another day. another movie.

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night two: ‘cronos’. [halloween movie fest, 2016.]

By Scott • On 2016-10-15 • In another day. another movie., hmf16, scott, vampires • 1 min read

“I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I think it’s better if we stay together.”

The second night of HMF and I’m revisiting a favorite from nights of Halloween past.

Guillermo del Toro’s debut feature has all of the themes he comes back to again and again. Del Toro himself said:

“To me, Cronos contains the essence of what I want to do … a sincere declaration of how I view the world.”

Both literally and figuratively, this is vintage del Toro.

His best work uses and subverts genre trappings and fantastical horror to showcase the beauty and monstrosity of humanity. The horror of the monsters in the del Toro canon always pale in comparison to what humans are willing to do to one another in a quest for power, money, or youth.

Del Toro said of Cronos, “I do what I’ve done in Devil’s Backbone, what I’ve done in Pan’s Labyrinth, etc. Which is, I take the central monster figure and I make it the saddest figure in the tale.”

This is a story of the inherent tragedy of vampire lore. One of the central themes in many vampire stories is the loss of humanity in the pursuit of immortality. The inability to accept the reality of death results in a half life. Vampires are immortal, they reject death, but only by becoming death. They live forever, but only in darkness, only by consuming life itself. #fucktwilight

These stories are often about the destructive potential of the human quest for immortality. Thus, Guillermo del Toro is the perfect storyteller for the genre, and it in turn is a perfect playground for his first feature.

Cronos is arrestingly grotesque and beautiful, often at the same time. A monster story about what it means to be human. A horror film about love, family, redemption, mortality, and sacrifice. Or to put it more simply, Cronos is Guillermo del Toro at his best.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Most definitely. As is easily seen above, Cronos is included amongst my very favorite Halloween Movie Fest films from the seven years I’ve done it.

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night one: ‘near dark’. [halloween movie fest, 2016.]

By Scott • On 2016-10-15 • In another day. another movie., hmf16, movies, scott, vampires • 1 min read

“Boy, you people sure stay up late.”

“We keep odd hours.”

And we’re off! Night one kicks off with Kathryn Bigelow’s cult classic about a guy who tries to convince a young lady to engage in some casual sex, and as these things often go, she turns out to be a vampire. Our young cowboy finds himself thrown in with a gang of asshole vampires who terrorize bar-flys, truck drivers, and hitchhikers along remote portions of Texas and Oklahoma highway.

The film is pretty to look at, and it’s easy to see the DNA of a directing style that would eventually win Bigelow a ton of awards for The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

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Critics liked Near Dark, and as I already mentioned, it became a cult classic. In some ways, I can see why. The idea itself was an interesting take on both vampire movies and neo-westerns, and at times it delighted in its own violent mayhem. It also featured a synth soundtrack by Tangerine Dream that had some great moments.

However, overall, this one was just too nonsensical in all the wrong ways for me. The writing and story just didn’t hold together at all. It was erratic and silly, but to me it didn’t seem to be so intentionally. Everyone has the sorts of holes and weaknesses that prohibit enjoyment, and Near Dark had too many for me.

If anyone wants to have a specific conversation about what didn’t work for me in Near Dark, I’m game. I just didn’t want to go on and on bitching about it in this post. That’s just not what I want RtM to be. I’m also totally down if someone who loves this movie wants to enlighten me concerning its virtues. I would genuinely enjoy learning to see it through a fan’s eyes.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? No. There’s definitely something I’m missing. It’s got a big following of folks who love it and rewatch it, so I’ll leave them to it.

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primer for vampire movie fest [halloween movie fest, 2016.]

By Scott • On 2016-10-14 • In another day. another movie., hmf16, movies, scott, vampires • 2 min read

Here we go. Halloween Movie Fest 2016.

First, a primer in part one of this year’s HMF.

As promised, the first half is all vampires. A movie fest within a movie fest. Like the cream in one of those Halloween themed orange and black Oreos, but where the cream filling is actually a monster who will grant you a grotesque immortality if it likes you, or merely exsanguinate you if it doesn’t.

The mini movie festival within a festival is rooted in last year’s HMF. When I was doing some reading on The Wicker Man after I watched it, I learned that it was a big deal for Christopher Lee to be the understated villain in this (mostly) subdued horror film. Until then he was mostly famous for his role in the Hammer Films Dracula series as the titular vampire.

I’ve never seen any Hammer Films, but they were clearly notable in the history of horror, so I read up on them a bit. The Hammer Films rabbit hole led me to a few other vampire films I’d never heard of, one thing led to another, and I realized that at the very least I was going to need to make half of HMF16 vampire movies.

This is fun for me, because it gives me a style of ‘Another Day, Another Movie’ I haven’t done in quite a while. I love Halloween Movie Fest, but it’s much more varied and diverse than other versions of ‘AD,AM’ I’ve done.

It’s different doing ‘AD,AM’ with a more specific genre, like Westerns or Noir films. It changes the way I watch because I’m focused in on the nuances and boundaries of that genre, whether those boundaries they are heeded or ignored. I start to inhabit the language, style, and palette of that genre. It becomes the story ecosystem I live in for a bit. This pointlessly fun activity gives me this big frame of reference for each film, which is obviously always there, but is easier to see and discern in the context of the geeky rhythm of this sort of endeavor.

