Spooky Season 2023

 Every year I say it* but this year I am doing it. I am going to try and watch a spooky movie everyday between now and Halloween. Spooky season being abut September 15th to November 1st. I won't do a post per movie but here is a mega thread of the season. Its a long one!

Smile-Its The Ring, which was already a re-hash. It had a neat marketing campaign (what with the cardboard cutouts of smiling people placed in random places like MLB playoff games) but its rather paint by numbers. The one striking scene comes at the very end when the villain shows its true form in a direct full shot of an unusual sort of monster. Mid movie

Signs-Only thing gets under my skin more than aliens are living dolls. I remember being really spooked to see this one back in the day but my son is now all into the unexplained so we gave it a shot. I did not remember much save the one scene (the TV scene from Brazil) that is still excellent even when you know the result. It really drops off in later half once all tension is gone and becomes a sort of one room chase movie.

The Neon Demon-Snoozy movie that thinks it has a lot to say but is quite predictable. Thinner, Black Swan, and Suspira with just better looking people. Lot of neat people in it and wow Jenna Malone is topless in one scene. 2003 version of me would have loved that. Look at that!

Friday the 13th: Part 2-These movies have such a complicated lore that always forget this one is a very clean direct sequel. Same movie as the first. I always think best part is five ten minutes with the apartment scene and several fake out scares. Then the title card the explodes. I literally LOL

The Host-my exposure to Korean media has been this movie, Squid Game, Parasite, Pororo the Penguin, and Tayo the Little Bus. I remember this movie getting a lot of hype back in the day. The monster effects are dated and less of a monster film than a horror of our sick sad world. 

Critters-The video store back home had a big cardboard display movie promo thing of this in the back and holy shit was I scared of that section. Watched this with my children who laughed at the monsters which are beyond the wall goofy. 

The Cabin in the Woods- A rewatch albeit have not seen it since it came out. I am very glad this movie exists and how it homages and lampoon so many tropes. If you have never seen it then come in with no background,  please! 

Also, holy smokes, Anna Hutchinson is in this! In a lead role! She was Lily the Yellow Power Rangers in Jungle Fury! Did not realize that until now.

No One Will Save You- It's cottage core Signs. The heroine even wears a flowing frilled night gown as she runs from aliens in the misty moonlight. Sincerely enjoyed this film even with the tacked on B plot. No jump scares instead relying on a clear cut dread. Also it's about an hour and ten minutes before anyone says anything in this movie.  It's all grunts, moans and screams (phrasing. It's not that kind of movie) for most of this. Fire in the Sky vibes also which scares me endlessly as a youth.

Goosebumps (Hulu 2023 version) I adored the book series as a youth. Every time that Troll or Scholastic book order form came to our class I scanned to get the newest one. When the original show came on I was hyped. And the material never was solid, even by YA standards, but I you are reading this blog it is because I wrote my own Goosebumps fan fictions and knockoffs on sheets of loose leaf paper. 

Anyway, this series (A cheat, I know. Not a movie) is great. Its not ashamed of its source material (like the 2017 Power Rangers movie) but does bring it to modern TV sensibilities. Its an anthology with Elm Street vibes (The sins of earlier generations visit their children) and not too scary. Its also...wholesome but in United Colors of Beneton way instead of Family Circus kitsch. 

Note: I did not realize this was a series releasing episodes weekly. So I watched as many as I could be 10/31/23

Five Nights at Freddy's: Ok, so, I only know about this because its some sort of horror game popular with kids and a previous job I had involved being a digital admin for a K-8 school. We had this program that sat on the student's Chromebooks and let us see their viewing and browsing history. A lot of FNAF stuff. Lot of hentai and ASMR as well.

 Even my own children knew about it and we had to see it! I truly felt at my most old man watching something I had no clue about save "haunted Chuck E Cheese."

Anyway...this movie is bad. Maybe if I played the games but it can't stand on even hackneyed plot points. The animatronic puppets, which seem like they were done in practical effects, do look good. And Matthew Lillard is in it as a villain!

Skinamarink-This movie made me angry. I had the same feeling I felt after leaving Blair Witch Project and asking my friends Bernie and Germain (Bernie had a car and Germain was the friend who was part of another friend group tangentially connected by Bernie) if we had just been tricked. This movie would have been much better had it been 10 minutes. Instead its an hour of...nothing. It could be something but in theory I could do a standing triple back flip! And just because I can't does not make me somehow an auteur gymnast. I am glad they made this movie and it has its hype but not for me. 

Texas Chain Saw Massacre-Never seen the OG one and aside from the Leatherface mask and chainsaws don't know much. Ill be damned it does not lose a beat. It would have been wild to see this in the 70s. It had to have the feeling you were watching something truly beyond comprehension. I was most shocked by how content it was in its wanton weirdness. The dinner scene with just every bonkers prop on the table. Grandpa and how he is both the world's worst and somehow most terrifying vampire. 

