Most Wonderful Time of the Year

As today begins, we now face the start of, in my opinion, the most wonderful time of the year: October.

As everyone knows who read my post called My Laura Dean, Christmas no longer thrills me as I associate it with when MLD broke up with me. I just go through the motions every year now for my daughter.

October is a totally different matter. The reason: it's the perfect excuse to watch nothing but scary movies.

As a species, we have a habit of wanting to be scared. Even those of us who say we hate it secretly love it. Something in our brains just desires to experience the emotion of fear.

Growing up, there were plenty of moments in movies that either scared or startled me (Corey Feldman driving a stake through the heart of the one vampire in the cave in The Lost Boys, the Ark opening in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Private Pyle's bathroom scene in Full Metal Jacket).

However, the first scary movie to give me nightmares was Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. My parents had HBO (yes, I was spoiled when it came to TV channels growing up) and it happened to be on late one night. I was about 8 or 9 at the time and the effects looked so realistic and scary to me. I wound up dreaming about Jason chasing me around the Crystal Lake docks that night.

Still, it didn't stop me from watching scary movies. In fact, I've watched that Friday the 13th (and all of them really) dozens of times since then.

John Carpenter is a major idol of mine in the filmmaking community. It's funny that most of his movies were disliked or underperformed when first released. Yet, thirty to forty years later, most of his films are considered all time classics. It's wonderful to go back through his films and either discover or rediscover moments and information I hadn't considered before.

As with any media, certain movies and scenes hit differently for me than others. For instance, Griffin actually enjoys Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, as well as the other films of that sort. Meanwhile, I (like the rest of you "normal" people out there) recognize it as a true piece of crap. Thanks Disney for letting those copyrights lapse. Morons.

However, I know lots of people that enjoy Silent Night, Deadly Night but I can't watch it anymore (or at least the beginning). I used to be able to watch it without issue. That changed when I became a parent. The rape and murder scene with the kid watching it happen to his parents really gets to me now. I'm not saying that nobody should watch it; just that I'm choosing not to do so. By all means, if you want to watch something, do so. To each their own!

I will say that I do still enjoy movies such as Silence of the Lambs and Sleepaway Camp despite their handling of LGBTQ characters or at least those perceived as part of our community.

Buffalo Bill is not truly transgender in Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lector even says so at one point) but he's deranged enough to believe that he is. Angela was essentially forced to being transgender by her crazy aunt. She's obviously having some insane form of gender dysphoria that causes her behavior. Both are extreme cases and in no way indicate the true nature of the LGBTQ community (despite what the far right would have you believe in the news these days).

Like I said though, I can enjoy those movies for their artistic merits despite how they portray their supposed LGBTQ characters.

While I greatly enjoy lots of scary movies, I won't be watching alone. My daughter Willow has also grown to love them as well. In fact, I've made up a long list of different types of scary movies (vampires, werewolves, aliens, Universal Monsters, Hammer Films, etc).

I will alleviate any fears you have though with Willow watching certain films with me: if I know full well that they're too scary, I watch them by myself. I try very hard to keep her from watching things that could either give her nightmares or really mess with her (the jump scare at the end of the first Smile trailer absolutely scared her to death when we both saw it on TV).

So, it's something that I greatly enjoy (and need at this point) and becomes something I can enjoy with my daughter. Sometimes, you need to see loads of gore and violence to feel alive. You need to see a crazy ghost story to feel alive. You need sex crazed teens being stalked by a killer with a hockey mask in the woods to enjoy the time you spend with loved ones.

Don't agree?

Then, in the words of the great Cenobite Priest Pinhead:

"WE'LL TEAR YOUR SOUL APART!"

😈

Just kidding. I love you all. 😁❤️
















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