The closest I’ve come to this within HMF is zombie films, because the genre is so young and the rules are so clear. Every departure from the tropes is really obvious, every stylistic choice stands out, meaning you need fewer films to really sense what a particular storyteller is trying to do.

Anyway, this year I get to fully add that element back into HMF by watching ten vampire films in ten days.

Next up, night one: Near Dark.

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halloween movie fest 2016!!

By Scott • On 2016-10-05 • In another day. another movie., hmf16, movies, scott • 1 min read

Sing it with me!

/ It’s the most wonderful tiiiime of the year. When the zombies are lurching and vampires and slurping so we live in feeeeaaar. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. / It’s the hap-happiest season of all. With the slashers all stalking and spirits all walking down your bedroom haaaaallll! /

Absolutely terrible adaptations of Christmas songs aside, October is back and the Halloween season is upon us. For my money, it’s right on time. I mean, it’s always right on time, but this year it’s even righter on time. Yup, it’s so perfectly timed I’m not even using well constructed phraseology anymore.

It’s been such a crazy year for me since Halloween Movie Fest 2015. We live in Brooklyn now, a very recent development, and I miss Seattle terribly. I’m surrounded by strange new things, thousands of miles from my friends and the home I grew to love over the course of nearly a decade.

What better way to feel something familiar than to slip into the tradition of Halloween Movie Fest? I hope it will be the movie-watching equivalent of putting on a perfectly aged sweatshirt on a chilly, rainy afternoon.

This year, there will be an ‘Another Day, Another Movie’ (ad,am) festival within HMF16. Some Inception-level shit. The first 10 of the 20 nights of HMF16 will be a vampire themed version of ad,am. More on that in the post for the first portion of the (mostly) one man movie festival. For now, the important thing is that bloodsuckers will make up half of this year’s list.

Here are the movies:

Movement 1 – The Vampires

Near Dark
The Lost Boys
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
What We Do In the Shadows
Nosferatu the Vampyre
Martin
The Horror of Dracula
Cronos
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Trouble Every Day

Movement 2 – Everything Else

The Witch
A Tale of Two Sisters
They Look Like People
We Are Still Here
Attack the Block
Kill List
The Hallow
The Invitation
Berberian Sound Studio
Pontypool

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my year in movies, 2015.

By Scott • On 2016-01-05 • In 2015, another day. another movie., lists of 2015, movies, scott • 2 min read

Every year I share the list of every movie I watched. Many years, it’s with a bunch of other lists I make of all sorts of favorite things and whatnot. We’ll see if that happens this year, but at the very least, here is my 2015 in movies.

125 is better than last year’s 105, but I really miss the days when 200 movies a year was the minimum. Anyway, on with the list!

The key is mostly the same as always:
(#) Movie I saw in the theater.
[#] Movie I saw for the first time.
E# Movies I watched with Emily.
Favorites (These underlined films cannot be movies I saw this year for the first time, they have to be movies that have been able to stand up after at least one repeated viewing.)
*Best movies I’d never seen before. (It doesn’t matter when these movies came out, I saw them for the first time this year, and they were awesome.)
Halloween Movie Fest.

1. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – E1
2. The Imitation Game [1] (1) E2
3. The Guardians of the Galaxy
*4. Persepolis [2]
5. The Guardians of the Galaxy – E3
6. The Grand Budapest Hotel
*7. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes [3]
8. Horns [4]
*9. Birdman (or, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) [5] (2) E4
10. What If [6] E5
*11. Calvary [7]

12. The Equalizer [8]
13. Captain America: The Winter Soldier – E5
14. Arbitrage [9]
*15. Whiplash [10] E6
16. John Wick [11]
17. The Trip to Italy [12] E7
18. eXistenZ [13]
19. They Came Together [14] E8
*20. Kingsman: The Secret Service [15] (3) E9
21. Gone Girl [16] E10
22. St. Vincent [17] E11
*23. Frank [18]
24. The History of Future Folk [19]
*25. The One I Love [20]
*26. Paris, Texas [21]

27. The Double [22]
*28. Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jô) [23]
*29. The Silence (Das letzte Schweigen) [24]
30. Nightcrawler [25]
*31. Housebound [26]
*32. Top Five [27] E12
33. Shadow of the Vampire [28]
*34. 13 Assassins (Jûsan-nin no shikaku) [29]
35. The Boxtrolls [30] E13
36. Hot Fuzz
37. John Dies In the End [31]
38. The World’s End
39. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug [32]
40. Girl Most Likely [33]
41. Shut Up and Play the Hits [34]
*42. What We Do in the Shadows [35] (4)

43. Avengers: Age of Ultron [36] (5)
44. Avengers: Age of Ultron (6) E14
*45. Brooklyn Castle [37] E15
46. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World [38]
47. Natural Born Killers [39]
48. Now You See Me [40] E16
*49. Fury [41]
50. Pitch Perfect 2 [42] (7) E17
*51. Mad Max: Fury Road [43] (8)
*52. Ex Machina [44] (9)
53. Zoolander
54. Star Wars – E18
*55. Inherent Vice [45]
56. A Fantastic Fear of Everything [46]
57. Spy [47] (10) E19
58. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief [48] E20
59. High-Fidelity E21