*To no one who can listen.

The Lamest Time Travel

I'll sometimes find myself shocked to a freezing stop because I imagine "where was the last time I experienced this? or "what was my life like last time I was here?" I'm worried time will snap back and Ill go to the last time I had chocolate covered jalapenos (A snoozy double date at Huntington Beach in Bay Village, Ohio) and have to re-live my whole life from that moment. With all the knowledge of the past but the same resources, people, and places as the original time. Dare I reset the timeline and try to change it? Or just re-live the time spent between high and low moments? 

One time my oldest cat got out and spent most of the day circling the hours and lingering in the low sightlines of our ranch home. She eventually came to the front door and batted at the glass bottom panel of the half screen door. Our other cat, a chubby black tomcat, lost his mind. He puffed up and snarled and hissed, all in defiance of his usual loopy doopy manner. If our life was Peter and the Wolf, then he would be the kazoo. Maybe she spent so much time outside that she got another scent? The smell of another animal? To him, this was a whole new cat he was meeting for the first time all over. No clocks moved back or forth but that is my feeling. My fear.

Any self serving person would hate to go back to high school. I car less and overweight, even with the cumulative knowledge of 30 plus years, would still seek solace in books and cable TV. Let me read all the other things I didn't focus on. The hackneyed thing to say is that I would try to get with girls with another shot at it. But, honestly, I would try to stop the cringe inducing embracing things done and said to try and impress the 25 or so girls in my HS class. I'll never meet these people again. . I know that because the time gods sent me back when I thought of last time I made an Oedipus Rex reference (9th grade Spanish). Not worth it and risk embarrassing my self in a whole new way.

If I went back to college then I would take the two more classes to graduate with a minor in art history. And not sell my Magic cards in the funky LGS above the used bookstore for $200. Which was a killing back then but the memories are worth more now. 

In adult hood, I hope the time snap takes me back to meeting people for first time. "Oh, here are your copies. I think you left them on the machine." Those memories are Cinco de Mayo ones. The gaudy beaded stylized Mariachi hats the Mexican place makes you wear on your birthday.  I drove by a shuttered pizza place yesterday (which was previously a failed yoga studio) which was also a coffee shop we used to stop at when my son was very young and we pushed him around the neighborhood in his stroller. Those memories are fall leaves and black forest cake.

A lot of these are food related. Makes sense since it is so connected to our mind and our very need to seek nourishment. But they are also run of the mill. I'm in a thrift shop and see a mustard corduroy jacket and I think of last time I wore corduroy. It was in junior year of college when I was at my skinniest and I am helping my girlfriend mover into a summer sublet. A place with a submarine slice of a kitchen with a manual gas stove called Martha Washington. 

There is no power in this form of time travel. It would be random but controlled by the triggers of the everyday. 

The last time I laid down painter's tape--Painting my son's nursery an electric blue

The last time I struggled with an exterior dryer vent--a soggy house we rented for four years after we barely escaped the mortgage of our first (and only) home. The rental had a history of clever "non-code" solutions by the landlady's dead husband, including what had to be a whole addition done just with lots of pluck. 

Every time I zip up a windbreaker I think how that was my shtick in high school---to wear this grey and black and yellow (Batman colors!) wind breaker even though it was always 80 degrees and sunny. I should wear less windbreakers save I go back armed with just more archival knowledge and smattering of who wins the Super Bowl. 

Autumn Colors

Autumn has a lock on its brand. The changing leaves, pumpkin patches, sweater weather, and apple cider. This transcends all weather and biomes so that someone in San Diego looks for the same signs as someone in Erie, PA. 

I did not grow up with Autumn. To me, autumn memories began in late teens in college in upstate New York. That is quintessential fall-y place. The local used bookstore, anchoring a pedestrian shopping district, was even named Autumn Leaves. 

To me, a sign of fall is on highway roadsides. That is when the dips between road berm and private property line bloom with the goldenrod, New Englad Aster, milkweed, and Queen Anne's lace. Fall is gold, purple, green, brown, and white. 

Goldenrod is the main character. It's dozen of varieties, differentiated by nuances like number of leaves or how flowers are arranged, dominate the landscape below the changing trees. Their paintbrush flowers sway back and forth as the cars swoosh past. 

The brightest is New England aster. It's neon hum purple feels out of place. Sometimes tiny white fleabanes pop out from under looking like first drafts of daisy flowers.

Milkweed either looks unassuming or just loud. When loud it can be gross. Are the leaves covered in the frass scat of Monarch caterpillars? Milky sap from leaf joints pouring out? Are the pods about to burst or have them spent themselves throwing thousands of prayers into the wind? They are brown and pale green looking ready for the long sleep.

I like when the Queen Anne's lace balls back up into a fist. The flowers dry up and curl unto themselves to wave menacingly at the creeping chill.