Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them! Halloween is drawing ever closer, and it's FINALLY starting to feel like Autumn here in NYC. Autumn is my favorite season, so this makes me sigh a great sigh of relief. Summer weather has just lasted WAY too long this year. There's now a slight breeze and chill in the air that I just love. It also means that every TV show is now trying to be a little bit spooky. Which is fine by me. Horror is easier to take in smaller doses, so I generally like horror TV shows a bit more than I do horror movies. The three below are two of my all-time favorites and one show that, frankly, should be so much better than it is, but is often still pretty good anyway.
The X-Files (1993-2002) It's true, classifying The X-Files as horror does it a bit of a disservice. After all, in its heyday, it could be just about anything from week to week. But there was usually an element of the scary, or at the very least the creepy, and the creepy-crawlies made multiple appearances. The basic premise is simple: Two FBI agents comprise in the bureau's "weird cases" division, one of whom is a true believer in aliens and the supernatural and one of whom is a scientist who is naturally skeptical of such things. But creator Chris Carter did so much more with it than that, creating a longer-term story arc deemed "the mythology" that had more influence on the state of TV programs today than most will admit. It's taken for granted now that the best episodes of the show were the "monster of the week"-style episodes, and the episodes focused on the "mythology" arc were lesser, but at the time, this was ALL truly thrilling stuff. On a personal level, The X-Files was basically my introduction to the horror genre. It was my mom's favorite show (next to ER), and when my sister and I reached the age when we were allowed to stay up late on Sundays to watch it, we were excited - we finally felt like grown-ups! Favorite Episodes: "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", "The Post-Modern Prometheus", "Triangle", "How The Ghosts Stole Christmas"
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) Yet another show that it feels like a disservice to reduce to being a "horror" show, as well as another show that had more influence on today's TV shows than most are willing to admit, Buffy was basically my favorite show in high school. The story of a teenager who is the latest in a long line of Vampire Slayers - "chosen" ones who have been called by fate to fight the undead (and other monsters), her friends (and a frenemy or two), and her "Watcher" (her high school librarian, natch)... and the hunky vampire with a soul Angel. Creator Joss Whedon's stroke of brilliance to have Sunnydale High School literally sitting on top of a Hell Mouth (exactly what it sounds like) and use the demons as metaphors for the vagaries of teenage life is what allows the show to endure, but the show's whip-smart, ultra-quotable dialogue is what made it a huge hit among the teens of the '90s. Favorite Episodes: "Doppelgangland", "Hush", "Restless", "The Body", "Once More With Feeling"
American Horror Story (2011-Present) Ryan Murphy's grand guignol anthology series is SO hit-or-miss, but at its best (unquestionably the second season, Asylum), it has a truly terrifying anything-could-happen brazenness that makes it required viewing. Given that each season is its own complete story, you an skip the seasons that don't seem like your thing. In addition to the aforementioned Asylum (in which Sarah Paulson's lesbian journalist commits herself to Jessica Lange's Catholic nun-run asylum for a career-making scoop), the best seasons are the first (Murder House, in which Dylan McDermott's psychiatrist and his wife Connie Britton move to the titular house in LA after a bout of infidelity on his part, only to find out it's haunted - by busybody next-door neighbor Jessica Lange as well as by ghosts both friendly and malevolent), and probably the absolutely demented sixth season, Roanoke (a "true crime"-style show within the show about a couple who move to a renovated home in the backwoods of North Carolina, supposedly on the spot where the infamous Roanoke Colony moved after its sudden disappearance). The third season, Coven, is wildly uneven and terribly scripted despite some entertaining performances; the fourth, Freak Show, is a wasted opportunity; and the fifth, Hotel is a gorgeous slog. American Horror Story is not a show that very much cares for silly things like logic and consistency, but in its best moments, that doesn't matter.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
Growing up, our house didn't have a backyard. Our backyard was woods. It was really beautiful when it snowed - it looked like a real winter wonderland with all the ice and snow coating the branches of all the trees, and it was fun to go wandering and exploring. But during any other time of the year, it wasn't a place you wanted to go. It wasn't often scary-looking, but sometimes, when it was particularly dark and the cicadas and crickets and whatnot were particularly quiet, it made it tough to take the garbage out to the end of our driveway.
This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're going into the woods, and.... well, there's one that immediately springs to mind, and the rest.... I REALLY had to stretch. Let's see how you think I did!
The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) Somehow, my family went to see this on a movie outing. I was 15 and my sister was 13. When we returned home from the theater, it was dark out, and pulling in to the driveway, we realized it was garbage night. It took all four of us to bring out one garbage can, because this movie had instilled such fear about the woods and the dark. I know it is now in vogue to dismiss The Blair Witch Project as solely a marketing gimmick, and/or to blame it for all the terrible found-footage horror films it spawned, but this is the REAL DEAL, dealing in genuine terror - the terror of the unknown, of the darkness, of what is lurking just outside your field of vision. It boils down an entire genre to its most basic elements - three people, investigating a legendary witch, lost in the woods, where there are creepy sounds and strange goings-on - and lets our own psyches fill in the blanks. The final scene of this is still the cruelest, most bone-chilling denouement of any horror movie I've ever seen.
The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012) It's nearly impossible to summarize Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's horror spoof without giving away it's big secrets, which are best left to be experienced while watching the movie, but it's another movie that boils down the horror genre to base elements: five horny teens, an old, semi-abandoned cabin in the woods and off the grid, and the dark of night. That it actually manages to be as scary as it is funny is pretty impressive... to anyone who didn't watch Whedon's TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer! The Cabin in the Woods is a total delight from start to finish, deconstructing the horror genre and satirizing it better, in a more serious and more loving way, than the Scary Movie series ever did.
Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009) You know what? I can't really in good conscience recommend this one. But GOD DAMN did it blow me away. The basic story is this: A nameless couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, both fantastic) are struggling after the death of their infant boy (he crawled out an open window while they were having sex in the shower). He is a therapist and she a scholar. After she becomes so grief-stricken she can barely move, he decides to take her to their woodland cabin, Eden, where he starts having terrifying visions and she starts exhibiting increasingly violent sadomasochistic tendencies. It terrible, ROUGH stuff, but cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle has created some of the most beautiful images ever put on a screen for this, and the performances hold absolutely nothing back. It's a hyper-violent, super-pretentious movie, one that is quite possibly not for anyone at all, really. But as an exploration of grief and the masculine/feminine dynamic, it's quite stunning, and totally singular. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
