Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Double Feature: The Haunted Hike & Halloween: Resurrection)

Here we are at last! Halloween! Spooky Day! The culmination of the spooky season, kids knocking on the door, candy given out, all of that. The choice of what to cover for the final day was locked in a while ago. It shouldn't be a problem. That was, of course, until things and impulses happened and there was another spooky season experience I really wanted to talk about on the blog. What to do? Do I not talk about Nameless and wait a day to talk about this? Do I skip the Halloween movie? Do I write about it and keep it in the vault until next year? The answer I came up with was just to do both. So, for this spooky finale, you get the equivalent of the full size chocolate bar from my house tonight. Two posts for the price of one. Hot damn. Let us begin.

THE HAUNTED HIKE

The Haunted Hike is not a movie, show, comic, or game. The Haunted Hike was a literal experience I had in the real world, last night. We've gone the ultimate non-traditional route, and I'm blogging about a spooky experience I had. Gonzo journalism meets psychogeography meets my usual brand. The Haunted Hike was a community event held in my general area last night, where groups were led on a spooky tour through the woods and told a scary story whilst people in the bushes try to jumpscare you. I've spent 3 bucks on worse and I was supporting my community by going. Besides, I knew it would make a good blog entry. There was a certain dark power to the event that hit with my own personal resonances, so let's talk about it. Let's talk about my night on the Haunted Hike.

Imagine being here in pitch-black darkness.

October 30th, 2021. 6:30 PM. Twilight is upon us, the sun pretty much set. I am walking from my home to a scenic little neighboring town on the southern coast of Newfoundland. Three generations of family on my mother's side grew up here, and that includes family who now reside in Grand Bank, Newfoundland. That's an important place to me, and as I reach the top of the hill leading down into the town I can actually see the distant Burin Peninsula. The street lights of the towns of Garnish and Frenchman's Cove glimmer across the water. I was there a month and a half ago, and now they're firefly pinpricks at day's end. Playing fittingly on my Ipod is Magia, the ending theme to Madoka Magica. A song which beckons oncoming darkness, as I walk to oncoming darkness. I leave the main road, heading on a dirt path that will take me to the cemetery, the Haunted Hike happening just around it. At this point it is dark enough that I need my flashlight. By the time I get there and wait in line, darkness has fully fallen. As I wait with the half a dozen others who will be walking with me on this tour of the Haunted Hike, hearing the occasional blood-curdling scream in the night, I ponder. Are they from the volunteers scaring the walkers, or from the walkers themselves?

We all have our personal spots of resonance. For me, these wooded areas are one such spot. I have blogged about them before, for an esoteric Nintendo Project post on Zelda. I have vlogged them. All of these were pleasant serene nature walks in broad daylight. Tonight these woods are not my serene walking trails. These woods are the woods of witches and dark magic and the walking dead. This is why I wanted to come to the Haunted Hike. The familiar and comforting turned into a dark mirror of itself. This theme continues as our tour guide arrives, a microphone amplifying her voice and a floodlight headband on her head obscuring her face to us. I know her, though. I went to school with her. We were friends. A nice girl who grew up to have a nice family. Now she leads us to a campfire, the four or five kids sitting around it as she begins to tell us a story. A spooky story, a secret history of forgotten settlers in this place. Three sisters of a mysterious nature. Three witches. The trail we are taking is not one I have walked before. It is my own secret history, the familiar made unfamiliar by the horror lurking within. We walk.

I nearly trip, of course, as this terrain is uneven. I'm fine, though. We hear a scream of anguish and terror from up ahead, and the bushes rustle. What's that? What is that? AAAAAAARGH! Ah, a jumpscare. How cute. Didn't get me, though. The anguished wails grow louder as our guide explains. A woman brought her dying daughter to the three witches, and as we take the turn we see them. They're right there in front of us, incanting and doing what they can. They fail. The girl dies. Then they cast the forbidden spell, the dark magic. The guide reads it, incants it herself. At this point I understand why I am here. The spooky movies with their jumpscares, as effective and immersive as they can be, are two-dimensional. A simple image trapped within my television. Out here, in the dark woods surrounded by foilage, it's 360 degrees of unease. I look to my left and my right, unsure if the margins of this trail are haunted by jumpscares. The witches bring back the girl, but they bring her back wrong. She goes for the throat of her own flesh and blood, right in front of us. We march on, and I've let my guard down. I told you we have been walking around the perimeter of a cemetery, and the woods on my right now give way to fence. I'm not looking up there, and so when someone from inside the cemetery grabs that fence and goes AAAAARGH!, I go AAAH JESUS! They got me. The Haunted Hike got me. Well done. We walk.

