Geek Punditry #145: What Makes an Icon?

October 10, 2025 blakemp Geek Punditry A Nightmare on Elm Street, Army of Darkness, Art the Clown, Child's Play, Chucky, Costumes, dracula, Evil Dead, frankenstein, Freddy Kruger, Friday the 13th, Ghostbusters, Ghostface, Halloween, invisible man, It, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Michael Myers, Mummy, Pennywise, Scream, Stephen King, Terrifier, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Universal Monsters, Wolfman

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, famously said he believes one of the keys to an iconic cartoon character design is whether the character is recognizable just from their silhouette. Think about it – if you show pretty much anybody anywhere in the world the mouse-ear shape, they’ll instantly recognize Mickey Mouse. The same can be said for characters like SpongeBob Squarepants, Phineas and Ferb, Bugs Bunny, and a lot of the other cartoon all-stars. And Groening himself is legendary for utilizing this tactic with the signature nine spikes on Bart Simpson’s head or the trademark antenna on the top of Futurama’s robot character Bender Bending Rodriguez. But as insightful as this piece of wisdom is, I don’t think it applies only to cartoons. In truth, any truly great design should have elements that make it instantly recognizable. And with Halloween only three weeks away, this week I’m going to help you all make your costuming decisions by applying this reasoning to horror movie icons.

Of course, the silhouette isn’t the only thing that makes for a horror icon. There are several factors to take into consideration. The overall design, in addition to just the silhouette, needs to be memorable. The characters themselves should be interesting and unique. A character should be popular enough that people will recognize them and you won’t have to spend the entire Halloween party explaining what your costume is. And when you’re talking about Halloween costumes, above all else, they should be fun to play. So let’s go over some of the all-time great horror movie icons and see just how they stack up to this metric before you suit up for your Halloween party.

We’re gonna start old-school with the Universal Monsters. The great thing about these characters is that they are all INSTANTLY recognizable, even to children who were born 90 years after the movies were released and have never seen any of them. Characters like Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Invisible Man are all based on classic literature and are not Universal originals, but when you ask somebody to picture them, they invariably envision the versions popularized by Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Claude Rains, respectively. In fact, those designs are all copyrighted (at least for the next few years). If you were to make a movie about Frankenstein, you couldn’t give your monster the flattop or neck-bolts, because those are all owned by Universal Studios even though the monster himself isn’t. So these classic horrors all meet the standard of memorability and recognizability. The only caveat comes with the Mummy and the Wolfman. Although those are, of course, classic monsters, the designs here (while still amazing for the time) aren’t as immediately attributable to the Universal designs specifically. It’s very easy to mistake Im-Ho-Tep or Larry Talbot for a generic mummy or werewolf. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with being a generic werewolf. But if you want to be the Lon Chaney Jr. Wolfman specifically, you may need something like a silver wolf-headed cane as an accessory to drive the point home.

I don’t think even a mother could love that face.

The 70s and 80s gave us our next great wave of horror movie icons, and many of them have persevered. Leatherface, the killer from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was probably the first great iconic character of the era. He’s got an easily-identifiable apron, a mask made of human skin, and – of course – a chainsaw to whip around his intended victims. He arguably started the trend of slasher movie icons that would explode in popularity in later years. He wouldn’t necessarily be my first choice to cosplay as, however. To be blunt, his appearance is a lot scarier than some of his successors. That’s not always a deal-breaker, of course, but you have to consider your audience. I’m a dad, and if I’m going to any sort of Halloween event there’s a 99 percent chance that there will be children in attendance. Leatherface is immediately frightening in a way that even the likes of Freddy and Jason are not. Of course, if you’re going to an adults-only event or to something like a horror convention, that’s less of a concern, but you should always keep in mind who’s going to see your costume. There’s also his signature weapon to consider. Having a prop to use as part of your costume is a plus, but you have to remember that you’re going to be keeping track of the thing all night long. Do you really want to spend the entire party looking for places to put your chainsaw?

Michael Myers from Halloween is a really simple costume – all you need is a jumpsuit and a mask. A bladed weapon is recommended, but optional. And that’s all it will take to be a character that 99 percent of people will recognize whether they’ve ever seen one of his movies or not. The question now becomes: how dedicated are you to staying in character? Michael is a silent killer. He stalks and he tracks you like an unstoppable monolith, and he never says a word. The closest thing you get to an emotion from him is when he tilts his head quizzically to look at the victim he’s just pinned to the wall. If you’re the type of costumer who enjoys not only dressing up, but also embodying the character that you’re playing (minus the actual murder part, of course), you have to be prepared to spend the evening being very restrained, slow, and deliberate with your movements. It’s not a dealbreaker, but you should definitely check if four out of five dentists recommend Michael Myers or somebody else.

“Yeah, I slept on Mario Lemieux’s couch for like six months after I got drafted…”

Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th has a similar concern. Again, the costume is pretty simple – virtually any ragged, ratty slacks and shirt will be suitable as his clothing, and an easy-to-aquire mask and machete will complete the ensemble. And as far as iconic characters go, I would say that Jason is perhaps even more recognizable to the general public than Michael Myers is. Michael has a William Shatner mask that’s spray-painted white, but almost ANY hockey mask will evoke feelings of Jason. Like Michael, Jason doesn’t talk. Unlike Michael, though, he’s much faster and more brutal, expressing his emotion through his actions rather than words. It can be a fun part to play depending on how willing you are to commit.

The absolute worst dream analyst in the phone book.

The great slasher triumvirate is completed with Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Iconic, indeed. Everybody knows Freddy on sight, with his classic red-and-green sweater, fedora, and bladed glove. The tricky thing with Freddy is his face. The character is a burn victim, and although he’s so ubiquitous in pop culture that I don’t really have the same concerns about him being too scary for kids that I have with Leatherface, the burns present a different problem. You see, Freddy – unlike Jason or Michael – is a talker. His quick, dark sense of humor is integral to the character, and if you’re gonna dress up like Freddy you’re going to want to throw out bon mots all night long, with an emphasis on extra “bitch”es should you encounter anybody at the party dressed like Rick and Morty. If you wear a Freddy mask, though, that talkiness becomes more difficult and cumbersome. Wearing a rubber mask makes it more difficult for people to understand what you’re saying, and actually speaking under the mask increases the temperature beneath the rubber roughly ten degrees per “bitch.” If you live in a climate like I do in Louisiana, that ten degrees may be the difference between life or death. The alternative to a mask is makeup, which can be time-consuming, difficult to apply, and easy to mess up. Please understand, I’m not saying any of this to discourage someone from playing Freddy – I just want to point out some of the possible concerns that come with such a costume.

“Chuck, look, I’ve thought it over and… well… I’ve decided that, no, I do NOT want to play.”

The last great slasher icon of the 80s is probably Chucky from the Child’s Play franchise. When my son was five years old, we took him to Spirit Halloween and we toured all the costumes before finally asking him which one he wanted. He jumped in delight and exclaimed “CHUCKY JUMPSUIT!” I actually took out my phone and recorded him saying it because I knew nobody would ever believe he picked it on his own.

My wife Erin and I are both horror movie fans, but we’re not idiots – our five-year-old son had never seen any of the Child’s Play movies, and the 8-year-old he is now STILL hasn’t seen any of them. But that doesn’t matter – Chucky is one of those ubiquitous characters that even kids recognize. His bright blue overalls and multicolor sweater, a shock of red hair, and freckles across his nose all give us a nice, friendly image that kids enjoy. That is, of course, the point of the character – he’s a child’s doll that is possessed by the spirit of a serial killer, so of COURSE his image is something that would be appealing to children. However, this also leads to a problem: it’s hard to wear this costume as an adult without coming across as creepy, and not in the right way. Five-year-old Eddie was the most adorable little serial killer ever, but if a 35-year-old puts on the jumpsuit, he needs to be DARN sure he’s got a receptive audience before he shows up, or he’s going to be getting strange looks all night.

Not every horror icon is a villain, of course. Ash Williams, Bruce Campbell’s hero from the Evil Dead franchise, is another solid costume choice. Most of the costume is relatively simple too – slacks, a blue shirt, a bandolier, and some blood splattered across your face. The most iconic part of Ash’s appearance, though, is the most difficult: in Evil Dead 2, Ash’s hand becomes possessed by a Deadite and he is forced to amputate it, then top off the stump with a chainsaw. Now you’ve got all the same problems as cosplaying Leatherface with the added difficulty of finding a way to keep a chainsaw attached to your hand all night. Alternatively, you could go with Ash from the third film, Army of Darkness, in which he replaces the chainsaw with a mechanical hand. It’s certainly easier than the chainsaw, but it’s FAR less iconic and less likely to be recognized. And honestly, even WITH the chainsaw, Ash doesn’t have the cultural penetration of a Freddy or a Jason. If you’re wearing the costume to a horror convention, people will know you immediately, but for the office Halloween party, be prepared to explain your costume over and over again.

Greenscreen backdrop of an 80s New York skyline sold separately.

Of course, as far as 80s monster movie heroes go, there’s nothing more iconic than the Ghostbusters. This has become a classic choice for a Halloween costume because it ticks all the boxes: it’s simple, it’s recognizable, and it’s fun. You need two things: a jumpsuit with a Ghostbusters patch and a name tag, and a proton pack. The jumpsuit is readily available in any costume shop and easy to make if you’re so inclined. The proton pack is more difficult, but there are inflatable ones that are lightweight and are usually included with commercial costumes, or more expensive and detailed ones that you can buy or assemble yourself. It’s also a highly adaptable costume. There are the classic khaki jumpsuits from the first movie, the gray variants from Ghostbusters II, the 2016 jumpsuits, multicolored costumes from The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, the red parkas from the Frozen Empire movie, versions from other cartoons, video games, toys…the list goes on. And fans often come up with their own original variants and designs. In fact, similar to the 501st Stormtrooper Legion (a Star Wars fan collective that has expanded far beyond just cosplay to things like public appearances and charity work), there are Ghostbusters chapters all over the world of fans who enjoy this sort of thing. I don’t have the time, talent, or money to be a really good cosplayer, but I’ve always said that if I DID have the opportunity to join such a group, it would be the Louisiana Ghostbusters.

