Three more days to Halloween...

I do love Halloween and I also love horror films, but Halloween also seems like the season where imbeciles who have never seen any film at the cinema recently go and see a horror film and bore all us year-round rather than fair-weather horror fans to death about the scary film 'that actually happened'. When teaching once I had to do so much to explain that the Blair Witch was not real, it was just designed to look real, like this year's offering in the OMG! stakes:

It's also a sign of my getting older that an actual vampire, zombie, or Frankenstein's monster would scare me less if they turned up at the door and three actual kids. I would have something in common with these classic movie monsters rather than this actual apathetic grunting violent creatures that would probably hold up a wee phone and terrorize me with shit drum and bass music coming from tiny wee speakers and then stab me in the neck for giving them sweets instead of crack.

I can chart the evolution of my geekdom thusly, loving dinosaurs begat loving dinosaur movies that begat loving science fiction movies and horror films and comics that begat a lonely life, the true actual real world horror. My major teen period of comic buying mid to late 1980s to early 1990s was also my major horror period, but the movies I remember actually watching on Halloween were always a bit apart from my regular Horror film watching: Dracula (1958), Cat's Eye (1985), and Misery (1990) are all films I associate with Halloween purely because of a memory rather than they were 'scary'. I loved Hammer Horror films and was always amazed that my father had actually seen them in the cinema, the Hammer Dracula series was lovingly recorded on VHS and made into makeshift video box sets before could buy amazing artifacts like this.

To an extent one always grows out of horror films, I don't mean their technique or any aspersions on the genre, but the idea of a film being 'scary' is a malleable one. Like Kermode when he used to on about 'extreme' cinema, I would always paraphrase him like 'the film you are about to see is so extreme it'll burn your eyeballs out of your head!'. Once you're and adult and can watch want you want, the teenager idea of sitting through a terrible 18 cert horror film just because it that might have some bosums in it goes out out the window.

Anyway this Halloween I will probably stick with The Exorcist or The Shining, not because they are 'scary movies' but because they fucking awesome movies!