This about wraps up Shocktober. Two years and 12 horror films in, I definitely have a new appreciation – if not necessarily a desire to see more – of the genre. That said, I now feel like I know the grammar of horror movies (to steal a phrase from Noel Murray on The Dissolve) better than I did before, and that has enabled to me to … Continue reading What scares me
For my last film for Shocktober, I picked (or more accurately, gave in to a friend who’d been bugging me for weeks to watch) something still within the horror genre but with a decidedly crooked point of view. I’m not sure how many Christopher Guest-style vampire mockumentaries there are – or even if this counts as a sub-genre – but What We Do in the … Continue reading What We Do in the Shadows makes a case for mockumentary as a horror sub-genre
Among his many reasons for disliking Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Stephen King said that one of its major failings was to represent Jack’s – and, by extension, King’s – battle with alcoholism the way he intended. While it’s true that Kubrick’s Jack is very different from King’s, that doesn’t mean Kubrick’s The Shining is less about alcoholism. Although I’ve see the movie several times, I’d … Continue reading Why Steven King is wrong about The Shining‘s representation of alcoholism
Since I started looking into horror films last year, every top ten list had The Thing on it. I wanted to watch it in 2016, but a combination of limited time and trouble convincing my wife to watch a movie so notoriously gory forced me to postpone it until 2017. And for such a perennial favorite, I chose to end Shocktober on it. Sadly, I … Continue reading The Thing may not be the scariest movie ever, but it is probably the goriest
Famously, Steven King hated Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining. There are a lot of reasons for that, some of which I’ll discuss later, but one comment of his stands out is “Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre.” Maybe that’s true, as The Shining doesn’t look much like the horror films of the 50s that King … Continue reading The Shining is still the gold standard for horror
As I approach the end of Shocktober, I’m returning to another old favorite. It’s been almost 20 years since I last saw Alien (it was part of a tradition at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor to show scary movies at midnight every Saturday in October – that was all well and good, until it involved me walking home alone at 2am after seeing Alien). … Continue reading Alien is as slow as it is scary – in a good way
As I come to the end of Shocktober, I feel like I’m getting an idea of what I should start looking for in horror films (or at least in horror films I’ll probably like). While in a lot of ways I lean towards the more unconventional side of the genre, there is one trope that never fails to get me: the anticipation of the jump … Continue reading Why the lack of a jump scare is worse than the scare itself
[SPOILER ALERT] For my second “classic” horror movie this Shocktober, I chose The Ring, which I remember as being even scarier than The Blair Witch Project the first time around (it contains the only jump scare that ever made me throw my bag of popcorn into the air). And like The Blair Witch Project, I was wondering how it held up 15 years later. The … Continue reading The Ring is unconventionally scary (even 15 years later)
All of the horror movies I’ve watched both for the original Shocktober and for Shocktober Returns have been new to me . . . until now. The Blair Witch Project is my first rewatch. The first and only time I’d seen it before was on opening night in 1999. I had totally bought into its hype as “the scariest movie ever made” (although not as … Continue reading The Blair Witch Project doesn’t hold up to repeat viewings
[SPOILER ALERT] First things first – don’t make the mistake I did and read the Wikipedia plot summary for The Cabin in the Woods before seeing it. I told myself “I’ll never see this but I’m curious what all the hype is about,” and I regretted that decision as soon as the movie started. Luckily, the twist was revealed within the first 30 minutes. But … Continue reading The Cabin in the Woods is about as meta as horror gets
Monday Morning Movie Quarterback 