“Stabbity-Stab-Stab-Stab!” -Ghostface in *Scream 7*, probably.

Moving on from the 80s, let’s look at the most iconic horror character of the 90s: Ghostface. The killer from the Scream movies is unique in that the costume is the only constant – a different set of villains wears it in every movie. In fact, over the six Scream movies to date, over a dozen different characters have donned the mask to engage in murderous shenanigans. But this lack of uniformity hasn’t been an obstacle for Ghostface becoming an icon – in fact, it’s probably the STRENGTH behind it. More so than any other character, anybody can wear the Ghostface mask.

It’s also unique in that the costume itself didn’t actually originate with the movies. It was part of a line of Halloween masks produced by a company called Fun World. Director Wes Craven liked the mask, put the character in black robes, and entered into a licensing deal with Fun World that has had them rolling in cash for nearly 30 years now. Not everybody may know the name “Ghostface,” of course, but we all recognize “the guy from Scream.” A few weeks ago my sister told me that my 11-year-old nephew – who is even less likely to have seen the movies than my 5-year-old was, because my sister is NOT a horror fan – has declared his intention to be Ghostface for Halloween this year. I’m very proud as an uncle and I can’t wait to see him when my sister and I take our kids trick-or-treating together. I just wish the boys had collaborated on being movie killers in the same year, because that would have been cute. (Eddie isn’t going as a murderer this year – he wants to be Superman. This is the proudest moment of my entire life.)

Since the turn of the century there have been several efforts at creating new horror icons. And while characters like Victor Crowley of the Hatchet franchise, Trick ‘r Treat’s Sam, and Leslie Vernon of the woefully underrated Behind the Mask are great and have many of the trademarks that make for a classic icon, the only recent monsters that have reached the degree of cultural penetration that the classics enjoy are a pair of clowns.

In 2017 we got a theatrical version of Stephen King’s It. The first dramatization of It, a TV miniseries from 1990, featured Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown, and he was magnificent. Curry in general is magnificent, of course, and his makeup as Pennywise is suitably creepy when Tim Curry is wearing it. But Bill Skarsgard from the 2017 version – let’s be honest here – has broken into the mainstream in a way that Tim Curry’s never quite did. The design of the makeup is creepier, and Skarsgard’s performance is unsettling in a more insidious way. A lot of people would recognize you if you dressed as Tim Curry’s Pennywise, but EVERYBODY recognizes the Skarsgard version. Either version is relatively easy to cosplay – you need the costume and the wig, which are readily available. Skarsgard’s makeup is more complicated, though, and if you don’t want to subject yourself to the same masking problems you’d have with Freddy, make sure that you – or someone you trust – is capable of making that transformation.

The most recent character to break into the echelon of horror icons, though, is probably Art the Clown of the Terrifier franchise. Art was originally played by Mike Giannelli in a series of short films and anthology segments, but Giannelli retired from acting and the role was taken over by David Howard Thornton for the first full-length Terrifier film in 2016. A malevolent clown with a stark black-and-white costume and makeup that is immediately recognizable, Art has risen to iconic status faster than anybody since Ghostface. As far as horror icons go, Art is perhaps the darkest, most brutal, most sadistic character ever to crack into the public consciousness. He’s more violent, more aggressive, and while the voiceless beast DOES still have a sense of humor, it’s so dark that it makes the likes of Freddy Krueger look like an episode of Bluey by comparison.

Naturally, he’s become a huge favorite among horror fans.

In terms of costuming, again, Art is relatively easy. Costumes and masks are available, and since Art doesn’t talk you don’t have to worry about being muffled. On the other hand, makeup is more expressive and less restrictive than a mask, so if you’ve got the skill (or someone with the skill to help you) I would always prefer the makeup approach. Something else to consider is that Art – while huge among horror fans – is not necessarily someone that the average person on the street will recognize, at least not YET. On the other hand, even if your audience doesn’t know ART the Clown, the general appearance of the character is more than sufficient to give the idea that this is NOT a funny clown, and the mystique is preserved.

There are plenty of other characters that we didn’t quite touch on, of course, and you should always go with whatever is comfortable and fun for you. Hopefully I’ve given you a few tools you can use to evaluate your own costume choices when you’re making the decision. You’ve got three weeks left, folks – get started.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Since Eddie is Superman this year, he’ll be wearing his own Kryptonian pajamas come Halloween night. Scary can wait.

Geek Punditry #136: Under Suspension

August 8, 2025 blakemp Geek Punditry A Nightmare on Elm Street, back to the future, How I Met Your Mother, Mel Brooks, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Star Trek, superman, Suspension of Disbelief

A few weeks ago, San Diego Comic-Con happened once again and…well, once again, I wasn’t there. It’s kind of a little tradition of mine. Comic-Con happens and I stay at home. Like many storied, time-honored traditions, it kinda sucks. So I instead spent that weekend waiting for the news to trickle out online. There wasn’t anything major this year, nothing that knocked my socks off, no “Robert Downey Jr. is Doctor Doom” moments. There were, however, trailers. I love a good trailer, those little short films that give us a taste of an upcoming movie or TV show. They’re becoming a dying art, really, with so many trailers either failing to give you any excitement or – much worse – giving away half the thrill and excitement of the movie itself too early. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Project Hail Mary, for example, then I beg you in the name of all that is good and holy DON’T watch it. It gives away one of the best reveals in the book.

Specifically, the fact that Ryan Gosling copies Guy Gardner’s haircut.

But the trailer that I’ve seen the most online chatter about had nothing to do with plot reveals, special effects, or the performances of the actors involved. No, the most talked-about trailer this year seems to have been the teaser for the upcoming Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series on Paramount+. Here’s all you need to know: Starfleet Academy takes place further along in the timeline than most of the Trek shows and movies that we’ve grown to love over the past six decades. In this time period, the Federation almost collapsed due to certain catastrophic events and it’s now in a rebuilding stage. This series is about the rebirth of the Academy, and the scene that has everybody talking is one in which we catch a glimpse of what appears to be some sort of Wall of Honor, adorned with the names of legendary Starfleet personnel. Ambassador Spock. Admiral Jean-Luc Picard. Lieutenant Nog. There are names on this wall from virtually every iteration of Star Trek to date. This one scene has had people freeze-framing it more than any single scene since Fast Times at Ridgemont High, trying to read all the names on the board to see who amongst our favorite Star Trek characters made the cut. I seriously doubt that this wall will have any great significance to the plot of the series, but it’s a fun Easter Egg for those of us who have loved Trek for so many years.

Barclay better be on that wall or we riot.

In one of the (many) online discussions I’ve seen about this scene, though, there was one dissenting voice that I found perplexing. This person, whom I am paraphrasing, basically expressed irritation that all of the characters that we’ve watched over the years turned out to be so remarkable. Statistically, they seem to think, not EVERY character should turn out to be some kind of legendary figure.

This person has got it completely backwards.

My reply was simply this: “It’s not that every character we watch has turned out to be remarkable. It’s that we are only watching them in the first place BECAUSE they are remarkable.”

This is one of those times where I engage in a discussion online over something that I always thought was blindingly obvious, only to learn that not everybody sees it my way (also known as the correct way). There are hundreds, maybe thousands of ships in Starfleet. Of course not EVERY ship and EVERY crew is going to turn out to be the one that makes it into the history books. But doesn’t it stand to reason that those boring, mundane crews are simply not the ones that we get to hear the stories about? In other words, the histories of the Enterprises, Voyager, or station Deep Space Nine aren’t remarkable because those are the crews we follow. We follow them because they ARE the remarkable crews.

This is the case with fiction across the board. We aren’t tuning in to a movie or a TV show to watch the adventures of some average, everyday schlub. There are exceptions, of course – “slice of life” dramas and comedies do just this, and sometimes they do it very well. But in the case of an adventure series like Star Trek, you’re following the exploits of the characters that make history. They even tried to subvert this expectation with the animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks. The idea behind it was that we were going to FINALLY follow the adventures of an unimportant crew on an unimportant ship. And what happened? It turned out that they weren’t all that unimportant after all, and if anything, Lower Decks winds up reading as the origin story for the next one of these legendary crews.

Suspension of disbelief is an important aspect of enjoying fiction. There has to be a willingness, as a member of the audience, to accept certain things that you are aware may defy reality. In the case of speculative fiction – sci-fi, fantasy, and certain types of horror – that means that you have to maybe ignore certain laws of physics. Yeah, Einstein said that we can’t go faster than light, but if we didn’t find a way to do it then there would be no Star Trek, so I’m gonna let that one slide. Quantum mechanics says that the way time travel works in Back to the Future is utterly impossible, but until quantum mechanics can give me something as awesome as Alan Silvestri’s score, quantum mechanics can bite me. Is there really such a thing as a creature that can hide inside your dreams and attack you? Probably not, but A Nightmare on Elm Street wouldn’t be nearly as scary without him.

Those are the big things, though, and when it comes to suspension of disbelief, people are oddly MORE accepting of the big things. What about the little things? There’s an old saying that in real life we expect the unexpected, but in fiction we don’t stand for it. Major, life-changing events have to be the REASON for a story, not something that simply happens IN the story. Think of it this way: if a character in a movie wins the lottery, that usually happens at the beginning of the movie, and the rest of the story is about what happens to them as a result. But if a character in a movie is in some sort of desperate situation – maybe he’s spent half the movie running from the mob because he owes them a fortune and they’re gonna break his kneecaps – and THEN he wins the lottery, the audience considers it a cheat. The suspension of disbelief breaks down here, even though the odds of a person winning the lottery are – mathematically speaking – exactly the same at the beginning of a story as they would be at any other point. I’ll accept a lottery win as the inciting incident, but if a random lottery win is what saves the day, that’s a modern deus ex machina, the “god in the machine.” It comes from those times in Greek drama where a character would be rescued by – literally – one of the gods intervening to get them out of a jam, and even back then it pissed off the ancient Greeks so much that they invented machinery just so they would have a term to use to complain about it.

