October is NOT over until I say it is, people. Your light reading recap continues below… Continue reading “The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2025: Deep-Dive Dispatch #2”
The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2025: Deep-Dive Dispatch #2
Tag: Halloween
The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2025: Deep-Dive Dispatch #1
After at least seven years of blog proprietorship and attendant stonewalling, my 31 DAEs of Halloween marathon finally launched in 2022. Affectionately if inadequately recapped a few posts south of here, it proved such a rousing personal success story that it almost immediately became a budding annual concern, one for which I find myself literally waiting with bated breath for the remainder of each year. October was already my favorite month bar none – the convergence of football, weather, and horror movies is located at the very apex of my happy place – and what better way to celebrate it than with gluttonous self-indulgence, a guided tour of the many and varied delights the horror genre has to offer? Continue reading “The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2025: Deep-Dive Dispatch #1”
The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #4
31 days, 31 movies…or so the story goes. Your light reading recap CONCLUDES below:
Continue reading “The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #4”The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #3
31 days, 31 movies…or so the story goes. Your light reading recap continues below:
Continue reading “The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #3”The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #2
31 days, 31 movies…or so the story goes. Your light reading recap continues below:
Continue reading “The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #2”The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #1
Last October marked the happy procession from conceptual daydream to reality of my personally curated month-long horror movie festival, “The 31 DAEs of Halloween”. 31 days, 31 movies, or so the theory goes. A heady mix of old and new, gristle and goo. I had such a blast with the whole thing, even during some particularly trying personal times, that I resolved then and there that the fest should become an annual occurrence. I even marked the occasion by pounding out a bare minimum writeup of notes for all the movies on the program that would also serve as one of my first posts in a year. I was happy to have the record of what I watched for posterity, but that’s really all the 2022 post was good for. I knew I could do better Continue reading “The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2023: Deep-Dive Dispatch #1”
The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2022: A Recap
This Halloween hangover has got legs, I can already tell. How is it that the spooky season has once again slipped through my fingers? Fake blood was spilled by the barrel. Vampires fed and the virginal shed, copious amounts in both cases. Every moon was just as full as your kid’s goody bag. And what a costume they’re wearing, might I say! Verily, I applaud you for raising your children right. While a certain breed of seasonal-affective lunatic, no doubt adorned in tinsel and stinking of eggnog, likely sprung from their long autumn’s nap and began decking every available hall the moment the clock struck November 1, I instead find myself in a rather ruminative mood. Continue reading “The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2022: A Recap”
Movie review: “Halloween Kills” (2021)
“Let him burn! Let him burn!”
Anyone using “Evil Dies Tonight” as a trigger for the Halloween Kills drinking game will either end their evening in a coma or the local morgue. This has been a public service message…
How quickly we forget the unassuming, self-contained majesty of John Carpenter’s Halloween – its brutal simplicity; its penetrating suspense; its authenticity of time, place, and, especially, tone; its utter lack of fat – even, it seems, in the ostensible act of paying it homage. Filmmakers of all skill levels, including Carpenter himself (off and on), have for decades chased the horror classic like a Holy Grail, as if its singular qualities could somehow be bottled and reproduced, let alone quantified. Continue reading “Movie review: “Halloween Kills” (2021)”
Dispatches from the 11th Annual “Shock Around the Clock” 24-hour Horror Marathon
Drexel Theater, Columbus, OH – October 12-13, 2019
“I may seem scary, but I have the heart of a small child…I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
-Robert Bloch, as quoted by Stephen King
There is always something cool going on in this town.
After several years of unproductive hemming and hawing, including missed opportunities beyond my reckoning, 2019 marked my maiden voyage as an attendee of the annual “Shock Around The Clock” horror movie marathon. I couldn’t be happier I finally decided to take the plunge. Celebrating its eleventh year at Columbus, Ohio’s historic Drexel Theater, SATC takes place each October in a single, continuous session starting at noon on the Saturday of Ohio State football’s bye week and ending at or around noon of the next day. Well over 200 bores, ghouls, and children of the night piled into the Drexel and peacefully cohabitated for a festive day of sights, sounds, smells, and screams fit to thrill the living and wake the dead (if we weren’t already at capacity). Continue reading “Dispatches from the 11th Annual “Shock Around the Clock” 24-hour Horror Marathon”
Ranking, dissecting the “Halloween” series
“It’s Halloween. I guess everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”
John Carpenter’s Halloween is no easy (or advisable) act to follow. Heaven knows many have tried. Over forty years, all manner of reverent pretenders, well-intentioned imitators, and outright thieves have approached the throne, even a couple bearing Carpenter’s own tacit seal of approval. The now-eleven official Halloween films feed into a self-writing narrative concerning the blight and bloat of horror’s most lucrative, long-running franchises, and Halloween sits comfortably alongside Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street at the top of any list of genre royalty, whether as the target of praise or scorn. Though, outside of scattered moments in the first movie and its 2018 “sequel”, Halloween has always taken itself with the utmost seriousness, the franchise’s chronic issues with continuity, motivations, and common sense have become something of a running joke. Continue reading “Ranking, dissecting the “Halloween” series”
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