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| "Oh look Martha, the creature from Mars is coming to get us." |
So here is my thing. I love scary movies and have since I was a kid - watching Outer Limits episodes with my mom or Predator with my aunt Becky might have been early inspirations. Regardless, it is something I quite love and enjoy more than the average (or normal) person should. So in this good naturedly ghoulish pursuit, I came upon a fantastic horror themed blog a few years back written by Brian Collins (@brianwcollins) out of Los Angeles called Horror Movie A Day. Brian has watched a scary type movie every day for (I'm pretty sure) over five years now. His blog has become a mainstay of my internet wanderings and I've greatly enjoyed his humorous, sharp and all together great writing style and clear love of film in general.
So that being said, I've been trying to come up with a way to get my own creative juices flowing with greater regularity and I thought it might be good to try to take on this 'horror movie a day' deal and write a paragraph or two on a movie of the scary type variety every day for October. Daunting? Yes. Fun? Well, that's the idea. I have to give all manner of credit to Brian though because even though he'll be winding down next year, his efforts have been inspirational and enjoyable in the most cool of ways.
So on to the plan. My tastes tend to be all over the board with the general exception of craptastic PG-13 remakes, a good amount of horror out of Japan and things of the torture-y nature. I tend to think their is a much greater amount of imagination in coming up with a really neat monster than yet another perturbed schoolgirl ghost or a bunch of inbred mountain people torturing CW ready teens for the umpteenth time, respectively. An-ee-way, I've been wrangling around with classifications of various types and how I might mix it up to bring in stuff anyone who might read this has never heard of, hasn't seen in 10,000 years or otherwise might be interested in and such. So here is what I have:
A. New -
My definition of new is anything that has been released in the past twelve months, has just now become available in some format (DVD, VOD, festival, special screening etc) or something in between. I don't want to be too strict on this because there is so much content out there that takes its sweet time becoming available. Case in point, the all together insane and wonderful, The Revenant. I got to see this about a month ago at a special screening hosted by Harry Knowles (@headgeek666) of Ain't It Cool News but it was created and initially shown at a few festivals about three years ago. But considering it hasn't been available until now (and has since finally been released on DVD) I would consider that new.
B. Classic -
My definition of classic would be anything pre ratings code. So anything out prior to November 1968 I would throw into the 'classic' category. Now wait a minute, doesn't that immediately cause an issue with Night Of The Living Dead you might ask? Well no, for two reasons. One, it came out October 1968 and not after the ratings code was adopted, silly person. And two, so many people have written about Night Of The Living Dead over the years that I figure, what on earth am I going to add? Case settled.
C. New Classic -
Anything that is widely regarded as a 'classic' or 'cult classic' released after November 1968. Examples of this would be Re-Animator or Evil Dead 2. There is some subjectivity on this matter but since I'm the one writing, I get to make the rules.
D. Foreign or weird -
Now before this classification ruffles any feathers, my meaning here is to include some stuff from outside the United States that I am either, 1. interested in seeing 2. have seen and love and group that together with truly oddball things that can't really fit in anywhere else. Foreign might include things like Rabies (Israel) or Wolf Creek (Australia), weird might include Rabid Grannies or, well, much of the rest of Troma's catalog.
E. VHS Boxes that scared me as a kid -
This is the group I'm most excited about - back home in Prescott, we used to rent VHS tapes from Video City or the grocery store and in both cases, they had pretty pronounced horror sections. There might be a context clue here as to what direction some of my cinematic interests might take later in life, but even though I got scared I always always always wanted to go back and see more of them. So my idea was to do a category of boxes that I remember seeing at that age and being quite scared by - I thought it might be fun to tell that 11 year old version of myself that he was being a ninny. Examples of this would be Waxwork, Candyman, The Stuff, The Blob, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2, Monkey Shines etc. Another example would be Night of the Demons but I won't be including it because of the ever loving God-awful remake they did a couple years ago. Just a steaming pile, not to be mean or anything. My goal with everything I include this month will be to have the original cover art and some kind of link to where it can be seen or bought and none would be more important than this bunch.
F. My favorites -
This is my lovey-dovey category because I get to include some of my all time favorite films. This presents an interesting problem because many of my favorites would or could be grouped into one of the categories above. Fear not, I say. The way I plan to do this is by classifying my 'all times' as Favorites first and then any other category above second. There will be other content tags too, but, that is a separate thing. Back to the matter at hand, favorites for me would include Creature from the Black Lagoon (classic), Them (classic) The Orphanage (foreign), Tremors (new classic...shuddup) and on from there.
So last thing, how this will work. I will figure out some way (numbered marbles, slips of paper, something) to randomly pick one of the categories above and watch something from that category that day. The reviews themselves will be short, one to three paragraphs, and include a link to Amazon or IMDB or something and, I'm hoping, original art for each one. At the top of each review I'll have tags (shout out to Brian) for content of the film ie zombies, killer bunny rabbit etc to help set the stage.
So there you go, a long winded rundown of this odd little project of mine for October. I'm looking forward to it.
Charlie
