Halloween!
Happy Halloween, everyone! Anyone have any fun plans? Parties? Costumes? Swine Flu emergency precautions? Zombie Apocalypse preparations?
Ah, Halloween. It’s one of my favorite holidays, but I’ve never really had the chance to really celebrate it. I love the darker aspects. I want to be scared. Around here, it’s a kiddified holiday, with cutesy decorations and the only costumes sold are for the very small. No big deal is made of it; there are no parties besides the private ones, and the only event is the actual trick-or-treating. And even that isn’t fun; in my area, it starts getting cold this time of year, and costumes are either covered with hoodies or bulky winter coats, or, worse, the costumes are worn over the coats, which, during one memorable year, turned my little brother from Batman to Fatman. Factor in the H1N1 scare this year, the precautions recommended for handing out candy, and some towns’ decision to just cancel the whole thing outright, and Halloween just isn’t much fun. Yeah, I want to be scared on Halloween, but not the fear-of-epidemic kind of scare. I miss college; the campus had actual parties and midnight horror movies and zombie crawls… Those were the days.
So I’m doing my own celebration. No costumes, no décor, more candy than is probably healthy (and has never come in contact with the Swine Flu), and horror movies. Which, oddly, have all been British so far. And have ties to Doctor Who. Er, has everything always come back to DW, or am I just being an obsessed fangirl at the moment? It wasn’t intentional - the audio was the only conscious DW choice I made!
I started the day with Shaun of the Dead. Partway through, I couldn’t help but notice that my Doctor Who viewing has certainly enhanced my knowledge of British actors. When I first saw SotD a couple of years ago, the only actors I recognized were Simon Pegg (which was odd, really, since I’d never seen one of his films before…) and, of course, Bill Nighy (who was up for the role of the Tenth Doctor, if I remember correctly. He’d be an awesome Doctor). The first actor I recognized was his girlfriend, who I’d seen in Secret Smile (okay, not directly Doctor Who related, but I watched the movie because it had David Tennant in it and came away deeply disturbed by how creepy he can be.) Then, even further in, I found myself yelping, ‘Oooh! It’s Harriet Jones!’ I'd forgotten how well it balanced both humor and scares; when I first saw it, with my siblings, it resulted in my brother and my sister's boyfriend (a really big guy) fleeing from the creepy old house we were watching it in when the power unexpectedly went out afterwards!
Next, I went on to 28 Days Later, with the oh, so pretty Cillian Murphy (proving once again that, yup, I am attracted to pretty boys without hormone altering drugs, so there) and Christopher Eccleston, in the first role I actually remember seeing him in. When I first saw it, it wasn’t the zombie-like infected people that freaked me out, it was Eccleston’s character. Why? Well, I’ve seen many post-apocalyptic movies and read many books, and I like to imagine I’d be a kick-ass heroine that could survive anything. But deep down, I know what would be more likely to happen if I survived the initial world-ending catastrophe: I’d be entertainment and breeding stock. That a military man who is supposed to protect people would treat the female characters as such really, really disturbed me. It left a definite impression, which I couldn’t shake when I finally got my hands on his run in Doctor Who. Boy, did that put an interesting spin on his and Rose’s relationship. *twitch*
Now, I’ve decided to do something different and listen to one of the BBC Doctor Who audios, Forever Autumn. I’m about halfway through it at the moment. Not as nice to listen to as the audios read by David Tennant, with that sexy Scottish accent that makes me melt and totally distracts me from the story, but I do have an easier time focusing.
Later, I shall watch The Boogieman, a Halloween episode from the TV show Quantum Leap. It has a reputation for being cursed, causing mysterious phone calls and tape recorders to run backwards. I laughed - then I actually got one of those mysterious phone calls one night while watching it at 1:13 in the morning. All that was there was a burst of creepy static... seems the perfect way to end the holiday!