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This was a documentary about author Alvin Schwartz's childrens series of books, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
This sort of broke my heart and I cried. It was about censorship and messing with creative content. It just hurt my heart.
Making the banned book list and challenged in libraries and schools, the series was fought for and against.
Apparently Mr. Schwartz did a ton of reasearch on these stories that are folk tales from all around the world. And there was so many human lessons to be taught hiding in the scares.
Illustrator Stephen Gammell had some absolutely gorgeous art in the original books and they were probably the one thing that got the books banned. Very graphic art.
Now, do I think a parent has the final say for their child? Yes. But, they do not have the final say for my child. You have no right to tell me how I am to raise my kid. So, this banning, and white washing and changing creative content just irks the holy sh*t out of me. We all know ourselves, our homes, our children. Some children are not mature enough for some topics. They may not be emotionally, chronologially, spiritually, mentally mature enough for some things, and you have every right to protect your child. Say no to these things for YOUR CHILD. NOT MINE.
The publisher re-released these books at some point with new illustrations from a different illustrator and there was a huge uproar -- GOOD!
Is there crap out there for all ages? Yes. There is stuff I find offensive and disgusting and stupid. Stupid sh*t is more offensive to me than some headless ghoul drawing.
But, guess what? I make choices for myself. Not you. And not your kids or family. If you want to read or watch or listen to stuff that I find totally worthless -- more power to you.
I think it said in 2017 the publisher once again re-released the series with the original artwork restored.
1. Ghost Stories*
2. American Murder*
3. Christmas Evil*
4. Vault of Horror
5. The Green Slime*
6. The Blue Elephant 2*
7. Theatre of Blood
8. Ghost Ship
9. Deathdream*
10. Fiend Without a Face*
11. Maniac* 1934
12. Books of Blood*
13. Escape Room*
14. The Severed Arm*
15. The Binding*
16. The Cured*
17. Friday the 13th
18. Tarantula*
19. Jennifer's Body*
20. Fantasy Island*
21. Mrs. Amworth*
22. A Fantastic Fear of Everything*
23. Within*
24. Trick r' Treat*
25. BEWARE! The Blob*
26. The Haunting of Bly Manor*
27. The Nightcomers*
28. Dementia 13
29. Coherence*
30. Midsommar*
31. Scary Stories*
Creature needs no introduction, if you haven't seen it then you should stop whatever you're doing and rectify that😁. In my opinion Spielberg's Jaws owes so much to this movie, from setting to pace even to the music, ever wondered where John Williams got the iconic Jaws score, I honestly think it was from this.
Alone In The Dark is a gem, a group of patients escape from an asylum and go after a doctor and his family, great cast and some wicked humour make this slasher a cut above the rest in my opinion....
So far,
01. Dracula's Daughter
02. Son Of Dracula
03. House Of Frankenstein
04. Rogue
05. Crawl
06. Count Dracula
07. Mrs Amworth
08. The Wolf Of Snow Hollow
09. The Vampire
10. Creature From The Black Lagoon
11. Alone In The Dark
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said.
Not really horror, more of a really intense drama, but it has horrific elements so I am counting it.
Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal play a divorced couple. She has remarried and is an art gallery owner and he is a struggling writer. He sends her a manuscript out of the blue, she starts reading, and then the story within the story unfolds. It is pretty dark and violent and horrific in spots. Good movie if you can handle that stuff.
15. Countdown 2019
A new phone app is all the rage, it tells you when you will die. All fun and games! Til people start dying. Our heroine has to find a way to stop it before her sister and herself dies.
It was ok. Kept my interest but was never on the edge of my seat. A few good jump scares. But the Death figure/person looked a lot like The Nun. Which is scary but I felt kind of a rip off here.
16. The Sixth Sense 1999
I have seen this several times. I have always liked it. It has been a while so watched it again. And this time, I really LOVED it. I always watched it "straight on," as if I did not know the ending. But this time, I paid very close attention to how it played out from the beginning with the ending in my mind. That changes the whole movie and makes it so much better!! I was blown away by little Haley Joel Osment's acting ability. Watching him deftly handle everyone, from his mother to the ghosts...I loved it. (He is also in another of my all time faves...Secondhand Lions.)
Watching it from the perspective of knowing the ending really put a whole new spin on the entire movie. Elevated it for me from a good movie to a great one.
Trick r' Treat is one of my favorites. Like a Quentin Tarantino Halloween movie. I also watched this one this weekend.
18. The Lodge (FTV)
Two kids get some bonding alone time a remote cabin with their father's new fiance who escaped a dark religious past.
This film is a combination of slow-burn solitude and nasty jarring shocks combined with an indie/arthouse aesthetic. If you like films like Hereditary and snowbound settings like in The Shining, this will be right up your alley. The whole situation is a powder keg but never feels contrived, probably because it at least begins by being grounded in reality, and relatable family situations. This is another one of those movies that I feel the need to talk indirectly about, rather than spoil too much, but I found it to very compelling and dare I say entertaining despite the bleak isolation and grim premise.
