Trever's Halloween movie list

Just posted this on another forum, so I may as well copy it here too! Here's my recommended viewing list for seasonal October entertainment.

(I should note that my preferences in scary movies is that they actually be scary, rather than stomach-churning, so my favorites list is biased towards older haunted house movies instead of modern gore fests)

The original black & white, 1963 film "The Haunting" is one of the scariest flicks ever made. It is rated G. There is no gore, no profanity, and virtually no special effects of any kind. Nonetheless, I can safely promise that it will freak you out if you watch it in a dark room.

Once you have experienced "The Haunting", you will never again be able to hear its absolutely perfect literary introduction without having all the hair on your arms prickle:

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone

The first comment on IMDB sums it up:

There is no blood, there is no slashing, today this would be rated "G." But, this is the scariest movie, ever. Every time I watch this masterpiece (and I have watched it over 50 times), I see or hear something new.

The density of the black and white is incredible. The camera angles and reflection shots are unsettling. The score is appropriately terrifying, from the ringing of tiny bells to the cannon ball rocking down the hall.

The cast is excellent. The direction superb. This is horror at the peak of perfection--it is in your mind. The only thing better is to read the book by Ms. Jackson on a dark night when you are all alone, and "far from town." As Stephen King said about Shirley Jackson, "She never had to shout." Mr. Wise is to be credited with bringing her whispers to the screen.

Rent this for Halloween. Or, own it forever. I still have trouble getting to sleep after I watch this.

If you want other great haunting flicks that are big on the freaky and low on the gore, I can strongly recommend:

The Changeling

The Legend of Hell House

Scream of Fear

Night of the Demon

Haunted

Carnival of Souls

The Uninvited

I wish I didn't have to go back twenty to forty years just to find movies that could be scary without buckets of blood and SPFX.

Happy Halloween!

Emily and Freya wish everyone a Happy Halloween! To our total amazement, we had real actual Trick or Treaters this year - Granted, they were kids of friends and friends-of-friends of ours, but still. Hopefully the word will drift out that we give serious candy and in years to come we'll be able to introduce the French kiddies to a little American-style Halloween fright... :D

Let's All go to the Movies

Halloween season is here. The air's turned cooler, the skies are getting that different sort of light, leaves are turning, and all of Brittany is getting ready for the next three months of solid rain. I keep a hoard of "Halloween Season" movies in a stack under our cabinet and they've now built up high enough that we could watch a horror film every night for about sixteen months without letup.... but this is a good thing! We've had a nice low-key opener to this year's six-week fest of monster movies - "The House that Dripped Blood", a classic Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee film that also rolls in Denholm Elliott and Jon Pertwee (in a role that humourously foreshadows the character of Peter Vincent some sixteen years later).

Last night switched gears for a replay of "28 Days Later", a fun modern semi-zombie flick that offers some very creepy moments and a better experience the second time around. Thinking of movies spurred me to look up some info on the latest Peter Mayle expat fantasy "A Good Year", and I thought I'd write a little about expat movies.

I mentioned this topic already in an article on our regular site, but thought I'd toss in a couple more cents. Most expat movies are utter rubbish - sometimes entertainingly silly, like "Under the Tuscan Sun", but as often as not they're over-romanticized fluff aimed squarely at bored housewives wanting to fantasize about moving to faraway lands. For anyone who really wants to put their head into the experiences, feelings, and struggles of moving to a foreign country, I suggest the following films:

Lost in Translation - Already written about, as mentioned above. Nails the experience perfectly in every detail.

Spirited Away - Probably the best animated film I have ever seen, and one of my absolute favorite films of any kind, the film sums up well the life of the working expat. It's marvelous in conveying the sense of alien-ness, the surreal experience of watching different rituals and modes of behavior without really understanding them. Add in the need for resigned acceptance that there is no running away or going back "home", and each new day's battles must be tackled head-on, and it's a perfect mirror. Especially touching is the depth of feeling displayed in the story for the kindess of strangers, those random folks we encounter who decide to help out when they've no reason to. The same themes and "leaving home" feelings permeate "Kiki's Delivery Service" too, and I like it equally, but overall it's a bit more of a Feel Good film that shares SA's victories but not its terrors.

