31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 31 (Halloween [2018])

Boo.

At last. We're here. Spooky night itself. I just have to finish this and then I'm free! Free from spooky analysis, at least. We've even got a really good movie that I just finished not 5 minutes ago. I watched it in the dark and everything. Honestly surprised at how few kids interrupted movie time for me to give them their treats, but that's just how it be with small town life. We're even going out on a really high note! It's that Halloween movie that came out exactly a year ago today! I had to watch goddamned Halloween 4 instead of going out to see this and writing about it last year. Not so this time. Now we're here for real, and I've finally seen the thing. Wow. It's one hell of a movie. I'm gonna talk about what I liked about it for an amount of time, and then this whole wild Halloween marathon adventure will be over. Hop on in, it's the train to SPOOKYTOWN!


It's another one of those Godzilla 1984-like situations here, where the people in charge just go "right, fuck all this other shit, only the first movie happened and we're building on that for the anniversary.". Rather surprisingly for me, this also includes throwing out Halloween 2. It's been two years, but I'm pretty sure Halloween H20 counted Halloweens 1 and 2 as canon. Here, though? Nope, we're just following up on the 1978 original. No Laurie Strode as Michael's sister, Dr. Loomis lived past that Halloween night, just... a sequel to the first. They even lampshade it which got a chuckle out of me. Okay, movie, I'll let that one slide. There are a lot of little cute callbacks to the original, some of which have a point beyond just whooshing a nostalgic chuckle out of you. (Okay, their variation on the bedsheet ghost is a good twist that has you laughing in a morbid moment of tense anticipation. Which is exactly on tonal point with the scene from the original it's referencing.) I like the cinematography and editing a lot, too: there are some fun cuts, and a lot of cute tricks like continuous shots, both tracking and static. It's a very slick and put-together movie, but I'm not one for pointing out cool film school tricks. No, I'm here to be the passing-grade English student that I am and point out thematic resonance and stuff. So. The ballad of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, 40 years later. Let's get into that for a bit.


Oddly enough, the theme I got from this is that Michael Myers exudes a sort of aura around him, which manifests itself in quite a few different ways. Notably, the aura of fascination over him and his crimes. This shows in the opening moments with the British true crime podcast duo, who are an effective device the movie uses in several ways; exposition to get us up to speed with the current status quos of both Michael and Laurie, and then as fresh bodies for Michael to murder in a pretty fucked-up scene at a gas station bathroom. I was honestly surprised they got killed off so quickly, but I guess they'd served their narrative function and were used for the scares. More interesting is Dr. Sartain, this movie's version of Dr. Loomis (and Laurie even textually says this) who fills the same narrative function... to a point. Recall that Loomis spent time trying to understand Michael Myers before deciding he was evil incarnate and had to be locked away. Sartain has spent 40 years studying Michael, trying to understand him.... and it's both a fascination and obsession. It ends up making him turn heel and knife a sheriff to protect Michael, even going so far as to briefly don the mask. The fascination and obsession in understanding Michael turns Sartain into Michael. Last, but certainly not least, we have Laurie Strode, in this movie a paranoid recluse who's all but alienated her family from her anxieties over Michael coming back to finish the job. Her wounds are more psychological, of course, but in the end the movie is basically mirroring her with Michael in a strange way. She's obsessed and determined to kill him, just as he's obsessed and determined to just kill in general. At least two shots of the movie go out of their way to reference iconic shots from the 1978 movie, only with Laurie in the place of Michael. I see what you're up to there, movie. Very slick.


If I have a complaint here, it's that Laurie briefly falls into horror movie trope levels of letting her guard down during the climax where Michael is attacking her stronghold. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I don't want to be a naughty nitpicker and wagging my finger because OH NO THE TRAUMATIZED CHARACTER UNDER SEIGE BY HER NEMESIS ISN'T ACTING WITH FULL LOGICAL EFFICIENCY, DIIIING. On the other hand, Laurie has been preparing for this for 40 years. She should kind of be a step above basic tropes like "investigate the noises instead of staying in your bunker and waiting with your gun for Michael to come to you". On the other hand, she is traumatized as hell from all of this... It's a very tricky tightrope to walk! In the end, though, it all works out and this is a really great sequel to Halloween... but it's by no means the end. They've got sequels planned for 2020 and 2021. For the love of god. Okay. We'll see how those go, but as for me? I'm done. That's another Halloween marathon in the bag. Here's where I'd usually make a terrified joke about NaNoWriMo tomorrow, but honestly I'm relieved for that! It means I get to watch things that aren't spooky and write about totally different things! You have no idea how much of a mental breather that will be for me! Anyway, this is me, signing off. See you for... let's be real, unless something big pops up, it'll be the Games Of The Year list in December. Until then, y'all. Thanks for reading.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 30 (The Simpsons: Treehouse Of Horror II)

Back to this again. It's a bit of a short thing, given I only have 25 minutes of TV to work with, but I'm on a deadline due to other things going on tonight. That and I'm a little burnt out from this spooky month. I am looking forward to tomorrow's view, though, as it's something I've never seen before. You can probably guess what it is, but in the meantime here's the second Simpsons Halloween Special, from 1991. Somehow it has been three years since I did a Simpsons Halloween special. That was the first one. It managed to give me a lot to talk about, and I even worked in some personal Simpsons history. Again, as with Beetlejuice, my insistence on doing things in order means we hit a Halloween special that never was my favorite. It's fine for golden era Simpsons, sure, but just doesn't stand out in the nostalgic mind compared to the later ones. Still, we're going to take a crack at it. What's fun about these early specials are both the Marge warnings at the top, and the idea that they have a framing device. Both of these get dropped pretty early on, but the former at least makes me remember that pearl-clutching people lost their shit at the Simpsons being a bit irreverent and rude. For fuck's sakes, I think there's one scene with blood in this entire thing. It's goddamned tame by today's standards. Our framing device is simple, almost perfunctionary. "Oh no the Simpsons ate too much Halloween candy and had nightmares". Let us delve into some of these nightmares.


They're not titled segments or anything, but Lisa's nightmare is just the Monkey's Paw. The Simpsons get a cursed monkey paw and make wishes that backfire. Actually, that's not even entirely true. The subtle subversive comedy of it is that the wishes only backfire if they would benefit the Simpsons in some major way. We see this when Maggie makes the first wish for a golden pacifier, and Ned Flanders gets the paw at the end. That's the gag. It works fine for them, but for any other substantial benefit it's curse time. This is evident in the wish to make the Simpsons rich and famous, which also serves as a little meta-commentary for Simpsons mania. The Simpsons are a big name, they're on fucking everything, and people are sick to death of them. Oh. Oh you sweet summer children of 1991. You have no fucking idea. Even Lisa's wish for world peace gets shit on with a Kang and Kodos invasion. There's a lovely bit with Homer's last wish, and then everything goes fine for Flanders. It's a fun retelling of the Monkey's Paw, and it's actually saying some things which resonate with the state of the Simpsons now. Wild. What's next?


Oh it's just that one Twilight Zone episode with the spooky kid that sends you to the cornfield, but it's Bart with the powers. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the anecdote connecting the Simpsons with this specific Twilight Zone story. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart, previously had a part in the Twilight Zone movie during the segment remaking that spooky psychic kid story... and her character dies by being trapped inside a cartoon. Ha. Ha ha ha. Holy shit. Despite a few cartoonish existential horrors, for the most part this one plays its joke simple enough. Ha ha ha it's Bart doing wild shit with his unlimited psychic powers, and everyone's acquiescing to him. (Okay, but the Bonerland callback gag is something else entirely.) Then it becomes a story about... taking Bart to therapy? And bonding with Homer, who he'd previously turned into a jack in the box? And this is the nightmarish part which makes Bart end up screaming. Wow. Fucked up. Uhhh let's go to the last one?


