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Writer in the Garret

~ A writer living one word at a time

Writer in the Garret

Category Archives: horror movies

31 Days of Spooky Stuff; October 26:The Lost Boys

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by Yvonne Montgomery in horror movies, Vampires

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Tags

blood

lostboy3Adolescence is bad enough…and when you add vampires? All hell breaks loose.

lostboy1

Brothers Michael and Sam move with their mother to a little town in northern California. Everything seems cool until, little by little, it becomes obvious that vampires are lunching off some of the teens who hang out at the boardwalk.

Kiefer Sutherland is their leader and he can feel the alpha waves emanating from Michael. And the girl Star is so pretty. It’s going to get ugly, and spooky, too.

lostboy2

Dance to the music a little bit. Then enter the Halloween drawing to win signed copies of the Wisdom Court books.

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31 Days of Spooky Stuff, October 22: Werewolves a deux…

22 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by Yvonne Montgomery in horror movies, Spooky movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

horror, imagination

were1I first saw The Wolf Man as a kid, watching it on one of Denver’s TV channels, probably presented as a “Fright Night” special. The story is basic, about a man newly returned  to his British home, at odds with his father, the lord of the manor. Lon Chaney, Jr., son of silent movie acting sensation, Lon Chaney, plays the son, Larry Talbot, as a sad outsider who soon falls victim to a nasty malady in the county: a werewolf bites him and thereafter he is forced to terrorize the area each month in search of blood. He searches for information–from the doctor, from the villagers, including the old Romani woman who finally tells him the truth. He is now a werewolf and there is no cure but death. His personal horror at what he’s become is what I best recalled  from my early viewing of the film. He fights to avoid hurting anyone, particularly the young woman who’s interested in him. He can’t connect with his father, leaving him alone with his terrible secret. It was that existential loneliness I remembered, heightened by its being filmed in black and white. Though the special effects were low-tech, the movie continues to have an emotional impact on me to this day.

wolf2

In the eighties, another werewolf movie was hot and happening: An American Werewolf in London. Two American students are backpacking across England, stopping at a Yorkshire pub for a pint. When they ask about the pentagram on the pub’s wall, the pub customers become hostile and the two leave. Warned to stay on the path across the moors, they are attacked by what appears to be a wild dog, and one of the boys is killed, the other mauled before the creature is shot. Of course, the wounded man is now a werewolf and will transform at the next full moon. Despite warnings from the shade of his dead friend, he ignores the danger. And when the full moon rises, he ends up killing six people.

Directed by John Landis, the film’s colors were garish and its special effects brilliant, especially the makeup by Kenny Baker, particularly in the transformation of the bitten man from human to werewolf. That sequence was almost nauseating in showing the biological details and the pain such a change would require. That was the most horrific thing about the story for me, the gag-inducing reaction to the sheer physicality of the process.

were5So, emotional horror as opposed to physical horror…There’s a place for both, no doubt, but I was struck, as I compared the two films, at how much more affected I was by the old black and white movie over the shiny, bloody one. I’m sure it says something about my esthetic state, but I’m damned if I know what. Both films are worth watching, especially during the month of Halloween.were3

 

Enter the Halloween drawing by commenting on the post. The prize: a signed copy of the Wisdom Court books, Edge of the Shadow; A Signal Shown; All In Bad Time.

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31 Days of Spooky Stuff, October 20: The Night of the Hunter

20 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Yvonne Montgomery in Gothic, horror movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

horror, shadows

nightofhunter1

This 1955 film is a strange, nightmarish depiction of evil loose in the land. As the Criterion Collection describes it,

The Night of the Hunter—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it stars a sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum as a traveling preacher named Harry Powell (he of the tattooed knuckles), whose nefarious motives for marrying a fragile widow, played by Shelley Winters, are uncovered by her terrified young children. Graced by images of eerie beauty and a sneaky sense of humor, this ethereal, expressionistic American classic—also featuring the contributions of actress Lillian Gish and writer James Agee—is cinema’s most eccentric rendering of the battle between good and evil.

nightofhunter2

I first saw this film at the recommendation of a friend who’d seen it decades earlier, and who shivered when she told me about it. The memory of it still scared her after all those years. While I watched it, my critical side noticed the slow pacing and wondered at some of the artificial-looking sets, but as the story deepened, the film took on the quality of a dream. The children couldn’t run fast enough to escape the evil man pursuing them. No matter what they did, he was still close behind them. The shadows darkened, my heart beat faster, and I couldn’t tell how the horror would end.

The Night of the Hunter is a spooky movie and I hope you like it.

(I’m including a link to Roger Ebert’s review of The Night of the Hunter because I always liked his film criticism, and because I miss his work.)

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-night-of-the-hunter-1955

Comment to enter the drawing for a signed copy of each of my Wisdom Court books: Edge of the Shadow; A Signal Shown; All In Bad Time. The drawing will occur on October 31.

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