Horror Movie Month II (though really it is probably more the fifth)

So it is October again.  And for my girlfriend and I that means it is time for scary movies.  Our tradition is that we try to watch at least one scary movie or television show in the month of October. We really try to do a movie but sometimes we are just busy or tired and so we at least try to do an episode of a television show (i.e. Supernatural, Night Gallery).  It is always fun and when we find a scary movie that we really are looking forward to we go all out and get candy and popcorn. This year has been pretty decent.  We have seen some very scary movies, some movies with decent scares with a good twist or two.   And a few "scary movies" that provided more laughs and as usual a few movies that were so bad they were not even laughable as much as they were insulting.

We have found that it is kind of rare to find a genuine scary movie anymore.  And it is all about taste and what scares you that makes a movie scary or not.  Some people are scared of monsters, slashers, or gory movies. For others it is Vampires or witches.  For us it is ghost story/ haunted house movies that we find the most scary.  We have found a few this time around but we really watched a high number of ghost movies back in May after we saw Cabin In The Woods.  But since then we have found more we either skipped over or just now discovered.

This year we are rating the movies we watch on IMDB so we can get suggestions as well as keep up with the films we liked and the ones we did not.  Plus I think it will be interesting to see how many we actually do watch and then see which ones were the best.  I am trying to plan it out so we have a few good ones mixed in with the the ones whose ratings are not so high.  For the most part it has been ghost/haunted movies.  But Vampires, Slashers, Monsters and even a Vincent Price night are all things we want to see.  We even had a couple of lighter nights where we watched the two Scooby Doo movies followed by the original Scooby Doo cartoons.  After those we watched The Dog Who Saved Halloween and the complete Halloweentown series.  It does not have to be scary to be fun. 

So Happy Halloween and Spooky times to all.

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

     Every year since I was a child whenever Halloween rolls around I always think of the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books written by Allen Scwartz.  They are short stories that are sometimes humorous, scary, ironic and sometimes just flat out silly.  I have the collection of all three books in one volume and a few Halloweens ago Lisa and I took turns reading each other different ones before going to bed.  Well to my surprise this year we found and audio book form of these books.  So we got them for cheap and decided to give them a listen. One of the ones we listened  to was very first one of these stories I ever heard.  When I was a kid our teachers sometimes would take us to the school library for story time.  Our library had a big multi stepped circle that had three or four steps and all the kids would gather around and the teacher would be in the center and read from books.  Well during October one year our teacher read a few short stories from one of the books.  But the very first one was called The Bride.

     The Bride is a story about a bride (obviously) on her wedding day (again, obviously) who during a game of hide in go seek hides in a trunk in the attic and is accidentally locked in.  Well the idea of this terrified the crap out of me.  Just the mental image of that gave me shivers.  Well after the teacher was finished the story she said there was a drawing.  There was a drawing with all the stories.  So she passed around the book and we all looked at the picture.  I was instantly scared.  This image just left me speechless which was something hard to do to me back then.  The image still is burnt in my head.  And still gives me the creeps to this day.  And here I am uploading it to my blog.

     Would that not scary you as a child?  Give you nightmares?  No?  Well what about if after hearing that story and viewing that picture you were spooked by a kid who was hiding in the closet waiting for someone to open the closet door so they could jump out for a quick scare.  Needless to say it made a lasting impression on me.  So much so that it still can scare me to this day.  As mentioned in on of my previous posts, This one here to be exact., the effect of this story and the incident with the closet still had an effect on me in 2003 when I saw The Ring for the first time and they got to the point in the film where they were discussing finding the body of a girl who was only in the first ten-fifiteen mintues of the movie and while describing how the body was found this quick image bursts on the screen.

     See the resemblance?  So did I.  I instantly stopped the movie for a minute just because it was so shocking to me how it matched my memory of the drawing from the story almost exactly.  Yeah some of the smaller details changed but basics of it all is still there.  Over the years I have read many different versions of The Bride and always compared them with the original one I heard as a kid.  It still creeps me out and I can still remember the feelings I had as a kid when first hearing it and this will be the version that I will tell to my kids in Halloweens of the future.  I think I will leave out the part that daddy was a big chicken when it came to opening closets for many years. 

Horror Movie Month

     Tonight is October 1st.  It is the kickoff to horror movie month.  My girlfriend Lisa and I have a tradition that each year during October we watch either one scary movie or an episode of a scary television show a night.  In the past we have watched as many as six movies in one night and as little as a thirty minute Tales From the Crypt episode.  It just seems to be a better atmosphere to watch a scary movie in October.  It is a very interesting feeling to walk our dog Kira at night right after watching a scary movie and be a little creeped out by the cold wind and the spooky shadows the moving clouds create.  A unique thing for us is about halfway through our nightly walk there is a lamp post that goes on and off at random.  So it is an added bonus after we watch a really creepy movie/show when we hit that point of our walk and the light goes out.  So I am looking forward to this years batch of movies and shows.  Tonight we start light with just getting caught up with Supernatural.  And we always save the "best" for the week of Halloween and usually watch classic horror movies on Halloween itself.