It's Frankenstein. But with Mr. Burns. Pure capitalism at work, as he hopes to make robot workers who will work harder for him, presumably to make him richer. I got a chuckle out of "Behold, the greatest breakthrough in labor relations since the cat-o'-nine-tails!" because ha ha ha capitalist hell world. Anyway they steal Homer's brain for the thing, and what should be a violent dissection of his brain becomes utterly comedic and yet not lacking at all in grotesqueness. The top of his head rolls off like a ball once it's cut off, and Mr. Burns severs the spinal cord and puts the thing on his head, with the immortal line "LOOK AT ME, I'M DAVY CROCKETT!". Of course the plan for unfettered capitalism is ruined because Homer is the laziest thing alive, even in a robot body, and we get a big twist of Mr. Burns grafting his head onto Homer's, ha ha ha special end. Yeah. It's fine. A few good jokes, a general fun time. I honestly don't have any more to say. Only one day left, and then we're free. See you tomorrow for spooky times.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 29 (Beetlejuice)

I probably shouldn't be covering this specifically, in terms of a nostalgic thing I remember from my childhood. If we were going to go from that angle tonight, I'd have to be doing the animated series, which I watched every Saturday and found to be a totally irreverent and strange thing that nonetheless entertained me, even if it was all full of puns that would make one groan. No, instead I dusted off a Beetlejuce DVD (which had three of the cartoon episodes on it anyway as extras) and fired up a weird Tim Burton movie. Oh, Tim. You're a filmmaker whose work I... kind of like, sometimes? I enjoy your Batman movies, but if we're going to be honest with my nostalgia then the sheer joy of seeing Batman Forever when I was 10 kind of beats you out. The best thing the Tim Burton films did, in my eyes, was inspire Bruce Timm to make his own cartoon. See, there I go, tying it all back to how I should be talking about the cartoon adaptations instead of the movies. Okay. Look. Let's get back on track with the rambling, for just a bit. This movie's fine. It has its issues and I'll get to those, but I get the vibe it's going for and the vibe it's going for is pretty neat in places! Let's discuss those places.


Funny enough, other pieces of media were jingling in my head as I watched this film. It's impossible for one of them to be an inspiration for this, given it came 30 years later, but the other could have been rattling in Tim Burton's head as he came up with it. I speak, of course, of both Zombie Land Saga and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Stick with me here. When I wrote up Zombie Land Saga, I called it a piece of reverse dissonance: an absolutely horrific premise played as a comedy. That's the same tone I get from Beetlejuice: we get to know the Maitlands over the course of a few minutes, they're a happy couple, everything's going great, and then they fucking die. They're dead! Instead of shambling reanimated corpses, we have the restless spirits of once-living people. It's a ghost story, yeah, but played as morbid comedy. Death is played for laughs here, and that's where we get to the Douglas Adams parallels. The afterlife of this film's setting is so utterly bureaucratic that it's hard not to think of Adams here. The Maitlands die and all they're left is a confusing handbook written in befuddling jargon, rather than explaining the rules of their spiritual life straightforwardly. There's waiting rooms and queues and goddamn offices on the other side. Death is no peaceful repose, it's an eternity of stressful working as a fucking office clerk for dead people. Holy shit. Maybe that's hell. Working in a fucking office for all time. It was enough for our title character to go off and become a goddamned freelancer, so there we go. Actually let's talk about him and some other stuff before we go.


He's some kind of huckster, obviously, advertising himself like some sort of anti-Ghostbuster, all flash and panache and supernatural TV ads. He's also just kind of the worst, which surprised me from my memories of the cartoon show. Sure, he was kind of a jerk and a prankster, but this movie guy is outright fucking terrible. Especially to women. Let us just say that certain aspects of this movie have not aged well. Especially the climax of trying to marry Winona Ryder to like, get out of being dead or whatever. This comes out of nowhere, is also kind of resonant with the idea of death's rules and regulations not being explained to you, and is really gross. Speaking of gross, Jeffrey Jones is in this. Eugh. What I find interesting is Delia Deetz's weird abstract idea of modern art, and how it both kind of fits the Tim Burton aesthetic and is also treated with some derision by like everyone else. Weird. That, I guess, is a good place to leave off with this one. It has some wild stop-motion stuff in it (because Tim Burton), some good ideas, some bad ones. Yeah, it's like... fine, I guess. Really it just makes me wish I were watching the nostalgic cartoon. I may have watched the wrong Beetlejuice tonight. NO SHIT WAIT--

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 28 (Annihilation)

Whoa. We've got a real big one here. I mean, wow. This is only my second go-round at this movie, since I watched it about... ten months ago, I want to say? Which makes this weird strange sometimes visceral thing associated with the holiday season for me. Make no mistake, the grim and gruesome shit that occasionally pops up, along with some of the existential horrors present, make it a perfect fit for this season... but it's far more than just a spooky mood piece with some gory bits. This movie's practically drowning in symbolism and metaphor, and you could deep dive through it for thousands of words. I'm not qualified to do that, and these are only quickies, but I did a little digging online myself to find some stuff worth talking about. As long as I get a post's worth out of it and don't massively misread the movie, I'm fine. My sources are resonant enough that I shouldn't do the latter, and as for the former... have you been here before? I'm the goddamned champion of dragging a point out with needless bullshit in order to hit a reasonable quota. For god's sakes, I'm doing it right now with these run ons that delay us out to make a decent-sized opening paragraph. It's a wonder I'm allowed to do this. Well then. Annihilation. What do we make of that?


I'm not being coy, I'm literally analyzing the title again and making a big deal out of it. Annihilation is the key word of the whole movie, and most of the big crunchy themes in the film are metaphors for it. The relationship between our protagonist Lena and her husband Kane, "annihilated" by both his disapperance and her infidelity, for instance. Totally something you can read into, but there are far bigger metaphors. Ones that work on multiple levels with multiple pieces of the film. Cancer, for instance. An annihilation of healthy cells. We open the movie with Lena teaching a class about cancer cells. Dr. Ventress, leader of the expedition, has a terminal cancer. Sheppard's daughter died of leukimia. Then there's the Shimmer itself, a strange and weird expanding thing that keeps growing, taking over the life within it and changing it. A tumor on the world itself. Change is another powerful metaphor within the film, and you can see how all of these things are intertwined with each other. In a dark sardonic way, what is change but the annihilation of who you used to be? The Shimmer is literally changing the DNA structure of things inside it, refracting them into all sorts of strange forms. what remains is different from what came before, and what came before is... you guessed it, annihilated in one sense of the word. The movie is asking questions of our capacity to change, as well as our own capacity for self-destruction. Every member of the expedition suffers their own form of self-destruction, and it all hinges on another theme; trauma.


As much as we as people change, trauma is a thing that sticks with us. This is something explored within the film, in its own way, as the different traumas of the characters are what ends up being their... annihilation. They change, yes, but the trauma remains and it is what undoes them. Sheppard, whose child died from random factors she couldn't control, is killed by a random bear attack she didn't see coming. Anya, hotheaded under pressure, loses her cool and is also killed. Josie, holding on to life, becomes part of the Shimmer. Dr. Ventress's own body betrays her, her cells destroying themselves. It's only Lena who manages to survive her own trauma, her own annihilation, by accepting that part of herself. Only then can she escape the rainbow alien mirroring her (Okay, I had to mark out for some mirror stuff). The final shot shows us Kane and Lena, irrevocably changed by what they experienced in the Shimmer. Whoever they were before going in, they've been annihilated... and yet, something of them remains. Enough of them remains to embrace, ready to live on, to move on. To change even further. So yeah, this was a pretty basic analysis and you have my apologies if I glossed over something, but wow. This movie is a hell of a movie. Check it out, make your own reading, your own deep dives, and like... enjoy and stuff. God we really only have three of these left, huh?

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 27 (Godzilla 2000)

I swear, Toho's Godzilla output post-1984 was designed to trip me up and confuse me. The movie titled Godzilla vs. Biollante isn't a big dumb campy monster brawl movie, but a thoughtful introspective look at Japan's changing times and its spirituality. Godzilla 2000, a title that doesn't promise much other than Godzilla in the year 2000, is the kind of campy monster movie. This is also, somehow, Toho's "response" to the 1998 American Godzilla. Which is a movie I actually kind of like, for nostalgic teenage reasons. Yeah, according to the history, Toho was kind of done with Godzilla in the 90's and they let Roland Emmerich and Tri-Star play with him in the hopes they'd do something interesting. Given that Godzilla 1998 is about as beloved as, say, Castlevania II, Toho was pressed into giving the big stompy boy another shot. What they crafted ended up going for another six movies, a whole "Millennium Series" if you will that culminates in some sort of goddamned 50th anniversary special where Godzilla fights all of the monsters. I hear things about it, so we won't tread there. Instead let's see what we can make of Godzilla 2000.