It doesn’t have to just be good things either – tragedy can break your suspension of disbelief too. There are a lot of tearjerkers about somebody battling an incurable disease, and we’re okay with that, because that’s what the story is about. On the other hand, if somebody spontaneously develops such a disease in the middle of a story without any prior warning, audiences will consider it cop-out. Why? In real life, people can get sick at any time, so why NOT when it’s convenient for the plot?

Because “convenient” is enough to break the reality of the fiction.

The rule is basically this: major life-changing events (either good or bad) either have to happen at the beginning of the story or be the consequences of the actions in the story, but they cannot happen randomly in the middle or end of the story or the audience won’t stand for it.

The one exception here – and even this one is iffy sometimes – is when you’ve got a long-running serialized story like a television or comic book series. When you’re following characters for years at a time, eventually a random event will occur, and the audience will be a bit more accepting of it. For example, the death of Marshall’s father in the series How I Met Your Mother came out of nowhere, but that episode is considered one of the most powerful, emotionally-resonant moments of the entire series. It’s something that hits the audience hard, forcing us to process the grief and pain of the character along with him. (The story goes that actor Jason Siegel didn’t know what the end of that episode was going to be until they filmed it, so when Allyson Hannigan delivers her line, telling him that his father died, his response is entirely genuine and his final line was a perfect ad-lib: “I’m not ready for this.)

People cried just as hard for the finale, but for…different reasons.

In a comedy, suspension of disbelief is allowed to go even farther. In a farce like The Naked Gun, for example, things routinely happen that make it feel more like you’re watching a cartoon than a live-action film, and the audience is perfectly satisfied. Nobody complained in the end of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles when Hedley Lamarr bought a ticket to a movie theater showing…Blazing Saddles. And Mystery Science Theater 3000 even wove the concept of Suspension of Disbelief into its THEME SONG: “If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts, just repeat to yourself, ‘It’s just a show, I should really just relax’.”

On the other hand, if that disbelief is suspended too long, there’s a temptation to try to work things into the story to justify the extraordinary. For instance, for decades there was a running commentary about how Clark Kent’s glasses wouldn’t fool anybody and that everyone would quickly realize he’s Superman. Eventually, the writers felt that it needed to be addressed to maintain the suspension of disbelief. Some writers said that he slouches as “Clark,” or changes his voice and mannerisms. Sometimes they actually have him attend acting classes specifically to learn how to do this. Sometimes the lenses are made out of special glass (usually from the ship that brought him from Krypton) that either changes the color of his eyes or – in the most extreme case – has a hypnotic effect on the people who look at him, making them see a different face. James Gunn even alluded to that in his movie, although a lot of people thought it was just a typical Gunnian joke, not realizing it was a legitimate piece of comic book lore.

I love it when intergalactic spacecraft crashes to Earth and the shattered remains of the windshield have two pieces that perfectly correspond to my frames.

We don’t read or watch fiction – for the most part – looking for ordinary things. We want to follow the adventures of extraordinary people or, at the very least, ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Stephen King fans (this is me raising my hand in the back of the room) will tell you that’s his great strength: the ability to create a realistic character and then show how they respond to circumstances that no realistic character could possibly have prepared themself for. And to be fair, a certain amount of analysis and nit-picking is acceptable when you’re discussing great works of fiction (or even awful works of fiction).

But eventually, when somebody online says something like, “Why don’t people in Gotham City ever realize that Bruce Wayne is the only one with the money to be Batman?” The proper response is simply, “Because the story wouldn’t work otherwise, so just get over it.”

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He, too, would like to wear hypno-glasses, but in his case he would just use it to make his students see him as Yoda.

Geek Punditry #92: The Spectrum of Horror and Comedy

October 4, 2024October 4, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry A Nightmare on Elm Street, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Addams Family, Army of Darkness, Art the Clown, Beetlejuice, Bugs Bunny, Cabin in the Woods, Child's Play, Chucky, comedy, Ernest Scared Stupid, Evil Dead, Freddy Krueger, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Hatchet, Horror Movies, Munsters, Phineas and Ferb, Tales From the Crypt, Terrifier, Victor Crowley

If there need be any further evidence that Hollywood executives frequently don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing, let’s talk about the fact that they seem to be afraid of horror/comedy hybrid movies. ‘It’s confusing,” they will tell you, pulling their hair out over a movie like Behind the Mask or Happy Death Day. “We don’t know how to market this! Who is it for? Is it supposed to be a horror movie or a comedy?” Whereas the answer is obvious to anyone smarter than a movie executive, which is a very large part of the Venn Diagram, and includes virtually all horror movie fans: it’s both. Horror and comedy BELONG together. They are a natural combination, the peanut butter and chocolate in the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of the movie industry, and the notion that there are people who don’t understand that is maddening to me.

Admittedly, humor and terror seem to be on the two extremes of the emotional spectrum, but that’s one of the reasons they compliment each other so well. Another reason is that, structurally speaking, they are very similar to one another. Both of these styles of storytelling are built upon creating an emotional response in the audience, and both of these responses are constructed through the careful buildup and release of tension. In fact, if separated from context, it might be impossible to tell if a scene is intended to be funny or scary until the punchline hits and the audience either laughs or screams, because until that point they can be virtually identical. A funny movie can turn on a dime if an expected laugh turns into a scare, and the dread of a scary movie can be decreased to a manageable level by a well-timed joke.

The horror/comedy combo is one of my favorites in all of storytelling, but there is a spectrum that these movies and stories exist on. Some of them lean heavier towards the comedy side, some more on the horror, and it’s fair if you prefer one side more than the other. But for the sake of discussion, this week I thought it would be useful to go over what I think of as the five levels on the horror/comedy spectrum and give some examples of each. We’ll start on the more comedy-heavy side.

Level one is where I place the mildest iteration of horror/comedy, where the emphasis is on the comedy. This is usually pretty lighthearted, and more often than not it’s family friendly. It usually has the TRAPPINGS of horror: haunted houses, ghosts, monsters, and pretty much anything else you would consider acceptable in an elementary school Halloween decoration, but there is rarely (if ever) a legitimate attempt at scaring people with this. The classic examples here are the legendary sitcoms The Addams Family and The Munsters. People will argue until the end of time as to which one was better (as far as the original TV show goes, that is – there can be no debate that the Addamses have superior movies), but whether you’re a Gomez Guy or a Lilly Lover, these two franchises are about as close to G-rated as horror gets. There are more recent entries into the category as well, like the Hotel Transylvania movies and underrated movie Igor, and a lot of family cartoons and sitcoms shift into this for Halloween episodes, often seen on the likes of Roseanne, Home Improvement, or Phineas and Ferb.

It’s worth pointing out here that, again, I’m calling this a spectrum, and even these five subcategories have different levels. Technically, I would place Beetlejuice here as well (the original, at least, I haven’t seen the sequel yet), because I don’t think that the movie is ever actually intended to be scary. However, it’s obvious that the movie is more intense than the adventures of the Addamses and the Munsters, and thus if it IS a Level One, it’s towards the high end of the spectrum. A 1.9, perhaps.

On the second level, I place those stories in which the situations are relatively serious, but the characters themselves are funny and react to the scary moments in funny ways. Ghostbusters is the classic example of this. The ghosts aren’t played for laughs (not usually, at least, especially not in the first film), and some of the things could actually be legitimately frightening, such as the first appearance of the Library Ghost. But the behavior and antics of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson are very funny and keep you from feeling any legitimate terror. Even when it looks like a Sumarian Deity is about to curb-stomp the city of New York, you know that Venkman is going to have a wisecrack to defuse the situation. Another of my favorite films, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, falls into this category. The classic Universal Monsters are there, and Lon Chaney Jr. (the Wolf-Man), Glenn Strange (Frankenstein’s Monster) and Bela Lugosi (Count Dracula himself) all play their roles perfectly straight, as if they’re in one of their solo adventures and trying to chill the spines of the audience. But with Lou Costello freaking out over a candle and Bud Abbott doing his impression of everybody who never sees Michigan J. Frog singing, there’s no real sense of danger. The blend of master monster performers and master comedians is never more evident than in this film.

Other works that are typically family-friendly but where the villains have the POTENTIAL to cause actual harm fit in here as well. Hocus Pocus and The Nightmare Before Christmas fall into that category, as do certain classic cartoons such as the Bugs Bunny short Transylvannia 6-5000. I struggled a bit with one of my other favorite Halloween movies, Ernest Scared Stupid, trying to figure out if it belongs here or level one. Ultimately, I’m placing it here, because there are kids (the intended audience) who might find the trolls actually frightening, and they’re trying to do bad things. It’s only through the intercession of American hero Ernest P. Worrell that they’re stopped in time. Yes, that means I’m giving Ernest a higher rating than Beetlejuice, but my metric is how scared the INTENDED audience might be, and I’m sticking with it.

Level three stories have a fair balance between the horror and the comedy. Parts of the film may feel like you’re watching a scary movie, other parts feel like a pure comedy, and when this is done well there is no discrepancy felt by the audience. These two styles of storytelling just match each other very well. Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods is a great example of this. We start out with what looks like some sort of bland, white-collar office comedy, then cut to a bunch of teenagers getting drawn into what appears to be a very stereotypical slasher movie. But the creeps start to claw their way into the office setting, while the events in the titular cabin turn out to be funnier than you would expect, and by the time we get to the full-on collision of the two settings and you come to understand what one has to do with the other, we’ve got a great blend of the two that maintains pretty much throughout the rest of the film.

