Scary Movie Night: The Recap (Part I)

*Will become important later*

We finally ended up having our Scary Movie Night.  Although it was still not particularly scary, it was a lot of fun, and I'm hoping to do it again.  Surprisingly, one of the most important things I learned from movie night was that it's always best to watch scary movies with other people (more about that in Part II).  This is especially true if you have access to a unicorn: the coward who is willing to watch them with you.  For me, this was my sister.  We watched a mixed of movies and "true" haunted house TV episodes, some of which I had already seen (but she hadn't) and some of which were new to both of us.  Since we watched three movies and two TV episodes, I'm going to split my recap into two parts.  So, without further ado, here is Part I.

Our first movie was The Blair Witch Project.  I had already seen this movie, but it was back when it had first come out. (Can you believe it was 15 years ago?!  That might have been the scariest part of the movie.)  I didn't remember much about it, and my sister had never seen it, but she had read a synopsis of it a couple years ago.  We chose this movie because, however you may personally feel about it, it is iconic.  It really started the found-footage genre, which I am a fan of because these movies tend to go light on the special effects.  Like I mentioned in my last post, sometimes not seeing the monster is the scariest part about a movie because the monster simply cannot live up to the hype.  Movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity deftly use their relatively minuscule budgets (budgets too small for any big, demonic reveal) to keep their scares mainly psychological.

There have been so many imitations and parodies of The Blair Witch Project that it's difficult to watch it with a clear mind.  The creepiest parts are so well known, that you can now home in on some of the less-great aspects of the film.  For example, I think I speak for everyone when I say: why the hell did that one guy kick the map into the river?  I had forgotten about that part, and with 15 years to consider it, it still feels forced.  It makes absolutely no sense.  It happens before they all start going crazy, and it's never implied that the witch can possess people.  This is a perfect example of how no explanation is almost always better than a half-assed one.  It would have made perfect sense within the universe of the film to have the map simply disappear.  So few of the mysterious occurrences in the film are explained - this one would have fit right in.  Instead we get a guy who believes that misreading a map once renders the map useless in the future...?

The creepiest thing about this movie was this
completely unnecessary clown.

We also watched Poltergeist, which we mostly chose because it was a classic and neither of us had ever seen it.  This movie was just way too much.  We laughed far more often than we jumped, although, admittedly, a lot of that was likely from the early 1980s special effects.  Also, we both felt that everyone seemed a little too...okay with the fact that this house was being haunted by just all of the ghosts.  I guess you can attribute a lot of it to shock, but the way everyone was just chilling in the house ("just avoid the portal to hell upstairs, no biggie") and seemed more exasperated by the ghosts than anything else was a little off-putting.  My sister was particularly concerned about the little boy, who after being almost eaten by a tree, did not seem to get the emotional support from his parents that is so often necessary for the nearly-eaten-by-a-tree individual.

The fact that the house was built on an old cemetery was creepy, particularly because I could totally imagine a shady corporation saving a few bucks by relocating headstones and leaving the bodies behind.  Also, the skulls popping up in the in-progress pool were not pretty.  However, the climax quickly became ridiculous when the characters couldn't walk two steps without a skeleton lunging at their heads, riding their coffins like bobsleds.  (It is worth noting that the producers of the movie apparently chose to use real human remains as props in the film, leading to the Poltergeist Curse: "four of the trilogy's actors all died within 6 years of the first movie."  Obviously, this adds a more sinister sheen to the final scenes.)

It was because of this movie, though, that I introduced my sister to the wonderful Does the Dog Die website (doesthedogdie.com).  People are dispensable in horror films, which is perfectly understandable; we go into the theater expecting at least a few of them to bite the dust.  Usually, this is not a problem because people, particularly the people in horror films, tend to suck.  But dogs are just happy balls of sunshine that never did anything to hurt anybody.  When the dog dies, you know that some serious shit is going down.  If this possibility is just too much for you (for example, if you're one of those people who will dive, screaming, to get the remote whenever "Jurassic Bark" or one of those damn Sarah McLachlan commercials come on), this handy site will tell you if the dog (or other pet) dies in any particular movie.  You'll be happy to know that, in Poltergeist, "The dog, E-Buzz, does not die and is never in danger." Phew.

Join me (hopefully) tomorrow with my take on The Orphanage and the Paranormal Witness series.