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Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
My brother was the original "left shark"
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
What Lies Beneath (Movie Summary and Review)
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| (2000) 2h 10min |
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
We Lived In A Haunted House
Tales From Connecticut
When I was sixteen, my mom woke up one morning and announced that our house was haunted. There was little doubt. For one thing, my mother is not the sort of woman given to flights of fancy, hallucination or anything of that nature. She's a rock. In addition, the house was built in the 1800s. This all happened where I grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut. Ours wasn't even the oldest house on the street. Roxbury people speak of ghosts without smirking. They're like "Oh yeah, the ghost." Like everybody's got one. We lived with our ghost for about four years. Nobody minded.The Grave
There was some sort of flat stone slab that we found out back in the underbrush. It was probably just an old well, but isn't that kinda creepy on its own? Of course our imaginations led us to "unmarked grave!"
Mom Told Us About The Woman in White
This is how it went.She'd been asleep. She heard a scraping metal sound, and that's what woke her. She thought she might have been hearing an animal outside eating the dog's food, so she got up to chase away whatever-it-was messing with Grover's food dish on the porch. There wasn't any animal, and the dog was snoozing. So then she did a walk-through, as parents are wont to do when they're woken up by a sound at night. Nothing was amiss, so my mom got back into bed. Before settling back into sleep mode, my mom asked Lou, "What time is it?" No answer, so she leaned over Lou to look at the clock on his nightstand. She leaned far over—that's important to know. She explains, "Picture that I left my whole side of the bed open, plenty of room for someone to sit down there. That's what she did." Because when my mom sat back, she startled a tall woman in a white nightgown. "She leapt back, then she sunk to the floor, back against the wall like she was terrified." They locked eyes. We asked, was she transparent? "No, she was solid." The woman in white was tall, too, which my mother says she could tell because when the woman sat on the floor she drew her legs up close, hugging her knees which were right under her chin. As short women, that's something we would both notice about a tall woman with long legs. My mom tried waking up Lou but he couldn't be roused. That's the last thing she remembers until morning. "The second I woke up, I asked your father if he remembers me asking him if he hears Grover's food bowl, and me asking him what time it was," and when he did remember, that made her certain that it wasn't a dream. It was firmly established: she was definitely awake.
The next person my mom told her story to was Eleanor Hurlbut, the lady of the house across the street. A lovely old couple, Eleanor and her husband Alden were multi-generational farmers with a large, well-respected family. Cream of the literal crop, you couldn't find nicer neighbors. And there were a lot of Hurlbuts. There was a street named Hurlbut. My mom and I both loved Eleanor. We visited with Eleanor a lot. When my mom described the Woman in White, Eleanor didn't even stop pouring the tea. She just said, "Now who might that be, hmmmm."At some point, it was suggested that this tall gal was someone named Ruth.
I Told the Warrens
The next person to hear about Ruth was Lorraine Warren, and she heard it from me. I grew up assuming everyone in the world knew about Ed and Lorraine Warren, but I would later find out that it was kind of a Connecticut thing. I met them at The Curtis House (Woodbury, CT) one night when me and a friend went to hear the Warrens speak. During the Q&A, I got up the nerve to ask my question."When my mom saw a ghost in our house, she couldn't wake my father, and he's usually a light sleeper."
Lorraine said that happens, actually. She said the theory was this: when a spirit manifests, it draws the energy from the room, and that's why my father never woke up when my mom was shaking him. Also, Lorraine Warren added, the room might get very cold." Funny she would say that, because there was one bedroom that we didn't use as a bedroom, because it was always cold, even though you could feel the heat if you put your hand directly on the radiator in there. It was the room next to her bedroom, on the other side of the wall where the Woman in White was last seen, and my mom used that room as her closet. She's something of a vintage clothing and accessory maven, and it was suggested that the vintage finery might have encouraged Ruth to make a connection.
Though we weren't afraid of the ghost, to this day, my mom does everything possible to avoid any sort of portal. "I could never do a Ouija Board," she told me matter-of-factly this weekend, "because I know I'm the kind of person they'll seek out." That's what Lorraine Warren advised, too.
Good advice. Don't provoke the spirit realm, because once the portal opens, anything might come through. 👻
Friday, October 5, 2018
The Conjuring (Movie Summary and Review)
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| (2013) 1h 52min |
Backing into a story this way, by having someone relate it to an audience after it's already happened to someone else, is an excellent device for horror, because we subconsciously make a decision about our level of buy-in whenever events are told second-hand. The auditorium scene is a neat twist on the device generally ascribed to Henry James and The Turn of the Screw. Purely from a story structure point of view, all we really know for certain is what the terrified nurses told the Warrens, and what the Warrens told their lecture audience—and some of them are laughing. The Warrens take questions. Someone asks, "What do people call you?" The Warrens look resigned and admit that "kooks" and "wackos" is something people call them, but they prefer demonologists.This intro also assures mischief managed: the doll is no longer a threat and has been hidden "someplace safe." So The Conjuring begins with the Annabelle story, for the moment, over...?