*60. Inside Out [49] E22
61. Wet Hot American Summer – E23
*62. Dope [50] (11) E24
63. Ant-Man [51] (12) E25
64. Say Anything… – E26
65. Slow West [52]
66. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation [53] (13) E27
67. The Guest [54]
68. Hurricane of Fun: The Making of Wet Hot American Summer [55]
69. Theory of Everything [56] E28
70. The Crossing Guard [57]
71. Life of Crime [58]
72. 48 Hrs. [59]
73. Dear White People [60] E29
74. El secreto de sus ojos – E30

75. Hot Fuzz
76. Three Colors: Blue [61]
77. Best Exotic Marigold Hotel [62] E31
78. Creep [63]
79. The Skeleton Twins [64]
80. Harmontown [65]
*81. Life Itself [66] E32
82. The House of the Devil [67]
83. Magic Mike XXL [68] E33
*84. Kingsman: The Secret Service – E34
85. Dawn of the Dead *1978*
86. Day of the Dead [69]
87. The Martian [70] (14) E35
*88. The Haunting [71]
89. Pulse [72]
90. Byzantium [73]
91. The Empire Strikes Back – E36
*92. It Follows [74]

93. Pan’s Labyrinth – E37
94. The Devil’s Backbone
95. Witching and Bitching [75]
96. The Wicker Man *1973* [76]
97. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead [77]
98. Frenzy [78]
*99. The Babadook [79]
100. Crimson Peak [80] (15)
101. The Blair Witch Project [81]
*102. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night [82]

103. Spirited Away – E38
104. Spectre [84] (16) E39
105. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 [85]
106. Seven Psychopaths
107. Better Living Through Chemistry [86]
108. People, Places, Things [87] E40
109. Jurassic World [88] E41
110. The Kings of Summer – E42
111. Rocky – E43
*112. Spotlight [89] (17) E44
113. Cop Car [90]
114. Return of the Jedi – E45
*115. Me and Early and the Dying Girl [91] E46

*116. What We Do In The Shadows
117. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. [92] E47
*118. The Tale of Princess Kaguya [93] E48
*119. Amarcord [94]
*120. The Force Awakens [95] (18) E49
121. Trainwreck [96] E50
122. A Very Murray Christmas [97] E51
*123. The End of the Tour [98] E52
124. Inglourious Basterds
*125. The Force Awakens – (19) E53

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halloween movie fest, 2015: nights 15-17.

By Scott • On 2015-11-01 • In 2015, another day. another movie., hmf '15, scott • 4 min read

I got there. All in all, this was a successful Halloween for me. I got to be The Driver for Halloween (nailed it!), I made all 17 films work with my schedule this year, and I got to play the Thriller album in its entirety at work two days in a row.

This was a great HMF! Sure, there were some duds, but that’s always worth it to watch films like The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, and The Haunting for the first time. I love doing this, my only hope is that I can get a rhythm back so that I can get the writing back to where it used to be.

Now I’m craving two things. 1. Doing ‘Another Day, Another Movie‘ with a genre other than horror, again. 2. Watching all of my favorites from previous HMF’s throughout the rest of 2015.

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Night Fifteen: Crimson Peak

“I heard you the first time.”

I’m sad to say it, but I mostly didn’t enjoy Crimson Peak.

Based on the trailers, I was worried about this from one from the start. I’d liked the idea for the long period that it was being reported on by movie blogs and whatnot, and I was stoked about Hiddleston and Chastain in a GDT film. Yet, the trailers had me underwhelmed and I just held out hope because I really wanted the movie to be good.

The aim for the dialogue seemed to be flowery and Victorian, but the result was clunky and wooden. Several plot elements that were supposed to be shocking simply aren’t because of a few major stories everyone has talked about over the last several years. Nothing interesting or surprising ever happens, and there times that GDT’s trademark visual choices actually tipped over the edge into what felt like an homage to himself, which I think I would have actually come to terms with if the story had been as interesting visuals could be at times.

The music was also really misplaced. I wish del Toro had worked with Javier Navarrete again, as he did in Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. I forgot to mention Navarrete earlier in HMF this year, as he also did the score for Byzantium. Three movies has to be a record for one composer in a single HMF. For my money, he’s the best at making sad, eery, beautiful scores for films like the three I’ve enjoyed recently.

Crimson Peak has some major plot holes that were just the right sort to be really distracting to me. This is where some people will make the tired old argument that I shouldn’t have a problem with plot holes because GHOSTS AREN’T REAL, I’m expecting too much if I want it all to make sense! You’ll especially hear writers and producers and actors say that sort of thing. Yet, there is still such a thing as internal logic in a story. I don’t need the ghosts to operate according to some rules I have decided on my own are how all ghosts in stories should act forever. However, I do need the characters in the story to act in ways that make sense, or else they aren’t characters but props.

It was still Guillermo, so the film was still beautiful to look at, but that wasn’t enough to save this one for me.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Sadly, I doubt it.

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Night Sixteen: The Blair Witch Project

“I love you mom, dad. I am so sorry. What is that? I’m scared to close my eyes, I’m scared to open them. We’re gonna die out here.”

So, spoilers, but that probably isn’t a thing in a film that has been such a major part of the cultural landscape.

We all know this one is about a malevolent and mysterious force which kills the world’s most incompetent film students (and don’t forget most incompetent hikers), saving us from what would have been the worst documentary of all time.

This was my first time watching this sub-genre spawning, classic, low-budget indie success story. It took me a while to get around to it, mostly because so many found footage films have followed in its wake and it’s tiring.

All in all, have finally seen it, I was really impressed by what they did and how they did it in The Blair Witch Project.