It becomes clear, as our guide explains, that the forbidden magic has brought with it something which cannot be contained; an undead thing which feeds on flesh and blood. To our left, in the woods, we see her gnawing on a severed hand. The guide warns us not to make eye contact. I hold my flashlight tight and follow the advice given. As we reach the corner of the fence, we see that this girl was not satisfied with one meal. We see people walking, and we see the monster pounce and drag them into the recesses of the dark woods. We go deeper still into those woods, down another path I did not know existed. Hands grasp out from the sides of the path, desperate to grab us. We make it to a clearing, the ocean cove visible even in the darkness. A fire burns, the three witches chanting to try and contain what they have unleashed. The familiar made unfamiliar, but even here there is some levity. An older man who has been walking with us has been amused by the proceedings, and he jokes and asks if the witches have any marshmallows for the fire. A cute little riff to ward off terror, the terror which surrounds us. Suddenly, without warning, the walking dead lurch forth from the dark woods, hungry for us! The kids in front panic and scream, our guide panics, it's a whole panic! We run!

Well, they run. I briskly jog. A slow zombie is still a slow zombie, after all, and a flashlight could do something. We run up past the fence, and then the show is over as our guide lets us know. What an experience. The familiar made unfamiliar, zombies lurking in the woods, jumpscares to be had. You would think, then, my journey into terror would be over. Oh no. Not quite. I walked here. Now, after hearing of the secret history of witches and zombies in my own serene places, I must walk back. In the dark. I am reminded of 2007, when a friend came to visit my house and we watched a new Doctor Who episode. It was "Blink", the debut of the horrific and frightening Weeping Angels. My friend had to view that and then walk home in the dark, and I do not mean suburban darkness where every corner is lit by orange light. I mean between towns. Pure dark. I now am mirroring him, but at least I have a flashlight. So be it, then. I walk.

I climb the ascent that will lead me out of town, and as I do my Ipod is serendipitous. It throws on Meteor Light, the ending theme to the first season of Symphogear. My love, my light, my comfort. I hike up that hill and look back at the twinkling fireflies of Garnish and Frenchman's Cove as Meteor Light fades out. I need a breather from the climb, so I go to sit and catch my breath at the nearby basketball court. I sit in the darkness with my flashlight, Meteor Light playing again, as I look up at the vast expanse of stars and reflect on my spooky experience. Pity the moon wasn't out right here, as that would have been ultra-symbolic. Still, the Ipod manages one last bit of reclaimed symbolism. As I resume my walk, it shuffles to a song from Zombie Land Saga. Zombie Land Saga. The show I called the Symphogear of zombie media in this marathon. Fitting, then, that after an encounter with "the real thing", I get that on-brand resonance to carry me home. I make it home, I lock my door, and I rest. That was The Haunted Hike. I hope you enjoyed my rather lengthy writeup. I think I'll have less to say about the actual spooky movie, but let's find out, shall we?

HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION

Boo.

Oh my god. Oh my good god. I honestly did not expect to vibe with this movie as much as I did. Part of that vibe was laughing, I'll be honest, but there's another sincere part of me that is honestly impressed. Halloween Resurrection is a movie with very clever ideas that would be killer in a better movie. At the very least, if it is not a good movie, it is an interesting one that has some stuff going on under the hood. The big bold beginning, the pre-credits scene, is a followup to Halloween H20. You know, the movie this was a sequel to ostensibly. Well, in case you forgot, at the end of that movie Laurie Strode fucking beheaded Michael Myers. How are we back? Oh, a little retcon. Wasn't him under the mask. He did a switcheroo. Okay. Now Laurie's in a psychiatric institution but she's been planning her revenge, so when Michael comes back she... Well, the big bold move is she doesn't succeed! Her need to make sure it's him gives him the jump on her and he kills her! She's dead! The shadow's won! What will Michael do now that he's killed the person he was seeking out? Well, that leads us into the rest of the movie.