Well, it fires on all cylinders from the word go. No slow burn, no thoughtful human drama setting it up, just... HEY FUCKERS IT'S GODZILLA! TWO THOUSAAAAAND!!! I should clarify, the original version was released in 1999 but it was still called Godzilla 2000. This will be important in a moment. What have we got here? A bunch of Godzilla trainspotters, in a sense, called the Godzilla Prediction Network, who go out hunting for Godzilla so they can warn people to evacuate or whatnot. It's interesting, then, that the trio here kind of slot into the same roles as people from the 1998 Godzilla? You've got the sciencey guy, his science colleague, and his reporter friend. Sure, the science colleague role is his daughter instead of a potential second love interest, but you can see the parallels. In doing more research, it's strange to see that certain plot elements from later episodes of Godzilla: The Series (the Saturday morning cartoon that was the sequel to the 1998 film, for those of you keeping score at home) show up here. Hmm. For all the Internet will rally over yelling that the 1998 film "doesn't count", a lot of it sure did show up in proper Toho Godzilla, huh? Hmmm. Anyway, I gotta give props to the opening bits here. We've seen Godzilla attack by night before, but this is a foggy night. The hazy half-formed glimpses of a giant thing attacking from a veil of fog? Holy fuck. This is atmospheric as all hell. It's definitely something I've never seen before.


Speaking of things I've never seen before, A GIANT FLOATING ROCK! That's Godzilla's nemesis in this movie. A giant floating rock that gets lifted out from under the sea by a research team, and is actually some sort of alien spaceship which lay dormant underwater for millions of years until science re-activated it with light. There's a line from the scientist who led that team where he laments his folly, and I'm like... Wait, that doesn't quite track with me. A folly is when you go against Japanese spirituality to play God and put your daughter's essence into a giant plant monster. You were just like, exploring the ocean and found a cool meteorite. Not quite the same. It's when the alien ship hacks into Japan's computers to assimilate data on Godzilla and Earth and whatnot that we get our window into the current anxiety within this movie. It's so cute, this. You probably got it already, but like... a movie made in 1999 that has all of the computers going berserk and freaking out. It's Godzilla taking on the metaphor of anxiety over fucking Y2K! The shit where we all thought every computer was going to self-destruct because they'd roll over to 1900 or some shit! Oh my god! That's such an of its time concern, and it only adds to the charm of this movie. It really just wants to be a fun sort of "don't take it too seriously" romp with alien spaceships and the Y2K bug as alien infection (and indeed, the aliens' goal is to kickstart a new 1000-year empire, right at the cusp of the year 2000, so add in a bit of era changing only for the calendar year). Oh, and think of this too: th ship eventually assimilates Godzilla's DNA and mutates itself into a Godzilla-like creature with amazing regeneration powers. Kind of like the movie drawing inspiration from 1998's film? God, even the design of the monster, Orga, kind of looks like the Amercian Godzilla if you stare hard enough. It's wild, it's gonzo, it's a little visceral near the end... and it's actually kinda fun. I wouldn't call it my favorite Godzilla film, but you know what? You can have a good time with it. I think that's enough talking about giant monsters for this year.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 26 (Godzilla Vs. Biollante)

FEED ME, SEYMOUR!

Boy, this one eluded me for a bit. I mean the things it's doing really just flew right past me on the first watch. I won't lie. It took me no less than a messup leading to an anxious episode, a few days of thoughtful pondering, and plenty of study and discussion before I was ready to give this another go. I won't go into that any further, and will instead ask a simple hypothetical: What does Godzilla vs. Biollante represent? Luckily for me, there was a nice big easy metaphor for me to hang my coat on with every other Godzilla film I've covered. The original is an obvious parallel with Japan's horror over having atomic weapons used against them. Godzilla 1984 reboots the series and uses the original to parallel with the anxieties of the Cold War, and Japan being caught in the middle. Shin Godzilla is, among many other things, tackling the specifics of government's responsibility in the midst of a natural disaster. Godzilla vs. Biollante, on the other hand, has no immediate massive historical event for you to hang your metaphors on. Well, if you're from North America and not thinking very hard about it, that is. Even the title may fool you into thinking this is one of those sort of goofy kaiju battle movies, and if you go in expecting that you will be disappointed. What is here, upon much closer reflection and attempts to understand the particulars of another culture's sensibilities and anxieties of the time, is quite interesting. Allow me to lay out a few of them, in brief.


The major thing underpinning it all is the generational change. The change in emperors in 1989 led to a change in "eras" of Japan, so to speak. So, 1989 was the start of the Heisei era in Japan, and this led to certain anxieties over Japan's place in the world and what this changing of the guard would mean. So, this manifests in a few ways in the movie. You have the older characters musing on their place in this new age, and a focus on the youthful energy of the next generation. You can see this with the military commanders: Gondo of the old guard is a burned-out man with some skepticism of the new way of doing things, and it's Kuroki, the new guy in charge of Godzilla defense, who proves himself with lots of new ideas and inventions and whatnot to protect Japan from Godzilla. Not all of them work perfectly, mind, but he's proving what the new guard can do. This theme is far stronger when we get to the character of Miki, who's an esper with psychic powers. Psychic powers? In a Godzilla movie? Yeah. Makes you go "huh?" at first, but it fits with this theme. Think Gundam and the Newtypes. Never seen Gundam? Well uh. Newtypes are the natural evolution of humanity as they venture out into space. Very abridged version as I'm not here to talk about Gundam, but Miki and the espers are the heart and soul of the new generation, with their powers attuning them both to sense Godzilla and giving them a sense of the spiritual world... which brings us to Biollante.


Putting Biollante's origin on paper makes it sound completely ridiculous. A scientist who lost his daughter Erika five years prior combines the regenerative cells of Godzilla with both the DNA of a rose and his dead daughter, creating what eventually becomes a massive goddamned floral kaiju that transforms into an Audrey II-looking thing by film's end. Now what in the fuck is going on here? The answer is an innate sense of Japanese spirituality. Erika isn't really gone in the traditional sense. Her father, Dr. Shirigami, has her cells, and according to Japanese spiritual beliefs every part of us is imbued with our soul. He's bringing her back to life, and effectively making her immortal thanks to those Godzilla cells. It can be tempting to read this as some sort of Jurassic Park-like moral about the folly of genetic engineering, but Shiragami's fault isn't so much playing God as it is going against the natural harmony of spirituality. Indeed, by giving this creature life with Godzilla cells, Godzilla resonantes within Biollante as well. They're the same cells, so they're the same creature and that essence takes over eventually. Godzilla is a vengeful engine of destruction, and so Biollante throwing down with it is eventual. The kaiju fights, though brief, are real brutal and visceral in this one. If you do enjoy a good monster spectacle, these bits are pretty good for that. There's so much more I could cover, like the espionage subplot that takes up a good chunk of the movie (presumably because the people in charge really wanted some James Bond-esque action)) but I think I'll leave a lot of it for you all to discover. If you're looking for a long and drawn-out clash of the monsters? This ain't it, chief. If you are looking for a surprisingly thoughtful and introspective film about Japanese sensibilities circa 1989 which happens to have some monster fights? This is a good one to throw on. Nice one, Toho.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 25 (House [1977])

Wow. Whoa. Wow. Whoa. Wow. Whoa. Before we begin, I'm going to be upfront. I am not going to do this movie justice with words. I don't have them. I do not have the words. I'm going to say something about it, but it won't scratch the surface of what in the holy fuck I put in front of my eyeballs (with great difficulty and generosity from others), not by a fraction. I've wanted to cover this one for years. James Rolfe (remember him?) covered it for his Monster Madness marathon one year and it stuck in my mind. "That one Japanese horror movie from the 70's that's totally bonkers or something, I should do that for 31 Screams.". Well. Here we fucking are. The hand on the monkey's paw curls. I have watched House, and I don't know what the fuck. It's not that this movie is bad. It's not even that it's absurd. I'll make a bold claim, but it's a true one. This is the single most surreal thing I have ever seen in my life. I use that word in its literal sense. Surrealism. A bizarre mix of elements, often jarring and nonsensical. House is as fitting a definition for this as I've ever laid eyes on.


I use both surrealism and the phrase "laid eyes on" in their literal senses. House's plot, as James Rolfe notes in that handy video I linked (which gives you a visual idea of how wild this thing is, but more on that in a second), is pretty standard. Teenage girls visit an old house and a bunch of supernatural shit happens. Okay, I'm oversimplifying. Even the girls are strange and surreal, only referred to by nicknames for their traits. So we've got Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Kung Fu, et cetera. It's an odd choice, but it works. Somehow. Right, let's get to it. Let's just say it. The cinematography and editing of House is fucking surreal as almighty fuck. Like it might as well be on the fucking moon for how unconventional and gonzo it is. I am literally ill-equipped to talk about all the tricks it does, but let me try and rattle a few off the top of my head. Lush backdrops and matte paintings. Flawless edits without cuts from one scene to another. Characters from a totally different scene popping into frame at the end of the preceding one. The frame rate dropping randomly for an entire scene. A flashback done in old film reel style that the girls riff over as we watch. That's barely scratching the surface. If you can handle a spooky film, please for the love of God just look at this thing. It's incredible and I am simultaneously blown away and completely baffled at what I just saw. Still, I have to make a stab at analysis.


