Halloween Thread

THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

Maybe talk about your favorite scary movies, books, and games, the first scary R-rated movie you snuck into to see gore and boobs, and any real-life encounters you've had with the supernatural or Space Aliens.

I talked about my three Encounters With the Unknown on the podcast a couple of years back, starting around 42:00.

Oh by the way, because Friday the 13th -- the Game is a big thing now, I watched some of the Friday the 13th movies, the 2009 remake and then parts 4-6 (the ones with Tommy Jarvis, who's prominent in the game).

Gee willickers, are they awful. A major trope of Friday the 13th is that Jason appears out of literally nowhere.

Seriously nowhere -- sometimes there's plainly nowhere he could be hidden, but a mere camera angle keeps him out of sight from the movie audience. But someone really present in the scene would obviously see him, because they're not limited by a deliberately-restrictive camera angle.

Anyway, apart from it just being dumb how Jason appears right in front of you from no hiding spot, it also destroys the whole suspense part of horror, that you're supposed to anticipate him coming. It's the suspense that makes it scary. Jump-scares without any suspense are just Haunted House goofball tricks.

From what I've seen of the series, they deliberately avoid all that suspense-building and growing fear on the faces of the protagonists as if that's a bad thing, going only for suspense-free jump-scares.

Because you never actually share in the fear of the characters, the franchise seems to be deliberately maneuvering you into rooting for the kills, just to kill the boredom. (And most of these characters are just hateable, so you're predisposed to just wanting them dead.)

But even the murder-gags usually aren't all that innovative. So you're rooting for a murder to stop the boredom but then most of the murders are boring too.

Anyway, just terrible, even by the very low standards of generic slasher movies. I might watch the first and second one tonight to see if the franchise fell from some better beginning.

Or I might just watch the end of my favorite Halloween movie, Halloween III: Season of the Witch. I know it's a weird choice and it sounds like I'm just saying that to be contrarian, and yeah, it's cheap and pretty boring throughout the first half, but the second half has an interesting (and, at the time, novel) Evil Plot and some really good creepiness and scares.

One flaw: the film is weirdly anti-Irish. Problematically so. Apparently all Irish people are Druid Sorcerers who love liquor and murder.

Speaking of scary movies: I usually find creepy murder mysteries scarier than actual horror movies. The opening prologue of 1974's Murder on the Orient Express is really chilling.

posted by Ace at 07:46 PM

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