We often see this type of balance, by the way, in later films in a franchise. It’s not unusual to see a relatively serious horror movie get zanier in the sequels. Gremlins 2 is one of my favorite examples of this. The first film has its humorous moments, but the sequel really leans into absurdity, with the monsters taking different forms and playing out scenes as though they fell out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The result is a movie that many fans even prefer to the original. Another good example of this is Army of Darkness, the third movie in the Evil Dead trilogy. The first movie is pure horror, almost nothing funny about it. The sequel, Evil Dead 2, is still very dark, but brings in enough comedic elements to earn it a spot on my spectrum. (That spot is in Level Five, and we’ll get to that soon enough.) But in Army of Darkness, Sam Raimi decided to let Bruce Campbell’s comedic skills and charm really shine through, resulting in a movie that is very different, tonally, from the rest of the franchise, but like Gremlins 2 is a favorite of a large number of fans.

Level Four is where things are getting a lot darker. These are films that are primarily horror movies, but movies that have a twisted sense of humor, and that often comes down to the villain of the franchise. We see this most clearly, I think, with A Nightmare on Elm Street. You’ve got a dead child killer who has the ability to enter and attack you through your dreams, which is not funny at ALL. But the child killer in question also has a wicked funny bone, which manifests itself both in what he says and in the scenarios that he traps his victims in – scenarios that can go from bitterly ironic to just plain goofy. I think it’s the reason that Freddy became such a breakout star in the 80s. There were lots of slashers at the time, but in an era when most of them were imitating Michael Myers and acting as the Strong, Silent Type, Freddy was blazing a trail as a new kind of killer. There have been efforts to imitate him, but few have succeeded.

Probably the most successful imitator, tonally at least, is Chucky from the Child’s Play series. In this franchise, we’ve got a child’s plaything, a three-foot doll, inhabited by the spirit of a serial killer. Making a kid’s toy creepy is a fairly common occurrence in horror (the idea of something that’s supposed to be wholesome and nurturing turning dangerous is frightening), but again, it’s the wit and cleverness of the Chucky character and Brad Dourif’s performance that made the franchise successful and allowed it to grow into so much more than it was in its origins. Oddly enough, later films in the franchise and the follow-up television series do drift, but not lower on the scale of comedy, but towards having a bit more melodrama. It’s a weird, unique transmogrification of the concept, but it never loses its sense of humor.

The Cryptkeeper from Tales From the Crypt and other assorted horror anthology hosts often fall into this category as well. Whether we’re talking about a TV series, movie, or comic book, the format is usually the same: they present to you a scary story, popping in before and after (or sometimes during, if it’s a format that has a commercial break) to drop in a few witticisms about the hapless characters marching stoically to their doom, and the audience loves them for it. The truth is, fans tune in as much for the Cryptcreeper’s ghoulishly ghastly puns as we do for any of the scares that are coming our way.

Finally, we arrive at the top tier, that level of horror that’s furthest away from comedy while still, at the same time, having some funny beats. In this category, I place movies that are primarily horror films, but that have a pitch-black sense of humor. Evil Dead 2, again, is a prime example. Bruce Campbell and his girlfriend are under assault by the horrific “Deadites,” demonic creatures that are out to torture and mutilate. Not funny. They take his girlfriend and turn her into one of them. Not funny. One of them possesses Campbell’s hand and he’s forced to cut it off with a chainsaw. Not –

–actually, that part is kinda funny. And that’s how movies on this level go. They take things that SHOULD be horrible and graphic and terrifying, but elevate them to a level that’s almost too cartoonish to take seriously, allowing some laughter. Campbell is great at this. We also see it done to good effect in Adam Green’s Hatchet series. The characters who are NOT undead revenant Victor Crowley are often pretty funny, but Crowley himself is the unspeaking sort of horror. The kills he pulls off, though, are so ridiculously gruesome that the realism is drained away, giving the audience permission to laugh a little bit. To a lesser extent, the same is true of the hugely popular Terrifier films, where the silent Art the Clown brutally tortures his victims. Early screenings for the third film (opening soon) are reporting people walking out during the first ten minutes, with one audience member allegedly even throwing up in the theater. If this is the reaction filmmaker Damien Leone is going for (and I believe it is), then you have to believe he is intentionally going way over the top.

So there you have it, friends, the levels of horror/comedy. Keep in mind that this scale is meant to determine INTENSITY and in no way is indicative of the QUALITY of a film. Every level has great movies and awful movies that belong there. But if you’re trying to figure out how intense a movie you’re looking for this spooky season, think of the scale and make sure you’re not in a Level Two mood when your friend shows up recommending a Level Five.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. The only movie on his scale to ever achieve a Level Six? Babe 2: Pig in the City. Weird, huh?

Geek Punditry #91: What Measure Horror?

September 27, 2024September 27, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry A Nightmare on Elm Street, Abigail, Freddy Krueger, Horror Movies, Monsters, Movies, Saw, Vampires, Walking Dead, Zombies

As part of my Pregaming for Scary Season, my wife suggested I watch the new movie Abigail. I’d heard mixed things, but between her recommendation and the fact that it was by the same writing and directing team responsible for the last two Scream movies (which I greatly enjoyed), I decided to give it a shot. I’m really glad I did. Abigail is about a group of crooks hired to kidnap the ballet-dancing daughter of a wealthy man. As they hold her, awaiting their ransom demands being met, they begin to fall prey to a series of increasingly unlikely mishaps.

Mishaps like a *grande jeté* gone horrifically wrong.

I don’t want to tell you anything more about the plot. If you’ve seen the trailers, you probably already know the biggest twist in the film, because the idiots in marketing gave it away even though the film is structured in such a way that it seems quite clear it was intended to be a surprise. I’m just going to say that I recommend you NOT look up the rest of the plot if you haven’t seen it yet and just watch it with an open mind. It’s a great, original twist on an old trope.

It got me wondering why so many people on the internet were down on it, though. I thought the movie was loads of fun. So I went back to find some of the complaints about the film and the major one seemed to be that it wasn’t SCARY enough.

Guys.

Okay, it’s not a movie that will make anybody wet their pants. There are a couple of jump scares and a LOT of gore, but nothing in it is going to keep me awake at night. But the thing is…is that REALLY the only metric by which a horror movie should be measured?

I suppose part of the question is what exactly one expects from “horror.” If you go by the strict definition of the word, yes, “horror” is supposed to be scary. But if I’m being honest, guys, there are very few movies that I find legitimately frightening. I’m not trying to sound like some macho jerk, like I’m above being scared. I get scared all the time. There’s a fair in town this weekend and I need to make sure we go on the day Erin is off work because I’m far too scared of heights to take our son on the Ferris Wheel. It’s just that jump scares and gore — while effective in the moment — are not the sort of thing that linger in my psyche. Stories that I find REALLY scary are the ones with unsettling or disquieting implications for the human monster. 1984, for instance, terrifies me. And I know enough about the movie A Serbian Film to know that I never, ever need to watch it. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just take my word for it. Don’t look it up. Seriously.)

From left to right, least scary to most scary.

Gore, similarly, only bothers me when it gets too “real.” Historically speaking, the gore in a lot of horror movies has been so over-the-top as to become comical, almost cartoonish. The things that Jason Voorhees does to a camper are largely impossible, and thus, not particularly disturbing to me. The stuff that IS disturbing is the stuff that – again – I don’t care to watch, like the wave of “torture porn” that was popular after the first Saw movie. Which is ironic, as the original Saw is actually relatively light on gore. The franchise didn’t get particularly bloody until the sequels, when it began to ride the trend of torture porn that was popularized by the over-the-top IMITATORS of the first film, who took it to ridiculous extremes.

Similarly, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts recently – Star Trek: The Next Conversation, featuring Matt Mira and Andy Secunda going through the vast Trek library an episode at a time – when Matt argued that he didn’t count The Walking Dead as horror because he doesn’t think zombies are scary. That’s kind of short sighted. Sure, ONE zombie isn’t going to be that terrifying. I think most able-bodied adults could survive a single zombie, unless it was one of those fast ones from movies like the Dawn of the Dead remake, but that’s going to open up an argument as to whether we should even count them as zombies at all, and that’s an entirely different column. But the horror of a zombie, from the earliest days of George Romero, comes because of the HERD mentality. One zombie? No biggie. Whack him in the head. A hundred zombies? Bring me my brown pants. It’s like a bee sting. Unless you’ve got allergies or other medical conditions, a single bee is just an annoyance. But if an entire HIVE falls on your head, I don’t care how good a shape you’re in, you’re going to have a very, very bad day.

“BOO! Did…did that scare…no? Okay, close your eyes, I’m gonna try again…”

I count zombies in the same category as any other movie monster, like werewolves, vampires, mummies, and my ol’ buddy Frankenstein’s creation. They are a type of creature, and while they certainly CAN be played for comedy (or any other genre, really – there are a shocking number of zombie romances out there), their ROOTS are in horror, and as such are part of the genre whether you, personally, are frightened by them or not.

My point is, I don’t judge the quality of a horror movie by its ability to keep me awake at night, but rather by the same standards I judge any other movie: writing, acting, innovation, music, direction. And by those metrics, I consider Abigail to be a pretty successful film. It takes a very familiar subgenre of horror and does something with it that I haven’t seen before, which is a huge mark in its favor. The writing is strong, with witty dialogue and several moments that were genuinely funny. The performances were very good as well, particularly that of 15-year-old Alisha Weir as Abigail. (I should point out that she’s currently 15, probably closer to 13 when the movie was filmed, and entirely convincing as the 12-year-old title character.) It was also great to see current horror It-Girl Kathryn Newton playing against type. Movies like Freaky and Lisa Frankenstein have kind of given her a sort of 80s Winona Ryder “dark teen in a quirky horror movie” vibe, although it should be noted she’s also been in Detective Pikachu and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and thus far more than a one-trick pony. This movie keeps her in the same KIND of movie where she’s become a queen, but she gets to do a very different CHARACTER than she usually does, which was fun.

But a contingent of the internet seems to think I should disregard all of that because the movie didn’t make me toss and turn until 3 in the morning. (LIFE does that, I don’t need movies to do it.) And like everything else on the internet, I’m sure it’s a small minority of loudmouths who make these complaints. Most horror movie fans that I know are among the warmest, most welcoming people I’ve ever met. But there’s always that jerk who thinks that any movie made after they turned 17 is garbage, and will loudly voice that opinion.