I didn't even get to the horror of House yet. Make no mistake, despite the never-ending cinematic trickery making it feel like some kind of lucid dream, this is a horror movie. It keeps your interest for its first half-hour with its surrealism, but you also know it's a horror movie so you're wondering just how horrific it can be on top of that. WELL. Let me tell you some tricks. A girl's severed head laughing before biting another girl's ass. A piano eating a girl's fingers before eating the whole girl as she comments on her own devouring and her fingers continue playing. MORE WILD SHIT INVOLVING MIRRORS AND FIRE. There's a lot of very specific Japanese symbolism and thematic resonance at play too, like the nature of generational passing of the torch and spirituality. Well, that first one is corrupted because the old guard in this movie is Gorgeous's aunt, who is literally a ghost that eats young unmarried girls and remains alive because of a promise made to her husband who died in World War 2. The resentment and bitter feelings of a ghost from the turbulent years of the war, literally eating the next generation who grew up without such horrors. Holy shit. It's a grim story, amidst all the absolutely surreal stuff, but it's one worth looking at. That's... that's really all I have, I think. My words can't do it justice. Maybe the words of others can, but it has to be seen to be believed. See it. Believe it. God, what a thing.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 24 (Winchester)

Winchester is... definitely an interesting film. Would I say I loved it? Not really. Liked it? Yeah. This is a somewhat surprising reaction from me, though, considering what I think this movie is trying to do. Well, I shouldn't say it quite that way. It's more what I thought the movie was going to do, followed by what it did do. That's not me being bitter about not getting what I was expecting, either. What the movie is has just as much merit as what I thought it was going to be. So. The Winchester house. A strange labyrinth of twisty passages in the form of a house, built at the whim of a woman who's convinced it has to be done. Part of this DNA is obviously in Rose Red, and since the other half of Rose Red's DNA is The Haunting Of Hill House, I was almost expecting something akin to that level of ambiguity. Indeed, the first glimpse we have of our protagonist Dr. Price seems to be setting that up, as he's a psychologist with a laudanum habit who hallucinates a picture of a deer bleeding on his wall after taking a hit. He takes his stuff with him to the Winchester house, and there's an amazingly built-up jumpscare involving a fucking mirror that plays on the rule of three, but twists it just enough to manage to still scare me. Anyway just before that he takes another hit of the laudanum, and I thought this movie might be about that ambiguity. Dr. Price, sent to evaluate the sanity of Sarah Winchester, slowly slipping into madness himself and questioning his own reality and whether or not the crazy ghosts he's seeing are even real. This being my third movie about a twisty turny haunted house, I expected that to be what was going to happen.


That is not what happens. No, it's all real. The Winchester house is totally haunted as all fuck. This is when we get into what the movie's actually doing, and it's an interesting thing. It's all about haunting, in a way. Well, haunting and healing. What is a ghost? In this case, the restless spirits of people who died at the hands of Winchester-brand rifles. Sarah Winchester is drawing them to her, haunted by the guilt of the lives her brand has taken... and working to heal. To heal both her own sins, and the wayward spirits who linger on and spook. Some of them are more malicious than others, of course, so they get all chained up until they settle down. This is the point of the movie, and it's fascinating. It all goes wrong, of course, when a particularly strong malevolent ghost starts possessing Sarah's nephew and busting all the other ghosts out in ghost pandemonium. He's the ghost of a Confederate soldier whose brothers were killed by Winchester guns in the civil war, so he shot up their offices and died. Now he's back and pissed off and wants the Winchester line to die. Dr. Price is key to this, as he was involved in an almost murder/suicide involving his wife and he was technically dead for a bit when she shot him, with a Winchester, before ending her own life. This means that technically, Dr. Price is a wayward spirit drawn to the Winchester house for healing, and so is his wife. Dr. Price is haunted by grief over not being able to do more for her own mental health, and coming to the Winchester house does help him heal from this trauma of the past. He even kills the Confederate ghost guy with the bullet that "killed" him as some wild form of symbolism. Really, for playing with so many rad themes of healing and whatnot, I should love this movie. Alas, I only liked it. It's fine, though. Worth a watch if you don't mind jumpscares. A bit of a shorter one tonight, but I feel I put my heart into it so that's okay. Moving on!

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 23 (Even More Angry Video Game Nerd Halloween Episodes)

Another year and another one of these. What can I say? James Rolfe loves the spooky month just as much as I do. Hell, he's done a version of this same thing I do in October for over a decade called Monster Madness. The man's a horror nut, and it shows through in his AVGN stuff right around the time of spooky month. In later years they got less and less overtly horror themed, just focusing on spooky games and stuff, but I've managed to pull three from his back catalogue that I can find some things to say about. Really, that's the goal here. To say something interesting about the videos Rolfe puts out as this character. I think we can manage that, so let's start with...

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection: Day 22 (Castlevania: The Adventure)

I ended up here on a pure whim, you know. I was thinking of covering Symphony Of The Night for this spot. I even bought it on the PS4 and was playing a bit of it. Then some stuff happened. New games. Anxiety attacks. You know. Normal life for me. I fell behind on Symphony, but I really don't know what I was going to say about it. I acknowledge its influence and reputation, but it's actually not a big tentpole Castlevania for me. No, far more interesting is this. A redemption effort of sorts. An attempt to understand the draw of something that garners a lot of ire. A positive read of a somewhat janky 30 year-old Game Boy game. Castlevania The Adventure, you see, is (probably) thought of as the worst Castlevania game. The only things I can think of coming closer to its derision are like... Haunted Castle? That's the ultra-hard quarter muncher arcade one. Maybe Simon's Quest, but that's its own negative connotation with "black sheep syndrome" and taking a certain popular exaggerated parody as gospel. Adventure, though? There's just about some legitimate critique to it that's hard to argue against, and who better to play the prosecution than me? Specifically the me of 10 years ago, the me who wrote up all the Game Boy Castlevania games and gave this a 1/5 ranking.(Yes there's no ranking on what I just linked; I had the number scores removed from my work on here for reasons which I won't get into. Let's go over what I had to say, my three main objections.


Point 1, there being almost nothing established from Castlevania in the game, is just not fucking fair and I would slap myself in the back of the head for it. Honestly, if you wouldn't slap yourself in the back of the head over some dumb shit you said ten years ago, you lead a far more perfect life than most. I said that? The person who defends Simon's Quest and Zelda 2 to the death from the aforementioned black sheep syndrome? Past me, you dumbass. I actually want to jump past point 2 for a moment, because I'll make a thing about that. Point 3, the whip downgrading, is actually still a bugbear for me. Yeah, it doesn't feel good at all and I still do not like it. We'll give you that one. Point 2, though, the walking speed of the character being a slow turtle gait... now we get to something far more interesting. It is, on paper, a valid complaint. You do walk slow as shit and it makes platforming/enemy dodging that much worse than it needs to be. The opening of Stage 2, wherein bats come at you from odd angles and are all but guaranteed to drain your whip power, does not feel good at all. Certain platforming challenges require near-perfect timing. It's a strange thing, these flaws. On paper, they should (and do for many!) wreck the game completely and make it terrible. But then, if you manage to endure long enough to get there... you hit Stage 3 of 4, and everything changes.


Stage 3 is a duplicitous dichotomy of design. It is at once a white-knuckle challenging chase of an autoscroller with instant death spikes pursuing at every turn, and a piece of design that feels like total bullshit thanks to the slow walk speed and the whip downgrade system. It will murder you unless you have memorized the where and how of jumping and whipping, and have it all planned out. Perfect execution is required, or you die. It's been the sticking point where plenty of people tap out, my past self suggests it as a form of torture for Simon's Quest haters, and I kind of admire it? This is not a broken stage with flaws that require fixing. There is purpose to its design, and it is the watch in the desert that proves these people knew what they were doing. It was meant to be like this, and I am at once frustrated by its ask of perfection and in awe of how good it feels to pull off that perfection. There is a famous ROM hack which dares to "improve" the game by increasing the walk speed, giving you more freedom of movement. It doesn't work. Stage 3's tension is completely eliminated if you're not required to be optimally running for your life at every second. Walking fast doesn't make the stage bearable. It makes it boring. I've laser focused on Stage 3 since it's the best setpiece the game has, in my opinion: Stage 1 is a decent beginner, Stage 2's cave has some fun gimmicks but also some maze game nonsense for no reason, and Stage 4 is challenging but lacks the high-speed tension of the previous level. Am I saying this is a perfect game? No. Its flaws are... difficult to pin down, though. Sure, I don't like the whip downgrading, but it is deliberate. So is the slow walk speed. As we see, the game was designed to be played like this, and when actually played like this? Good elements shine through. I hesitate to call it great, but you know what? I like it. It sure as shit deserves more than a 1/5, and that's good enough for me.

