "Slotherhouse" and "Aaah! Zombies!!" (the first of which is about an animal trafficked sloth murdering its way through a sorority house; and the second of which has a level of effort put into its creation that I think can be best described as, "exactly the amount up to which the people involved were still having fun, and absolutely not one single iota of effort more," which in the case of this movie was also objectively the correct amount of effort).

American Psycho II, which I feel like deserves its own category as a movie that had literally nothing to do with American Psycho, had been fully filmed and was basically on final edits, when it was forced to add a few new scenes and a handful of voiceovers to make it (very vaguely) related to American Psycho for entirely marketing purposes, and then proceeded to absolutely bomb in reviews because it was billed as a sequel but actually has literally 0% of anything to do with the movie it was billed as a sequel to for 100% nonsense publicity reasons. It also features Bill Shatner at his post-Star Trek Bill Shatner-y best, Mila Kunis carrying most of the movie as pretty much the only cast member capable of acting, and a plot that only barely makes sense sometimes, but still makes me laugh in delight every time. Really, the only thing that even remotely justifies this movie's attempt to bill itself as an American Psycho sequel is that otherwise, I might never have encountered it, and that would frankly be a tragedy.

And it occurs to me that if I happen to have any followers who have always vaguely wanted to participate in Halloween Month Movie watchings but also have super weird and often nonsensically specific taste in horror or horror-adjacent movies like I do, I would be totally down to offer personal recommendations from any and all of these categories (with or without plot summaries, insofar as there exists a plot to be summarized).

My credentials are: I love stories, and as a consequence I have consumed a lot of stories over my 3+ decades of life so far; I have extremely random taste that covers the whole range from "matches up with popular expectations" to "I think this movie is genuinely brilliant and do not get why so many people don't like it" to "bad"; and finally I am very good at finding extremely esoteric offerings + having a range of very typical to very very atypical takes on more well known offerings, too.

I love soulmates but also this-

salting a wound to preserve for longer

sometimes you really just gotta say “that’s not my business” and move on

Sometimes, "Write for yourself," means that you have to stop waiting for someone else to convince you that your work has value worth sharing before you believe in that value for yourself.

Write for yourself because you believe you have a story worth being told, not because you are hoping that someone else will agree with you after the story is done.

It means worry about what other people will think about your story after you've written it, but you have to decide you have something worth writing first.

The only definite guarantee is that no one will ever think anything of the story you gave up on before it was ever put down on a page.

6.5k into next chapter of the Groundhog Day AU, and I feel like I am at the same editing stage as the 5k word point of Ch. 2. Y'know, the chapter that doubled in word count from that stage of editing and became a 10k word chapter by the time it was posted...

I have already cut this chapter in half and added a whole new chapter to the chapter count, it had better not become a 12k word chapter anyway.