Spooky season movie marathon
I'm trying to watch a scary movie every night in October, or as much as I have time for. I'm going to attempt to watch movies I haven't seen before, but given the limits of the streaming services I have access to, and the many horror movies I've already seen, that probably won't be possible.
Sunday night I watched The Black Phone. As I mentioned before, I've read the Joe Hill story it was adapted from, but I was sick at the time and on heavy doses of Nyquil, so I don't remember much. (The most difficult book I ever read while on cough syrup was probably The Greenlanders. That was not a good idea.)
Truth be told, I didn't much care for it. I don't really like fictional portrayals of children in danger, which is a trope Hill's father--you may have heard of him, some scribbler named Stephen King--leans on rather hard, as does his son. And there was some awful real-world violence portrayed: abusive parents, bullies, children getting stuffed into panel vans.
I bring it up because the movie was set somewhere in the latter half of the 1970s--1976, or '77 or '78, somewhere in those years. And I realized that I've lived long enough to see the decade of my birth come back around twice. Following the normal 20-year cycle of culture, the 1970s had a revival in the 1990s. Dazed and Confused and The Brady Bunch Movie, long ironed hair replacing big '80s hair, club kids wearing bell bottoms and rave DJs mixing disco classics.
I remember that iteration better than the original one; I had just turned 5 when the 1970s ended.
So movies set in the 1970s now remind me of both being a toddler, and being in my early 20s. It's like holding a mirror up to another mirror and seeing an endless corridor of fading reflections.
Tonight's movie was Under The Skin, which I did not like at all. I normally enjoy the arthouse horror of A24, but this was 2 hours of ScarJo driving a van around Scotland. When I could see what was happening, anyway. The movie was lit so darkly that half the time I couldn't tell what I was watching.
Sunday night I watched The Black Phone. As I mentioned before, I've read the Joe Hill story it was adapted from, but I was sick at the time and on heavy doses of Nyquil, so I don't remember much. (The most difficult book I ever read while on cough syrup was probably The Greenlanders. That was not a good idea.)
Truth be told, I didn't much care for it. I don't really like fictional portrayals of children in danger, which is a trope Hill's father--you may have heard of him, some scribbler named Stephen King--leans on rather hard, as does his son. And there was some awful real-world violence portrayed: abusive parents, bullies, children getting stuffed into panel vans.
I bring it up because the movie was set somewhere in the latter half of the 1970s--1976, or '77 or '78, somewhere in those years. And I realized that I've lived long enough to see the decade of my birth come back around twice. Following the normal 20-year cycle of culture, the 1970s had a revival in the 1990s. Dazed and Confused and The Brady Bunch Movie, long ironed hair replacing big '80s hair, club kids wearing bell bottoms and rave DJs mixing disco classics.
I remember that iteration better than the original one; I had just turned 5 when the 1970s ended.
So movies set in the 1970s now remind me of both being a toddler, and being in my early 20s. It's like holding a mirror up to another mirror and seeing an endless corridor of fading reflections.
Tonight's movie was Under The Skin, which I did not like at all. I normally enjoy the arthouse horror of A24, but this was 2 hours of ScarJo driving a van around Scotland. When I could see what was happening, anyway. The movie was lit so darkly that half the time I couldn't tell what I was watching.