31 Days, 31 Screams Resurrection- Day 21 (A Cure For Wellness)

"The systems aren't the problem."

Here we go again, from one sanitarium to another. I don't know how the shape of this one is going to go. Could be long, could be short. A Cure For Wellness is a very strange film, quite hefty at 150 minutes or so. Its message is also pretty clear-cut. This is an anticapitalist film... or at least, as anticapitalist as a studio-released movie can be. It somehow manages to convey this, mostly by using a direct mirroring structure and coating what's being mirrored in a whole bunch of gonzo metaphor about health spas and exploitation. The opening, though, is dealing with straight-up capitalism. A totally unrelated man working late but groaning about chest pains who collapses, spilling a bunch of water. Yeah water's a big thing in this movie, get used to that. So that leads our protagonist Lockhart, a hypercapitalist himself, to be sent to retrieve another hypercapitalist from a health spa in Switzerland so he can be brought back to secure a big merger and also take the fall for Lockhart's illegal fudging of the numbers or whatever. Because, you know. Capitalism. Getting all the gain for yourself while some other poor schmuck suffers the consequences. Get used to that too because it's the core of the film.


Let's rip the band-aid off and get right down to it, huh? That's the point of the whole thing, as I said. The exploitation of people deemed lesser, all so a small minority reap the benefits in perpituity. There's a lot of slow build psychological horror going on in this movie, to its credit, but I'm happy to say I pegged the anticap reading pretty early on and it helped me guess a few of the late-game twists. It's got plenty of time to build to its setpieces, and maybe it's too leisurely in spots but it works. On the outside, then, we have a health spa where rich people come to relieve themselves of the stresses of the world. Inside? It's all a front for a bunch of immortals. The head doctor, his staff, and a very special patient all get to harness the water of life and use it to live forever, all while they slowly poison the people who are here to be healed and drain the life force from them, leaving withered husks who are then fed to the eel creatures which are poisoning them to purify the water of life for the priveleged. These people are the 1%, hoarding immortality and murdering countless old people in the process all so they get to live longer. All while lying through their teeth about it to the bitter end. They know goddamned well what they're doing, and they keep doing it. That's mostly the staff. Dr. Volmer, the one in charge... well, he's up to way more.


It's actually quite disturbing, Volmer's grand plan. See, 200 years before all of this, a baron lived in the castle setting of the film. He got burned at the stake along with his sister, because he wanted to marry his sister. Which, yuck, but their child survived and is actually the special patient at his spa, Hannah. And he like... wants her. That's what all this murder and lifeforce draining is for; not just to keep them alive, but so he can keep their bloodline alive. You know. I can't even type it out in full, it's just that goddamned gross. I'm used to bullshit power structures sacrificing innocents so those in control can do it all to save one person close to them, because I play Japanese RPGs, but this is a level of fucked up beyond that. What does Lockhart do when he finds out? He lights the shit on fire. Lockhart's 150 minutes of hell have turned him anticap, and he ends the movie riding off with Hannah on her bike instead of going back with his bosses. As he says, he's feeling much better. So really, when you think about it, capitalism was the "wellness" of the movie. Systems put in place to benefit some at the expense of others, be it becoming rich or living forever. Lockhart's cured at the end. What a wild movie. Shame about the gross shit in it.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 20 (A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors)

Ah yes. Back at this shit again. I don't know if I've detailed how much Freddy Kreuger as a concept scared me as a child, but he did. Not the main source of childhood horror movie trauma, but definitely up there. A lot of that was just in the sheer idea of "if you go to sleep, something you cannot possibly avoid doing, a monster will fucking kill you". Oddly enough, revisiting the opening of this movie had me tense and shitless for a completely different reason. That being the wrist slash scene near the beginning. Artery injury's a phobia of mine, and anything with slit wrists or throats has me noping the fuck out. (I don't think I actually witnessed a single kill in the original Friday The 13th because of this, but we're about 15 years too early to cross Jason over with this.) Still, you know, dread happened and I managed to avert my gaze like the phobic dork I am. The rest of the movie should be okay. We're on the third Nightmare movie, and one I haven't experienced since college when I marathoned these things in a bid to conquer fear or whatever. I thought it was fine back then, but I think I've consumed fan consensus to believe that this is the one the most people like? Not really me. Still, this rewatch has given me quite a thematic thoroughline to talk about... even if the other parts of the movie don't work. So, let's talk about that a bit.


Whereas the first two movies were set in suburbia (the same house of suburbia, in fact) and dealt with all the haunting of that, Elm Street 3 (let's just call it Dream Warriors from now on, huh?) takes place in the halls of a psychiatric ward with a ragtag group of troubled teens. Freddy's back and toying with them in their dreams, but Nancy Thompson from the first film is back as well and is now a psychiatrist herself, here to help them out. This setting, and the tropes of supernatural horror in general, reflect each other in a strange and honestly sobering way. (Oh and if you want mirror imagery, there's lots.) The teens are refusing to sleep, due to the quite sensible reality that a goddamned dream ghost with knives for hands is trying to murder them. As part of the conflict and danger to them, their doctors think it's all just delusions and a healthy bit of sleep is all they need to get right-- GEE HEY WHY ARE ALL OUR KIDS DYING IN HORRIFIC AND ABNORMAL SUICIDES ALL OF A SUDDEN??? It's the typical horror movie cliche of the adults in power not believing a word these kids say when they express fears of being murdered by a supernatural monster, and those adults taking the absolutely wrong actions in trying to protect them. Set in a psychiatric ward, though, this all suddenly takes a morbid turn. It feels like a metaphor for the sorry state of mental health treatment in general, and how it's a fucking joke. The people who are in need of help, who are practically begging for help from those in power to help them, are not getting it. Those with the power to help are instead having academic debate about delusions and REM sleep and completely dismissing all of their concerns, and the people in need of that help are fucking dying. Indeed, this becomes all but textual when Kristen, the girl from the beginning, is set to be sent to solitary and sedated so she'll quiet down, at the behest of the one doctor who doesn't believe them. In hysteria, and basically pleading for her life because she knows Freddy Krueger will dismember her in her dreams, she screams "YOU STUPID BITCH, YOU'RE KILLING US!". God. I didn't expect this movie to be saying something so strong.


Unfortunately the rest of it doesn't quite work. There's a very weird undercurrent of science vs. religion going on in the background, where the other doctor who slowly comes to believe Nancy has his faith in science questioned as he's powerless to stop the kids in his care from these bizarre suicides... and then he keeps seeing a nun who tells him to have faith and use it to beat the abomination killing his kids. That ends up being what kills Freddy in the end, throwing a bunch of holy water on his bones and compelling the shit out of him in the name of Christ. There's also Freddy's "origin" story, wherein a sister of the faith locked in a ward for criminally insane inmates is sexually assaulted by them and gives birth to Freddy. Which, where in the fuck do I begin with that? Sure, it mirrors the theme of mental health treatment being inadequate, but Jesus. There's also the whole "Dream Warrior" idea, where the kids learn to weaponize the power of their good dreams to do cool shit like backflips or super strength or shooting lightning bolts as a wizard. It sounds like a great idea, and it would be a beautiful resonant duality of them beating their nightmares and traumas with positivity if it actually affected Freddy in any way. Every Dream Warrior confrontation has him shrugging it off like the unstoppable slasher icon he is and then just fucking killing them anyway. It's a pessimistic waste of a great idea. I think that's all I've got on Dream Warriors. It's better than I thought it would be, but it doesn't quite come together on all fronts to be the perfect dreamlike horror movie it could be. Oh, what could have been.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 19 (The Immortal Hulk)