Murdering horny college kids. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's what you paid to see, right? What is this? Michael Myers isn't Walmart-brand Jason Voorhees (despite what Halloween II desperately wants you to believe) so what intrigue and boldness is there in a movie of "th-the college kids have sex so I cut their throats"? This is a loaded question as that doesn't really happen, but I want to lead in to what kind of gives this movie a unique flavor. To be fair to the college kids, they're enroaching on Michael's territory here. The premise of the movie is a reality TV livestream thing doing a Halloween night special wherein six college kids put on cameras and go into the old Myers house to find clues as to why Michael stabbed a bunch of people. The movie does quite a lot with this that I genuinely did vibe with, so let's get into that. First off, you have the pseudo-found footage aspect of the movie where half the shots are shot on a grainy digital camera from 2002, giving it that exact vibe. The movie effortlessly cuts between the shitty quality of the POV shots from the broadcast and its "own" POV that's shot like an actual movie you are watching. How does that work for a livestream, though? Ignoring the fact that a stream of this quality is about 10 years too advanced for the time of the movie, we see people viewing the stream. The website lays out every camera, be they ones planted in the house or the body cams of the college kids, and the viewers can freely switch between them to focus on whatever or whoever they like. This setup has a surprising resonance for me; the 1992 FMV game Night Trap, where you switch between camera angles in a spooky vampire house and focus on whatever and whoever you like. To see that approach in a slasher movie is some genius.

The real absolute wild thing is when the murders start. This being a live stream, you'd expect someone to go "oh my god people are literally being murdered on this thing", but you have that artifice of reality TV that makes one unsure. It's probably faked, right? All reality TV is just fake made-up bullshit. The movie bothers to give the producer of the livestream (played by, I shit you not, Busta Rhymes) a big monologue about how everyone needs to play along and get spooked and all this bullshit isn't real so shut up and scream and get your paycheck. Maybe in 2002 the "reality TV ISN'T REAL" thing was more of a shocker, but I was sitting here rolling my eyes like "What are you gonna tell me next, Busta Rhymes? That wrestling is just prefabricated choreography?". It's right about here we get to the subplot of the people watching the livestream. So, bit of setup. The new Final Girl of the movie (Christ what an oxymoron that sounds like, but you know what I mean) has an Internet pen pal who goes to the same college she does. There's some dated Internet pen pal jokes but let's ignore that. So this guy is at a Halloween party but ducks into another room to load up the stream, at which point people find him doing it and then half the party is like "yeah sure, why not, we'll watch the spooky Halloween stream and drink beer and shit.". When people start dying (Fun fact: the first college kid to die gets it when Michael Myers bursts out of the other side of a mirror to drag him to his death. I just call 'em as I see 'em, I don't make the rules.) the pen pal character, we'll call him by his screen name "Deckard", is convinced that they're seeing actual fucking murders on the Internet. The rest of the party dismisses it because all reality TV is fake. The movie's hit this sweet spot of metacommentary on horror movie watchers where it's not quite super-meta but not quite ghoulish either. Somewhere between the opening of Scream 2 and Cabin In The Woods. It works for it.

What also works is the sweet spot between the Internet being a thing and smartphones not being a thing. So many clever dingers out there like to point out how so many spooky movies would be solved with a smartphone. Sarah does not have a smartphone, but she does have a... well, I don't know what this is. A PDA? Whatever it is, Deckard can send text messages from the party as he watches the livestream, to warn her about where Michael is and when she should hide and when she needs to run. Hey, holy shit, I'm really vibing with this! They're using the Internet angle to the fullest, the stream and the pen pal thing all came full circle like a Chekov's gun! I genuinely like this, and again it hits just the perfect spot. She can't just call for help on the phone, but she can still be helped via technology in a way you couldn't do in most previous slasher movies. Before I go, I just want to say that this movie has perfect moments of hilarity and a lot of them involve Busta Rhymes. Michael does Kool-Aid Man a door at the beginning of the movie, but this is mirrored by Busta Rhymes kicking a door down and saying to slasher icon Michael Myers, "TRICK OR TREAT MOTHERFUCKER.".  He also has a Chekov's Gun of his own where he likes watching martial arts movies and then does roundhouse kicks to Michael's face. Oh yeah, I can't forget to mention HE ELECTROCUTES MICHAEL MYERS IN THE BALLS. That's right. Busta Rhymes electrocutes slasher icon Michael Myers in the balls in this movie. Look. There are better Halloween movies. There are worse ones. (I have heard unkind things about this year's Halloween Kills and I dread next year.) As it stands, you can have an interesting time with this big dumb slasher movie, if you roll with it and let it. I think that will do it here. That's it for Halloween, that's it for Sixteen Screams... but there are bigger horrors on the horizon. Oh, and I don't mean NaNoWrimo. By no means are we done on this blog yet. As I write this, across the pond in the UK, the people have experienced something truly horrific. It's making its way over here as I speak, and in hours it will reach my shores and I have to reckon with it.

Forget being afraid of NaNoWriMo. Tomorrow I have to write once again about Chris Chibnall's Doctor Who. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!! Until then, everyone.