Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (John Carpenter's Christine)

[VFX: car on fire]

Okay. What do we make of John Carpenter's Stephen King's Haunted Car: The Movie? There's actually something I can really jam with in here, but we gotta build up to it. Unfortunately since it involves the titular Haunted Car, I am going to really have to stretch. No worries. No worries, y'all. If you know me, you know I'm good at stalling out a point and rambling. For God's sakes I'm doing it right now, even. I don't think I'm going to get a paragraph here before I actually have to talk about it, but I'm damn close. Let's talk about the book a little, then, since this is an adaptation. I'm not sure what drew John Carpenter to this King work, specifically. Oh. I literally just did a Wikipedia glance and it turns out this was just a "well I got nothing else going" kind of deal and Carpenter actually wanted to direct an adaptation of King's novel Firestarter. Interesting factoid. Okay. Let's talk about the book. Christine, not Firestarter.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 3 (Zombie Land Saga Revenge)

Idol stuff, man.

I always end these marathons with some variant joke on how the real horror before me is NaNoWriMo in November. This right here is a horror lurking in the future for me. This season of Japanese cartoon television, aired in the summer of this year, was good and resonant enough that it practically demanded I do a patented Frezno-brand deep dive project about it. It pissed me off and terrified me because of the work I'd have to put into it, but honestly? It won't be as long as Symphogear. I can live with that. So, consider this a rare moment of brevity before I give into my excesses and tell you fucking everything about this show and how it made me cry. First, though, a primer. Two years ago, in preparation for another spooky marathon, I took the first season of this show with me on vacation. You can read those thoughts right here. Two weeks ago, I blasted through it all on a rewatch on vacation in that same place. Here are some thoughts on that.

With Zombie Land Saga Revenge, it's a cemented fact: Zombie Land Saga is now my favorite piece of zombie media. It ain't even close. Sorry, Shaun Of The Dead. Woe be to World War Z. In fact, I'll lay a little groundwork for me to pick up on in like six months or whenever I get at this. Zombie Land Saga is the Symphogear of zombie media. "Oh fuck, did you drop a good one there, past me". I'll be saying. Zombie Land Saga, in its first season, was all about healing from trauma; the psychological trauma of one's anxieties/fears/regrets, and the physical trauma of literally having died and finding oneself to be the living dead. In short, ZLS Revenge runs on that theme to even greater effect. The main arc of the season is Japanese idol group Franchouchou, in secret composed entirely of the decomposed living dead, plotting a revenge concert at a massive venue in which they previously performed and totally bombed at. The first season was Franchouchou's rise, in between they fell, and now they're going to rise again. They're the undead, it's what they do best.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 2 (Llamageddon)

Good lord. What do you say about something like this? I guess you start with the mindset you have to have going into a movie like this. Some movies give you exciting thrills. Some give you insightful allegory. Llamageddon is not one of those movies. Llamageddon is the kind of dumb fucking movie you throw on with friends to have a chuckle at. There are all sorts of movies like this, but Llamageddon at least feels like it's laughing with you. It knows it is a dumb fucking movie about a killer llama, how absolutely gonzo that premise is, and just goes hog wild with it. Movies like Sharknado and its ilk are big budget variations of what Llamageddon manages with some cameras shooting at a house in the country for the weekend, and that's kind of impressive.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (Gremlins 2: The New Batch)

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU'RE AT SOUP???

The spooky month has descended upon us again! It is time, once again, for the real horror to blight me; the constant non-stop writing rush between now and early December. God help me, the snow will be coming by the time my fingers stop moving. Ironic, then, that the inaugural subject for our new and brevity-improved Sixteen Screams marathon is the sequel to a Christmas movie. Yes, Gremlins is a Christmas movie and that's why I'm not covering it here. God help me if I ever wade into the debate about which marathon The Nightmare Before Christmas would belong in. It would help, before we begin, to talk a little about that original movie and what I remember it doing. Certainly I never saw it until I was a teen. As a child, a cousin had the Gremlins 2 game on Game Boy. Its cover art with the Mohawk Gremlin spooked me, but I liked the game. One summer while visiting I found the Gremlins 2 NES game at a flea market. Same cover, but I picked it up. Time has proven that it was a much better game than the Game Boy version. Oh, God. I said I was going to talk about the movie and then I went on a tangent about the Gremlins 2 video game. That was, uhhh, setup for going into talking about the movie. Yeah.

