Singing the Blues

A rare horror movie to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, 2017's Get Out, written and directed by Jordan Peele, fuses its slow-burner tale with creepy atmosphere, relevant social commentary and touches of comedy, making it so much more than just a straight-forward horror flick. With a story somewhat reminiscent of The Stepford Wives, protagonist Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya – an Oscar nominated performance) is an up and coming photographer, an African American twenty-something living a fulfilling life in the big city. In a loving relationship with Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) for the past five months, she has decided to bring him home to meet the folks – a weekend trip that is not exactly the most enticing scenario for the man.

Hangry: bad tempered or irritable as a result of hunger; also the title of the most recent short film from UK Indie writer/director Daniel Harding. Fusing classic horror elements with a modern twist (and adding a few dashes of macabre humour), a posh British couple, Clarey (Sophie Dearlove) and Boyd (Neil James), are taking a trip away from the stresses of their big city life, though, along the way, get lost in the countryside. Both a bit peckish, a surly, ornery attitude begins to seep into their conversation – I am quite sure we have all been there before.

There is something alluring about ghost tales being told in the darkness of the night. . . the way in which John Carpenter’s 1980 horror thriller The Fog opens – with a grizzled seafarer (John Houseman) recounting (to a group of wide-eyed children) the story of a ship of sailors who died in a horrific manner off of the coast of their small town one hundred years earlier. Building off of the success of his hit from two years earlier, Halloween, Carpenter once again shows his skills at developing an immersive world – this time creating a realistic ocean-side town packed with intriguing personas (in both films, he does so with a very limited budget). The locale, Antonio Bay, California, is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary, something the townsfolk are very proud of, especially Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh), one of the organizers of the festivities.

The penultimate movie to watch on October 31st, John Carpenter’s 1978 motion picture Halloween is the king of the slasher horror genre, fusing a villain of pure evil with suspenseful subtlety that keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat. Co-written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill (who also produces), the simple yet effective story begins with a young Michael Myers murdering his sister on Halloween night, 1963, in Haddonfield, Illinois. Committed to the Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, the Myers home, even fifteen years later, sits empty, dilapidated and believed by most community members to be haunted.

As you can likely imagine, I go through quite a few horror movies every October. . . and not every one I watch meets my strict criteria and earns a review. But, that is not to say that these films may not interest you, so, instead of letting them fall behind in the forest for the proverbial psychopathic serial killer, I’ve decided to start this new blog feature in which I will provide you with the good, the bad and the ugly on those horror flicks that just missed the bloody cut. 2017's A Ghost Story, written and directed by David Lowery, is arguably one of the more creative and unique iterations on a spectre in some time. A deep philosophical rumination on love, life, death, loneliness, time and ghosts, it takes the rare position of showing the ghost’s point of view. Less a typical horror story and more along the lines of a fantasy drama, the movie stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara as the two leads. Kind of a spoiler, but not really, Affleck dies early on, and, instead of moving on, he feels like he has unfinished business, and returns to live a pale existence of what life once was.

Come with me, and you’ll be, in a world of pure Ozploitation. Had you going there, didn’t I?. . . you thought I was going full Willy Wonka, but rather, I am transporting you to a very different landscape, that of the Australian exploitation film. Growing out of the R rating after it was instituted (as well as helped by new tax cuts), this Australian New Wave rose out of the 1970s and 80s (a little later than its American counterpart), and is a broad term that refers to no specific genre, encompassing horror, comedy, sexploitation, post-apocalyptic, dystopic and so much more – though it does slant the traditional norms of culture at the time. It is hard to argue that the Mad Max franchise, directed by George Miller, would not be the best known example of this type of movie.