I thought the main characters were really annoying, but in this rare case that’s actually a good thing. If you watch unedited footage from some film students making a documentary, more often than not it is going to be annoying, especially if those film students are growing increasingly lost, terrified, and desperate. Annoying characters fit this story.

This film proves that you can be effectively scary without having a ridiculous CGI monster, or even without a well-designed practical effects monster for that matter. The film’s final moments were especially creepy and unsettling, including the end where our foreshadowing tells us what Mike was doing over in the corner. Creeeeepy.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Probably not, fitting as they may have been, I don’t think I could spend another 80 minutes with these characters.

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Night Fifteen: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

“You’re sad. You don’t remember what you want. You don’t remember wanting. It passed long ago. And nothing ever changes..”

Holy shit, yes! This movie is so good.

Called the first Iranian vampire western, it’s like Sergio Leone, Drive (which is already a neo-western, so I guess that’s redundant), and Let The Right One In had a beautiful Iranian-American baby together, and there was much rejoicing.

Watching Ana Lily Amirpour’s feature length debut felt just like when I saw Take Shelter. While not his debut, that was my first Jeff Nichols movie and I immediately wanted to see everything else he’d made and wait with bated breath for him to make more. That’s instantly how I feel about Amirpour. I just want her to make more movies as soon as possible! Her sure-handedness and textual literacy was on display everywhere in this film, and it just made me want to keep getting lost in her visuals and references and framing and sound choices.

Amirpour wrote the film in English and then translated that to Farsi phonetically, which would have been reason enough to have a quiet film dialogue-wise. Yet, this would have been a quiet film anyway. Amirpour has crafted this film so that every gesture, every prop in the background, every pause and beat is perfectly constructed for the movie. I know that’s how it is usually supposed to work, but this is what it looks like when a filmmaker actually succeeds at it.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night has style for days, paints its allusions with perfect balance for the tone of the film, has an amazing soundtrack, and just plain feels like the sort of movie that would crawl out of my own love for culture and genre and film.

This was a really great way to end Halloween Movie Fest 2015.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? I could watch this one on repeat.

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the babadook, though! – halloween movie fest, 2015: nights 13 & 14.

By Scott • On 2015-10-27 • In another day. another movie., hmf '15, movies, scott • 5 min read

Okay, this is a little awkward pacing-wise. The posts were originally framed out into three parts. However, I had so much to say about The Babadook that I simply had to post one today to keep things a bit more manageable for readers. It reminds me of back when Another Day, Another Movie posts would actually be one per movie. Maybe with my getting back into a rhythm will return ADAM posts to their former glory.

Anyway, on with the movies.

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Night Thirteen: Frenzy

“You’re not wearing your tie.”

This Hitchcock thriller is horror in the loosest sense of the word. Featured on the They Shoot Zombies, Don’t They list of 1000 Greatest Horror films, this is the story of a sexual maniac serial killer before they were featured on sweeps week for every crime show on television… and there are somewhere around 25,625 of said shows currently on the air at last count.

Anyway, whatever genre you’re comfortable calling this movie, it sure is fucking beautifully filmed. This is Hitchcock’s second to last film, one of only two he did in the 70’s. It was strange seeing Hitchcock’s fingerprints all over a 70’s film. Hitch reveled a bit in the ability to take things much further in the climate of the decade than he could earlier in his career.

Apparently, Hitchcock had just had two duds critically and commercially that made people wonder if he’d just gotten too old and tired to perform cinematic magic anymore. Frenzy was almost universally seen as a return to form, and it’s easy to see why. As is always the case when he’s at his best, the entire movie is amazing to look at, but there are also several scenes that are so wonderfully crafted and executed that it literally makes me a little giddy just to watch. I love watching people do something they are great at, and no one has been better than Hitch.

I didn’t realize when I put the list together that this is the second film this year with a screenplay written by Anthony Shaffer (The Wicker Man). Just like The Wicker Man the screenplay is mostly enjoyable, but features some notable holes that were large enough to be a bit frustrating. Also, this movie had a strange, very old school British obsession with how terrible anything gourmet is (which includes scratch margaritas for some reason). It was used to color all the exposition scenes, but was distractingly small-minded.

Also of note, it’s amazing how much changed between the reception of Peeping Tom in 1960 and Frenzy in 1972. This went much, much further and was not decried as the downfall of Western civilization by critics like Peeping Tom was.

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Night Fourteen: The Babadook

“You can’t get rid of the Babadook.
I’ll wager with you
I’ll make you a bet.
The more you deny,
The stronger I get.
You start to change when I get in.
The Babadook growing right under your skin.“

Of the several films from this year’s list released over the last 18 months, this one had the most buzz and critical fanfare around it. A 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. 86 (Universal Acclaim) on Metacritic. Folks were not ambiguous in their feelings about this one. That can set up the potential for a huge disappointment, which is what happened for me when I watched The Conjuring last year. In the case of The Babadook, disappointment was the farthest thing from my reaction. I loved everything about this film, and in so many ways it exceeded my expectations.

First, a description, after that it will be spoiler time.

The story is about a widowed single mother trying to hold her life together while battling grief, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and intense insomnia. One night, when her son gets to pick the bedtime story he hands her a book called Mister Babadook. Things don’t go so well after that.

