Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers)

Boo.

Well, here we are at last. It's Halloween, and we have once again come back to that powerful series which usually ends these. The double whammy of circumstances over what to cover, as well as just plain having done most of this series already, has led us to this thing. I covered the film this is a sequel to, Halloween 4, a good five years ago. I did not particularly like or dislike it, as I recall, but the words are back there in the archive. It is a film I let pass into hazy memory. This, on the other hand? I don't despise it, but I don't like it either. Halloween 5 is not a very good film, and let's talk about why to close things out.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Dracula [1958])

Oh boy! We get to talk about Hammer Horror today! It's got a great beat and it's a lovely tune about performativity, with lots of interesting theatrical dancing-- Wait, shit, sorry, that's the Kate Bush song. No, we're actually talking about the Hammer film studio in England which did a whole bunch of horror films in the middle of the 20th century. Hammer Horror is a catchall for them, and I'd never seen one until now. For a first, I went with one that was both highly rated on Letterboxd and had the two iconic actors most associated with Hammer Horror: those two being Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Here we are, then, in a Hammer adaptation of the tried and true literary classic Dracula. How is it? It's not half-bad.

For a Dracula adaptation it certainly takes its liberties. Like how Jonathan Harker and Cushing's Dr. Van Helsing are in cahoots before the film even begins, and that's why Harker is at Dracula's castle. Or the swapping around of Lucy and Mina's partners in the film. Or how Harker bites it within the first 20 minutes. Or how Dracula's castle and the well-to-do society he invades seem to be like, a half-hour carriage ride away from each other? The broad strokes of Stoker are kept, but Hammer isn't afraid to change things up and make a quick and breezy 80 minute vampire movie. If you want a more literate and erudite adaptation, they're out there. You're here for some spooky vampires and to see splashes of bright Technicolor blood, and this Dracula adaptation cuts right to the chase and gives you that.

Just because it's speedrunning doesn't mean it's a fast-paced film, though. There are plenty of scenes of old British people (namely Cushing and Michael Gough) talking about what they're going to do. I quite like Cushing's Van Helsing, as I find it nails the perfect balance between a proper Victorian gentleman and a scientist/monster hunter who's devoted himself to going after vampires. Christopher Lee's also quite good and imposing in this, but therein lies a bit of a rub: his presence in the film is pretty brief. The glimmers of appearance he has in the Holmwood home, striding with imperious confidence towards the woman he's about to nibble on the neck, are powerful in their own right. I do also dig the effects when he melts in sunlight at the end of the film. For most of it, though, Lee haunts the proceedings from the night. Haunting, and hunting. In the end, it's a pretty neat little speedy adaptation of Dracula. I like it, but I imagine it had more power back in the day. Or maybe the like six or seven sequels Hammer banged out go even wilder than this, unrestrained by Stoker's framework. That could be something to discover in marathons in future, but for now we're at the finale. The stage is set.

Happy Halloween.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (Beau Is Afraid)

(TW: child abuse)

Oh god. Oh dear God in heaven. Once again I find myself returning to an Ari Aster film. Two years ago I did Midsommar for one of these and it was an anxious nightmare of a film, one which reflected back on me and made me feel the life of an anxious nightmare for that day. Things have not gotten any cheerier with his next film. Beau Is Afraid was three hours of Asterian nightmare for me to wring myself through, and it didn't help that I was interrupted 25 minutes in by some stuff and errands which needed to be done. For four hours I marinated in this absolute hell. Four godforsaken hours of this. Now I have to talk about it, and to talk about it I have to relate what I took from it.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (Paprika)

For last year's spooky marathon, I went back to a film I'd only seen once before. It was a film which had left a mark on my psyche, a harrowing and haunting anime. That film was Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue, and it remains just as terrifying as it ever was. In chatting with a streamer friend of mine, they compared it to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and I can definitely see the similarities. Both are quite intense. I put all this upfront to say that Paprika, another film of Kon's, is less intense than those nightmares. Nevertheless, it manages to delve into some of the same subject matters, and what remains is more unsettling and eerie than outright terrifying. It's still a fantastic film, barring like one caveat I have with it, so let's talk about it.

