A Very Halloween Movie Day With Treats!

My Halloween Movie List and Office Fundom:

Oh yes, it needed to be posted. Sure, film critics and aficionados everywhere have gone beyond beating me to the punch right through into pummeling, but this is my list under my criteria. I am enamored of time and season. I will only eat pumpkin pie in the mid-to-late fall, so that it remains special. And there are some movies that have ritualistic qualities requiring they be cracked open during their season.

And because that "thirty means I'm an adult" thing didn't stick, I will be interspersing my list with photos of the terror and horror I have inflicted on the office this morning. I insisted that we keep our calendar clear today in honor of Halloween, have brought in candy (notifying other attorneys that they are welcome to come by and trick or treat) and located some... decorations in my mom's basement. I also suggested that we go trick-or-treating to the offices of the five or six attorneys who have not gotten back to us with crucial papers etc. for months... and if we don't get our papers/signatures/etc. then we teepee their offices of course! It's Halloween darnit!

I'm even somewhat in costume - or moderately less "professionally" attired than my usual half-hearted gesture:

Watch the leg-wear, as they may be changing. I wasn't entirely happy with the length, but the patterns made me happy!

For me, Halloween is a particular delight - a Jungian bacchanal of unravaged Id. A time for all our murky primordial undercurrents to burble out to the surface for an effervescent romp. It's a touch creepy and unsettling, as our shadow selves always are. It's also a time to trot out the ghosts of selves, fantasies and memories past, and perhaps to embody them, as we release tight control of consciousness and merge the waking and simulacrum in a far more satisfying framework than any of those dumb Matrix films (sorry, but we are talking film today, so warming up with some random snark). We can be the stuff dreams are made of, fully delving into the chaotic worlds within our darkest nooks and crannies. All with candy!

So, for my slate of Seasonally Approved Halloween movies, I'm not a straight out horror gal. I love me a good zombie flick. I like hokey horror and evil hotel rooms, but I'll watch these any time of the year. There's a certain fantastical quality that makes a film Halloween appropriate. And that quality manifests for me through various categories.


There are the disturbing, heartbreakingly sad, fairy tales:

As can be expected of fairy tales, these are grim (har har, etymology!) and feature children as the protagonists. Naturally these children have at least one dead parent and at least some kind of evil-step-parent figure. You can read all through Joseph Campbell about that particular fairy-tale model, but I'll leave it there for now.

1. Tale of Two Sisters - Koreans make damned fine horror movies. There's a certain quality of dread they can attach to the most mundane objects. Modern kitchens suddenly become soul-threatening. Routine facial expressions imbue import. This story is appropriately based on a Korean fairy tale, although it certainly embodies ghost stories bandiedy about campfires. Two sisters (no way, really??). Evil step-mother. Strange and inexplicable things happening in a creepy house. An overwhelming sense of foreboding. And amazing cinematography. All swirling around a heart-wrenching story of love and loss.

2. Pan's Labyrinth: From the evil step-mother to the evil step-father and a back-story where the real world is far more horrifying than the parallel fantasy world into which the heroine delves. Although this world features monsters and child-eaters and all sorts of spooky ookies, the harshness of the Spanish civil war and blind obedience to moral degredation are what will really get under the skin and crawl around like the scarabs in that 90's Mummy remake. Don't watch this if you aren't ready to be a touch nauseous and distant for a few hours later as your tear ducts handle the overload. And be ready to buy the soundtrack.

3. The Devil's Backbone: An early(ish) Guillermo Del Torro that provides another ghost story, another orphan, and another tale of the Spanish Civil War. Apparently, it was pretty horrifying given the movies it's produced. I watched this in my teen years and although the specifics fade in and out of my memory, the mood and timbre of the film has stuck with me and produce goosebumps.

The Devilish Tim Burton (or Burtonesque) Stop Motion

My favorite type of Halloween film, so the longest of the list. These take on the macabre with childish glee at the spooky and a knowing nod to the horror argot of yore. They're both delightful and nostalgic and fully committed to the bizarre nonsensical world of our subconscious dreamscapes. More often than not, they also feature a child with a rich imagination and a deep sense of loneliness and alienation.

3. Frankenweenie - A new but worthy addition to any Halloween list. I was skeptical. Tim Burton may have become painfully iterative in increasingly diminishing quality over the years, but this hearkened back to his heyday with such perfect pitch as to supplant some of those prior. Granted, it's based on an old short, but he infuses a particular twist of sere to a sweet story. And the classic quality of a good Tim Burton are all present with just a little twist of pro-science messaging in an era where perhaps science is becoming its own ghoul to sizable swaths of the American public (talk about scary - Halloween ain't got nothin' on the political season swirling around it!).

