Frezno's Comics Challenge: November 2024 (The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion)

(TW: Anti-semitism, the recent election.)

Sometimes, like as we saw with From Hell, comics can be a form of magic. At times it can create something wonderful and resonant with that power, but at other times there are some really dark synergies at play. Case in point, this book. It's not even the fault of the book, as it's a very important and powerful text that makes the world better for existing. No, it's just the timing of things. My esteemed comics critic and guide on this journey, Sean Dillon, selected this one for the month of November. They could have given it to me in March, or in May, or in any of the other months, but he picked this one for November. They informed me of this selection on October the 19th. Two and a half weeks later, in the United States Of America, the world plunged backwards into hell once again. We will deal with the horrific synchronicities at play in recent world events in a bit, but first as always we must define the book and its author.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween II)

Boo.

Well, here we are at last. Halloween! I am banging this one out at just after 3 PM, having literally finished watching the film in question moments ago. I do this because I want to be closer to the front door to greet the children who are expecting sweet treats and/or tricks. So, let's sort this one out as quick as we can before I get interrupted by like 20 knocks on the door. October 31st, the end of the marathon, has traditionally been the slot for the Halloween franchise. Michael Myers and all that. I've covered pretty much every film, and my options are slim. It was either The Curse Of Michael Myers, Rob Zombie's take, or this film which slipped under my radar for so long. I chose to get this one out of the way, and the slip under the radar was deliberate. I do not care for Halloween II. I did not like this movie the first time I saw it. I might have seen it a second time, I don't know. What I do know is that I gave it another shot just now, and it also failed to connect. Maybe I wasn't fair to the thing, given that I started the morning with a rewatch of the original. As one is a direct sequel to the other, in fact picking up right where it left off, maybe I'm not being so unfair. If it wants to pair itself with the original so bad, then I'll judge it by those standards.

Frezno's Comics Challenge: The Straight Story Six Part 4 (Mary Tyler Moorehawk)

Alright then, before Halloween comes, it's time to talk about another comic. Really, it's rather fortuitous that it's this comic in this month. Dave Baker's Mary Tyler Moorehawk, you see, is this curious little thing which feels like the House Of Leaves of comic books. No, I'm not doing the densely layered footnote joke again, it'd add another two hours to the post and cheapen the bit.¹ Right up front then, in declaring that this is the House Of Leaves of comic books, several questions present itself. Questions like "what does it even mean to be the House Of Leaves of comic books?" or "Can you adapt House Of Leaves into a visual medium such as the comic book?". Let's see if we can get to the bottom of this. Not to rehash everything I said on the book again, and if you've not read that go over here and do so, it's good, but House Of Leaves used the metaphor of the labyrinth to construct itself a labyrinth of words on the page. It did this in various ways, but the main two were arranging the words on the page to mirror what was happening in the story, and drowning everything in verbose footnotes as either a parody of pretentious academia, a digression into a nested narrative, a mirror of the labyrinth theme of the book, or all of the above. With that defined, let's try and answer that first question. Let's try and pin down Mary Tyler Moorehawk.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Longlegs)

Oh, we're really dwindling down to it now. Halloween approaches, and I can feel it in the air. Those last gasps of summer that you feel during the end of September and into the beginning of October are all gone now. The crisp cold of fall has arrived, and it's only going to get colder from here. There's an obvious tradition here on the spooky marathon for Halloween itself, and so in a sense this is our last exploration. Certainly, it's the last film I've never seen before that we're doing for this one. What do we have here today, then? Longlegs is a film I knew nothing about going in, save for one tiny bit of osmosis. Thanks to my pal Sean (you'll be getting your other comic book post tomorrow, friendo) I had it in my head that this resembled Twin Peaks in a fashion. It does, but it does it with its own flourish and style completely different from David Lynch and Mark Frost do it. That's not unwelcome, however, and I found this film growing on me.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (X)

Alright, time for the Jenna Ortega half of this thing. Which, she's actually only a supporting character in this, oops. Look, I wasn't going to watch the Beetlejuice legacy sequel for this. Probably could have done a little Wednesday for it. Oh well. Look, even if she's not the focus and it doesn't end too well for her in the motion picture, I didn't know that going in. In fact, I didn't know much of anything going in except that this was a Ti West picture. We've covered his work twice thus far, first with The House Of The Devil and then technically in the first V/H/S movie. His segment was one of the better ones, it had a particular scare that used the found footage format well and a wild twist. Still had a man be shitty to a woman though, so not helping that particular film's vibes. So, again, no idea of what I was getting into when going into the movie X. What I got certainly was interesting, so let's jam with it a little.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (Abigail)

In this scene Melissa Barrera shows the 
importance of masking.