There are some missteps here and there, a few questionable motivations and "hey, why didn't they just" moments, but for the most part this film works because we find ourselves experiencing things through the characters eyes and mindsets, which makes the shocks all the more horrific. This is a great example why character and performance matter so much in horror. Without being a "message movie", the film makes some pretty bold (if dark) statements.
4 out of 5 stars.
Bob's October 2020 Horror Movie List
*FTV denotes first-time viewings
1. Viy (1967) 4/5 (FTV)
2. Night Visitor 3/5 (FTV)
3. Tigers Are Not Afraid 5/5 (FTV)
4. I Trapped the Devil 4/5 (FTV)
5. Vivarium 3/5 (FTV)
6. The Kiss of the Vampire 3/5 (FTV)
7. The Invisible Man (2020) 4/5 (FTV)
8. Horrors of Malformed Men 3/5 (FTV)
9. Come to Daddy 3/5 (FTV)
10. Dead Alive 4/5
11. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things 3/5 (FTV)
12. Swallow 4/5 (FTV)
13. One Cut of the Dead 4/5 (FTV)
14. 3 From Hell 3/5 (FTV)
15. Scared Stiff (1987) 3/5 (FTV)
16. Zoltan: Hound of Dracula 3/5 (FTV)
17. To Your Last Death 2/5 (FTV)
18. The Lodge 4/5 (FTV)
Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Watson, Holmes tackles the Ripper in London 1888.
So far,
01. Dracula's Daughter
02. Son Of Dracula
03. House Of Frankenstein
04. Rogue
05. Crawl
06. Count Dracula
07. Mrs Amworth
08. The Wolf Of Snow Hollow
09. The Vampire
10. Creature From The Black Lagoon
11. Alone In The Dark
12. Murder By Decree
18. Zombie For Sale (aka The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale) (FTV)
Korean zom-com where a bite from a zombie proves to be a fountain of youth that can be exploited and sold to locals, but with inevitable consequences.
Does the world really need another zombie movie, let alone another zombie comedy? I would have thought not, but then I watched Zombie For Sale and was happy to be wrong. If you're fans of quirky small town comedy like Fargo, and oddball Asian horror families like those in The Host and The Happiness of the Katakuris, then you'll love this movie.
The zombies aren't particularly threatening or scary, they are bumbling, like drunken vagrants, which leads to some great comedic sequences. The film has great characters: a zombie who prefers cabbage over brains, an elderly patriarch who just wants to go to Hawaii to see the hula girls, his hapless gas station owner son and no-nonsense pregnant wife whose weapon of choice is a cast iron pan, a recently fired company man from the city who wants to exploit the zombie, and a teen girl who has romantic feelings for the undead.
The movie goes from funny to ridiculous to full-on lunacy over the course of nearly two hours, so it's just a tad too long for the plot line, but pretty much great fun throughout--I found myself laughing out loud quite a bit. A nice little surprise and great change of pace!
4 out of 5 stars.
Bob's October 2020 Horror Movie List
*FTV denotes first-time viewings
1. Viy (1967) 4/5 (FTV)
2. Night Visitor 3/5 (FTV)
3. Tigers Are Not Afraid 5/5 (FTV)
4. I Trapped the Devil 4/5 (FTV)
5. Vivarium 3/5 (FTV)
6. The Kiss of the Vampire 3/5 (FTV)
7. The Invisible Man (2020) 4/5 (FTV)
8. Horrors of Malformed Men 3/5 (FTV)
9. Come to Daddy 3/5 (FTV)
10. Dead Alive 4/5
11. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things 3/5 (FTV)
12. Swallow 4/5 (FTV)
13. One Cut of the Dead 4/5 (FTV)
14. 3 From Hell 3/5 (FTV)
15. Scared Stiff (1987) 3/5 (FTV)
16. Zoltan: Hound of Dracula 3/5 (FTV)
17. To Your Last Death 2/5 (FTV)
18.The Lodge 4/5 (FTV)
19. Zombie For Sale 4/5 (FTV)
Long time since I had watched this, I forgot a lot. Giggled out loud at the scene at the play, where Wednesday and Pugsley spray the audience with fake blood...did not remember that even a little bit! And, I just found it funny. Also, toward the end, when they had been kicked out and were living in the hotel, it made me think of Schitt's Creek. 😀 Fun family movie.
20. The Wind (1986) (FTV)
1986 Euro Horror slasher has an authoress in a remote Greek seaside villa fighting off a sickle-wielding maniac.
Another fine restoration by Arrow Video here, and if you like women in peril, siege films, and giallos, you will enjoy this film, with some caveats which I'll get into later. Meg Foster (she of the amazing ice blue eyes) puts in an able performance and her character refuses to let herself be intimidated by the local handyman, played with manic glee by Wings Hauser. There's a great "touring the grounds" scene by British character actor Robert Morley (best known for The African Queen), I wish they'd spent more time with his character.