4. Nightmare Before Christmas - Well, duh. I've often waffled between categorizing this as a Christmas or a Halloween movie, but it is ultimately the celebration of the spirit of Halloween and Jack's quest to rediscover this. And it may have defined a genre. Not sure what that genre might be specifically, but one nonetheless. The music is pure beauty (and yes, I've used versions of What's This during milongas before), and I can't say I mind that the film is only 76 or so minutes long.

5. Paranorman - Ok another newbie ode to childhood horror film fascination mixed with a fun ghost story mixed again with a really sad ghost story and all kinds of lessons about fear of the unknown and the devastation this can manifest.

6. Coraline - Sort of a Gaimanesque take on Labyrinth. Except with less music, and a total dearth of David Bowie in spandex. Don't forget yet another spin on the evil step-mother figure (the anti-parent is just one of the enduring themes I think! Again consult your Joseph Campbell). Creative little girl bored and ignored by her parents stumbles into a parallel world that appears to be an idyllic recreation of her own (except for how everyone has buttons for eyes... details). Everything seems great at first, but of course there's more than meets the button-eye and turns out there's a dark side to the "perfect" world (never would have guessed).

The full-tilt hokey and fabulous:

7. Hocus Pocus - Bette Middler, Cathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker as bungling witches out to suck the souls from little children to attain immortal youth. Didn't go so well in the days of Salem for them, but then some little tween trying to get some action reads from a book in the mid-nineties and they get a second chance. Also featuring a young Thora Birch before her indie days. And yes, Bette sings I Put a Spell on You with some notable changes to the words. The film is so drippingly nineties, I feel I might stain my skinny jeans with some Blossom hats.

8. Young Frankenstein - And another duh one to add to the list.  In a sense, this is almost an anytime movie to the point that I don't reserve it for Halloween, but it does just kind of capture that slapstick madness of an evening of adults dressing in funny costumes and trying to recapture some swigs from the eidos of youth.

9. Bubba Ho Tep - No Halloween is complete without Bruce Campbell, and hell I went to our first Halloween party of the year as Elvis, so naturally this makes the list. Features an aged Elvis and JFK - both alive and kicking, albeit feebly, in a retirement home - battling an ancient soul-sucking mummy terrorizing the home. Not always as easy to find on television this time of year, but occasionally replayed at midnight showings and highly worth the cost of your time searching it on hulu.

Fun Horror:

10. The Shining: Who can't relate to the old "All work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy"?? I fear that Stephen King might have been adding a few autobiographical elements to his original story, given that it seems to really be a story about the agonies of writer's block taken to its logical extreme. I also hear he hated this adaptation. Too bad for him. It's one of those movies ever edified in my Halloween story, due in part to the many midnight showings of the darned thing from teen years. And, well, it's odd and freaky, but funny. And to continue a theme (spoiler alert), it joins Pan's Labyrinth in the hallowed panoply of movies that end with a deranged homicidal anti-father figure chasing a child into a labyrinth! What fun! 

11. Evil Dead - I repeat, no Halloween should go without at least a dose or two of Bruce Campbell. Sam Raimi's major break-a-way and another genre definer, this low budget tale of teens in a cabin happening upon a Book of the Dead and all hell inevitably breaking loose has an unspeakable charm. Raimi balances a golden ratio of scares and laughs. I didn't grow up with Army of Darkness, or perhaps that would be my film choice here, but this one caught my fancy and gives me a sort of devil-may-care chilly chuckle. 

Classic Horror and Horror Respun:

12. Ed Wood - Tim Burton's love note to the ineffable cult-horror-hack has a bittersweet fancy about it that always gets me in the right mood to dress up in a costume, grab some bad stock footage wrap myself with a few plastic tentacles and overact (if possible, in a bra that's pointier than anything Madonna ever attempted). 

13. Nosferatu - I don't know why, but this is the classic that does it for me. Perhaps because it was featured in an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark (classic Nickolodeon tv show where kids get together and tell ghost stories around a campfire which qualifies in and of itself for Halloweendom! Incidentally, I can't recall the exact episode, but I swear up and down that they did the whole Sixth Sense twist ending way before that movie came out in one of their episodes... as another film on this list might have done it better). Perhaps because sometimes the silent movies just leave something more to the imagination. 

Beware the BANGS of BEDHEAD!!! OOOOOOOOOOOOHHH

And I stop at 13, because I am gimmicky like that. Of course there are plenty of movies I think should or could be on a parallel list, but these are my Halloween cinematic treats for this year!

Have a safe and sugary Halloween. At the end of this holiday, we have reached the peak of our little autumnal roller coaster. I hope you are ready to take that deep anticipatory breath in suspended store for the impending plunge into THE HOLIDAY SEASON. Because it is coming! It is nigh! There is nothing you can do about it!!!!! And you thought ghosts and goblins were scary!