YOUR HORROR MOVIE CHECKLIST FOR OCTOBER 2008

[mister_punchy]

___ Set a plastic container of chewy orange mallo-pun'kins on the teevee. Find a half-dozen of them between your couch cushions sometime next April.

___ Watch Halloween stoned.

___ Watch Pieces drunk.

___ Watch Wild Zero drunk & stoned.

___ Watch Evil Dead II on coke.

___ Watch Suspiria while coming down from a psychedelic mushroom high

Comments

[transistorblast]

Joking aside, I got to see Kubrick's The Shining on the big screen earlier this year. Not only was it still damned scary (okay, to me, anyway), but it made me appreciate the movie even more and notice plenty of things I'd never picked up on watching it on TV or home video.

Things like Kubrick's brilliant use of music and sound, and the heavy use of mirror images. I mean, "REDRUM" backward is obvious, but somehow, every time I'd watched The Shining previously, I never picked up on the fact that the scene where Jack Torrance is speaking to his kid on the bed, the camera's aimed at an image of them in a mirror, not the actors (for part of the scene, at least). There are a few other scenes like that (Jack in the bar with Lloyd is another). Also, you never see Lloyd letting Jack out of the freezer. You hear his voice, you hear the sound of the bolt being withdrawn, but the scene cuts after that. In King's book, the ghosts are real, but in the movie Kubrick really plays around with the idea the ghosts might not be real at all. I didn't really see that, either, until I watched it in the theater.

[mister_punchy]

I'm not all that into Kubrick, but "The Shining" seems to be one that everybody puts at the very top of their favorite horror movies. It's ironic considering the extreme stupidity of some of the horror flicks I dearly love, but I just find it dull and Nicholson goofy and totally unsympathetic. I'd rather watch The Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby.