One.
Tune in next time when we find out if this will be old dotty great aunt Bedelia’s only stop…
Tag Archives: horror
Fifty
The fifty word story challenge.
Thanks for the inspiration, Regina.
It Came From Under the Bed
His breath held painfully as fretful fingers climbed the bedstand lamp for the switch. Below, old homework papers crunched slowly. Ominously.
“Skipper…?” The dog’s name was little more than a slow exhale.
“Please be Skipper.”
Pffffffffft
He gagged on the warm, unlikely relief of dog fart.
The Returned is wickedly good
I’ve fallen under the spell of the Sundance Channel’s ‘The Returned’ (Fr. Les Revanants).
What started as a slow-paced introduction to a small city in the mountains of France dominated by a large dam on the outskirts of town that provides power to the city and appears to be hiding some secrets.
What separates The Returned from other thrillers like it is that it introduces us to the Living Dead in a way that is entirely new, these aren’t horrors that are out to sate their appetite for human flesh, instead, they are just like the rest of us. Perhaps a little more confused and alienated, but really just trying to find meaning.
Why am I here?
The Returned don’t seem to know any more than we do. They once lived in the city, they died and now – they’ve returned. In the first episode we are introduced to Camille, a girl who died when her bus swerved to miss a little boy and left the road to plunge off a precipice killing all aboard. Camille walks back into town remembering nothing of the accident and thinking that it just happened, when in fact she had been dead seven years.
Why Can’t I Leave?
I expected the rest of the bus’ occupants to make up the remainder of the returned, but I was mistaken. The rest come from a number of walks of life and they’ve died at various times. None seem connected at first, but some similarities do appear as the season progresses.
I’ve watched all but the finale, which I look forward to eagerly. Recently, the last several episodes have altered my expectations and given hints of a variety of influences. Apparently no one can leave, and a horde is amassing…
Dark Night of the Scarecrow : after 30 years of nightmares
Have you ever been haunted by an old movie existing in the shadows of your mind? Something you
shouldn’t have seen? Perhaps hiding behind the couch when your parents thought you were in bed sleeping?
I can think of several films I saw that way when I was young. Films that gained special power because my memory was incomplete and my mind filled in the gaps with things a lot scarier than the film itself.
I was too afraid to keep watching that night and left scared out of my wits early on to stew in my own imaginings.
It must have been thirty years ago, and I never even knew what the movie was until just recently, when Netflix found it for me: Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Directed by Frank De Felitta in 1981, starring more familiar faces than you’d believe.
The film opens introducing us to Bubba, a man from the mold of Lenny from ‘Of Mice and Men’, a big man with a small mind. Not five minutes in, Bubba is (wrongly) accused of doing harm to a young girl who he plays with regularly.
The good old boys in town form up a quick posse to bring street justice to the man that they have already decided was a menace to their town. Soon, they corner the simpleminded man as he hides in plain sight as a scarecrow near his house.
From then on, everything goes so predictably, Bubba could have written it:
The men learn of Bubba’s innocence with their guns hot in their hands, there’s a trial but the men get off (they appear to have benefitted from a ‘stand your ground’ law that strongly favors the survivors of an interaction. But as the trial ends, they are cursed by Bubba’s old crone of a mother. One by one, over the next several days, the men see the scarecrow in their fields, panic and get themselves killed in ways that are arguably accidental.
There are some moments of tension once in a while, but this is not the kind of movie that will make you jump. Ever. I would not say that it’s a very good film, but it’s not terrible either. And Bubba will haunt your children’s dreams for years if you let they get a glimpse.
A la the ‘They’re Coming to get you Barbara’ movie review site (may it rest in peace), I’d give it two severed thumbs up.
In New Zealand, no one can hear you bleat.
A movie review: Black Sheep, 2006. 70% positive on Rotten Tomatoes.
Watching this film, I can’t help but be reminded of such classics such as ‘Dead Alive’ (a fun zombie story by a little known Kiwi director, Peter Jackson) or ‘The Re-animator’ (a great mid-eighties mad scientist film starring Jeffrey Combs). The story is: Genetically altered zombie sheep are released by animal rights activists. This is terribly unlucky for Henry, the younger of two brothers inheriting a massive New Zealand farm, who suffers from acute ovinaphobia (an irrational fear of sheep – but can there really be a rational fear of sheep?) from a traumatic childhood encounter. Black sheep has it all – familial struggles, money and greed, a love story, the claustrophobic terror of spelunking in an offal pit, oh, yeah, and Zombie Sheep.
I’ve heard of this movie, but it took me quite a long time to actually see it. Luckily I caught it on IFC a couple weeks ago and taped it, so now I can strike it from my Netflix list.
Like so many other films of this kind, there is a great deal of tongue-in-cheek demonizing science and specifically genetics, because everyone knows that biotechnology inevitably leads to a zombie apocalypse.
If you don’t like gratuitous blood and guts with gobs and gobs of gore, this might not be the movie for you. And if you still can’t watch the scenes with the abominable snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, you might want to cover your eyes from time to time because this is about that scary.
A wonderful time of year
The leaves are changing, the god-awful heat is gone, frost coats the lawn and a fire is crackling. I love the fall – possibly in large part because I hate the hot summer days so much, but also because it’s a great time of hunkering down for the holidays and a cold winter.
One thing I especially look forward to is the surfeit of horror movies on TV. I’m a big fan of the Hammer Horror films – which I consider the true classics of the genre. I enjoy the older Universal films, but I think Hammer did a better job with less money. Instead, they somehow lucked into a team of truly great actors and gave them good scripts. There was no shortage of gory scenes, but none of these films depended on them to deliver the real tension (well, not really anyway).
Interestingly, this is also the time of year when the first Exam happens in my intro Bio class and I just can’t imagine a world where it would be harmful for my students to take a break and enjoy a great film like Dracula or Frankenstein.
On a side note, despite all the problems I have with George Lucas for doing everything in his power to undermine his own opus, he did at least have an eye for talent (well, sometimes he did). It’s just too bad that he didn’t learn more from watching Hammer films as a kid.
1976 – The Omen
Netflix just delivered the Blu-Ray version of The Omen today. I’ve been looking forward to watching it all day. I think the last time I saw this film was when I was in high school.
To be perfectly honest, I have only snapshots of memory of the film and had even totally forgotten that Gregory Peck was in it. So don’t give anything away. I didn’t think I’d get to watch it tonight because my wife and I were going out, but unfortunately, our son was feeling sick to his stomach, so we had to leave ‘The Bourne Legacy’ just as it was starting to get exciting.
OK… roll film.
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