Coming Soon: Sixteen Screams For Halloween!

 Hi there. Before we get into the usual preamble, I just want to talk about something that's way too short to devote a blog post on, but too longwinded for a tweet. Singer/songwriter Dua Lipa, who I have heard all of one song from prior to today, dropped a music video for a song called "Levitating" the other day. It's an animated music video which takes obvious aesthetic influence from 90's anime and Sailor Moon, but also has a couple of sly homages to Dirty Pair that I caught. Often, in posts on media important to me, I will refer to the concept of my "internal landscape". The music video for Levitating somehow manages to be a perfect representation of my internal landscape, circa September 2018. The visuals, the sound, the mood... This is pure Freznocore as I existed back then! It's wild, and it's like looking back at a past version of myself, but through this weird audiovisual pool. Anyway, check out the video down below. Visuals are rad, and the song's good too. Past that, on with the main show.

It's that time of year again. Fall beckons, and my fingers tremble in fear; not from the spooky season rapidly approaching, but for the sudden marathon of writing they will now endure every day for the next two months or more. Between this and NaNoWriMo, fall is my most productive period. So, we're announcing the start of that once again. It's almost time for another Halloween marathon in which I write about spooky and spooky-adjacent media during October. The astute among you will notice a change. Previously our spooky marathon was called "31 Days, 31 Screams" and had a post a day during the month of October. I am making the executive decision to cut things in half this year, for two reasons. The first is that I actually have some more writing I need to set aside some energy for during the fall. I don't want to reveal anything just yet, but it's one hell of an opportunity for me and I hope and pray the results are up to par. The second is that I'm running out of ideas for things to do in the spooky months. Last year was a hell of a stretch. I think we can make one post every two days an easy thing this year. 16 days, 16 Screams. Sixteen Screams For Halloween. You like it?

Well, I hope you like it. Of course, as always, even 16 might be a stretch. That's where you all come in! I always open up the request line this time of year for spooky media that you think would result in a good post from me. I am but one individual with my own tastes and focus, and opening the floor to others helps broaden my perspective and cover shit I might never cover otherwise. So, do feel free to suggest some things in the comment section below! I will give you some helpful bullet points for ease of selection on my part:

-I have access to Canadian Netflix and Youtube rentals, and am debating a one-month resub to the streaming service Shudder for the month of October.

-My only real trigger/phobia, beyond a very specific case, is wrist or throat slashing. If such scenes are signposted in the movie such that it's obvious they're going to happen, I can avert my eyes in time. If there's only one or two such scenes in the movie, it's fine with a warning. If it's something like a Friday the 13th or Sweeney Todd, where such things are the main method of murder, that's a hard pass.

-I am open to other media, like brief forays into TV shows or comics or what have you, but it's not my main area of expertise and I'll need a relatively affordable or even cost-free way of access to cover it.

I think that's everything. I look forward to your suggestions, and we'll see you in two weeks for some more screams and spooks and scares. Until then, get some hot chocolate at the cafe, watch the leaves fall from the trees, and wait safely for my return. Then we'll delve into the world of the macabre. Together. 

Enterprise Season 4: A Trek In Episodic Substitution

Well then. What in the hell is this? That's not just a question you may be asking yourself right now. It's a question I'm asking myself. Why am I back here, of all places? The answer is that I'm being a cheeky little gremlin, an agent of chaos getting revenge in what, to borrow a turn of phrase from El Sandifer, is a text-based magical ritual to destroy nostalgic pandering. Ah. There's that old Nintendo Project-styled esoteric gonzo waffling. Enough of that for a second. Let me set the scene and explain what the hell I'm doing here.

