OctoberFest

"Ooh. Gaslight!" --Lorelai Gilmore

The Scranton Witch Project



This has nothing to do with Oktoberfest which mostly takes place in September. Instead, it's all about my favorite month--October! Fall is my favorite season and while September brings intimations of Autumn, October is the real deal. The tomatoes and peaches may be gone by now, but now there's pumpkins and soup and pie. I also love seasonal "harvest" ales and beers--Redhook makes a great one. It's the perfect weather for sweaters and scarves. I love taking long walks on dark, brisk nights. And fall has two of my favorite holidays--Halloween and Thanksgiving. And who doesn't love Halloween?, but without Ellen and my other friends, I doubt this one will be as festive. Ellen and Melissa are the ones who decorate for the holidays--and I would expect nothing less of an elementary school teacher and a daycare worker--but I did not get the interior decorator gay gene. But hopefully I will have enough cool, fun friends by the 31st to have one amazing Halloween party.

So October is also the time for scary movies and books. I would recommend Edith Wharton's short ghost story "All Souls." Harold Bloom calls it the finest ghost story in the language, and it's quite good, though it's actually more about witches than ghosts. Some Hawthorne or Poe may also be called for (though please, "The Raven"?, nevermore). Other scary reads include Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives both by Ira Levin and fairly short. I've decided to try to read Dracula again (I failed the first time, back in high school) this year. I finished the first chapter, but it's quite long and I have this little thing called grad school, so we'll see what happens.

Anyway, on to the movies. Now, I've only recently gotten into scary movies, and I avoid the term "horror" because I generally stay away from slashers and splatter films--also known as "torture porn." I prefer psychological thrillers and ghost movies. My favorite of them all has to be Stanley Kubrick's The Shining which is a classic--everything that can be said about this film has already been done so, but if you haven't seen it then you need to. The Orphanage (or El Orfanato) produced by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) is a superior ghost story and quite terrifying. The Others, in case you somehow still haven't seen it, is a chilling ghost story, but not really scary at all. On the same note, The Skeleton Key is suspenseful and dark but not too intense and actually rather interesting. Last year I finally saw Hitchcock's Psycho and that one is quite creepy. Now the ending is what did it for me rather than the infamous shower scene, which I didn't find particularly frightening. And my last favorite scary movie is Interview with the Vampire. This movie based on the Anne Rice novel also isn't terribly scary, though you may not want to drive in a convertible car after dark, but what I really love is Kirsten Dunst's uncanny portrayal of a grown woman trapped inside a child's body. If you're really into vampires, it's worth checking out. So these are the scary movies I love so far. I've added several films to my Netflix que-u-e for this month, and last night I watched The Innocents with Deborah Kerr adapted from the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw by myself. This is another ghost story, and I was quite scared. The two children, the eponymous innocents, are anything but, and are possibly the creepiest children in film. It's quite old, 1961, but if you're looking for a good ghost movie, I would recommend it.

The other movies I have in my queue for this October include 28 Days Later which is a science-fiction horror film. I haven't seen any zombie movies, and while this may not technically count, I think it's close enough. And Cillian Murphy is creepy enough. Zombieland looks pretty good, but without the zombie genre context, I doubt if I'll really "get it." I also have Misery with Kathy Bates, and everyone I know who's seen this movie swears it's terrifying. And finally I have Les Diaboliques, a French film where a wife and mistress team up to kill their husband/lover only to have the corpse vanish. The Silence of the Lambs is also in my queue, but quite far down the list, and I refuse to watch this movie unless I'm with a bunch of other people and won't have to sleep alone. The Changeling and Alien are both in my in there as well, but it doesn't look like I'll get to them this year.

So, what are your favorite scary films that you like to watch around Halloween?