my Halloween

Image by brothergrimm via Flickr

I had a great Halloween this year.  Our own homes were off-limits, so my brother and I decorated my parents’ house.  We chose the theme of skulls and spiders, it made us happy.  We had a giant spider climbing out of a coffin with a skull.  We had spiders in webs and climbing down walls and over our dummy’s face.  We had skulls on pikes.

We made a wraith which was taller than the roof of the house. We had gray webbing this year which I preferred but my brother is a traditionalist. My brother even carved a spider on our jack o’ lantern. The pumpkin seeds were delicious.

We had a moderate number of trick-o-treaters but not bunches.  We had a small ninja who posed in battle stance for us (so cute!).  An adorable pumpkin and bumblebee came to visit.  We had some older kids: cowboys and pirates. All of them seemed incredibly shy.

My nephew was a monkey (my brothers were a monkey’s uncles); my nieces were a witch in a purple gown and a “Cinderella princess.”  My brother and sister took them out around the neighborhood and they got 2 buckets full each.

We watched Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1998) – the only scary part was the clown design – and Fido (2006) – a comedy with zombies as a gimmick. We played a story telling game that I had gotten for my birthday.

We also played Betrayal at House on the Hill – a superb game.  We’ve nearly run through the official storylines and are nearly to the point of making our own.

I do love Halloween.

The Orphanage (2007)

Image via Wikipedia

El Orfanato or The Orphanage is my new favorite Halloween movie.

Haunted Houses are my favorite kind of scary tale.  This one was light on the gore, so I especially liked it.  I also scare easily and the final part of the movie had me holding my viewing partner’s hand. But for regular people, I think it’s just suspenseful.

A young family moves into an old house that used to be an orphanage.  The parents are planning to open a home for kids who are disabled.  Needless to say, the family finds it is NOT ALONE.  Something super-spooky is the house and is threatening their family bonds and ultimately their lives.

Like all the best horror movies, this one is more about human fear and human relationships than it is about the supernatural.  The main relationship under the microscope is the one between cute kid Simon (Roger Princep) and his warm-hearted mother Laura (Belen Rueda).  Rueda gives a great performance in the panicking mother role that I usually dislike but I was rooting for her throughout the movie.  The house, though just a set, is beautiful to look at.  The story effortlessly moves between a kind of twisted fairy tale and contemporary story of a family melt-down.

I re-watched the movie with a women from Madrid.  Some trivia I gleaned: she used to play the “1,2,3 knock on the door” game.  When the boy asks if Santa Claus is a lie, he’s really asking about the three wise men who are the gift-givers.She said that Rueda used to be a television personality, very bubbly and cute.  Now I’m doubly impressive.

I hope, hope, hope that this not the last effort by this director.

More Not-Too-Scary Halloween Movies

Ghost and House

Last year I posted a short list of movies that were gore-free and jump-free, yet still quickened the pulse enough to match the season.  Here are some more.

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Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)  A young ex-soldier and his companion travel across England killing vampires and picking up cute girls.  This is more of an adventure than it is an outright horror movie.  As if Buffy Summers were a blond man in the 18th Century.  A bit of blood at the end but no real jump scares.

Corpse Bride (2005)  Tim Burton’s usual fair with some Gothic romance thrown in.  A bit icky about physical decay but that’s all.  Stop-motion.

The Orphanage (2007)  A mother’s young son goes missing in a haunted house.  One gory scene involving a car crash but mostly intensely creepy.  Spanish language.

Stir of Echoes (1999)  A young family man in Chicago starts hearing and seeing things that are not there.  A few scary appearances of ghostliness but no slashing or hacking.

The Haunting (1963) A group of psychic spend some time in a supposedly haunted house.  One or two definite jump-scares but not gory.

Whispering Corridors (1998)

Despite some lukewarm reviews I read, I found this movie thoroughly enjoyable.

At an all-girl high school in South Korea, one girl is attacking people in the evenings. It could be the artist Lim Ji-oh (Kim Gyu-ri), the shy girl Youn Jae-yi (Choi Se-yeon), the smart girl (Young-Soo Park?), or the surly-looking girl Kim Jung-sook (Yun Ji-hye). There is also a young, unsure teacher Hur Eun-young (Lee Mi-yeon) who has returned to teach in her former school.

All the characters have painful secrets. However, the attacker has preternatural speed and strength, which means she is not entirely human.There are some gory bits but it was mostly about the atmosphere and mystery.

My first and strongest reaction was, “Surely, Korean schools aren’t that tough?” The girls are almost entirely compliant but the teachers have nothing but contempt for them. They physically abuse the girls (hitting them with rulers, knocking them to the ground). One of the teachers, Mr. Oh, is constantly making sexual advances to the girls. If the girls whisper to one another, he accuses them of being “degenerate.”

High school as a metaphorical hell has never been quite as blatant.

According to some of the things I’ve read (Metropolitician and Pop Matters ), the movie was protested by the South Korean teachers’ organization. The director Park Ki-hyeong discusses his film – short and worth reading.  It’s been ten years since the film was made, and these issues may be moot.

All the girls were individuals and were neither perfectly sweet nor perfectly vile. In the world of the movie the girls are faced with a struggle both in high school and further on in life. While I didn’t exactly like all of the girls, their problems made them interesting. I also liked that the relationships between women, good and bad, were at the center of the story.