From February to April 2019 I ran a project on this blog called To Boldly Step Forward, in which I watched the show Enterprise for the first time and offered bite-sized thoughts on every single episode. All the words are right there in the hyperlink if you wish to delve into my deeper thoughts, but I will for once show brevity and give a quick summary of the long road I had, getting from there to here(Sorry not sorry.). Star Trek: The Next Generation was an important part of my interior landscape, a show that moved and changed and inspired me. Enterprise turned out to not be that show for me, but it was so tantalizingly close to being it that it still frustrates me. The short version of the path that To Boldly Step Forward led me down was a show with wildly fluctuating ups and downs; the downs were hella down, but the ups tingled with possibility and intrigue. Through its first two seasons Enterprise's most resonant moments involved its "Temporal Cold War" arc, in which people from the future mucked around in the past. I took it as a metaphor for Star Trek's utopian future seeking enlightnment and inspiration from its flawed but good-hearted past.

The Harmony Of Hope And The Hope Of Despair: The All-In-One Package

Hi there! It's been two months or so since we finished this, and I'm not really back at it, per se. Just some tidying up. Since finishing this project, I've been sort of relaxing and procrastinating. My usual self. I got one or two things in the pipeline, though; one being a quickie post that's as gonzo as it is a stupid idea. The other is much more in line with my 'brand", so to speak. Anime, cute girls, the utopic ideal. It's a show I've talked about before but its follow-up was so good and personally resonant to the larger narrative of the blog that it actively pissed me off, solely because now I have to devote a little project time to it. With that timely tease out of the way, what is this?

For any newcomers to the blog, or those of you who clicked my pinned Twitter post, or anyone else, a little explanation. From November 2019 to May 2021 I watched, enjoyed, ruminated on, and wrote at length about the Japanese cartoon Senki Zesshou Symphogear, a magical girl cartoon about finding hope and the utopic ideal in the most desperate and darkest hours of the human soul. It's a show that's very important to me, and very resonant to me given the types of media that have shaped and changed me over the course of my life. I expressed that in one marathon of a project which took me 60,000 words and a year to write, and this blog post is the all-in-one package curating every single word in one handy and easy-to-access compilation. With that, I for once find some brevity and leave you to it. Please enjoy my hard work and thoughtful feelings, in... The Harmony Of Hope And The Dirge Of Despair.

Introduction: Elegy Of The Eternals

Part 1: Meteoroid-falling, Burning, And Disappear, Then… (Senki Zesshou Symphogear)

1.1: Sonata Of Sacrifice

1.2: Tempo Of Tsubasa

1.3: Crescendo Of Chris and Minuet Of Miku

1.4: Finale Of Finè

Part 2: In The Distance, That Day, When The Star Became Music... (Senki Zesshou Symphogear G)

2.1: Aria Of Apples

2.2: Canon Of Corruption

2.3: Bolero Of Betrayal

2.4: Upbeat Of Understanding

2.5: Hymn Of Heroism

Part 3: Believe In Justice And Hold A Determination To Fist (Senki Zesshou Symphogear GX)

3.1: Allegro Of Alchemy

3.2: Waltz Of Weakness 

3.3: Cacophony Of Curses

3:4: Falsetto Of Fatherhood

3.5: Melody Of Memory

Part 4: By Shedding Many Tears, The Reality You Face Is... (Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ)

4.1: Incantation Of Illuminati

4.2: Requiem Of Regret

4.3: Precipitato Of Problematic

4.4: Percussion Of Perfection

4.5: Discord Of Divinity

Part 5: Create A History, With The Light God Could Not Know (Senki Zesshou Symphogear XV)

5.1: Verse Of Violence

5.2: Amplification Of Amalgam

5.3: Progression Of Protection

5.4: Mambo Of Monsters

5.5: Bridge Of Blessing

Epilogue: All Good Things...