The zombie is where it all ends. Not just this journey through the ABCs of Horror, but something larger as well. The zombie is the most millennial of monsters: the one that scares us not just because of its foul appearance or its nasty behavior, but because when it shows up you know that things are really starting to fall apart at the seams. 

Is there a good zombie movie that isn’t apocalyptic? Well, a couple. Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 classic I Walked with a Zombie, for example, manages to be a Grade A zombie movie despite the fact that there are very few zombies in it and that they wreak little in the way of damage as well. But by and large, a good zombie movie is about more than just zombies: it’s about the end of the world.

Continue reading "Z Is for Zombie" »

The young. Where would horror movies be without a steady supply of them?

Not that it was always that way. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and any number of other pre-and-early-fifties monsters all got along fine without any teenagers to menace. But these days it’s the rare – and typically more serious – horror film with a victim list that doesn’t include at least one or two sub-twenty-year-olds.

The reasons for this are well known. The advent of the drive-in; the realization among movie-makers that teenagers made up a large part of the horror movie audience; the equally important realization that teenagers like watching other teenagers on the screen…  Taking all those cold hard economic facts into account, it was only a matter of time before cinematic natural selection left horror movie viewers stuck watching a bunch of dumb kids (along with one or two smart ones) getting picked off for an hour and a half.

But in a perfect world, might it perhaps be a little different?

Continue reading "Y Is for Youth" »

What spot would that be?

The spot where it happened.

Where what happened?

The anchoring event: the Bad Thing around which the rest of the events in the film will arrange themselves like garnish around a main course.

Sometimes there is more than one such event – as is the case at the Overlook Hotel, where Mr. Halloran explains to Danny that “a lot of things happened right here… and not all of them was good.”

Continue reading "X Marks the Spot" »

Weird. Funny. Strange. As in a radio station going off the air all of a sudden. As in Tippi Hedren pointing out to Suzanne Pleshette that the gull that crashed into her house in The Birds couldn’t have lost its way in the dark, because there’s a full moon out. Or as in the guy throwing the stick for Pippet the dog in Jaws suddenly… not being able to find him anymore. That’s funny. Pippet was a big dog. Where could he have gone?

When characters in horror (or science fiction) films run into something weird, the first thing they try to do is pretend that it’s not there. How COULD it be there, after all, when it doesn’t fit into their model of what the world is?

Continue reading "W Is for Weird" »

... and it won't be standing for "Werewolf." Not after my "L" entry, which pretty much took care of my basic thoughts on the matter of lycanthropy, etc.

On the subject of basic thoughts: as the ABCs get ever closer to Z, I find myself wondering if I should do another series (as was suggested in the comments to V. Thanks for all the positive feedback, by the way!).

As mentioned before, I'm the the oldest, slowest, and least up-to-date poster on Monsterfest. I never know what horror movies have just come out this week, never know where Rob Zombie is or what exactly he's up to, and am usually pretty clueless about what the current status of the Hellraiser remake is as well (though I'm always happy to learn about this stuff from my more on-the-ball associates).

Continue reading "W is on the Way..." »

“So I finally made it to V,” I told a friend who knows I write this blog the other day.

“That’s a good letter,” she said. “I guess you’ll be doing ‘Victim.’”

Victim! Who’d have thought? Certainly not me. From pretty early on in this casual journey through the horror alphabet, I could see “Vampire” coming from a long way off.

Continue reading "V Is for Vampire" »

No, we’re not quite at V yet. It’s an important letter, and a little build-up is necessary.

In our previous letter (U is for Undead) we suggested that the state of being dead-yet-alive, while not so much fun for the zombies, ghosts, mummies, and laboratory-created monsters who actually suffer it, is weirdly and wildly attractive to us horror movie viewers; so much so that we’re actually jealous of those monsters, even if we don’t know exactly why we are.

Or do we?

Continue reading "A Question for the Readers" »

What does it mean to be undead? That you’re dead? That you’re alive?

Both at once, of course -- and for horror movie viewers, that’s an extremely attractive way to be.

For the undead themselves, though, that feeling isn’t always shared. The original dead-yet-alive monsters are Dracula (who never entirely died) and Frankenstein’s Monster (an assemblage of multiple dead people, sewn together and zapped back to life). Dracula is – foolishly or not – happy, even ecstatic, about being undead. But Frankenstein isn’t so sure it’s such a good thing. In fact, it doesn’t take him much time at all, once back in the world of the living, to become thoroughly miserable about his condition. And when Elsa Lanchester finally arrives to give the Monster a little company, she immediately becomes so unhappy with her own undead status that it throws the Monster back into a deeper funk than ever.

Continue reading "U Is for Undead" »

Earth, air, fire, water… Horror movies are full of elemental imagery. Best horror movie featuring water? I’d vote for Gore Verbinski’s version of The Ring. Earth? That stuff’s everywhere in horror, but Brian De Palma deserves special recognition for the energy with which he’s threaded his obsession with (live) burial through his films – especially 1984’s Body Double. Air is a little harder to nail down, but that too gets special treatment in films like The Exorcist, The Shining, and both versions of The Thing, in all of which (very) cold air is so important that it’s almost a character in itself.

And then there’s fire. Whether it’s a source of evil (Firestarter, Carrie, etc.) or good (Carrie again, and just about every Universal horror film ever made), fire symbolizes human uncertainty in the face of the unknown. It holds the darkness back – which is good – but it’s also indiscriminately destructive, which can be… problematic.

Continue reading "T Is for Torch" »

"That's a terrible scream. Jack, what cat did you have to strangle to get that?" -- Archie Lang in Blow Out 

I went back and forth on this one. I mean, of COURSE S is for Scream, but the scream has already been celebrated, analyzed, made fun of, and otherwise commented upon so much that the decent thing would be to just leave it alone for a while to recover.

The scream has been SO analyzed that when I hear one in a movie today, it can take me out of the action a bit. I start analyzing myself. Is it a good scream? Is it a dubbed-in scream? Etc.

That’s too bad, because a good horror movie scream is supposed to do just the opposite: to bring you to that jumping-off point where you no longer just watch the horrors on screen but – at least for a moment or two -- actually enter into them. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, you ARE the scream while the scream lasts.

Continue reading "S Is for Scream" »