Before we get going here, a little bit of a tangent on why I'm doing this film and the next one. Last year, as you may recall, there was a strike and so for the Halloween marathon that meant not talking about any struck studio films as a stand of solidarity. Included among this was 2023's Scream VI, and so true to my word I did not talk about it. I did, however, watch it eventually. I do not remember it all that well. Scream V was a master class of a self-aware slasher, updating itself both for another generation of horror movie evolution it could reflect as well as making its killers the ultimate escalation of toxic fandom: committing murders so that Hollywood would adapt them into a trope-laden slasher movie that would get back to basics and not do any innovative shit like that Rian Johnson guy done. Scream VI was too soon to have anything to say about the state of horror or fandom or anything interesting like that. It has some half-hearted messaging but its most meta moment has the movie shrug and go "It's a sequel to a legacy reboot which means anything can happen!". The anything, in this case, was a bunch of callbacks to the Scream franchise and also pissed-off family members of one of the killers from the last movie deciding they were justified in pretending to be friends with the protagonists before killing all their friends and then laughing about how they're the good guys in the climax. 

Why are we talking about Scream? Because of what happened next. Namely Melissa Barrera getting shitcanned from Scream for (gasp) saying that maybe all the Palestinians shouldn't be fucking killed! Her costar Jenna Ortega followed suit, and that left the new Scream series without its leading ladies... at which point they have just called Neve Campbell back as a desperate pandering plea to the Scream fans out there. WE'RE SO SORRY THEY SAID THE MEAN THING, THEY'RE FIRED NOW, BUT LOOK WE GOT YOUR OLD FAVORITE FINAL GIRL BACK PLEASE GIVE US MONEY! It is as cowardly and craven a business decision and appeasement to "the fans" as The Rise Of Skywalker, and the people behind it should fucking know better considering they made assholes like that the fucking killers two movies ago. As a result, here's my line in the sand. No more Scream on the spooky marathons. I really dig some of the older ones, and Scream V did light my world on fire with how much it seemed to get that toxic fandom can and would escalate into literal death for the sake of a fucking motion picture. Life does not imitate art, and they have sided with that fandom. Let them have Scream VII. They're toxic fandom, they'll probably hate it because a black woman dared to appear on screen or something.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 12 (Splatterhouse 2)

We once again find ourselves in an unexpected place, but nothing too unexpected. This did start as a video game criticism blog, after all. I haven't done that at all this year since the masochistic nightmare of Final Fantasy II, but what the hell? A quick one for old time's sakes... and I do mean old times. We previously looked at Splatterhouse on the very first iteration of the Halloween marathon, in 2016. Holy Christ that's a long time ago. It's a bit of a messy post, but what do you want from me, I was banging out 31 of these things back then. They can't all be winners. Let's try and give this one some craft to make it a winner, though, and give it some context. To wit, then: Splatterhouse was a 1988 arcade game from Namco, a sidescrolling beat-em-up game with a sense of the visceral to it. Instead of just punching dudes in the face and making them fall down, you punch ghouls hard enough that they burst into pools of bloody guts and gore. It's a neat little arcade game with a lot of depth, creepy atmosphere, and enough gross bloody stuff to interest any gore hound who loved Freddy and Jason at the time. In 1992 a sequel came out, this time on the Sega Genesis. It fits at home there, the Genesis having originally been marketed as this graphical powerhouse that could give you the gaming ideal of the time, Like The Arcade BUT AT HOME! 1992 feels a little late for that sort of thing, being post-Sonic for the Genesis, but whatever. What is happening with Splatterhouse 2?