Non-spoiler praise: Jennifer Kent’s writing and direction are perfect, as are the set design and art direction. Also, Essie Davis’s performance is amazing. Most importantly, I saw The Babadook as an amazing metaphor about denial, grief, isolation, and mental illness.

It’s deeply sad and troubling, featuring some scenes that will bother you, especially if you don’t normally watch this genre. With that warning out of the way, I think people should see this film.

I struggle with the things depicted in The Babadook in my own life. I also grew up as a child with too many parallels to Samuel. The last time I felt this much deep internal connection between my own childhood and the thematic territory of a film was Where the Wild Things Are.

As such, this film was both difficult and therapeutic for me to watch.

Now it gets spoilery. I hope you’ll read it anyway, or even better, go watch the movie and then read it.

Primarily, this film is about the honesty and surrender necessary when dealing with grief, trauma, depression, etc. Since that is the primary issue I deal with in life, the dark heart of so much of my weakness and powerlessness and struggle, this film immediately feels close to my heart and life.

When I wrote about Pan’s Labyrinth earlier in the Fest, I mentioned that Story can collude with two different types of escape. There is the sort where we use Story as an escape from unchangeable circumstances, a reprieve into fantasy and imagination. Then there is the sort where Story collaborates with us in an escape in which we are actually able to flee mental prisons and thought patterns, to break out from the limitations of our own habits and assumptions that actually makes new things possible for us. I’m hoping that The Babadook can be another partner in crime for me in my escape past the walls and guards and barbed wire of my own mental landscape.

This metaphor is remarkably astute in my experience. Amelia won’t surrender to the reality of her grief and trauma, she keeps her memories locked away in the basement, she can’t bare to look directly at the darkness. Whenever we keep things in the shadows and closets of our lives they continue to grow scarier and darker, they emerge as shapeshifting black monsters that stalk and hound us, change us, isolate us, torture us, even make us dangerous to the ones we love.

Amelia’s shame keeps her isolated. It keeps her from differentiating from the vapid idiots who are incapable of empathizing with or hearing her at all from the people who genuinely care for her and want to help her.

The monster is always far scarier when we won’t look at it. The mental space it takes up as we try to pretend it isn’t there is far larger than the space it takes up when we face it.

Don’t deny the Babadook. We can’t get rid of it, we must learn to live with its presence. The task, and it is a considerable one, is to face it. There will be times we must rage against the Babadook, tell it how small it is. There will be times when we must make peace with it, feed it and calm it, shush it and tell it everything will be okay. These are the things Amelia is forced to do to save her son from the monster, and it is what we must do when we face these monsters of our own. It will always be scary to face, time will never remove all of its teeth and claws, it will always try to frighten and intimidate us. The filmmakers of The Babadook have created a totem we can use to steady us for carrying this burden, a burden which is always heavier when we resist it. I’m genuinely grateful for their work.

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halloween movie fest, 2015: nights 7-12.

By Scott • On 2015-10-26 • In another day. another movie., hmf '15, movies, nerd candy, scott, the revisitor, zombies • 6 min read

The second third of this year’s HMF was a mixed bag. A few underwhelming films, two favorites I was revisiting, a trendsetting classic in the horror genre, and a film that will become that in time. Let’s just get right to the films:

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Night Seven: It Follows

“It could look like someone you know or it could be a stranger in a crowd. Whatever helps it get close to you.”

It Follows is a really great movie. It is also one of those movies that may be impossible to talk about with folks who have never seen it before. For one, the film is pretty spoiler-friendly. If I explain anything about the premise to someone who hasn’t seen it, then I will ruin the early build of tension and strangeness. And two, the film doesn’t have a clear narrative point. It has a lot to say, but not in simple allegory. It Follows engages many ideas concerning sex, death, relationship, family, absentee parenting, and coming of age. Yet it doesn’t engage any of those ideas in a way that offers answers or morals, but instead insinuates mercurial questions and open-ended thoughts.

David Robert Mitchell has created a film that is moody, atmospheric, and wonderfully creepy. Also, Maika Monroe is fantastic as the terrorized lead, Jay.

This is a film that will be a genre classic, and I expect to see this referenced, honored, parodied, and copied in coming years.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Yes. This feels like the sort of movie that can be watched again and again with varying takeaways and reactions every time.

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Night Eight: Pan’s Labyrinth

“Me? I’ve had so many names. Old names that only the wind and the trees can pronounce.
I am the mountain, the forest and the earth. I am… I am a faun. Your most humble servant, Your Highness.”

This was my third time watching Pan’s Labyrinth, but the first time in quite a while. The computer effects are certainly more dated now, but the film is still as darkly beautiful and moving as I remember it to be. This is Guillermo del Toro’s rendering of how story and imagination can sometimes be our only salve in a violent, often ugly world.

Escapism can get a bad rap when it comes to stories and art, but Pan’s Labyrinth illustrates the reality that sometimes escape into story is our only hope.

As Tolkien said about the scorn escapism faces: “Evidently, we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

The escape story offers can function in two possible ways. In some instances, it can actually help us escape from our prejudices, small-mindedness, fear, anxiety, etc. In others, we are powerless to change our circumstances, like Ofelia. Then, story and fantasy might be the most sane way to respond and keep hope burning in a hopeless situation. Story might not always save us, but it may be the only thing that makes the impending darkness bearable. Pan’s Labyrinth remains one of my two or three favorite artifacts of this idea.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Obviously. Del Toro’s work is the sort that reminds me of the power of storytelling.