Jacob's Ladder - What, a horror film?! Yet the similarities are unmistakable in the overall subtle sense of unease.... Things aren't quite right. You can't hear what those people are saying, you don't know if the person you're depending on is behaving properly or intentionally causing problems, you don't know the customs, you feel plunged into a bizarre world where everything feels just a little bit off. We tried watching this one too soon after we arrived here, and had to turn it off. Everything was going wrong, we seemed to be losing massive amounts of money with no end in sight, we'd had all sorts of horrible problems, and, like Jacob in the film, I was occasionally plagued by vivid dreams at night that I was back in the US... that none of what seemed to be happening actually was happening, and that everything was still OK. In those days, waking up to the unpainted walls, bare flooring, and escalating mountain of debts and problems was like being punched in the stomach.

I'm sure I'll have more to add in future....

Riding the Ghost Train

Overhead, the plastic banner crackles in the evening breeze, advertising, "Nouveau! Train Fantome - SPOOKY". We're at Luna Parc, a traveling amusement park that sets up near Guérande in July and August, looking for all the world like some misplaced cutting of American culture that's been broken off and dropped wholesale into the French countryside without any alteration.

But that isn't entirely true, as it turns out. You see, French "county fairs" aren't quite like US fairs... They're better.

Our car starts forward with a lurch and the carnie man gives us a doleful, "Au Revoir" as we bump open the doors leading into darkness. We're the only ones on the ride ... It's early yet, the fair doesn't open until 9pm and we arrived at 8:30, accustomed to US fairs that run all day. Lights flash in the dark and strange monsters appear, lunging at us half-glimpsed from every shadowy corner. The car jerks and twists, speeding us around the tight black maze. Beasties keep flashing up in a constant stream, barely lit and timed to the flickering strobe, when we round a corner and my eye catches sight of something odd. Yes! Yes, that's no mechanical thingie, that's a man! I have only a second to realize this as a black-garbed figure melts out of a corner shadow behind us. There's a yell and we both jump - a glowing green face is trailing our car. We laugh and turn away, but a few seconds later Emily squeals again as green fingers wriggle in her hair. Something grabs my shoulder and I jump, twirling around to see that our ghoul is happily chasing our car and flapping his painted fingers at the backs of our heads and necks. He pursues us past a couple of motorized monsters before finally giving it up, and we burst out into the evening sunset blinking and laughing.

A few minutes later, we realize we've been touched, a very strange experience. When I watched Amelie, I'd assumed the fairground ghost scene was purposefully overdone, drawn as surreal as the rest of the film, but we've just had an encounter nearly as physical. This would never have happened in the US, where any physical contact during a ride would almost certainly generate one of two responses:

"Aiii! He touched me! I can't believe he touched me! I'll sue! I'll sue for distress - I'll bankrupt this carnival!!"

...or...

"Shee-it, that sumbitch just laid his hands on me, I'm gonna hafta go whup his ass now!"

But the French aren't as litigious as Americans - A Frenchman who trips and breaks his nose is more likely to make a joke of it to tell his family than to sue the sidewalk construction company for negligence. And they're certainly not as violent. These traits benefit an amusement park in some very fun ways...... The rides are longer, MUCH more dramatic and scary/rough/wild, and you can buy malt whiskey at the concession booths if you really want to test your projectile-vomiting range on the rollercoaster. We got lost in the multi-level mirror maze for about a half hour, bumping our way through the mix of glass panes and reflections and strobe lights and sudden near-darkness until we finally emerged nearly as freaked and dizzy as Miss Foley in "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (Possibly the best 'autumn fair' movie ever....)

There was one odd loss - they have cotton candy, candied apples, and of course chi-chi's, but there were no caramel apples in sight. A curious ommision, considering the French passion for all things caramel. Are caramel apples another puzzling non-entity in France, or was it just this one fair that lacked them?

I will close by posting a selection of photos from the fair, but first I wanted to mention two local cafés of note. In my last article, "Beware the Murky Frogpits", I was pretty (deservedly) harsh on the rather dank and nasty village cafés scattered all around here, that supposedly serve as local "fast food", but there are exceptions. The pirate café by the Barrage (dam) d'Arzal was great fun, with a young staff who greeted us on entry and a waiter who turned up promptly and actually smiled . The decor was fun, the food was good, and overall it was a drastic improvement over our usual "village café" experiences. Another nice spot for a semi-fast bite is Herbignac's own "Bar Roseau", a tavern that doubles as a tasty sandwich shop. It does tend to have a bit of the "locals staring like frozen guppies" effect, but it's minimal by comparison. Now, on to the pics!


This is the three-story Funhouse, filled with all manner of bizarre devices including a top-to-bottom spiral tube slide, huge whirling grabbers that will sieze you and fling you through what resembles a car wash buffer, and many other semi-lethal tricks and traps that would never be allowed in NC because, well, "somebody would get sued"....


