Halloween = Horror Movies

So it is funny to me how people can love the same things in different ways. When I talk to other people that love Halloween it is always interesting to me to find out what they love about Halloween and how it is different than I do.

For example, my wife and I both love Halloween. Now we both love the trick-or-treat aspect with our kids, and we also love the dressing up for Halloween parties and going to those as adults. Although with kids, that last part doesn't happen nearly as much as we'd like. We both also like the decorating of the outside of the house with tombstones, skeletons, ghosts, and noisy (annoying, but fun) mummies and zombies. But more so than anything else, Halloween to her is shopping at Halloween stores and looking at all the different decorations they have out that year, and some of the costumes and those things. Myself, I really like Halloween for the scare factor and the mysticism that is involved. That is exactly the stuff she does not like about Halloween. This is what cracks me up. How we can both love the holiday and not love it in the same way.

It is just funny as I talk to neighbors that "love" Halloween, but they don't decorate the outside. They "love" Halloween, but they do not like horror movies. They "love" Halloween, but they do not enjoy the parties or dressing up. It is just interesting how so many people can love something, but love it so differently. I heard an amazing statistic that Halloween is the second-most profitable holiday to Christmas. So it must be true that people love Halloween. I guess there are just so many components to Halloween that can attract so many different types of people.

Now as I mentioned, my love of Halloween centers around scary movies and trick-or-treat. It is awesome that this time of year all these DVD's and Movies come out to get me in the mood. It is pretty funny that I do not care too much about scary movies until around late September. That is why every year I have a horror movie festival in my man cave, leading to the Month of Horror this year.

Day Five: Lady in White

So the last few days I feel like I have hit stride in my quest for ten days of horror. I hit a small speed bump with Children of the Corn, and since then I recovered well with The Frighteners and Sweeney Todd, so I felt like I needed to keep the momentum going. I have owned Lady in White by Frank LaLoggia for a few years now, and never got around to watching this on DVD. I think that I have seen this movie close to ten times on HBO when I was growing up back in the late 80s, early 90s.

The funny thing is that with all the times I have seen the movie, I do not remember the first ten minutes at all. Maybe I never watched the first ten minutes before since it was on HBO, I probably came in late each time watching it. Without the cable box built-in guide, we had to rely on TV Guide or the local paper for our show times, so catching a movie on time often didn't happen unless you rented the movie.

So I wanted to do this movie mainly because I have great memories of it from when I was a child, and because it takes place over Halloween. The story centers around Frankie Scarlatti (played by Lukas Haas), a budding author in grade school who is considered weird by his fellow students. He begins to have visions of a young girl that had some traumatic experience that somehow links to his life.

I really like this movie... it has the typical 80s fluff feel but still manages to also have a more ominous presence to it. This was a pretty low budget independent film, but does not show it. The movie's effects for the time are really good, the acting in the movie is probably as good as you're going to get for kids, and the adult acting is perfectly serviceable. This movie provides you with a relatively good twist, back from a time where twists were not yet trendy. The twist really pays off because of the time and effort that is taken in telling the story and setting up the characters. Even though I would not classify this movie as a true Horror, I truly recommend this movie for anybody trying to get into the Halloween mood.

Click here to read reviews of Lady in White

10 days of 10 Horror Movies

So I am going to try and live the dream over the next ten days. I am going to attempt to watch 10 horror movies leading up to Halloween. I am not sure which ones I am going to watch yet, but I will give a not-so-official review of each one over the next few days. In the meantime, I have posted in the right-hand column what I currently feel are my top ten horror movies of all-time. I am sure I have forgotten some but these are definitely in my wheel-house when it comes to the fright-flicks.

Commence the Halloween Shenanigans

GeoTagged, [N40.03234, E83.17400]

So this weekend marked the beginning of the Griswold... I mean Poole, holiday season. Three months, four holidays. Let the good times roll. So I am not sure what is normal for most families seeing as I said bye-bye to normal a long time ago, but my household loves Halloween. It is probably the most celebrated holiday in my family. From the decorations outside, to Trick-or-Treat, to costume parties, and horror movies, it is definitely a blast. I read somewhere that Halloween is now the second biggest, from a retail perspective and I surely contribute a sizable chunk to that statistic.

Well tonight we cooked up a Halloween feast. We made witch's finger breadsticks, pumpkin pie dip, a cheeseball in the shape of a pumpkin, and buried cupcakes. Once we finished watching the Buckeyes dismantle the Spartans, we started with the festivities. After eating we decided to watch Ghostbusters to kick off the frightfest. I know it is not very scary, but it is a classic and the kids love it, so a good starting point. This also gave me the chance to try out the iPhone Blogger Pro application. After Ghostbusters we turned up the horror movie quotient just a bit and watched Children of the Corn. I also rented Sweeney Todd to see how it rates vs. the play version. More on that later.