"Oh God, We're In The Middle of Nowhere"
The main action of The Conjuring begins at a large ramshackle house in Rhode Island, with the Perrons, a congenial blue collar family who are relocating from New Jersey because 1971 was so weird. Yes, of course a snotty teenager is mad about the move—as if you even need to ask? Then one daughter finds a creepy antique toy and talks to an invisible playmate, then another daughter is a sleepwalker...haunted! The house is haunted. And because there are so many children, the movie almost rents itself out as a biggest-hits-of-haunting anthology. Even aside from the events that happen to each of these children, there's a metric ton of trope here. In no particular order:
- Dog whines and refuses to come inside the house.
- Dad breaks into a sealed-up door to a hidden basement.
- Mom's body shows mysterious marks and bruises.
- Clocks all stop at the same time every night.
- It's always cold no matter how high the heat is turned up (make a point that it's not the furnace).
- Something smells bad.
- Sheets are suddenly yanked off the bed while people sleep.
- Pictures fall off the wall.
- A music box.
- An antique wardrobe.
- Doors creak open.
- Doors slam shut
- A devoted mother becomes terrified that something horrible is happening in the house and she gets Ed and Lorraine Warren to come over and purge the demon before it's too late.
- The end...?
*It's About Family, Grandpa!
A pause here to talk about a major theme of The Conjuring. "Family" is the fraught centerpiece of this particular haunting, and this theme reverberates from the world of the living (the Warren and Perron families) to the realm of the dead (ghosts) and non-living (demonic spirits). In the world since the Amityville Horror (not the movie, I mean the real-world tale from the original Warren files) we know Lorraine Warren as clairvoyant, and we know her as demon-vanquisher, but we've never seen Lorraine Warren as a mother. Here, Lorraine helps a fraught Carolyn to escape the wrath of dark spirits hell bent on possessing Carolyn and turning her from loving mom to murderous madwoman. Two families, that means two devoted mothers who become terrified that something horrible is happening in her house, and one of them is Lorraine Warren, well-played here by Vera Farmiga. And doesn't the other mother just happen to be perpetually-haunted Lily Taylor as Carolyn Perron.
*I am poking nerdy fun. "It's about family, grandpa!" is an unforgivably corny haunted-Lily Taylor line from another movie entirely, The Haunted. I couldn't resist using it here, because...Lily Taylor!
Fast-Forward This Review
Tell you what. I'm sure there's loads of super-detailed reviews penned by stronger souls than mine, and any number of scene-by-scene video essays to provide you with the full-tilt-boogie effect of following The Conjuring story lines as concurrent, past and future events unfold, merge and play out through to the end of this chapter, for "chapter" it is! Because behold! The Conjuring is a franchise, and it's growing fast, so it looks like **we'll have this thing around for as long as we've had The Amityville Horror, with loads of prequels, sequels, and spins-off.
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| **Generation X knows no world without 112 Ocean Ave. |
The Warren Effect
Okay, I'd heard The Conjuring described as the most chilling movie since The Exorcist, that's one reason I put it on the list this month. The other reason is that I'm an easy sell on any Ed and Lorraine Warren story however heavily fictionalized. I'm from Connecticut. The Warrens were like, a whole thing. They're legendary. Their case files have been used as source material for loads of books and movies, most famously The Amityville Horror. Still, I'm kind of a hard sell on forsaking plot for scares, that is to say, when "story" falls apart the minute you stop watching through your fingers, and this Conjuring story seems incredibly dense. There's more than one thing doing the haunting. There's a witch, there's a demon, some ghosts...and what about that doll?! My initial reaction was that the whole movie churns to the point where it's distracting to keep track of which witch, what demon, who is this ghost, is that a ghost or what IS it, and wasn't there something about a doll in the beginning...? That's my initial reaction until I remind myself that, actually the franchise aspect means that of course there will be un-answered questions. In a franchise, they can close those loops in the next movie, or in the one after that.
- Why does Lorraine tell the young nurses that spirits don't possess things, when she's got a huge storeroom in her house with a lot of possessed things in it?
- If those nurses said the doll was moving all around their apartment, even came back once after they tried throwing it in the trash, how come Ed thinks it's "safe" in a glass display case in a locked room that his daughter seems to sneak into any time she feels like it?
- If Ed views his primary role as debunking (finding a logical explanation for) weird goings-on, why does he start right out telling the Perrons such terrifying things the minute he steps into their house before he even entertains any logical explanations first?