Using Fire Walk With Me as a springboard lets us make a good starting point. David Bowie's one scene in the theatrical cut of that movie is a fractured disjointed mess of images, but one of the many poetic things he says during it is that we live inside a dream. That's Paprika, through and through. Duality is blurred within the confines of this film. The waking world and the dreaming world merge, and you're never quite sure if you're in a dream or not. Dreams themselves seem to fulfill the old Steven Moffat adage of thinking for themselves, and invading the world to blur the lines. The mundane and the bizarre mix, the world shifting its state and us shifting our understanding of things as it happens.

Perfect Blue had a duality within it, the image of the perfect idol juxtaposed with the ordinary performer enduring the psychological terrors. So too is there a duality between Dr. Atsuko Chiba, working on dream diving tech, and Paprika, her other self who delves in the world of dreams and helps dreamers come to terms with themselves. Even this is blurred, as by the end of the film dreams and reality have merged, so Chiba and Paprika exist within the same space. The spirit self coming forth alongside the true self. This merging of selves is what brings about something beautiful. Paprika works as a dream-diving psychologist, hopping into the confusing mess of images in a person's mind to see what it says about them in reality, their worries and their guilts, in order to help them grow and change. It's police captain Konakawa who benefits from this in the film at first, a recurring dream about giving chase to someone being his mind's way of working with feelings of loss and grief from a dead friend of his who was always one step ahead in life.

The blurring of dream and reality helps not just Konakawa deal with his traumas and heal from them thanks to Paprika, but Paprika herself helps to make her own true self in the waking world grow and change for the better. Chiba's relationship and feelings for her colleage, Dr. Tokita (who's the film's one bum note, sorry to say: he's a large man and the film has some cheap shots at the expense of him being fat) are able to blossom and grow as she changes from the blurred reality of dreams becoming real. Paprika's a strange film, reminding me of David Lynch in the way it deals with the hazy ambiguity of dreaming and what it means to us, and some of it is spooky and unsettling enough for a spooky marathon. Either way, as Satoshi Kon's last feature film, it was one hell of a sendoff. It's worth your time, so give it a watch... and dream a little dream, every now and thena.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 12 (The Haunted House)

It's been a strange sort of spooky marathon, what with the strike and all making me think outside the box. In any other year, that might really hamper me, but 2023 has also been the year of broadening my horizons with the Criterion Challenge. I mention that because the two dovetail together nicely for this instance. For the Criterion Challenge, I did a silent Buster Keaton film from the 1920s called Three Ages. It was a pretty good and funny bit of silent slapstick from one of the all-time greats of that particular genre. Somehow or another, in my research for things outside studio-released films, I came across this. A spooky-themed Buster Keaton silent short film? Okay, sure, why not!

It may be lacking in the spooky department compared to some things, but it's all in the right spirit of fun for this thing so who needs to quibble? The titular haunted house doesn't factor in until about halfway of the 20 minute runtime, and for a brief moment I thought I had chosen wrong and would need to pick something else. That's not the case, as you can see from this having been posted. That being said, the ten minutes before the haunted house escapades are still wickedly funny. I don't know much about silent film, but I did grow up watching episodes of Mr. Bean; as it turns out, that was well within the wheelhouse to appreciate this. Buster Keaton fumbling around as a bank teller with glue on his hands and making the money stick to everything, and then everything sticking to everything else, elicited an incredible laughing fit from me. Like, holy fuck. This was funny as hell.