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Night Nine: The Devil’s Backbone

“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.”

Revisiting another del Toro film. I saw this for the first time during a previous HMF, which I wrote about here. The Devil’s Backbone is the lens through which I see del Toro’s work, as it’s an early film for him, it took him 16 years to develop, and he described it afterward as the first time he was fully satisfied with the final product of a film (which is in itself an amazing thing to say when your first feature length movie was fucking Cronos).

There are so many similarities between Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, and I believe it is because they are the closest to the DNA of del Toro’s heart and his storytelling sensibilities. In both, we see the themes of violence, cruelty, power, innocence, gender, and humanity’s capacity for both monstrosity and beauty. In both we have scary supernatural elements that pale in comparison to the terror of what people are capable of doing to each other.

This time, rewatching both del Toro films, a primary thing that struck me was that each had a villain who was truly horrible, but complicated. Even though it doesn’t go into detail, each film’s villain had a rich subtext, the implication that a deep wound was the source of their ability to do evil things. It didn’t act as an apology or justification for their actions, but it made the characters richer and more satisfying. It made the fairly binary separation between good and evil in the films easier to buy into. The human ability to do monstrous things is so often rooted in our own fear and brokenness.

Whenever I rewatch things I previously loved I’m worried I’ll see new cracks or weaknesses that will ruin it for me, but I was happy to see that The Devil’s Backbone stands up as a beautifully crafted story and film.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? See above.

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Night Ten: Witching and Bitching

“What’s she doing with the broom?”

“Not sweeping up, that’s for sure.”

Witching and Bitching is a crazy film from Spain that I wish I liked more than I did. After a jewelry heist, some robbers and hostages are on the lam when they run afoul of some evil cannibal witches.

It’s really weird and original. It has a lot of enjoyable energy. At times it’s hard to tell if the film is sexist, or challenging sexism, which I think is actually a strength.

In the end the storytelling just gets a little too cartoony for me to keep enjoying it. For example, two characters fall in love because they need to for the filmmakers to make certain jokes and points, even though those characters had previously only been in the same room for maybe twenty minutes, none of which involved believable emotional connection.

Witching and Bitching felt to me like they ran with the kernel of a good idea with abandon, when they should have spent more time solidifying things early on. The energy and craziness were good, but without the needed foundation and structure that makes films like Shaun of the Dead or the original Dead Snow work so well.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? No, but I didn’t feel like once was a waste of time.

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Night Eleven: The Wicker Man [1973]

“Come. It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man.”

The Wicker Man has been referred to as the Citizen Kane of horror films. Mostly, this is simply a hyperbolic way of praising it by comparing it to one of the few films that is always on the shortlist as greatest film of all time. However, there are ways this comparison is actually accurate. Citizen Kane set a new standard for visual storytelling, and The Wicker Man was a new way of making a horror film. Robin Hardy abandoned the horror sensibility of the time. Gone were the broad strokes and gaudy make-up and melodramatic overacting, replacing them with creepy subtlety and weirdness. The perfect microcosm of this is horror star Christopher Lee’s appearance as your friendly neighborhood cult leader.

The movie is definitely weird, for example it has a nude musical number by one character. It needs to be weird to throw the audience off balance along with the protagonist.

The plot definitely has a few major holes in it, and the main character is so hard to like that the stakes and danger never felt real to me. Yet, for the most part the film is still compellingly well-crafted in terms of visuals and atmosphere. From the slow burn of the film’s opening act to the impressive final shot, The Wicker Man is a solid movie that deserves its place in the cult film canon.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Eventually. This will be a good one to revisit for film and genre study.

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Night Twelve: Dead Snow 2

“The operation was a success. We managed to put your arm right back on.”

Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead is so over the top and insane that it’s hard to fault it for being so empty and nonsensical. As a movie to watch with some friends to laugh at its ongoing self-aware absurdity it is worth the price of admission. However, it pales in comparison to Dead Snow and other similar films.

The movie revels in its over the top gore and cartoonish violence as much as the original, but it lacks all the internal logic and structure that made the first one so satisfying. The first film was full of fairly interesting characters, ultimately ill-fated but tough enough to be competent in a zombie fight, in part thanks to their film knowledge. The second film had mostly annoying characters who didn’t make much sense.

This was fun while it lasted, in the right context, but lacks all the craft of the first film.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? I’ll watch Dead Snow again, repeatedly. I imagine this will be my only viewing of Red vs. Dead.

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halloween movie fest, 2015: nights 1-6.

By Scott • On 2015-10-19 • In another day. another movie., hmf '15, movies, scott, zombies • 7 min read

And so it came to pass that the first six nights of Halloween Movie Fest 2015 were completed.

And it was good.

Far more than I’d expected or hoped, adding this structure back to my movie viewing habits has reminded me how much I love film. It’s hard to describe how one can forget that, especially someone like me, with a long track record of a passion for movies. I was genuinely wondering if I would ever get that old passion back. This last week, I’m remembering how life-giving film can be for me. The films themselves, along with going back through old iterations of Another Day, Another Movie, have stirred those embers, and it turns out there is still enough heat left to make fire.

I’m waking up, and HMF is playing no small part in that!

On with the movies:

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1. Night One: The House of the Devil

“After tonight, everything will be complete.”

The first film of this year’s HMF is Ti West’s 2009 homage to vintage horror movies. It succeeds by being such a perfect recreation of creepy, atmospheric devil worship films of the 70’s and 80’s. Yet, it doesn’t offer anything new or have anything interesting to say.