This was, if nothing else, an interesting read for the spooky season. From page one it states "There are two people in every mirror" and if you know me by now, you know that's enough to get my attention. Really, applying the notions of duality and dark mirroring to the Incredible Hulk sounds kind of obvious when you put it on paper like that, but over the 24 issues of The Immortal Hulk so much more happens than just that. I don't know how long I'll talk about those things for, but we can get a post out of it so... let's start from the beginning. This ain't a happy fun punching Marvel comic book, it's all dark and visceral and introspective and shit. Its opening moments have a gas station holdup gone wrong, with three dead... including one Bruce Banner. Once night falls, the gang who put the robber up to it find a green monster ready to enact vengeance like some unhinged Batman. (Okay, maybe not that different from how Batman would have done it, actually.) The portrait painted of the undying Bruce Banner and his other selves, the green thing on the other side of the mirror, is that of a wanderer seeking atonement for past sins. That's the vibe the early issues give, and #3 is a lovely little Rashomon-style affair of different people being interviewed about a Hulk sighting, with different art styles for every vignette. Still, there's a whiff of something here. Something more... and soon enough, it rears its head.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 18 (A Voice From The Dark)

Well, that turned out to be a bit of a surprise. It even gives me something to work with for post length. Speaking of that, I feel like I need to give context for what A Voice From The Dark is, and the specifics of why it is a thing. Not because I assume the backstory is something unfamiliar (I'm sure like 90% of you know all about what I'm going to mention), but because it is important to understanding the actual thematic resonance of the story. Yes. It has one. Incredible. So. There's a website for a particular old-school style of Internet review show called Channel Awesome. Until about... last year or so, it had a hell of a lot of people on it and a huge community of different and varied critics covering their own niches, all rallied around the main draw of the site; Doug "Nostalgia Critic" Walker. There are two things you need to know about all of this. The first is that, over the first few years of the website's history, Doug Walker brought all of his pals together to film anniversary specials. Like, The Avengers of Internet reviewers. These started as 20 minute crossover "brawls" with a lot of pretend fighting and memes, and then grew into actual feature-length movies and a four-hour miniseries before culminating. You should also know that I hate these things. They have their audience, but I am on the fringe of that audience and yet all it is to me is hammy bullshit, obnoxious memery, and a shitload of pretend fighting. The second thing you need to know about all of this is that, last year or so, a mass exodus occured from Channel Awesome after several allegations came to light; some unprofessional annoyances, others massive accusations. It is far beyond my wheelhouse to detail them at length; suffice it to say there are grievances, I believe them, and just about everyone abandoned ship en masse. Then, born out of some nostalgia on the part of these creators over the good parts of those old anniversary films, a bunch of them got together to create another crossover miniseries, this one as an audio drama instead of a filmed thing. That's A Voice From The Dark, and it's got Lovecraftian undertones and is set in a haunted house, so that's why it's here. What does it have, though?

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 17 (When I Arrived At The Castle)

You've got red on you.

This will probably be a much shorter post than usual, I'm afraid. There's a few reasons for that. One, the subject matter is a pretty short affair, all things considered. Nothing wrong with brevity, of course, but that leads me to issue two. I'm not much of a comic critic. I can talk about how pretty the art is, and I shall, but any specific visual drawing techniques at play beyond the immediate obvious elude me. Listen, my field is the written word and not the painted picture. With all that in mind, what have we got here? Well, it's an evocative and moody little piece of fiction, if nothing else. I looked at the cover and expected some sort of dark lesbian gothic horror fantasy. I got... some of that. Other things I got I didn't expect, but are good because it means I get to write about them. So, let's see what When I Arrived At The Castle has going for it.


Its use of color is on point! Black, white, red. That's what you get, and that's all you need. Really, let's do our best to point out the use of red as it's the only non-monochrome color used to illustrate the piece. As an accentuator, it works for narration first off. As you flip through and our protagonist catgirl ventures deeper into the castle at the behest of what must be a vampire girl countess, red splatters all over. The carpet, the portraits, the rain outside. All signifying the bloody nature of this place. It all has a certain surreality to it, and later on, as we see our catgirl taking a bath (Incidentally, there are nipples in this book, so heads up on that) the water is inky black. A knock comes to the door, gentle white at first before a blood red cacophany. We get even more surreal imagery with a fantastic "jumpscare" in page-turner form involving the vampire, and then on we go. Beneath her elegant facade we see the shades of red where some terrible true form lurks. Then come the doors, and we never actually see what is behind them, we only hear of the fates of those who have come before in two-page spread narration (with a red background, of course). As we go on, more and more red stains our catgirl.


Then, a confrontation. Our Countess is a lamia, inviting our catgirl to kill her... and we get true visceral. Red everywhere, a terrible thing finally bursting forth from the elegant countess, sinking its fangs in... and then no red. A moment of calm, a simple dream of sinking... and, eventually, the thing. The human features in white, the monstrous blood red, halfway out of the dark. True animalistic nature takes over with evocative narration, a dance of visceral red playing out in a white void. Both of them are monsters now, wrestling and tussling and biting. We dance and dance until we have a red cat, a thing with its prey in its mouth... and fade to black. That's When I Arrived At The Castle. It's a surreal piece of work with a lot of clever uses of color and allegory that I barely scratched the surface of... but these are hardly deep dives. It's pretty neat! Lots of spooky imagery, and not at all what I was expecting. Nice stuff. On to something else that's odd and wild in a lot of ways, then.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 16 (Alien Resurrection)

It's time once again to play the personal memory game. So. It's 1998. I feel like it must have been the end of winter, beginning of spring. Still cold, but not the hellish depths of winter. The previous holiday season of 1997 saw me, high on the inspirations of Star Wars and the Star Trek movies, take my first true delve into the horror genre. I watched the Alien trilogy, and even though they scared the hell out of me I still really liked them. Hey wow! There's a new one out! I lived in the middle of nowhere, so it wasn't like I could pop into the cinema. Therefore I had to wait for VHS so I could rent it. As I recall, my cousin found it in a video store a few towns over. It was a hell of a search, a treasure hunt that yielded fruit. So, here we both were, at his place in the cold of 1998, Alien Resurrection in the VCR. How would they follow up from Alien 3, considering the definitive final end? Well, we both watched Alien Resurrection. It was not very good. I didn't care for it, and that's the opinion I held for 20 years. I didn't care enough to go back in all that time, despite the fact that I must have seen those first three Alien movies a good 10 times each in those intervening years. Maybe even more. Then I revisited it, a few years back, and I thought it was the funniest goddamned thing. Like, so bad it's good glorious. Now we've gone for the hat trick of revisits, and I've come back from my third viewing of it in 22 years. How'd that go? I think I took a bit of both of my opinions this time. Let's dig in, I guess.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 15 (Doctor Who: Listen)

The bedsheets are a metaphor. The bedsheets are anxiety.

Holy shit do I love this episode more and more every time I see it. Listen. No, I'm not just quoting the name of the episode, I'm like stating "please listen". This is actually the third time I'm writing about this Doctor Who episode. The first time was as it aired, when I had a little writing gig and got to cover the first Peter Capaldi series as it came out. The second was just before Series 9, when that little writing gig had evaporated and I was reposting the old content on my blog, with new thoughts as I rewatched in anticipation of the new show. Both of those were September viewings, as I recall, so there's no real sense of me covering (or watching) Listen in any spooky month sense. Until now. It's absolutely prime Halloween marathon material, with themes and images that resonate with the season... and it is, in all respects, absolutely what I needed to see at this time.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 14 (Mothra)

Okay. That was different. It still gives me plenty to work with, so let's get to sculpting the shape of this post. This is the first Toho Co. kaiju film I'm covering that doesn't have our big stompy lizard pal in it, and good old Godzilla always did strongly reflect something of the nuclear disaster. Be it fresh memory of the horror of August 1945, or nail-biting anxiety over the Cold war, or even critique of government's reaction to disaster crisis, Godzilla's got you covered there. What about this, then? What is Mothra strongly reflecting? I must confess I don't know. There's no obvious and intended subtext I can easily dig out because I don't know Japanese history that well. The best I can give is that it's pointed commentary on postwar occupation of Japan by the USA. As for Mothra herself? A force of nature and of vengeful retribution... but it's all collateral damage. Mothra has an actual goal, see, and that's where we get into the parts of this movie that resonated with the here and now for me.