Emily becomes, on her very first try, the only human being I have ever known who actually won something from one of those fairground "pick up" machines. And she got a Nemo, no less!


I'll sign off of this blog entry from the front of the Mirror Maze, snacking on my chi-chi's. A bientot!

Halloween season in Brittany

(The pic today is actually not an October pic - this was taken sometime after midnight last Christmas while walking through the medieval city section of Guerande. But, I thought it was appropriate)

Halloween does exist in Europe. I've spoken with people who have lived here in decades past, and they usually commented that there was no such thing here - that mainland Europeans did not celebrate Halloween. This is not true today, however, and it seems to have gotten more popular through the last three years that we've lived here. I just visited the Mini-Fouine yesterday (a sort of dollar store), and they had a bustling Halloween aisle out, full of costumes and masks. We need to drive down to St. Nazaire, where lots of shops have big sections of Halloween goodies, just to get our seasonal "fix". It's an interesting thing to watch the progress of this imported holiday. There seems to be some ambivalence about exactly what to do with it - one Frenchman once told me it was "too Parisien" and he didn't enjoy it. I have NO idea what this means in cultural context (Generally calling things "Parisien" seems to suggest that they are snobby, or too full of themselves, but I don't see how this could apply to a holiday). Unfortunately, Halloween here is still just a pale shadow of what it's like in the US, where entire houses and streets are decorated, whole shops dedicated to Halloween open in every mall, and troops of kids in costume are everywhere (I won't even get into the terrible lack of haunted houses here - one of the key attractions of the season). Overall, it seems like there is a sort of hesitancy about the season, as if they want to enjoy it but aren't quite sure how to go about it. If I had the time and money, I would definitely run Herbignac's first Haunted House show. As a friend once told me, he'd love to watch me pitch that idea to the mairie - "See, it's a huge scary house filled with threatening monsters who chase the children and do their best to traumatize them and even send them out crying and screaming. It's fun, really!"

October movie of the day - "Escape from LA" Not exactly a horror film, but something I'd been wanting to see again. One thing I have noticed about John Carpenter's films is that they are nearly all ten or more years ahead of their time - they come out, receive mediocre reviews and low box office, vanish, and then are rediscovered as genre classics a decade later, when they suddenly seem "better". I recall especially "The Thing", which was released in the aftermath of ET and Close Encounters, when aliens were all warm and friendly, and the film just seemed too dark and bleak for the time. On a second look in the 90's, it was revealed to be a horror classic, and in my opinion one of the best horror films ever made. Anyway, Escape was soundly trashed on release, particularly by fans of the first film, "Escape from New York", compared to which it was goofy, silly, lacking in tension, and generally blah. I'd read, however, that it was all in the expectation - going in expecting to see a serious continuation of EFNY was wrong, because the new film was a tongue-firmly-in-cheek comedy, a parody of both US politics and action films in general. Seen on this level, it is great fun, full of both laughs and witty observations on American life. And it has one of the very best endings in all cinema history! I'll sign off with this classic exchange, which is really relevant to smokers in the US today...
Snake Plissken: Got a smoke?
Malloy: The United States is a non-smoking nation! No smoking, no drugs, no alcohol, no women - unless you're married - no foul language, no red meat!
Snake Plissken: Land of the free.

First Post under the new setup

This photo is already posted elsewhere on the site in the "Life in France" area, but it is so silly that I thought it deserved a day in the spotlight. Emily is playing on the Sit-N-Spin at a playground on the cliffs of St. Marc. I kept spinning her round and round and she couldn't stop laughing. This is the same park where we saw the African Grey and Amazon Green parrots sitting freely in a tree at the cliff's edge, where the Grey was mumbling to itself and chatting with passers-by.
Oh, and I almost forgot to add - we've been watching The Horror Channel a fair bit lately, with it being October and all, and last night we saw one of the most ridiculous "horror" movies I've ever seen. Produced by, and starring, Nicholas "Xander" Brendon of "Buffy" fame, the movie was titled "Pinanta: Survival Island" and featured the usual bunch of young folks being stalked by a..... possessed pinata. Yes, a 4' tall, very angry pinata from hell. That has to win some points for sheer originality, but halfway through I looked at Emily and asked, "Just think - did you ever, ever imagine that one day in your near future you would be living in France, and relaxing on an American couch watching a movie about a killer pinata?"