I don’t believe I’d seen any Korean films before this one, so it was a new and intriguing experience for me. It made me interested in seeing the sequels to this movie and other South Korean movies not in the horror genre. Recommended.

Valentine’s Day/Halloween

Halloween and Valentine’s Day are my two favorite holidays.

Maybe it’s something to do with the extremes. Halloween is about death. It is about evil beyond our kin. It is a harsh kind of celebration that reminds us that our time is short and often brutally so. We honor the dead and allow ourselves a look into the abyss.

It is the severing of connection, if you will.

Valentine’s Day is just the opposite. It is forging and strengthening connections. It is life, and the beauty and pleasure of it. Plus, kissing.

Oddly enough, more people seem reluctant to celebrate this holiday than Halloween. Maybe because nobody much expects the corpse to make a statement about how it feels to die. On Valentine’s Day, you are expected to express a sweeping passion. People who are single complain to me that it’s just a way for couples to make them feel ashamed. People who are coupled complain to me that it’s an artificial and expensive holiday.

So, I thought I’d celebrate Valentine’s day in my own way and consider beauty and grace. Of course, what I consider to be beautiful may not be your ideal. You can object and we can discuss it and not come to any kind of conclusion. At least you won’t be lamenting your singled/coupled status. And that is my master plan.

“…scared me as a kid” links

What scared you as a kid? I don’t mean real horrors, I mean the movies, the ghost stories, the books, the weird neighbors? I remember being terrified of a movie about a guy in a scarecrow costume who was sneaking up to a house full of people to kill them.  More recently,  I was terrified of Audition and The Ring.  I’m a cowardy custard.

Anyway the worst scares are those that aren’t meant to be scary and that’s the subject of this post.

Cinematical has non-horror movies that scared him as a kid. 

Upper Fort Stuart lists the non-horror books that scared him as a kid.  Check out this Three Bears version.

Commonplace Book vs. scary Sesame Street - has video goodness.

On the “Hey, Beastmaster’s On” blog has trailers that terrified Kelly as a kid.

 Finally, Cynical Kitty was not afraid of Scissorhands or E.T. as a kid but she is now.

The question is, what scares you then or now?

Scary Video

Screenrant has found a scary video.  Take a look.  Hide your eyes if you need to.

Rate a Jack O’ Lantern

People have been uploading pictures of pumpkins they’ve carved to Wired’s blog.  You get to vote on which one you like best.   They are all pretty good and I wouldn’t try to sway your vote… no, wait, yes I would.

Vote for Death Star – intricate and beautiful

Vote for Neil Gaiman’s Death – well done

Vote for Tux-O-Lantern – penguins!!!

Tarot Cafe and Tarot Reading

It happens with embarrassing regularity that I avoid a comic book or manga because it doesn’t appeal to me visually. Finally, I pick it up and am immediately sucked into the story.

There is a much shorter list of manga that I collect but don’t read at all: Tarot Cafe by Sang Sun Park. I have four of the six books. In the books, a woman with lots of bushy hair reads tarot cards for monsters. Stuff happens.

I buy it for the pictures. It’s all lollipop-decadent stuff – everything is lovely or just cute with a slight grotesque element. The pensive characters, dressed eccentrically, wander around and apparently have multiple flashbacks or maybe they just change clothes between panels. Not sure. I love the look of it: the thick lines and the rich chiaroscuro. There aren’t a lot of wispy, fragile lines that turn the image gray.

The best part is that the tarot cards are beautifully drawn and they incorporate the characters. The styles of the decks change story by story but Park manages to make each card’s archetype recognizable.

Even better, she doesn’t just stop with the Death card. So many books and movies show that card and everybody gasps as if it had materialized in the deck. *eye roll*

Now if it were a handwritten note that read: “ha! ha! Your all going to die!” that would be disturbing.

correction: it’s manhwa. oh, well.

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I first encountered tarot cards just after I finished at college. A friend read them for me one day – she was using the Mythic Tarot deck which I still think highly of. I loved the pictures and learning how they fit together to tell a story. For my birthday, another friend bought me a different deck, and I started taking it to parties.I discovered that tarot cards are are the most wonderful ice breaker. You can ask a person what she’s been doing and get a pleasant, vague answer.Then you can say, “According to this layout, your business life is taking a new turn. ” The same person will tell you all about her plans to relocate to Tahiti.

Tarot readings are like an exotic form of small talk and an invitation to tell one’s story. And everybody’s got a good story.

Tarotpedia.com is a nice place to start, if you want to learn more about tarot cards.

The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination by Robert Place is pretty good. He talks about their origin as a specialty card game (like Uno or something) and their eventual transformation into a fortune telling deck.

Halloween Odds and Ends

A short list of Halloween fun facts.

Some Halloween jokes with abysmal puns – for kids

From Halloween Website – trivia for Halloween.

The listverse gives their “5 Reasons That We Love Cheesy Horror Movies.”

Fun Trivia – which is great way to waste time – has a listing of all their Halloween trivia tests from bunny to expert.

Phronko lists #30-#34 of his “100 Original Ideas for Horror Movies” – except these have been done. I want to see Black Sheep but I’m not so sure about the rest of them.

A Big Victory has you guessing movies from still shots. It’s gory so the sensitive should be careful. I haven’t tried it yet.

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