What's fascinating is that, structurally, Mothra is built in much the same fashion as another infamous kaiju movie: King Kong. Both movies have an expedition to a mysterious island with strange wildlife and indiginous people, followed by the discovery of something amazing and the decision to take that something back to the mainland, to exhibit it to an amazed public (and make fame and fortune in the process). Then everything goes horribly wrong and we have a kaiju running riot through the city, causing untold millions in property damage and loss of life. Now, in King Kong the thing brought back was the giant ape himself, so all he had to do was get loose to go on a rampage. Mothra plays it differenly; the thing that Mr. Nelson of Rolisika (yeah... I'm going to get to that) takes back with him from Infant Island are a pair of very tiny women. Like fairies. They then use telepathy and their harmonizing song to call for Mothra to rescue them, and that's what kicks off all the giant monster destruction. Nelson is a real son of a bitch, though. In the first place, he's keeping a pair of tiny women in a birdcage like slaves and showing them off for fame and fortune. Even when it's clear Mothra will not give up, he resorts to fleeing Japan for homeland Rolisika, dodging all authority and responsibility before trying to flee again, pulling a gun on an angry mob of people pissed off with him for endangering them all, and then gets gunned down by the police. Here's where I get into my sheer swerve of a reading of this movie, once I accept is not at all what was intended... but, fuck it. Death Of The Author, right? I get to play jazz with what harmonizes with me in 2019. Okay. here it goes.


Mothra is climate change, and Nelson is a climate change denier. Yeah. Think about it. Nelson's actions and his fairy show make him rich and famous. The movie never comes out and says he's making a shitload of money, but I can buy it. Nelson's fortune comes from the fairies, and the fairies have sent Mothra to save them... and Mothra will fuck everything up that's in between her and the fairies. Nelson, pointedly, does not give two shits. He will do anything and everything to keep his hands on those fairies as long as possible, consequences to everyone else be damned. He's a climate change denier making millions from big oil, who doesn't give a fuck about the planet burning as long as he gets his! He'll ignore all appeals to reason, violate the law all over so long as it can benefit him, and at the end of it all a bunch of angry protestors harass the shit out of him for it! HEY ASSHOLE WE'RE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE BECAUSE YOU HAD TO HAVE ANOTHER FUCKING ROLLS ROYCE! GET OUT OF THE CAR, I'LL SHOW YOU A FUCKING FAIRY SHOW. And then he pulls a fucking gun on them all! Jesus! He really thinks, even then, he can get away with it! Oh yeah, and he's from Rolisika. Which at first I took as a made-up country that's just supposed to be Russia... but in the climax of the movie we go to "New Kirk City" in Rolisika, with lots of Americans. So it's like... both? Which I guess makes sense, since Nelson being an arch-capitalist wouldn't make much damn sense if he were supposed to be from a socialist country. With that reading in mind, I found Mothra pretty fascinating. It's got some decent destruction, a lot of fun with the human characters, and the fairies are just so mystical and magical and inspiring. This one was a great time, and I even got to make a gonzo reading of it. Still, though. It ain't kaiju season without the big boy himself. Let's see what Godzilla's got for us this time.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 13 (Rose Red)

Reach out and touch me.

Okay. Now that we ran from ghosts and knights and stuff in slapstick cartoons, let's get back to that cliffhanger I left off on the other day. Stephen King, the man who wrote about the elegance of the opening to The Haunting Of Hill House, and what he took from it. What he ended up taking from it (and the 1963 Robert Wise adaptation of the book, says Wikipedia, though I've not seen that so none of it will inform the following analysis) ended up going into this. A three-part miniseries that isn't based on an existing book of his, Rose Red. Gosh, the Netflix era sort of did away with the whole idea of the miniseries, huh? Off the top of my head there's one more King-based one that came after this (Bag Of Bones, starring Pierce Brosnan, and it's shit)but this is all to distract from the matter of hand. What does King take from the ambiguous nightmare halls of Hill House? There's quite a bit at play here, so let's see what we can delve at.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 12 (Scooby-Doo Where Are You)

Zoinks.

I may have cliffhanger implied something last entry, but as it's a great deal longer than I thought you all get this instead, for the time being. I'll be honest here; Scooby-Doo is not really something I grew up with as a big fond childhood memory. I had some big tape of Hanna-Barbara cartoons as a child, and there was a Scooby-Doo episode on it. I couldn't tell you which or from what series, but Scrappy-Doo was there. I was also aware of The 13 Ghosts Of Scooby-Doo, thanks to Teletoon Retro up in Canada airing the hell out of it. Oh, and then there are a few of those late 90's Scooby-Doo movies, as well as those two live-action ones. That is about my speed with Scooby-Doo, but given that the original show's 50th anniversary is this year, I figured that I should spend some time with that incarnation. No Scrappy-Doo, no real supernatural threats, no John Cena stopping a boulder with his bare hands, just the original show that started it all. With all that in mind, I watched five episodes of Scooby-Doo Where Are You, and here are five little capsule reviews of those episodes.


WHAT A NIGHT FOR A KNIGHT

It's odd, given my cultural memory of this show, how this just starts with Shaggy and Scooby stumbling onto a mystery while walking home one night. I figured the Mystery Machine gang like, took on cases and stuff. Here they just find a mystery, ask around the museum about it, and then decide to break into the museum at night on their own to solve it. What follows is then a bunch of zany slapstick and running around. It's quite charming, really, and parts of it remind me of another show I did watch as a child; Inspector Gadget. There is, on a certain level, the same sort of "oops we accidentally bungled into progressing in solving the mystery with our slapstick" going on. Perhaps Inspector Gadget was inspired by this. The mystery, as it is, is a simple (yet needlessly elaborate) art forgery scheme, and I did appreciate the clue of the other statue's moving eyes once we got to the resolution. Not a bad start!


A HASSLE IN THE CASTLE

Huh. Yet again our groovy 60's kids just sort of stumble upon a mystery by accident while on a boat ride. There's also a joke where Velma says they're "lost in a fog", at which point Shaggy pokes his head out all like "big mood" before saying he's hungry. Now, Scooby-Doo/marijuana use jokes are pretty old hat, but that made me perk up and scratch my chin. We've got a ghost this time, with a cackling weird laugh, and then even more slapstick madness to amuse. I mean, it's Scooby-Doo, you know what you're getting. It's horror-themed comedic lightness with a bunch of scaredy cats running away from monsters in goofy ways while their pals also try to solve a mystery. This episode also has the whole thing with setting up an elaborate Rube Goldberg trap to catch the monster, which Scooby gets caught in while running from the monster as bait, which ends up with them catching the monster anyway. So that's classic Scooby-Doo right there. Oh, and our guy's a magician looking for pirate treasure and using magic tricks to make people think the castle is haunted. Okay. I thought these Scooby-Doo villains like, tried to scare you away for land development. Well, I guess they're still capitalists. On with the show.


THE BACKSTAGE RAGE

Okay I must be thinking of later Scooby-Doo incarnations where the groovy kids "take the case" because this one is yet again them stumbling onto a mystery by accident, in this case Shaggy finding a goddamned violin case full of counterfeit money that gets stolen back. From there our clues lead us to like, the backstage of a puppet theater? It's a pretty neat setting, and it allows for a lot of theatricality in its goofing around. Plenty of life-like puppets and some Phantom Of The Opera-looking motherfucker being threatening, but wow. The scheme is a counterfeit money-making ring. That's a little wild to me. Still, this was good.


SPOOKY SPACE KOOK

As far as monster design and setting goes, this is the best of the ones I watched so far. We have a spooky old abandoned airfield with lots of wrecked planes and other disused equipment, and the monster's a glowing blue skull in a space suit who does a WHOOOLOOLOOLOOLOO cackle. Holy shit, I love it. A bit weird, though, how Fred gets caught on a hook and Velma and Daphne need to go get Shaggy and Scooby to find the lever to get him down. Like, come on, they're capable girls and part of the team. Yeesh, y'all. Oh, and the scheme was all about scaring potential people away so someone could have land all to themselves! And he almost says that iconic meddling kids line! Okay, this is as close to the pop culture osmosis of Scooby-Doo as I've gotten so far. I liked it. Which only leaves...


WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WEREWOLF?

Hey, neat, spooky stuff going on in the woods! With a werewolf who's... green for some reason. Okay, fine. I'll roll with it. Our kids are out camping and then a werewolf scares them. WELL GANG WE GOT A MYSTERY ON OUR HANDS! Stuff moves out of the woods quick, going to an old abandoned mill... and then weird shit goes down. Like, weirder than usual. We get some real fun bumbling into stopping the monster business with Shaggy and Scooby, but then the werewolf is chasing them and... there's a song? This Monkees-ass sounding sound whose lyrics have nothing to do with the zany chase scene other than the word "runnin'"? Wh... what? Also another go of the plan to catch the monster going wrong but working out anyway. Oh, and it was sheep rustlers. Uh. Fine. This one's pretty good, too, but just kind of odd in places. That'll do it for Scooby-Doo. Fine show, and you can see why it's still around. Here's to 50 years, buddy.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 11 (The Haunting Of Hill House)

You knew I had to use it.

