You’re the best month of the year—the month I bring my snuggly clothes and my tights out of exile, lobotomize pumpkins, and eat an entire apple pie all by myself. And the month I watch so many horror movies, I’m sure Netflix has me on some kind of emotional stability watchlist.
This year, I’m trying a new thing (Ed. note: in addition to blogging) where I experience something spooky every day. Can be a movie, a TV show, a book, a song, anything. I love to be freaked right the hell out. I haven’t always loved horror movies—in fact, when I was wee I was pretty terrified of violence and manaics, of axes and knives and blood. Terrified but always curious, and I think it’s fair to say I’ve always loved monsters. [Notable exceptions: the Gmork in The NeverEnding Story and the Wicked Witch of the West, especially when she threatens the Scarecrow.] The infamous masquerading-as-kid-friendly monsters of the 80s—the Dark Crystal‘s Skeksises (Skeksii?), Falcor the Luck Dragon, the Wheelers, Mombi and her wardrobe of heads, the Gnome King (okay, like EVERYTHING) in Return to Oz—may have permanently scarred many of my contemporaries, but they were my kind. They didn’t frighten so much as fascinate, and feed my imagination.
Now I’ve developed a taste for crazy stuff beyond the fantastic; now I crave ghost stories, haunted hotels and poltergeist, serial killers and murderers, vampires and werewolves. The Sunday nights I spent watching Murder, She Wrote segued into reading Mary Higgins Clark. Michael Crichton led in a direct line, do not pass go, to the humongous back catalog of Stephen King. My modern love of horror movies—straight-up, never meant to be anything but scary movies—started with a VHS tape of Scream. Scream is a very, very funny movie, which I think initially distracted me from how horrifying it is; because it’s pretty sick, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Then came Rosemary’s Baby, George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Cemetery Man, all great examples of the irresistible alchemy of funny and human and sick. They were gateways to the harder stuff, stuff like The Exorcist, The Shining, Alien, The Thing. The more I watched, the more I loved them, the more I watched them again.
Horror movies are my cinematic comfort food. I’m not sure what this says about me. I’m fairly certain most people would say that I’m a pretty happy, well-adjusted, non-homicidal-tendency harboring type, which I am; really, I am. I just love that dark mirror. Horror can explore the extremes of human nature and emotion, madness and violence, and there’s a kind of sublime freedom in experiencing the really awful parts of ourselves through stories. In watching our own nightmares on a television or a movie screen, and not having to close our eyes to survive.
Two brief recommendations from this October’s horror-a-thon!
The House of the Devil / Awesome retro-80s horror movie about a desperate babysitter (tagline: Talk on the Phone. Finish your homework. Watch TV. DIE!) that’s ultimately less satisfying at the finish line. But the build-up is RADICAL.
Let the Right One In / Um, wow. Many people recommended this one to me, so I expected great and it totally delivered. A lonely boy has the good misfortune to fall in love for the first time with a vampire—who’s been twelve for a very long time.
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