The thing that really baffles me is that a lot of those people who whine about how “not scary” a movie like Abigail is are the same ones who will bemoan the days of Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers. Fellas, I hate to break it to you, but Freddy ain’t scary. Sure, the CONCEPT is frightening – a demon that has the ability to stalk you in your dreams, in the one place where you SHOULD be the most safe but, at the same time, are at your most helpless. That’s a terrifying thought. But go back and watch those movies. Robert Englund is a blast to watch. Heather Langenkamp deserves far more credit than she gets for being one of the all-time great Final Girls. And Wes Craven, of course, was a master storyteller. But I’ve seen every one of those movies multiple times, and I never even ONCE was worried that anything in them could possibly happen in my life. If I had, I probably never would have gone back to them again.

“BOO! No..no good? Geez, you’re a tough nut to crack…”

Most horror fans are great, of course, but there are snobs in that fandom just like any other. And like a lot of snobs, there’s a recency prejudice that seems to lock a lot of people out of current stuff that’s really good just because they think that the stuff from their formative years is the greatest that will ever be. (I wrote about this with cartoon fans a couple of months ago. It’s the same concept.) So with October coming, with the glorious Creepy Movie Bacchanalia that we’re all going to indulge in impending in just days, here’s my message. Give stuff a chance. Try new things. Watch new movies – and I don’t just mean movies that came out last week, but rather anything you personally haven’t tried in the past. And don’t think that the ONLY thing that matters is that you get nightmares.

Sometimes, a scream can just be for fun.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s trying to do the math to figure out just how many monster movies he can squeeze in between now and Oct. 31. He’s terrible at math, but the only answer he can arrive at is “not enough.”

Geek Punditry #90: The Mount Rushmore of Monsters

September 20, 2024September 20, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry A Nightmare on Elm Street, Adam Green, Bela Lugosi, Bill Skarsgård, Boris Karloff, Brad Dourif, Bride of Frankenstein, Child's Play, Chucky, creature from the black lagoon, Damien Leone, David Howard, dracula, Elsa Lanchester, frankenstein, Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Hatchet, Horror Movies, It, Jason Voorhees, Kane Hodder, Michael Dougherty, Michael Myers, Movies, Pennywise, Robert Englund, Slashers, Stephen King, Terrifier, Trick 'r Treat, Universal Monsters, Victor Crowley

Yesterday, September 19, when I got home from work, my wife was ready and waiting for something we’ve been looking forward to for months: putting up the Halloween decorations. Oh I know, some people may scoff. Some may say it’s too early. Some may say that preparing for Halloween before October is a terrible breach of seasonal etiquette. To these people I say, bite my gourd. Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year, and I’ve been waiting for this day since I went back to work from summer vacation on August 1. It is well past time, as far as I am concerned.

Our decorations aren’t terribly complex, because we can’t afford anything terribly complex. Nor are they terribly scary, because we have a seven-year-old and we don’t want to give him nightmares. But Eddie does love monsters and creepy crawlies, so we’re not above hanging a few ghosts from the trees, wrapping the posts in front of our door with LED lights, and setting up inflatables of the likes of Slimer and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. We’d have more if we could, but we’re happy with what we got.

As we were decorating, though, I started to think about just which horror icons I would adorn our home with if money was no object. If I could grab the icons of terror from any time period, who would they be? In short, what creatures belong on the Mount Rushmore of Monsters?

It was honestly too hard to narrow down all the different monsters from throughout history to a simple quartet, so I decided instead to do three different mountains dedicated to three different eras: the Universal Monsters, 80s Slashers, and 21st Century Terrors. Obviously there are plenty of other ways I could subdivide things, but restricting myself to these three keeps me from going overboard (and gives me an excuse to return to this topic later, should I so choose).

I’m making my decisions based on how iconic I think the monsters are – how far have they come in terms of penetrating popular culture? For example, no matter how good a movie I think Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is (and it IS a GREAT movie, and you should all watch it) the fact that he’s kind of faded away since then is going to keep Leslie off the list.

But enough of that. Who HAS made the cut?

Universal Monsters

Universal Studios didn’t invent the horror movie, and in fact, most of their iconic creatures came not from them, but from the annals of public domain. That said, when people think of these classic monsters, the average member of the public is picturing the versions that came from the Universal monster flicks. The Universal Monsters are still known worldwide, a valuable brand that even kids will recognize without ever having seen a single one of their films. Their versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, and many more are absolute legends. How in the world do you narrow it down to just four?

Well, you do it by deciding which ones are the MOST iconic, which ones are known by EVERYBODY – even people who hate monster movies or don’t like Halloween. And for that reason, I think the first two spots have to go to the Frankenstein Monster and his lovely Bride, as portrayed by Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester, respectively. Karloff wasn’t the only actor to play the creature for Universal (Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange each had turns as well), but he was the first and there can be no denying that he was the most memorable. It’s his picture that you see on the merch, his face that the Halloween masks are based on, and his rendition that has informed pretty much everything from his three successors to Frankenberry cereal. As for the Bride, despite the fact that she only appeared in the one film – and only in the final scene of the movie at that – she has become as iconic as the Monster himself. The tall hair with the white streak, the bandage-wrapped body draped in gossamer, and Lanchester’s wide eyes and legendary scream have earned a permanent place in pop culture.

“Still a better love story than–” Ah, you know the joke.

Spot #3 on the mountain couldn’t possibly be given to anybody but Bela Lugosi as Dracula. People don’t often realize that Lugosi only played the count twice, in the original 1931 Dracula, then not again until 1948 in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But like Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, his is the most recognizable version of Bram Stoker’s bloodsucker. Everything we accept about Dracula’s hairstyle, his clothes, and his accent (a remnant of Lugosi’s own Hungarian background) come from this version of the creature. Even today, when you watch a Hotel Transylvania movie, it’s Lugosi that Adam Sandler is doing a parody of. Like Karloff, his depiction of the monster is so famous that anybody who tried to do a novel-accurate version of Dracula would probably be met with confused looks as people asked why the hell he has a mustache.

“Sometimes I do, in fact, say ‘Blah, blah, blah’.”

And then there’s the final spot and…guys, this is hard for me. REALLY hard. Not because there isn’t an obvious choice, but because it means I’m going to have to sideline one of my favorites. I love Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman. I think he’s got some of the best, most nuanced performances in the entire Universal monster canon, and if this mountain was just my favorites, he’d be right up there. But in terms of how ICONIC he is…well…there are a lot of werewolves in movieland, and he doesn’t quite have the complete dominance over his version of the monster that Karloff and Lugosi do. But you know which monster IS instantly recognizable as the one and only Universal creation? The Creature From the Black Lagoon.

He’s not my favorite of the monsters (in fact, a few years ago I actually ranked him as my LEAST favorite of the iconic Universal Monsters), but EVERYBODY knows the Creature. And since this is the only iconic Universal Monster that is a wholly original creation, not based on an existing book or folklore, there’s not even any real competition for him to have to crush. He’s the one and only. (Although the most famous knock-off happened to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Go figure, Universal exec who turned down Guillermo Del Toro.)

And he never needs a moisturizer either. Guy is legit.

80s Slashers

It has been said by many a horror fan that the slashers of the 80s are the spiritual successors to the Universal Monsters. Granted, they’re far gorier and less kid-friendly than the classics; I’ll sit down and watch a Universal classic with my son, but we’re not going to be sharing a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon any time soon. But at the same time, many of these creatures have achieved the same level of cultural awareness as the creatures of the golden age of cinema. In other words, although not everybody may have watched all of – or ANY of – the Friday the 13th movies, I don’t think there is anyone in the western world who can see somebody wear a hockey mask and pick up a knife without thinking, “JASON!”

Which is why, by the way, he gets the first spot on the 80s Mount Rushmore. Jason Voorhees is synonymous with slasher movies. Even though he wasn’t the bad guy in the first movie and he didn’t get his iconic hockey mask until the third, the version of Jason we’ve had since then has made his mark on our culture. It’s a go-to Halloween costume for bigger dudes (guilty) because it’s so simple – the mask, a weapon, some old clothes and everybody knows who you are. He’s a lumbering monument to the iconic nature of the 80s slasher. Also, the question of which version of Jason is most iconic is largely moot, since no matter who plays him, the mask makes him look pretty much the same. Besides, the best one was Kane Hodder and you know it.

The downfall of the summer camp industry began here.

Next to him will be his one-time sparring partner, Freddy Krueger, and this time the creature IS permanently associated with one actor, Robert Englund. (Jackie Earle Haley played him in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and although I don’t think anyone really blames that movie’s failure on his performance, it’s still a version we’d rather forget.) In an era where most of the slasher icons were silent killers – hulking brutes who were just as capable of breaking your bones as slitting your throat – Englund’s Freddy is svelte, agile, and with a wonderfully wicked sense of humor that has made him as beloved in the real world as he is terrifying to the teens of Elm Street. Even before the two characters faced off in the movie Freddy Vs. Jason, people would often say their names in a single breath as the two most well-known movie monsters of the era.

The only guy on this list to have recorded a song with Will Smith.

The third slot belongs to another quiet killer, Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise. (I know, the first movie came out in 1978, but he’s part of that 80s echelon of horror regardless.) Like Jason, many actors have played the role, but unlike Jason I don’t know that there’s necessarily a consensus as to who did it the best. That said, the creepy killer in a William Shatner mask painted white is indelibly linked to the holiday of Halloween. If you weren’t afraid he might stick a knife in their stomach, you might be sending your kids to sit on his lap for a picture like we do Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Jason and many other killers over the decades have taken their cues from John Carpenter’s creation, and few have done it better.

The fourth spot is a little tougher this time. There’s an argument to be made for Leatherface, gruesome titan of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, but A) only ONE of his films actually came out in the 80s, and B) I don’t think he’s nearly as recognizable to the general public as Freddy, Jason, or Michael. But you know who is? CHUCKY.