Good lord. I'm stepping into boots that might be too big for me here, in trying to tackle this book. There's a certain... richness to the whole thing, an endless swirling expanse of possibilities and uncertainties involving the analysis of it. You could teach it as part of a high school or college English class. It probably has been, come to think of it, but I never got to tackle anything quite so weighty in my English classes. (Okay, but high school did give me Macbeth, and college did give me Frankenstein, so it wasn't all bad.) I suppose, then, the best way to begin this is to talk about that uncertainty. No, a better word would be... unreliability. That's the main undercurrent I took from the whole affair when I finished it. Unreliability and confusion over what was going on. It all seemed to actively contradict itself, an ambiguous mess of mystery that ended in tragedy. As we follow our point of view character, Eleanor, through her extended stay at the titular (and supposedly) haunted Hill House... what exactly happened here? Weird shit seems to happen but it just as easily might not have happened. Characters alternate between being nice and charming to Eleanor, and passive-aggressive insulting assholes. Things just keep flip-flopping back and forth, and at first I thought it was just the situation getting worse... but then it all snapped back. And snapped again. Back and forth, in and out. What was going on here?


The way forward is to consider Eleanor, and consider Hill House in tandem with her. Stephen King (about whom you'll be hearing more regarding this story real soon, with luck), in his non-fiction horror analysis novel Danse Macabre, takes a bit of time to analyze the opening paragraph of Hill House. As a fellow writer, he finds it utterly fascinating and well-crafted, and goes into a bit of that. What's pertinent is his reading that says Hill House looks fine on the outside, but inside is a totally different story; a deadly place, a place that kills. He then makes an offhand reference to Norman Bates of Psycho fame "looking fine on the outside" as well, and that's the hook we need. Eleanor and Hill House, you see, are mirroring each other. On the outside, Hill House is fine. Ordinary and plain. Inside, it is a nightmare labyrinth of disorientating design, a house that is... well, to use a loaded term, atypical. (Jackson's use of atmosphere and lavish description of the interiors of Hill House is also well-noted here, and one of my main initial takeaways when I first put the book down.) Eleanor is the same. Ordinary on the outside. Inside... a nightmare labyrinth of disorientating intrusive thoughts, a person that is... yes, neuroatypical. The titular haunting, then, could just as easily be the hallucinations, anxieties, and lashings out of an unfortunately unwell woman. Nowhere does this become clearer than her relationship with the other main woman in the story, Theodora. Theodora is a darling, elegant and witty and classy... and, it has to be said, the energy given off between Eleanor and Theodora is absolutely peak lesbian energy. You can just about ship it, from a modern mindset... but then those passive-aggressive moments rear up again, and Theo snaps back and forth between doting and straight-up mean to Eleanor. How much of this is actually happening, though, and how much is Eleanor imagining? Is it anxiety making her assume the worst of Theo's tones and inclinations? Is it straight up imagining things that were never said? Who can say for sure? I imagine the real Theodora to be just as elegant and charming as she was in her happier moments, doing her best to help her new friend... but, sadly, failing to do so. This rich ambiguous relationship is shown, to lesser degrees, with the other players in the story. It's Eleanor and Theodora who show it in the greatest detail, though. There are so many little details that I can't begin to list them off, or we'll be writing a college paper. A short post will have to do.


And then, tragedy. When I first read it, knowing I was coming to the end, the sad end seemed abrupt. Now, knowing what I know? It only makes sense... and if you think about it, you can likely guess how it had to go for Eleanor. I don't want to spoil the book, not really (and if you're Canadian, it's actually in the public domain somehow so YOU CAN JUST READ IT FOR FREE HOT GODDAMN), but I do have to end this somewhere, so there will have to do. Even the very quick "happy ending" where we see where everyone made it in the end feels melancholy and bittersweet, and then the whole thing ends as it began, with Hill House standing silently against its rolling green hills. It ends the only way it could, and I end the post the only way I could; by telling you to grab this book, give it a read for the spooky season, and think real hard about what the hell is going on within the maze of twisty, lavishly described, passages that make up Hill House. It inspired a lot of people, people I respect greatly, and thinking of its implications inspires me too. One of those inspired people, as I said, was Stephen King. Now I wonder what he could have taken from it, beyond his praise for that opening paragraph...?

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 10 (Doctor Who: The Seeds Of Doom)

Yeah, you knew I had to come back to this well. Doctor Who, in its 55 (and counting) year run, has made scaring the piss out of the children of England and everyone beyond into a form of art. They've done it in almost every way imaginable that's suitable for an all-ages audience, and tonight's story of focus is really pushing the envelope in regards to that suitability. We are once again back in the favorite stomping ground of spooky Doctor Who, the mid-to-late 70's. Tom Baker's on, Sarah Jane is here, we've got Phillip Hinchcliffe in the driver's seat and a shitload of horror tropes to dig through to find the most macabre teatime sci-fi entertainment. All of this is to say that The Seeds Of Doom, the final story of Season 13 and the one I viewed tonight for the blog, is hardcore pushing it. Let's dive in to Seeds Of Doom, just for a hot minute or so.


What immediately strikes me is how clever this set of scripts is with its six part structure. Doctor Who has a lot of six parters, and they tend to drag in places more often than not. You get the same setting, you run out of ways to delay the plot, so you have to spin your wheels for an episode or so just so the damn story doesn't end 50 minutes early. This can be as infuriatingly simple as having the guy in charge not believe the Doctor for four fucking episodes because if he did the plot would be over, or locking people up and separating them for an episode or so. By the Tom Baker era, they were getting better at monkeying around with the six-part structure to alleviate this sort of thing. Seeds Of Doom solves it by having a completely different setting for its first two parts, and the events that happen there dovetailing into the lavish mansion setting of the rest of the story. The first setting, for the record, is an Antarctic base where a weird new life form has been discovered that ends up infecting people and turns them into monsters. Oh, and it's plant-based. At first I thought this story was being prescient and emulating John Carpenter's The Thing a good half-decade before he did it. Then I remembered that movie was a remake, and wasn't the monster in Thing From Another World some kind of vegetable man? Hmm. I like these opening two episodes, quite a lot. The worldbuilding is on point, showing a globetrotting sense of scale, and then when shit hits the fan it really hits the fan. Episode Two even ends with the whole thing blowing up, which is usually the money shot of these episodes... and we're not even a third of the way through!


Well, things do kind of drag out in some way when we get to Harrison Chase's mansion. For its part, though, the show tries to make things as exciting as possible. The Doctor is far more in an action hero mode than usual this time; he's jumping off of tall things to tackle dudes, smashing through FUCKING WINDOWS, punching and stunning people, and he even waves a gun around for a bit. He also gets quite cross at times, something which is a rarity for Tom Baker, I feel. It all adds to the grim and visceral nature of this story. Things are especially more violent than your usual Doctor Who. We've got lots of guns, plants choking people to death, and the goddamned mulcher. At multiple points Harrison Chase tries to feed people to his compost mulcher, a gigantic fuckoff bladed grinder at the end of a conveyor belt. Oh and he does it while they're still alive. Oh and he does kill a guy with it, albeit offscreen. Oh and he ends up getting churned alive in his own mulcher at the end. Not a drop of blood is shown, but at the same time the power of the human imagination does all the work for you with only a sight of the blades and the actor's screams. Jesus Christ the poor kids of England. As I said, it's a story that's pushing the envelope, and a few stories later that envelope-pushing would lead to consequences. Here and now, though, we're at the height of visceral hubris. I haven't said too much about the story, but it's fine. It shifts from Thing pastiche to sort of an Avengers (the British one) story to a  movie with a giant plant monster, the effects of which sometimes work quite well actually! As far as Tom Baker tales go, it doesn't crack the top 10 or anything but it's no stinker by a long shot. It's fine, pretty grim in spots, and a good fit for the marathon. Well then. On with the show.
kaiju

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 9 (Us)

And now you're mirroring us. Fuck.

Well, that sure is a movie I literally just finished not ten minutes ago. Listen. I had stuff to do today. Besides, if Douglas Adams could skirt deadlines and still put out legendary work from the crunch of it all? I think I can manage a couple hundred words on a horror movie as a quickie. Besides, tomorrow's subject has already been experienced, so I have a little buffer at work. All of this is to preamble before I talk about Jordan Peele's Us, which is a supremely fucked up little movie that plays with themes I have been known to enjoy. THAT'S RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKERS, STRAP YOURSELVES RIGHT THE FUCK IN BECAUSE IT'S ONCE AGAIN TIME FOR FREZNO TO TALK ABOUT SOME MOTHERFUCKIN' GODDAMNED MIRROR THEMES!!!