West’s joy at celebrating and recreating the styles, editing, cinematography, and stilted acting of late 70’s/early 80’s horror is contagious, but also instantly forgettable.

The House of the Devil is a slow build of menacing tension. Taking its cues from films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, we find a story where the devil is real, and people do terrible things to follow his will.

I liked this film enough that it was worth a viewing, but it never becomes anything special. I wish that West would have done something different with the genre. In a world where films like Shaun of the Dead and Cabin in the Woods exist, a skillful homage to a beloved genre or sub-genre isn’t compelling without distinct style or the infusion of something new. West recreated the film styles he is celebrating perfectly, but never adds a voice of his own. The story also never gets particularly interesting, but is more paint by numbers devil worship yarn.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? I can’t imagine I will. There are just too many amazing films to revisit to waste time on the decent ones.

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2. Night Two: Dawn of the Dead [1978]

“Don’t do it until you’re sure I am coming back.
I’m gonna try not to… I’m gonna try not to come back.”

This is the one that really started it all. Sure, Romero created the genre in Night of the Living Dead in 1968, with flesh-eating corpses (Romero never called them zombies) rising from the grave in hordes to terrorize the world. Before that we had all the voodoo zombie films and Ed Wood’s 1959 “worst movie of all time,” Plan 9 From Outer Space, featuring corpses revived by aliens to take over the world (although they didn’t eat flesh). But it is this one, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, that is responsible for the zombie DNA we know and love today.

I wrote about this one for HMF ’10, and I’m still just as impressed that Romero got so much right here that folks are still recreating scenes and moments from this film almost 40 years later.

It’s dated. The blood is all bright red. The acting is clunky and ham-fisted. The zombie make-up is pretty silly much of the time. The soundtrack bizarrely tips over into an episode of the A-Team once or twice. Still, with all that, Dawn of the Dead remains compelling and relevant. This is one of the cultural artifacts portraying the rotting underbelly of nineteenth and twentieth century American life.

I do wish I could see it with the ending as it was originally written though. **Spoiler Alert** — Where Peter actually shoots himself and Francine puts her head in the helicopter blade in despair, then the film’s credits roll over the helicopter blades as the gasoline runs out and the blades stop rotating, showing they wouldn’t have made it anywhere if they’d tried. It’s a dark, fitting end to the story, even though they decided against it.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Absolutely, yes. This one is in the canon.

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3. Night Three: Day of the Dead

“Take me man, take me! I don’t want to be like one of them!”

This was my first time watching the third film in the Dead series. Romero says it’s his favorite of those first three films.

Of the original trilogy, it is the angriest and the goriest (the makeup and gore effects age far better from this installment). The final act has some of the most intense, grotesque zombie mayhem in movie history. The horror of being overwhelmed by a zombie horde was fully realized and depicted.

Day of the Dead also features the worst acting of any of the three films… seriously bad acting. Oh man, so very bad.

I haven’t seen Land of the Dead yet, so I can’t speak to the human journey in that one, but in the first three there is a really satisfying movement of the human characters in general. This is true even though there are no recurring characters in any of the films. Night of the Living Dead is a siege film, it captures the panic and confusion of the initial outbreak. Dawn of the Dead is depression and despair, humanity is realizing that things aren’t going to get better, they are trying to adapt in various ways to the new world. Day of the Dead is rage and madness, the human characters have long since been pushed beyond their breaking point and left to live in that no-man’s land indefinitely.

The human on human violence in Dawn of the Dead contains a certain amount of perverse joy, people reveling and pillaging in the destruction of the old boundaries and rules that kept us civilized. But in Day of the Dead, the human violence is all frenzied despair. Characters might whoop and laugh, but it is an empty playacting, a hollow shell to cover their blind rage and hopelessness. We see more and more Romero’s assertion that there has only ever been a thin veneer that separates the living from the living dead.

Obviously, the films also do far more than that in terms of satire and commentary, but that was a huge takeaway for me after my first viewing of Day.

I do still need some time to decide if I’m on board with the whole ‘learning zombies’ thing. For me it might stretch the internal credulity of this world’s logic a bit too much. In time I might continue to warm to it though.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Definitely.

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4. Night Four: The Haunting

“An evil old house, the kind some people call haunted, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored. Hill House has stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there… walked alone.”

THIS is the sort film that reminds me why I fell in love with doing various versions of Another Day, Another Movie. The Haunting is really, really good.

It’s hard to call a movie that Martin Scorsese listed as the scariest movie of all time underrated, but I think this one is. This should be on more lists of historically great films.

An adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting on Hill House, The Haunting is one of those films that could be enjoyed without volume. That’s not to say anything negative about the dialogue or music, it’s just that this film is so visually captivating, the cinematography so well-crafted, that the story would come across without audio. Every frame in this movie is beautiful, but not an empty beauty, each frame is also meaningful. Freeze and capture any frame and you’ll still be able to sense the anxiety, the madness, the terror, and the tension in each scene. Robert Wise, in-between directing West Side Story and The Sound of Music, used lighting effects, shot framing, contrast, and blocking beautifully. This is a great director delighting in a change of pace.

Some plot holes aside, The Haunting was a joy to watch, and unnerved me far than I expected.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Oh my god, yes. This joins films like Peeping Tom as one of the most delightful surprises I’ve come across in my time doing HMF. This is a new favorite.