“Chucky, I appreciate your offer, but I’ve considered the situation and…well…I have decided that I do not, in fact, ‘wanna play’.”

Charles Lee Ray, the bloodthirsty serial killer played by Brad Dourif who has possessed the body of a child’s “Good Guy” doll and, in the process, made us all afraid of our kid’s toys, has earned his spot on my Mount Rushmore. Okay, only one of Chucky’s movies (the original Child’s Play) came out in the 80s, but he’s a MUCH more recognizable figure than Leatherface. In addition to his film series, he’s the star of a TV series that is currently on the air and – let’s face it: the merch. Chucky’s as much a brand as he is a character at this point. Everybody knows who he is and what he looks like, and the name “Chucky” is now permanently associated with a red-haired pint-sized whelp who brings chaos and despair in his wake, although part of that may be attributable to the cartoon Rugrats.

21st Century Terrors

This last mountain of mine is going to be the most challenging, mostly because the pop culture penetration part is a little harder to say for sure with modern monsters. Lots of things are popular when they’re NEW, but will they still be instantly recognized 40 to 90 years later like the monsters I’ve talked about already? Only time will tell. That said, these are the four that I would currently put on the mountain, based on how popular they are NOW and how popular I think they are likely to remain. I’ll go in chronological order of their first films for this batch.

First up is Victor Crowley, the hatchet-wielding killer of Adam Green’s…well…Hatchet series. Victor is a good ol’ Louisiana swamp boy, accidentally killed by his own father as the result of a cruel Halloween prank gone tragically wrong and transformed into a murderous, vengeful spirit that allows no one to leave his home in Honey Island Swamp alive should they be so foolish as to venture there after dark.

“No, Victor, you’re still a…a handsome young man…”

I admit to a little bias on this first choice – I’m a big fan of Adam Green and his work in general, so I’m always ready to promote it a little bit. Regardless, I think Victor (who has ONLY been played by Kane Hodder) is highly deserving of this spot. The first Hatchet movie, in 2006, came at a time when virtually all horror was a remake or reboot, either of an older franchise or of a Japanese horror film. Green had the guts to come out with an 80s-style slasher in a time when they weren’t in vogue and created a popular, beloved franchise. It’s been a few years since his last outing (in 2017’s Victor Crowley) but he’s still filling toy stores and turning out new comic books from American Mythology, keeping him alive until Green and Hodder are ready to polish up their hatchets and bring him back to the screen.

Next, from 2009, I’m picking Sam from writer/director Michael Dougherty’s anthology film Trick ‘r Treat. This is one of my favorite Halloween movies, an annual must-watch featuring four delightfully scary stories that all center around the same small town on the same Halloween night, with the diminutive orange-and-burlap clad creature called Sam serving as the common element to all four of them. The movie has a highly devoted fan base, and every few years we get our hearts broken all over again as news of a sequel is announced and then, sadly, nothing happens. Despite that, though, Sam has only become more and more popular as an icon, with costumes, decorations, and toys filling the shelves of a Spirit Halloween near you even as we speak – and really, is there a better measure of an iconic monster than that?

The psycho that gets the third spot comes from 2016’s Terrifier by writer/director Damien Leone: Art the Clown. (And let me just say for the benefit of those readers who happen to be my wife that I intended to include Art BEFORE you looked over my shoulder and saw the title of this column and said, “You better include Art the Clown.” You’re welcome.) Art actually appeared in a couple of short films and the 2013 anthology All Hallow’s Eve, played then by Mike Gianelli. But it wasn’t until the 2016 Terrifier, when David Howard took over the role, that the character really started to get stratospheric popularity.

If you weren’t scared of clowns already, this guy will change that.

What is it, exactly, that makes Art so creepy? I suppose part of it is just our cultural fear of clowns, which has only gotten worse in the last decade. Part of it is the unnerving design of the character and his ghastly makeup. But a lot of the credit has to go to Howard’s performance. His Art is lithe, quiet, menacing, and probably the single most brutal horror to yet appear on my list. Seriously, if one of my Mount Rushmore Monsters was coming after me, there’s nobody I’ve mentioned that I would be more disturbed by than Art the Clown. Art, like Sam, has begun to ascend that Mount Rushmore of Merchandise as well, with costumes, decorations, and tchotchkes appearing everywhere this Halloween season in anticipation of the upcoming Terrifier 3 which, amusingly enough, is going to be a Christmas film. My wife got a stuffy of him when we made our first Spirit trip this year. It’s adorable.

The last monster on my last mountain? It’s going to be a controversial choice, I know, but I challenge anyone to make an argument that Bill Skarsgård’s rendition of Pennywise the Dancing Clown doesn’t belong there. Like Art, the villain of Stephen King’s It has that creepy vibe to him, but unlike Art, he’s a chatterbox. He’s as likely to talk the terror into you as he is to jump out from a closet. Whereas Art is an anomaly, a creature of unknown origins who is all the more horrible for it, we know what the deal is with Pennywise. He’s a nightmare out of time, a beast from another universe that preys on our fears and surfaces every 27 years to do so. And Skarsgård is flawless in the role – sly, charming, compelling, and an absolute terror every second he’s on the screen.

This is the guy who WOULD say “yes,” when Chucky asks if he wants to play.

I know some of my Stephen King purist friends will turn on me for this one. And look, I love Tim Curry as much as anybody. But he’s be honest here, Skarsgård’s version of the character has completely eclipsed Tim Curry in terms of cultural awareness. Children of the 80s and 90s remember Curry as Pennywise, but if you ask anyone who didn’t see that miniseries in their formative years, the vision of the character they come away with is Bill Skarsgård.

And damned if I don’t think he earned it.

There you have it, friends, three Mountains of Malevolence. But lists like this one are intended to INSPIRE discussion, not settle a debate. So tell me, who would YOU put on each of those mountains? And what other mountains would you build? Let me hear all about your Quartets of Corruption!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Other mountains he considered were Hammer Horror, Final Girls, Horror Heroes…ah well. Next time.

Geek Punditry #58: Finding Movies at the Bookstore

February 9, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry A Nightmare on Elm Street, books, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Kevin Murphy, Michael Adams, Movies, Mystery Science Theater 3000

Not too long ago, I remember seeing a statistic that said among adults who read frequently, men are more likely to be nonfiction readers, whereas women are more likely to read fiction. When you consider just how prodigious the romance section of a bookstore can be, the idea that women read fiction makes perfect sense. (I’m not trying to indulge in gender stereotypes here, but let’s be honest, ain’t nobody marketing a Harlequin bodice-ripper to a male audience.) I’m a bit more confused about the men reading nonfiction, though. Sure, I suppose men are more likely to be into things like military history and other such subjects, but if I were single and looking to meet a woman in a bookstore, I would probably start hanging around the true crime section. And subsequently get arrested, now that I think about it. Dear God, I’m glad I’m married. Anyway, I suppose I’m a bit of an odd duck in that I very rarely read nonfiction. My shelves are stacked with novels and comic books, for the most part. And when I DO read nonfiction, it’s usually nonfiction that, in one way or another, is ABOUT fiction. In fact, my favorite nonfiction books are all about the movies.

It’s like if *The Godfather* were written by a sarcastic robot.

Back in 2002, Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni Kevin Murphy (a few years before the birth of RiffTrax) released his book A Year at the Movies. I bought it, mostly, because it was written by Tom Servo and I thought that was cool, but I was amazed at how utterly engrossed I was when I opened up the book and started reading. In the years after MST3K ended its initial run, Murphy had become – understandably – a bit disenchanted with the movies. For this book, he embarked upon a quest to rediscover them. His goal was to attend a public screening of a movie every day for an entire calendar year, and this book is a memoir of his experience.

And it’s great.

First of all, it’s funny. This should come as absolutely no surprise to anybody, that a book written by Kevin Murphy has plenty of knee-slapping moments. But it’s a lot more than that. Murphy doesn’t just go down to the local megaplex 365 times. He explores the world, going to film festivals and special events. He travels to the smallest movie theater in America, visits a theater built inside an ice hotel where the movie is projected onto a wall of snow, experiences a film festival in a country where the sun doesn’t set for months at a time. He takes Mike Nelson with him to watch Corky Romano. Reading about these adventures makes me want to go and join in.

In Kevin Murphy’s Odyssey, this is Scylla AND Charybdis.

And he talks about the movies, of course. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones in-between. The book is part film critique and part travelogue. And it should be mentioned that the year mentioned in the title happens to be 2001 – so fair warning, when you get to September, something happens that obviously is of far greater significance than Kevin’s little movie watching project, but nonetheless impacts his quest.

It’s a magnificent book and I’ve often wished Murphy would write a sequel. In this age of streaming and the massive changes that have undergone the movie theater business in the last decade, I’m wondering what his findings would be if he tried to do this again. Mr. Murphy, if you’re reading this, I know you’re pretty dang busy with RiffTrax, but I read this book probably every other year and I would LOVE to intercut it with a Part II.

The fact that I do re-read this book, on average, every two years or so, brings me to my next point. Obviously, this is the kind of writing that appeals to me. So I need more. I need more books ABOUT movies. Not just the making of movies (although there are obviously some excellent books written about that very subject matter), but books by people who love movies, about WHY they love movies, about HOW they love movies. So let me tell you some of my favorites that I’ve found in the years since Kevin Murphy inadvertently set me off on my own quest, then I’ll open the floor for recommendations from the audience.

Not THAT *Showgirls*. Except for the one part where he talks about *Showgirls*.

In terms of matching the flavor that Kevin Murphy brought to his project, the next best thing I’ve found is Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic’s Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made. Written by Michael Adams, this is a book whose subtitle lays out its premise exactly. Adams, at the time a writer for Empire magazine, was struck by the idea of trying to find the worst movie of all time. The book chronicles his journey of hunting down DVDs and old VHS tapes, categorizing them, brushing with fame, and the conclusions he has reached at the end. The amazing thing about this book – like most of the books I’m talking about here – is that even when he’s telling me how awful the movies are, Adams describes them in such a fun and charming way that I find myself adding many of them to my watchlist on Letterboxd.

