As is my custom to close out October and hail in the winter, here's Opeth's Dirge for November. From their masterpiece (well, one of their masterpieces, anyway), Blackwater Park.
31 Days of Halloween:
Now that 31 Days of Halloween is over, it's straight into finishing our Stranger Things rewatch (we're on season four) and plunging into the murky depths of Noirvember. I have a lot of plans for this, so although I don't intend to do a movie-a-day, I'll keep a running list here just like I did for 31.
My favorite watch this year? Well, the old standards always feel great, and there were quite a few of them I didn't get to, so I'll have to work on my timing next year. However, I can honestly say that rewatching GDT's Crimson Peak was a 'peak' moment this year. It'd been so long since I'd seen it, and I really didn't remember it at all.
Just a gorgeous film from start to finish, with all Del Toro's trappings and a healthy dose of the Modern Gothic. Gonna have to pick this one up on BR eventually.
..
1) Incident On and Off a Mountain Road///The Funhouse (theatrical viewing)
2) Tales From the Crypt Ssn 1 Ep 4, "Dig That Cat... He's Real Gone"///Cabin in the Woods
3) Satanic Hispanics
4) Creature From the Black Lagoon 3D///Lucky McKee's May
5) The Strangers
6) [REC]
7) The Autopsy - GDT Cabinet of Curiosities///[REC]2
8) Where the Devil Roams
9) The Roost
10) Good Boy///The Viewing - GDT Cabinet of Curiosities
11) Blood Moon (aka Wolf Girl)///All Hallows' Eve (The Last Drive-In Helloween)
12) The Shining///The Simpsons Ssn 6 Treehouse of Horror V
13) Stream (2024)
14) Creepshow (1982; theatrical viewing)
15) They Live in the Grey///John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (theatrical viewing)
16) Black Phone 2
17) Scream 2///Mayhem (The Last Drive-In Blu-ray
18) The Exorcist
19) The Wolf of Snow Hollow/// The Taking of Deborah Logan
20) Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (theatrical screening)///Cellar Dweller
21) The Black Phone///"Dream Kill" (segment in V/H/S85
22) The Transfiguration///Black Phone 2
23) Shelby Oaks
24) Clown in a Cornfield/// Jack-O (The Last Drive-In Splatterween double feature)
25) Ken Russell's Gothic/// Inferno/// Lords of Salem
26) Night of the Living Dead 1990/// Night of the Demons
27) Final Destination 3/// Jimmy & Stiggs
28) Trick r' Treat
29) Crimson Peak
30) GDT's Frankenstein/// Arsenic and Old Lace/// Satan's Playground/// Rob Zombie's 31
31) Halloween (Last Drive-In Halloween Hootnanny)/// Night of the Living Dead
Read:
I spent my Halloween morning re-reading James Tynion IV and Michael Walsh's Exquisite Corpses. The first volume is now collected and readily available and I can't recommend this one enough. Here's the solicitation for issue number one from League of Comic Geeks:
"Every five years on Halloween, the wealthiest families in America play a game. Twelve of the deadliest people in the world are dropped into a small town with just one goal: last killer standing wins. For the citizens of Oak Valley, Maine — this year's unlucky arena — the goal is much simpler. They must survive the night."
Sounds a bit like Rob Zombie's 31, no? Well, there's definitely a comparison to made, but it's a surface-level comparison. When you go deeper, not only do you get some of those great James Tynion IV insights into the world, you also get context for the twelve killers loosed upon an unsuspecting town. Here's the context on the twelve killers, straight from the mouth of one of the characters in issue #1:
"In 1775, the thirteen richest families in America took the reins of power from their counterparts across the Atlantic. They have ruled this country from the shadows ever since. What you know as history is a fiction performed for the masses. Ruling didn't come easy. It took nearly a century of bickering and warfare to figure out which family rules over the rest. So every five years, we play a game on Halloween. It starts the year before, each competing family draws one of the twelve cards, representing a weapon used in every game since the first...
The ruling family's job is to find a small town in some lonely corner of America and seal it off from the rest of the world. The killers are dropped into the battlefield on Halloween night, and they must hunt and kill each other until there is a single survivor. The family whose killer survives to the end rules America until the next game."
So far, while we've been given glimpses of the power brokers in charge, we've mainly been boots on the ground with the killers and the 'collateral damage' - the innocent inhabitants of the town besieged by killers (did I forget to mention there's a large contingent of the competing families that just make side bets on how many innocents their killers can claim?). This has made for some very effective storytelling, seeing killers who maybe want something more than what they are, maybe don't and ordinary people fighting for their lives in extraordinary circumstances. We're not reinventing the wheel here, but rather upgrading its dynamics.
Playlist:
Steve Moore - Jimmy and Stiggs OST
Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses (Suspended in Dusk edition)
Ritual Howls - Ruin
Various - Return of the Living Dead OST
John Carpenter - Lost Themes
John Brennan and the Bigfeet - The Last Drive-In w/ Joe Bob Briggs OST, Vol. 1
M83 - Saturdays = Youth
Opeth - Blackwater Park
Opeth - Deliverance
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Four of Pentacles
• Six of Wands
• Eight of Pentacles