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5. Night Five: Kairo

“Help… help…. help… help.”

Kairo is a 2001 Japanese horror film written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Ghosts have crossed over into the world of the living and are using our technology against us.

The writing is uneven, at times the allegory of how our technology isolates us instead of bringing us together is too on the nose. Other times, the story gets convoluted and confused. As is always the case when subtitles are involved, there is the possibility that things were lost in translation. I have a suspicion that was at play for Kairo.

Yet, even with the writing issues, Kairo succeeds because of how effectively unnerving it is. When they’re on their game, and hell, even most times when they’re not, J-Horror directors craft atmospheres and visuals which are creepy as fuck! Kurosawa is really good in this regard. All the terror in this film is from nuance and details. No gore, no cheap jump scares created with manipulative music and lazy lunging villains. Every scene is imbued with dread and menace because of the way the camera moves to reveal something which has appeared in the frame but wasn’t there a moment before. Even the scenes that would be horrifying anyway are made all the more creepy by framing and movement.

This won’t be in the running for my favorite ‘new-to-me’ film from the HMF ’15, but it was definitely an enjoyably creepy way to spend two hours.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Perhaps. First I need to see more of the J-Horror films I’m missing, as it’s a sub-genre I’m underexposed to.

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6. Night Six: Byzantium

“I had eyes that cut through lies, I had lungs that breathed eternity. I felt I’d lived my whole wretched life just to prepare me for that moment.”

I really enjoyed this one. A small gothic horror tale of mother and daughter vampires. Like House of the Devil, this doesn’t really do anything to offer a new twist. Nothing is added to vampire lore. The difference is that Neil Jordan has a distinct visual voice on display here. The story is compelling, the film is stylish and beautiful to look at, the actors all offer absolutely wonderful performances, and the writing feels like a good novel, it’s warm and inviting and made me want to curl up and keep watching these dark, violent characters well past the film’s runtime.

I love well crafted, dark, romantic stories (in the 18th century Romanticism sense, not the romance novel sense) about the nature of life and death and terror and awe. Byzantium was very much one of those stories.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? I’d love to. For a long time I’ve wondered what possible genre or sub-genre I could pick to do another original ‘Another Day, Another Movie’ series. I think I just realized it needs to be a week or two of beautiful gothic horror and related films. Crimson Peak is coming up soon in that same vein!

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halloween movie fest 2015!!

By Scott • On 2015-10-01 • In another day. another movie., hmf '15, scott • 2 min read

Guys… it’s October!!?! Like, October of the year 2015. I can’t really wrap my brain around where the time goes. I don’t like how fast the months fly by. However, there are a few very big reasons why the arrival of October is good news for me.

1. It’s autumn!

2. Seriously, though, fall is here.

3. It’s time for another installment of Halloween Movie Fest.

I love Halloween so much. Most years I’m working on Halloween night so I don’t go to any Halloween parties or even have a costume, but I still look forward to the season with much excitement. It’s a holiday where my love of dark, magical, haunted stories finds its proper home. Not to mention, it’s a holiday properly celebrated at night, which is where I do the majority of my living and feel most at home.

My affection for Halloween is evidenced by all the previous installments of HMF (links to previous installments can be found here).

Now it’s back for its sixth year!

As always, the list is made up of films I’ve never seen before along with a few favorites I’m revisiting.

Not all of these movies will fit with everyone’s definition of horror, but that’s mostly because lots of people have incorrect ideas of how you define horror. Being included in the horror genre simply means that a story is drawing from a broad and diverse group of myths, tropes, and archetypes to induce horror and terror. That doesn’t mean they require jump scares or gore (although they often include them). Said horror and terror doesn’t have to be about dismembered bodies or monsters or ghosts and whatnot, and even when there are those elements the best examples of horror often use dismembered bodies and monsters and ghosts and whatnot as metaphors to engage more terrifying things like grief, loneliness, violence, and our own inevitable deaths. Also, as with all genres, the tent is large and the boundaries are flexible, so now things appropriately fall under the horror umbrella even when they aren’t trying to scare us at all, but are simply using the tropes and concepts of the genre. Countless times I hear people say something “isn’t horror” because it didn’t scare them personally. That’s not how it works. What scares us is wildly subjective, and also changes across times and cultures.

These are all horror films, end of story. As such, the common bond of the films I watch here is that these are all stories that fit into the Halloween ethos in one way or another.

Here are the films, not necessarily in the order they will be watched:

The Babadook
It Follows
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
Dawn of the Dead [1978]
Day of the Dead
The House of the Devil
The Haunting [1963]
Witching and Bitching
Frenzy
Byzantium
The Wicker Man [1973]
Kairo
The Blair Witch Project
Dead Snow 2
The Devil’s Backbone
Pan’s Labyrinth
Crimson Peak

I tried to make the list varied, as usual. We have ghosts, vampires, zombies, monsters, cults, and run of the mill murderers. It’s a little weighted toward newer films, but I tried to at least include films from several decades. Also, I’m revisiting some Guillermo del Toro films in preparation for the release of Crimson Peak on the 16th.

I wanted to include more of my favorite films from previous years but this list is already probably a little foolhardy in terms of how much movie viewing time I’ll actually have. Maybe I’ll somehow find some bonus movie time for stuff like Pontypool, Let The Right One In, Shaun of the Dead, etc..