Brian W. Collins had a similar project, his Horror Movie a Day blog, where he watched and reviewed a different horror movie every single day for a few years. Eventually he gave up on the “daily” aspect of the project, but he still publishes new reviews relatively often, and he put the best of them into Horror Movie a Day: The Book. In this one, Collins simply chooses some of his favorite reviews (not necessarily his favorite MOVIES) and divides them up into several categories. For horror movie fans, this is a fun way to find lots of movies you may never have heard of and get opinions on movies that you already have your own thoughts on. Collins is also a strong writer, and his style is entertaining to read in and of itself.

Of course, I don’t want to discount books about MAKING movies. There are three books by Dustin McNeill worth mentioning here, the first two co-written with Travis Mullins, all of which are about some of our favorite slasher flicks. In Taking Shape: Developing Halloween From Script to Scream, McNeill and Mullins do meticulous research and conduct lots of interviews with the principal writers, directors, actors, and other people involved in the production of the various movies in the Halloween franchise, beginning with the original in 1978 and going up to the most recent film at the time of publication, which was 2019. What I love about this book is that even though I’ve seen all of these movies time and again, there are a lot of things that went on behind the scenes that I never knew about. It’s not like some lame clickbait article with a headline like “20 things you never knew about Halloween III that turns out to be 17 things everybody knows and three things that are bullshit. This book gives serious, entertaining insight into the production of one of the most iconic horror franchises of all time.

It’s the *Lord of the Rings* of books about slasher movies, some of which were never actually made.

The sequel, Taking Shape II: The Lost Halloween Sequels, gives the same treatment to all the Halloween movies that were NOT made over the decades – the rejected pitches, the movies that started production but died on the vine and so forth. I liked this book even more than the first one, because it not only gives great insight into the way the movie business works, but it lands with a wealth of ideas for movies that never existed but that, in a few cases, really sounded a hell of a lot better than the movies that were actually made.

Before either of those two, though, McNeill published Slash of the Titans: The Road to Freddy Vs. Jason. It’s the same conceit as the Halloween books, but focused solely on the project that ultimately became Freddy Vs. Jason. The movie was in development for many, many years, and McNeill breaks down all of the various iterations that it went through before finally landing on the one that made it to the screen. It, too, is a fascinating read. McNeill has several other similar books on his bibliography that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, but I want to, including another Mullins collaboration, Reign of Chucky, and a book co-written with J. Michael Roddy called Adventures in Amity: Tales From the Jaws Ride that sounds pretty darn interesting.

All of these books are well worth reading if you’re a fan of the movies in question or even just a fan of movies in general. I am, however, always in search of more. My question for you, guys, is simple: what are your favorite books ABOUT movies? Books that are similar to the ones I listed above, books that aren’t at all like any of them, I am open to all suggestions. Movies are one of the greatest forms of storytelling, and stories about that form of storytelling – be it from the perspective of an insider or an outsider – absolutely fascinate me. Hit me up with your favorite picks, and maybe in a few months I’ll come back and do a follow-up to this column evaluating what you guys recommend.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Has anyone ever written anything about that Star Wars movie? Seems like that would have been chronicled somewhere by now, right?

Geek Punditry #41: Playing Favorites With Horror Movies (Part Two)

October 13, 2023October 15, 2023 blakemp Playing Favorites 1408, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alfred Hitchcock, Boris Karloff, Bride of Boogedy, Disney, Frank Darabont, frankenstein, Freaks, Get Out, Halloween, Horror Movies, It, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jordan Peele, Misery, Mr. Boogedy, New Nightmare, One Hour Photo, Peeping Tom, Poltergeist, Psycho, Robin Williams, Stephen King, The Mist, The Others, Wes Craven, Wonderful World of Disney

Horror Without a Death

Last week, in a column that has been-fast tracked for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Blog Posts about Horror Movies (probably not a real thing) I asked my friends on social media to give me suggestions for categories of horror. I would then report back on your suggestions here and talk about some of my favorites in each category. I got a lot of great suggestions – so many, in fact, that I couldn’t fit them all into a single column. So buckle in, my friends, it’s time for Week Two of Playing Favorites With Horror Movies!

Horror Without a Death

Duane Hower came at me with one of the toughest suggestions of the whole batch: what’s my favorite horror movie in which NOBODY DIES? (And a note here – just the fact that a movie can be mentioned in this category qualifies as a spoiler, so if you’re squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to hop down to the next category.)

It was tough, guys. There aren’t that many films that meet the criteria – after all, the point of horror is to instill fear, and that inherently brings with it the fear of the void. There are plenty of horror/comedies that fall into this category, sure, but straight horror? It’s not easy to find good examples.

A few eventually came to mind. Poltergeist is about a family that moves to a new home only to discover malevolent spirits already inhabit their dwelling. The Others is about a family that moves to a new home…only to discover that malevolent spirits already inhabit…okay, there’s a pattern. But 1408! That mixes it up! That’s about a travel writer who gets a hotel room! And finds that malevolent spirits inhabit the dwelling.

“I see dead people. Not fresh ones, though.”

Still, these are solid films where nobody dies (well…depending on which cut of 1408 you watch). The thing is, they’re also all ghost stories. And ghost stories rock, don’t get me wrong, but they’re stories about somebody who has already died. Can I count them in this category, just because the deaths in question happened before the movie began?

If I rule out ghost stories, the pool gets even shallower, but there are still a few tasty fish in it. Tod Browning’s Freaks from 1932, for instance. The director of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula followed it with this movie about performers in a circus sideshow and an unscrupulous woman who plans to take advantage of them to seize an inheritance one of them is due to collect. The movie is pretty wild, and was so controversial at the time that Browning’s career was essentially destroyed. But nobody dies in the film…although by the ending, there’s someone who may wish they were dead.

I also need to give credit to One Hour Photo, a thriller starring the late, great Robin Williams. Williams plays a man who works for one of those one hour photo development labs (kids, ask your parents) and becomes dangerously obsessed with one of the families whose film he processes. Williams, of course, was a legend for his comedic roles, and often showed his dramatic chops as well in movies like Dead Poets Society and Good Morning, Vietnam, but this is the only movie I can think of that showed how outright SCARY he could be when he set his mind to it. The man was a unique and priceless talent, and I feel like this is a movie that doesn’t get talked about enough, possibly because the entire premise is centered around a piece of late 20th century culture that doesn’t really exist anymore.

Hammer Horror

My old buddy Eric LeBlanc wanted to know what my favorite movie was from the Hammer Films catalog. In the 1950s, after Universal Studios quietly put an end to their monumental run of monster movies, Britain’s Hammer Films saw an opportunity to fill the void. Not only did they start pumping out horror movies at a pace that would have made Carl Lammle Jr. pick his jaw up off the floor, but they did so by borrowing a heck of a lot of the goodwill that Universal had built up, using the same public domain creeps like Frankenstein’s monster, vampires, mummies, and werewolves.

I never got quite as deep into Hammer as I have into the Universal library, but I’ve seen a lot of their films and I definitely have my favorites, the top being 1958’s Horror of Dracula (or sometimes just Dracula). Incredibly stylish and colorful, the movie is also a bit more faithful to the original novel than the Universal version. Plus it has two of the giants of horror in some of their best parts: Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. Lee is creepy and charming, and the only reason he’s not considered the definitive version of Dracula is that Bela Lugosi beat him to it. And Van Helsing? Sorry, Hugh Jackman, but Peter Cushing owns that role.

The HORROR…of a world without photoshop.

Stephen King Adaptation

Rachel Ricks played right into my hands by asking for my favorite Stephen King adaptation.

Project ALF.

As anyone who has read this blog for more than a day knows, I’m a huge fan of Stephen King’s books…but what about his movies? There have been over 200 adaptations of King’s novels and short stories (I checked IMDB), so which one is the best? Truth is the really great ones aren’t actually horror movies: The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Stand By Me are some of the best films ever made based on King’s work, but none of them qualify as horror. When you get into the scary content, the sad truth is that a lot of the adaptations are sub-par. (I mean…have you SEEN Maximum Overdrive? Whoever directed that movie doesn’t seem to have the slightest idea what Stephen King is all about. It’s like he was on cocaine or something.)

That said, there are SOME good horror movies based on King’s work. Many people would point immediately to The Shining, but I’m not among them. Look, it’s a good movie, but as an adaptation of King’s book it is terrible. I’d rather focus on movies that DO adapt the books more or less faithfully.

I already mentioned 1408 earlier, and I’d place it close to the top of this list. At the VERY top, though, would be Misery, the James Caan/Kathy Bates adaptation about a writer (it’s a Stephen King movie, of COURSE it’s about a writer) who gets in a terrible car accident only to be saved by his biggest fan. As he begins to heal, though, he discovers that he may have been better off in the wreck.

Some people, however, would classify Misery more as a thriller than a horror movie, so for those who like to split hairs, let’s talk about The Mist. A mysterious fog full of murderous monsters rolls over a small town, trapping dozens of people in a supermarket. The adaptation is solid, but what really elevates it is the ending. Frank Darabont, who wrote and directed this film (and Shawshank and The Green Mile, so you see his pedigree) changed the ending of the story, something that I usually find outrageous. But the ending he put on was so shocking and dark that even Stephen King himself says he prefers it to the original.

And I’ve got to give credit to It. I consider this one of King’s best novels – perhaps THE best Stephen King novel – and we’ve gotten TWO pretty good adaptations. The original miniseries from the 90s did the best it could on network television, and Tim Curry is iconic as Pennywise. But in 2017 we got a fantastic adaptation of half of the novel, with Bill Skarsgard taking Pennywise and making him his own. Admittedly, It Chapter Two from 2019 didn’t quite live up to the first part, but you can watch the first part on its own and get a solid, satisfying story. It’s darn near perfect.

