13 Nights of Hallowe'en 2010: Night #12 The Shining (1980)

The night before Hallowe'en, Devil's Night. Can you feel the excitement? Are you ready? Well if not then you should be aftertonight's movie. In a list of movies with infamously haunted places there is one name that towers over the others. It is called The Overlook Hotel, and it is not real, but most people will know the name nonetheless, even if they don't recall from where. The Overlook is based for the most part on a real hotel called The Stanley Hotel and is the creation of Stephen King in his novel The Shining. This is the first movie adaptation of that novel. The mastermind behind it is none other than Stanley Kubrick. Mind you some people aren't so sure on the mastermind part. This movie deviates from the novel on several levels. To me this makes for the more interesting of the two kind of novel to movie adaptations.

Kubrick had his own vision for the story. It is both familiar and divergent. Starting off we have the cast. The movie stars Jack Nicholson,Shelley Duvall, and young Danny Lloyd as a family maintaining The Overlook Hotel during the long and harsh winter. This is the same as King's story. It's not a spoiler, but the only thing I'll say here about the differences is that in Kubrick's movie the hotel has a hedge maze, and the novel--and remake mini-series--has hedge animals that come to life. As one might expect from a Kubrick movie there is a great attention to detail from sets to locations to the acting, and of course the direction. As for the haunting, the Shining has it in spades. Also, if you don't know, the shining is actually psychic ability, exemplified by Danny Lloyd's character and the cook played by Scatman Crothers.

Mood: stoked.

Music: Halloween by Helloween. MP3s

13 Nights of Hallowe'en 2010: Night #3 The Fog (2005)

It's Thursday and our movie is the 2005 remake of The Fog. The first question you must be asking is why the remake? Don’t get mewrong, the original is classic John Carpenter, but it was so random overall. As far as storyline goes I prefer this remake with its solid back-story to explain the ghosts. It has a little bit of randomness and of course a modern aesthetic, but Carpenter himself seemed congenial to the film in the extras, so what the hey. The remake stars Tom Welling from Smallville and his love interest is Maggie Grace from Lost. The iconic radio host played by Adrienne Barbeau in the original is now played by Selma Blair from Hellboy and seems much more peripheral to the story. The director, Rupert Wainwright, also directed Stigmata and the episode "Echoes" of the TV horror series Fear Itself.

Remakes are a touchy subject, but I'm always of the mind that a movie should be watched on its own merits. Not on the original version, not on previous movies in a franchise, not even in comparison to other work by the same director. When it comes to discussing them it's okay to compare, but I don't think a strict comparison is fair either, something softer is required. Reviews on the other hand fit in with watching. The best remakes don't either try to outdo the original or just copy it; they go their own direction. That's why I like this The Fog too and why it's here. Now about the actual fog. It looks great here, but it doesn't exactly get the same importance. I don't know if it has more screen time or not, but it wasn't as powerful a point of tension. It's kind of like the radio host, there, has its place, but isn't the show runner it could have been.

Mood: obscure.

Music: Fear Of The Dark by Iron Maiden. MP3s

13 Nights 2008 Aftermath

I hope everyone had a great Hallowe’en and enjoyed the thirteen nights as much as I did. On one of the nights I revealed that there was an unintended connection between several of the movies. Most of them were made by a writer/director. This trend is most common with horror movies. It doesn’t matter whether these are all scriptwriters that want to be directors, or need to be to maintain the vision of their script. It doesn’t matter whether these are all directors who happen to write scripts, or need to as a matter of getting to direct the sort of movies that they want to direct. The first name in horror writer/directors is of course Wes Craven. Right behind him is John Carpenter. Oddly enough the thirteen nights did not involve either of these giants. This wasn’t the only trend.

The list of movies intentionally included several that were victims of bad press. They were written off as rip-offs, or in some cases declared unwatchable. This must be disheartening to everyone involved in their production. It is discouraging enough as a fan of some of these films to see them so maligned. This is further true with good movies that are not campy. At least with camp and a high cheese factor there are people who will flock to be fans for a movie because it is so bad that it’s good. Horror is a good genre for not being dismissive of low budget films. Some of the lowest budget horror movies gained great fame, from John Carpenter’s “Halloween” to Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” to the granddaddy of modern horror George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”.

One last thing that was apparent from the selection of movies is that good horror comes from many different places. Some comes, naturally, from Hollywood. Others can come from a world away like New Zealand. The inspiration for horror movies has just as wide a spread. Some come straight from the scriptwriter’s imagination. Others come from the literary world. Yet others come from other media altogether such as video games. Then there are always the horrors that come from real life. One movie even came about because of one of horror’s most lucrative film genres, the slasher. Life spawns books and movies, books spawn movies, a genre spawns video games that spawn movies, and a genre even spawns parts of itself in a widening family tree. Isn’t horror grand?

Mood: exhilarated.
Music: Breakin' in the Gun by Vince Neil and Harbinger of Fate by Iced Earth.

Buy these at Amazon.ca Click Images to Buy