Then the part that we're here for happens, and the setup to get us into the haunted house is surprisingly layered and dense for a 20 minute short. The house isn't haunted, but is a front for money counterfeiters operating in cahoots with a man from the bank, who fake the house being haunted to scare away intruders. In addition, due to a misunderstanding involving bank robbers and Keaton picking up their gun, the cops are after him and so he runs into the haunted house. In addition to that an opera group performing Faust is chased off the stage for being terrible, so they also run into the haunted house, including a guy in a devil outfit. What follows is a thing of silent beauty, as Keaton and the actors and the counterfeiters in ghost costumes and some skeleton men bumble around the house scaring each other and causing havoc. To a modern lens, it's like Mr. Bean crossed with Scooby-Doo. The repeated gag with Keaton and the staircase which collapses into a slide is amazing, especially the payoff to it at the end which I dare not spoil.

Sometimes it's good to just have fun with the spooky marathon. It isn't about getting scared out of your wits or unsettled every time. Every once in a while, let your hair down and watch a spooky-themed comedy. At 20 minutes, this is just charming and wonderful. It made me want to seek out even more short but sweet Buster Keaton antics, and that's no mean feat for a film that's over a century old. You can do a lot worse this Halloween season, so why not give an old classic a go?

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 11 (Train To Busan)

(Just a heads-up, I do kind of "spoil" stuff about this film in this writeup, so if you have an interest after the first paragraph, see the film. It's good.)

Oh my good God. You have to understand, I just sort of picked this one while looking up foreign spooky cinema. All I knew going in was that it was a South Korean movie with a titular train, presumably going to Busan, and that there were zombies. Alright, said I. I can deal with a zombie movie. Sure, by this point I'm more attuned to the subversions and swerves that other pieces of zombie media go for where they focus on things other than the miserable and visceral end of society as they know it. I can handle something more straight-laced. I won't love it, but it will probably be competent enough to give me some stuff to talk about and I only need to bullshit for a few hundred words anyway. Fuck it, let's take the train. So it was that I threw on the movie, and the inciting incident for getting on the train is a workaholic dad with a strained relationship with his daughter. She wants to see her mom, who's separated from this shit of a dad, and so he begrudgingly takes her on a train ride and then we got Zombie Time.

In a moment of calm after everything goes to hell in a handbasket, though, , there was a moment which made me sit up. The little girl gives up her seat for an older lady, and the dad tells her she didn't have to do that: that in a crisis like this, it's best to look after yourself first. Wait. Oh shit, wait. The movie's doing a thing here. Is it... could it be actively rejecting selfish lone wolf bullshit and grim practicality during a zombie apocalypse? Is it actually advocating for being a good person even in crisis, letting empathy and kindness take charge instead of selfishness and throwing others to the wolves? Oh, it is. You bet your ass it is. This zombie train movie is preaching the same scripture as the other most impactful pieces of media in recent years for me. Oh my God there might be something to this shit.

It goes even beyond that, though! The dad is a fund manager and called out on being a shitty capitalist by one or two characters, but there's also this corporate executive on the train who starts taking charge. He is making all the tough "needs of the many" choices that you'd expect from the typical zombie movie, leaving doomed people to die and not letting others in because they might have been bit. The film is not on this asshole's side, and you very quickly grow to hate him. He manages to turn everyone else on the train away from the small group of survivors who got away from zombies, exiling them to the next car. Typical mob mentality horseshit... and then everyone who went along with this gets fucked by zombies. This man somehow continues to survive, and he does it by routinely shoving other people into the path of zombies so that he can get away. He absolutely sucks, the literal sacrificing of other people both a metaphor for being a capitalist shitheel and a condemnation of that mentality in a zombie crisis.

He gets his in the end, but it is not without cost. Not just the people he lets die, but our protagonist workaholic dad gets bitten by him while trying to save his daughter and a pregnant woman. The final goodbye between the dad and daughter, and him thinking about the day she was born as the zombification takes hold, is some of the most heartwrenching shit I have ever seen in a zombie film. Sweet Christ. The ending is bittersweet, but it almost pulls a Night Of The Living Dead on you and for a moment you're wondering if they will actually pull the trigger on this, literally and metaphorically. They don't, and it's certainly something. Good god, this was an incredible film. 

