Halloween 2016: Sunday Cinema
Oct. 2nd, 2016 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdHorror movies are great fun. There are none I find truly scary at least not the monsters.
So today, we're listing five of my favorites and what I found scariest in each film. These are in no particular order.
Cabin in the Woods
There is no Joss but Joss, and he brings it in this. Five friends spend the weekend at a cousin's cabin, and weird things start happening. Sigourney Weaver is the scariest thing in this movie, with her cold rationality.
In the Mouth of Madness
A writer of Lovecraftian horror vanishes and an insurance investigator is sent to find him. Sam Neill is brilliant as skeptical John Trent who slowly comes to believe that everything about Sutter Caine is true. Unfortunately his shrink is David Warner, so he's doomed the minute you see him. Scariest bit: "Reality is what we tell each other it is."
I'm also partial to the ever changing painting at Pickman Hotel.
Gothic
Lord Byron (see icon) invites his lovers Claire and Percy Shelly, and Percy's wife Mary, to join him and Dr. Polodori at Villa Diodati. And they all decide t write ghost stories... We know how this ends: fragments of two poems, Polodori shooting himself over debts because he managed one novel and no more, and Frankenstein. The movie is stylish, stylized and very sexy.
The scariest part is how normal everything is the next day, all 1820s gowns, tennis on the lawn, and ordinary life, after all the nightmare.
Phantom of the Opera at Royal Albert Hall
Phantom is one of my favorite musicals, but as I get older, I like it less for the mind control aspects and Stockholm Syndrome. The scariest part of this performance is not the play itself, but the undertones during the post-concert when five different Phantoms are pulling hapless Christine in different directions.
The Hills have eyes (remake)
I hear the 77 version is superior. Family on a road trip gets ambushed by mutants. I have a lot of problems with this movie, beginning with general stupidity and ending with Big Brain's speech about how it's all the normals' fault. (Clue, after two generations, being an inbred cannibalistic radiation mutant is a lifestyle choice)
But there is one moment that has no equal and it's just an instant.
Doug watching his teen sister-in-law sunbathe. And the look of greed and desire on his face is the same as the look on the mutant's faces. His wife sees it and knows... And at the end of the movie (spoilers) Doug ends up with the teens in his care. I shuddered.
Sounds of the Season:
Creepy Pics:
Hosted by the black-armored monster that stalked my nightmares for six years.
So today, we're listing five of my favorites and what I found scariest in each film. These are in no particular order.
Cabin in the Woods
There is no Joss but Joss, and he brings it in this. Five friends spend the weekend at a cousin's cabin, and weird things start happening. Sigourney Weaver is the scariest thing in this movie, with her cold rationality.
In the Mouth of Madness
A writer of Lovecraftian horror vanishes and an insurance investigator is sent to find him. Sam Neill is brilliant as skeptical John Trent who slowly comes to believe that everything about Sutter Caine is true. Unfortunately his shrink is David Warner, so he's doomed the minute you see him. Scariest bit: "Reality is what we tell each other it is."
I'm also partial to the ever changing painting at Pickman Hotel.
Gothic
Lord Byron (see icon) invites his lovers Claire and Percy Shelly, and Percy's wife Mary, to join him and Dr. Polodori at Villa Diodati. And they all decide t write ghost stories... We know how this ends: fragments of two poems, Polodori shooting himself over debts because he managed one novel and no more, and Frankenstein. The movie is stylish, stylized and very sexy.
The scariest part is how normal everything is the next day, all 1820s gowns, tennis on the lawn, and ordinary life, after all the nightmare.
Phantom of the Opera at Royal Albert Hall
Phantom is one of my favorite musicals, but as I get older, I like it less for the mind control aspects and Stockholm Syndrome. The scariest part of this performance is not the play itself, but the undertones during the post-concert when five different Phantoms are pulling hapless Christine in different directions.
The Hills have eyes (remake)
I hear the 77 version is superior. Family on a road trip gets ambushed by mutants. I have a lot of problems with this movie, beginning with general stupidity and ending with Big Brain's speech about how it's all the normals' fault. (Clue, after two generations, being an inbred cannibalistic radiation mutant is a lifestyle choice)
But there is one moment that has no equal and it's just an instant.
Doug watching his teen sister-in-law sunbathe. And the look of greed and desire on his face is the same as the look on the mutant's faces. His wife sees it and knows... And at the end of the movie (spoilers) Doug ends up with the teens in his care. I shuddered.
Sounds of the Season:
Creepy Pics:
Hosted by the black-armored monster that stalked my nightmares for six years.