After a pretty strong first 35 minutes where all the groundwork is laid out for a creepy thriller, the film squanders a lot of potential tension by casually revealing the cause behind the strange occurrences. Why the screenwriters chose to do this is a mystery to me. So instead of a "whodunnit" the film pivots into a "watch him do it", which is far less compelling. Perhaps the director had just seen Straw Dogs midway through the filming and wanted to go in a new direction.
In addition, the film at times feels amateurish and cheesy, although I have to confess I found the cheesiness to be part of the fun, but at times it was just distracting and silly. Yeah, this sort of thing goes with the territory, but one can't help but wonder if this merely decent film could have been a great one with some script revisions and better direction.
3 out of 5 stars.
Bob's October 2020 Horror Movie List
*FTV denotes first-time viewings
1. Viy (1967) 4/5 (FTV)
2. Night Visitor 3/5 (FTV)
3. Tigers Are Not Afraid 5/5 (FTV)
4. I Trapped the Devil 4/5 (FTV)
5. Vivarium 3/5 (FTV)
6. The Kiss of the Vampire 3/5 (FTV)
7. The Invisible Man (2020) 4/5 (FTV)
8. Horrors of Malformed Men 3/5 (FTV)
9. Come to Daddy 3/5 (FTV)
10. Dead Alive 4/5
11. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things 3/5 (FTV)
12. Swallow 4/5 (FTV)
13. One Cut of the Dead 4/5 (FTV)
14. 3 From Hell 3/5 (FTV)
15. Scared Stiff (1987) 3/5 (FTV)
16. Zoltan: Hound of Dracula 3/5 (FTV)
17. To Your Last Death 2/5 (FTV)
18.The Lodge 4/5 (FTV)
19. Zombie For Sale 4/5 (FTV)
20. The Wind (1986) 3/5 (FTV)
01. Dracula's Daughter
02. Son Of Dracula
03. House Of Frankenstein
04. Rogue
05. Crawl
06. Count Dracula
07. Mrs Amworth
08. The Wolf Of Snow Hollow
09. The Vampire
10. Creature From The Black Lagoon
11. Alone In The Dark
12. Murder By Decree
21. The Silent Scream (1979) (FTV)
College students in a creepy boarding house get bumped off one by one by someone who lives between the walls.
Written by the Wheat brothers (who wrote Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Pitch Black, The Fly 2) this is one of those films I'd always heard good things about over the years, but somehow never got around to watching until last night. Stars include Cameron Mitchell (Night Train to Terror), Barbara Steele (Black Sunday) Rebecca Balding (The Boogens) in a Dorothy Hammill haircut, Yvonne de Carlo (Lily Munster!) and none other than the "Doritos guy" Avery freakin' Schreiber in a serious role!
This is a decent early slasher that moves along at a good pace, despite few if any surprising twists, in fact this is pretty straightforward stuff, but it succeeds despite its familiarity. The film picks up more and more as the body count climbs, building to an effectively tense final scene. Without getting into spoilers, one gets the feeling that they could have taken this story in one of two directions, and in watching the extra features I confirmed this hunch--the movie was already being made when they decided between which outcome they were taking. I sorta wish they'd taken the less obvious approach, but nevermind, it's still a fun little slasher.
3 out of 5 stars.
Bob's October 2020 Horror Movie List
*FTV denotes first-time viewings
1. Viy (1967) 4/5 (FTV)
2. Night Visitor 3/5 (FTV)
3. Tigers Are Not Afraid 5/5 (FTV)
4. I Trapped the Devil 4/5 (FTV)
5. Vivarium 3/5 (FTV)
6. The Kiss of the Vampire 3/5 (FTV)
7. The Invisible Man (2020) 4/5 (FTV)
8. Horrors of Malformed Men 3/5 (FTV)
9. Come to Daddy 3/5 (FTV)
10. Dead Alive 4/5
11. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things 3/5 (FTV)
12. Swallow 4/5 (FTV)
13. One Cut of the Dead 4/5 (FTV)
14. 3 From Hell 3/5 (FTV)
15. Scared Stiff (1987) 3/5 (FTV)
16. Zoltan: Hound of Dracula 3/5 (FTV)
17. To Your Last Death 2/5 (FTV)
18.The Lodge 4/5 (FTV)
19. Zombie For Sale 4/5 (FTV)
20. The Wind (1986) 3/5 (FTV)
21. The Silent Scream (1979) 3/5 (FTV)
01. Dracula's Daughter
02. Son Of Dracula
03. House Of Frankenstein
04. Rogue
05. Crawl
06. Count Dracula
07. Mrs Amworth
08. The Wolf Of Snow Hollow
09. The Vampire
10. Creature From The Black Lagoon
11. Alone In The Dark
12. Murder By Decree