I hardly mentioned the zombies themselves, but everything about them is fast as shit. Not just the speed at which they attack and give chase, but even the infection itself is fast as hell: someone who gets chomped in the throat will be up in seconds to do the zombie thing. The way they all run in a horde and trip over themselves and are just relentless is something to behold. I could say a lot more, but sometimes it's best to leave things unsaid. If you can handle the zombie thing, this one is absolutely worth the time. It almost rivals Zombie Land Saga for how it handles empathy and kindness in the face of zombies, and coming from me? That's high praise indeed.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 10 (Skinamarink)

Right away, I knew that I had to go a little extra with this film in order to create a memorable and intriguing aesthetic experience with it. It all stemmed from the fun little fact that it got a limited edition release on VHS, of all things. I did not have the cash to pony up for one of those tapes, so I made my own. I attained a digital copy of the film, ran it through a video editor to get it in an acceptable format, popped it on a USB drive, put that into a PS3 hooked into a VCR via AV cables, and then played the movie while recording it onto tape. This only got the visual aesthetic, and I needed to do one more thing to really get the effect to work. I went down into my basement with that same VCR hooked to a CRT, and late at night I turned off all the lights and sat back to watch the resultant tape. So it was, then, in illuminated blackness, that I let this wash over me.

Before we get into the film, I would like to share with you two similar stories from my childhood. I could not have been more than 6 or 7 years old when these occurred, and they both involve me waking up in the middle of the night. In the first, I awoke to a house that still had all the lights on but no Mom or Dad around. They were out doing something, and had figured I would just sleep right through their absence. I did not, and the sheer terror of being Alone In The House for the very first time is a memory that's stuck with me. The second is me waking up once again, needing to use the bathroom. While I had slept, there was a power outage and the lights did not work so I could not go. You may wonder why I'm bringing up random nighttime anxieties from a couple of decades ago. Such things are tantamount to what I got out of this film. Such things are what that film is all about.

Skinamarink is many things at once, but the one thing it is not is a traditional film. There is no fancy plot, no three-act structure, no detailed lore explanation for what is happening here (no matter how many goddamn Youtube videos attempt to do such a thing). This is almost an experimental film in many ways, a full-on example of vibes-based storytelling and chasing the unique aesthetic of dimly lit shots of a suburban house at night. Its refusal to be anything traditional can blindside many, and it makes the film what I like to dub a "picket fence film"; that is to say, a film where the Letterboxd ratings graph has a nearly equal amount of ratings for every star possible, from 1/2 to 5. A film that is equally beloved and berated. 

If you are expecting a traditional film, something with a narrative and an arc and an explanation, or you just can't plain vibe with it, then you are going to get jack shit out of this experience other than annoyance and boredom. I get it. I honestly get it more than I do the continued hate and backlash over Halloween Ends for not being what was expected. It's one thing when you whinge about not getting your epic final slasher villain battle. It's another when you go into a movie expecting, you know, a usual movie. If you don't go in knowing what this is, it's understandable that you can't vibe with it. 

I can, however, vibe with it. In a dark basement in 2023, I vibed with what this was doing. It's almost a Rorschach test, in a way. It is a movie about childhood nightmares, of sleepless nights, of the terrors lurking within your little child brain that only come out when the sun comes down. The people behind it had their own childhood nightmares that they see in the film. I have my own which I see in the film, which I told you about. That's why the lore explanation thing drives me mad: do you wake up from a nightmare and then nitpick your own imagination's plot holes? No! God no! This thing, this 100 minutes of whatever it is, is an ambient terror that reflects the darkest parts of your childhood subconscious, spitting it back out in a visual form that resonates with everyone in a different way. All I can do is tell you how it resonated with me, how it made me remember the night I woke up and my Mom and Dad weren't there. The night that the power went and the toilet might as well have vanished into inky blackness. Every spooky night, every terror from my dreams I never told anyone about, all of it pondered as scratchy audio on a videocassette shows me a deserted hallway, flickering with the light of a CRT as I too bathe in the flickering light of a CRT. All of this and more were pondered as I lay in that darkness, letting whatever this was wash over me.

Sweet dreams, kids.