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lucymonsterSince my sudden mania for film shows no signs of slowing, I've created a Letterboxd account. I don't really plan to use it for much besides tracking what I've watched and what I plan to watch, but add me if you're a user and I'll heart your reviews when I see them. :)
Anyway it has been A Week and I've been too tired by the end of each day to do ANYTHING other than vegetate in front of the TV, and specifically to vegetate in front of something scary and tense enough to prevent my otherwise inevitable zoning-out. The upside of which is yay, more horror movies!
Hell House LLC (2015): A documentary crew investigates a haunted house attraction that went gruesomely wrong on its opening night, leading to more than a dozen fatalities under baffling circumstances which the authorities have hushed up. Whensnickfic recced this movie to me, I said I would not watch it because clowns gross me out. But the haunted house + found footage conceit was calling to me enough that I decided I could probably handle the clowns - and hey, I was right! This is not especially clowny clown horror by my highly arbitrary personal standards that mostly boil down to "there are no gross clown smiles" and "there are no even grosser clown laughs". Maybe this is a gateway for me? Maybe someday I'll be sufficiently desensitised to clowns that I can catch up to the rest of the world and watch It? Whatever the case, I had fun with this movie. I admired the filmmakers' decision to leave so many questions unanswered and I think that uncertainty is scarier than any explicit answers they could have devised. (For that reason, I'm going to go right on ahead and ignore the fact that there are sequels. Not EVERYTHING has to be a franchise, damn. The movie stands alone just fine.)
On a minor note, I REALLY liked the piano-and-violin piece in the soundtrack. Beautifully simple, beautifully discordant.
Carrie (1976): I am once again standing in awe of the incredibly broad palate of flavours that get lumped together under the "horror" label. This movie is not a scare so much as an anguished distillation of the cruelties of high school. Carrie suffers horrific religious abuse at home and extreme bullying at school; after falling victim to a very public and sadistic "prank" during senior prom, she unleashes her budding telekinetic powers on the watching crowd with murderous results. But her rampage is - well, not an afterthought per se, but it happens right at the end of the film in a dizzying blitz; the vast majority of the screentime (and the most visceral source of horror, for me at least) is the long, slow lead-up to the prank, as tension mounts between the glow-up narrative Carrie thinks she's living and the humiliation we know she's about to suffer.
I am not enough of a Film Buff(TM) to comment on the weird split-screen thing they were doing during the climax, or whatever the fuck was happening at the start with that borderline pornographic locker room shower scene. Both of them threw me out a bit but neither was enough of a hiccup to spoil what was otherwise a really gripping story.
The Old Dark House (1932): I watched this because it stars Boris Karloff, and while it may not be one of his most iconic roles, it was the one my library happened to have on offer at the moment I found myself thinking, 'Hey, I should watch some Boris Karloff!' So on those qualifications, I bring you this old-school spooky cult classic about two small groups of travellers who are forced by a violent storm to go begging for shelter at an isolated old house in the Welsh countryside, whose eccentric inhabitants turn out to be harbouring a deadly family secret. Karloff's physical acting is impressive: his character, Morgan the butler, is completely mute but has an immense screen presence (literally as well as metaphorically) despite the lack of dialogue. He's a hulking mass of danger whose sullen subservience turns to violent, lust-addled malice when he drinks, as of course he does on the stormy night in question. There's also a romance between a feckless WWI vet and a chorus girl who is only technically not the sugar baby of one of the other houseguests, which aside from being endearing in its own right was a lot more risqué than I expected of a movie from the 30s. Evidently the "pre-Code" label is more than just a historical technicality!
Anyway it has been A Week and I've been too tired by the end of each day to do ANYTHING other than vegetate in front of the TV, and specifically to vegetate in front of something scary and tense enough to prevent my otherwise inevitable zoning-out. The upside of which is yay, more horror movies!
Hell House LLC (2015): A documentary crew investigates a haunted house attraction that went gruesomely wrong on its opening night, leading to more than a dozen fatalities under baffling circumstances which the authorities have hushed up. When
snickfic recced this movie to me, I said I would not watch it because clowns gross me out. But the haunted house + found footage conceit was calling to me enough that I decided I could probably handle the clowns - and hey, I was right! This is not especially clowny clown horror by my highly arbitrary personal standards that mostly boil down to "there are no gross clown smiles" and "there are no even grosser clown laughs". Maybe this is a gateway for me? Maybe someday I'll be sufficiently desensitised to clowns that I can catch up to the rest of the world and watch It? Whatever the case, I had fun with this movie. I admired the filmmakers' decision to leave so many questions unanswered and I think that uncertainty is scarier than any explicit answers they could have devised. (For that reason, I'm going to go right on ahead and ignore the fact that there are sequels. Not EVERYTHING has to be a franchise, damn. The movie stands alone just fine.)On a minor note, I REALLY liked the piano-and-violin piece in the soundtrack. Beautifully simple, beautifully discordant.
Carrie (1976): I am once again standing in awe of the incredibly broad palate of flavours that get lumped together under the "horror" label. This movie is not a scare so much as an anguished distillation of the cruelties of high school. Carrie suffers horrific religious abuse at home and extreme bullying at school; after falling victim to a very public and sadistic "prank" during senior prom, she unleashes her budding telekinetic powers on the watching crowd with murderous results. But her rampage is - well, not an afterthought per se, but it happens right at the end of the film in a dizzying blitz; the vast majority of the screentime (and the most visceral source of horror, for me at least) is the long, slow lead-up to the prank, as tension mounts between the glow-up narrative Carrie thinks she's living and the humiliation we know she's about to suffer.
I am not enough of a Film Buff(TM) to comment on the weird split-screen thing they were doing during the climax, or whatever the fuck was happening at the start with that borderline pornographic locker room shower scene. Both of them threw me out a bit but neither was enough of a hiccup to spoil what was otherwise a really gripping story.
The Old Dark House (1932): I watched this because it stars Boris Karloff, and while it may not be one of his most iconic roles, it was the one my library happened to have on offer at the moment I found myself thinking, 'Hey, I should watch some Boris Karloff!' So on those qualifications, I bring you this old-school spooky cult classic about two small groups of travellers who are forced by a violent storm to go begging for shelter at an isolated old house in the Welsh countryside, whose eccentric inhabitants turn out to be harbouring a deadly family secret. Karloff's physical acting is impressive: his character, Morgan the butler, is completely mute but has an immense screen presence (literally as well as metaphorically) despite the lack of dialogue. He's a hulking mass of danger whose sullen subservience turns to violent, lust-addled malice when he drinks, as of course he does on the stormy night in question. There's also a romance between a feckless WWI vet and a chorus girl who is only technically not the sugar baby of one of the other houseguests, which aside from being endearing in its own right was a lot more risqué than I expected of a movie from the 30s. Evidently the "pre-Code" label is more than just a historical technicality!
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Date: 2026-03-05 09:08 pm (UTC)