The Wonderful World of Disney

Ryan Tait gave me a category I NEVER would have thought of, but absolutely love: my favorite Wonderful World of Disney Halloween movie. Back in the day, before even the Disney channel, Wonderful World was a delightful showcase for Disney content of all stripes, and some of those made-for-TV movies still hold a warm place in my heart today. My favorite for this category is going to both show my age and make a lot of people wonder what the hell I’m talking about, but I have a deep abiding fondness for the 1986 film Mr. Boogedy.

From the studio that brought you *Old Yeller.*

A novelty salesman and his family move into a new house that turns out to be haunted (SO MANY of these movies are about people who move into haunted houses, and there are some downright unscrupulous realtors out there) by both some kind ghosts who have been trapped there and by the malevolent spirit who has kept them prisoner. It’s a silly, cheesy movie, but it’s so much fun. And the cast has a great pedigree. Richard Masur of the 90s It, a pre-Buffy the Vampire Slayer Kristy Swanson, a pre-Married With Children David Faustino, and young Benji Gregory, on the cusp of superstardom for his role on the sitcom…not making it up this time…ALF.

Both Mr. Boogedy and its (perhaps even better) sequel, Bride of Boogedy, are available on Disney+…but I’m hesitant to tell you to go and watch them if you’ve never seen them before. It’s one of those things where I know my fondness for the movie comes from having watched it over and over again as a child, and I suspect that somebody watching it now, for the first time, as an adult, wouldn’t love it the way that I do. But if you HAVE seen it before and remember it warmly, go check it out. I watched it last year and I still love it.

Installments Past a Sequel

Jasper Fahrig asked what I thought were good installments of a franchise past the first sequel. It’s a truth of filmmaking that long-running series often suffer from diminishing returns. The deeper you get, the worse the franchise often becomes, so finding a good movie that’s part 3 or higher isn’t always easy. Fortunately, Wes Craven is there to hook us up with not one, but two films in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Craven wrote and directed the original Nightmare, but sat out the sequel. When Part Three (Dream Warriors) was made, he came back to help with the story. After a part two that many people admittedly enjoy, but doesn’t really fit with the rest of the franchise, part three is GREAT. Robert Englund is in top form, Heather Langenkamp returns as Nancy (the BEST final girl outside of Laurie Strode), and the crazy horror dream imagery is used to the best effect in the entire series. What’s more, the movie was directed by Chuck Russell (whose remake of The Blob I mentioned last week) and co-written by Frank Darabont. Maybe I’m NOT a horror fan, guys, maybe I’m just a fan of several very specific filmmakers.

But Craven wasn’t quite done. He stepped away from Freddy after that and three more sequels incredibly diluted the character before Wes came back to save the day one more time with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Langenkamp is back again, but this time she plays HERSELF, an actress who finds herself haunted by the spirit of Freddy Kruger, the killer from that old movie she made years ago. Craven also appears as himself in the movie, as does Robert Englund, playing both himself and Freddy Krueger. The movie uses the language of the Nightmare series to make a statement about the power of storytelling and belief. It was ” meta” two years before Craven would redefine “meta” with the Scream franchise, and it’s hands-down my favorite Nightmare.

A double feature to keep you up all night.

Award-Worthy Horror

Seth Pontiff wanted to know some horror movie performances that I thought were worthy of Oscar consideration. Oooh, that’s a good one. I’ve often complained about the way the Academy ignores genre movies, but there HAVE been a scarce few performances that got nods. Kathy Bates actually won best actress for Misery, and the next year both Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins would take home statues for Silence of the Lambs, but those are movies that the Academy can classify as “Thrillers” without getting their hands dirty in a straight-up horror movie.

So who should have been recognized, but wasn’t? I have to say, I think it’s an outright crime that Boris Karloff was never recognized for his work as the Frankenstein monster. He played the creature three times, twice in movies that are indisputable classics, and infused the monster with such depth and humanity that the viewer comes out the other end on his side. There was so much sadness and power in the character, interspersed with other moments like unbridled joy at those few times he thinks he’s found a kindred spirit, and Karloff sells every second of it. There’s a reason that every kid who draws a picture of the creature gives him a flattop and bolts on his neck, and it’s not because Mary Shelley described him that way.

Another performance that I think was awardworthy? Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween. Not the 1978 film…the one from 2018. This is going to be controversial, I know, because that film has become EXTREMELY divisive among horror fans. And in truth, I was highly disappointed in the final film in that trilogy. But when I look at the 2018 movie by itself I am in awe of her performance. Curtis plays Laurie Strode as a trauma survivor who has spent her entire life preparing for the other shoe to drop. It’s a performance full of anguish and pain, and she sells it every second she’s on screen. I’m glad that she got her Oscar last year for Everything Everywhere All at Once, but I really believe she should have had it sooner.

I’m actually not great at Photoshop either, so pretend I made it look like these two are holding little statues.

Psychological Horror

And finally, AJ Peden asked me about my favorite psychological horror movies. What makes this difficult is that it’s really hard to define what “psychological horror” actually is. The Wikipedia definition (yeah, I looked it up) says it’s horror “with a particular focus on mental, emotional, and psychological states to frighten, disturb, or unsettle its audience.” Well gee, that narrows it down, right? Another problem here is that so many of these movies overlap into other subgenres: ghost stories, slasher movies, found footage films, etc., have all had prime examples of what we could call “psychological horror.”

I suppose my favorites in this incredibly broad subcategory would have to go back to the great Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho is the obvious example – it’s a great movie with a brilliant twist halfway through the film and a second brilliant twist at the end of the film. It’s also one of the prototypes for the slasher. So is Peeping Tom, which is also a dandy example of psychological horror. In that film, directed by Michael Powell, Karlheinz Bohm plays a photographer making a documentary about fear by filming the deaths of his victims. I suppose a 1960 audience may have been enticed by the title or the high sexual content (by 1960s standards) of the film, but the way Bohm’s character messes with your head is really powerful.

In the 60s, this was scarier than asbestos.

For more modern examples, I think Jordan Peele has kind of taken the forefront of the wave. Get Out, the movie that made people realize that guy from the goofy sketch comedy show was actually a master of terror, was not only a meditation on race relations, but a terrifying film about the potential of having your body literally stolen from you and the mental state that would result from – or compel somebody to do – such a thing. There have been a lot of films since Get Out that have tried to capture that same flavor (The Barbarian comes to mind, as does X and its prequel, Pearl), but I think as far as today’s filmmakers go, Peele wears the crown.

And I think that’s going to wrap it up, guys. There are a few other suggestions I didn’t get to, but those are either in categories where I haven’t seen enough movies to really form an opinion (Patrick Slagle – sorry, I don’t have a lot of folk horror movies in my catalog) or categories where my answer is so basic that I don’t know that I have anything interesting to say about it. (Rene Gautreaux: the best religious-based horror movie is still the original The Exorcist. Tony Cirillo, my favorite puppet from the Puppet Master franchise is Blade, because blades are cool.)

I hope you enjoyed this little experiment as much as I did. I had a lot of fun letting you guys tell me what to write about, and I think we uncovered a few gems in the process. May this two-parter help you find some new stuff to watch in the remainder of this spooky season, and keep your eyes right here! I don’t think it’s going to be too long before I ask you all to help me Play Favorites again.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. All this and nobody asked about the best zombie movie? Ah well, maybe next time.

Geek Punditry #37: What’s Your Favorite Scary Franchise?

September 15, 2023September 16, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Horror, Scream, Slashers

I’ve said it before and it’s worth repeating: what true fans want, above all else, is more. And this is especially true of horror movie fans. The concept of a “horror franchise” goes back at LEAST to 1935, when Bride of Frankenstein was the first sequel to one of the classic Universal Monster movies. (One could even argue that it goes back to the Golem films of the silent era, but only one of those has survived.) Frankie’s creature would go on to appear in eight official films, with his pals Dracula, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, and the Creature From the Black Lagoon each appearing several times. In the 70s and 80s, the horror franchise became a cinematic staple, with the likes of The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror paving the way for the slasher icons of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, among a sea of others. I love horror movies, and I appreciate many of the great franchises throughout history. But when I look at the vast sea of horror available, I’m surprised to see which franchise – besides the Universal classics, of course – holds the trophy as my personal favorite…the bloody good adventures of Ghostface in the Scream series.

Having recently watched the sixth and most recent film, I’ve been thinking about why I enjoy them so much. I’m not going to start a debate over which series is the best – there’s no way that you’re going to convince anybody that their personal favorite isn’t the best and it’s useless to try – I’m just saying that it’s the one that means the most to me. There are a few reasons for it. First off, there’s nostalgia. Believe it or not, Scream was the first horror franchise I ever got into. Growing up in the 80s, I already knew the characters and tropes of slasher films via cultural osmosis, but my parents weren’t into horror movies and I was never really exposed to them until college, when my friend Jason showed me the first Scream. (Jason was the manager of a video store at the time, then later the owner of the video store, then later employed in an entirely different line of work because video stores ceased to be a thing.) We watched Scream because Jason wanted to see the newly-released Scream 2 and I HAD to see the original first, and he was right. I was hooked. I loved the meta comedy, I loved the characters, and I was impressed at the structure of the mystery. Even before I considered myself a horror fan, I was a fan of Ghostface.

Over the next few years I branched out and slowly acquainted myself with the films of Freddy, Jason, Michael, and the rest, but I kept coming back to Scream. There are great films in every horror franchise, but to this day this is the only franchise where I haven’t seen anything I would classify as a “bad” movie. Even the worst Scream film (that would be Scream 3, for those of you keeping score) is watchable, with funny moments and good twists, and I would never skip over it when doing a rewatch of the series the way I would, say, Halloween: Resurrection.

Even in the early years I felt somewhat protective of the franchise. While 3 was not my favorite, I accepted it as the end of the story, capping off the trilogy in a way that tied things up and left the characters I cared about in a satisfying place. When word came of the fourth installment 11 years later, I was somewhat disturbed, thinking that it would break the ending of a supposedly-completed story the way other franchises have (lookin’ at YOU, Toy Story 4), but with both director Wes Craven and original writer Kevin Williamson returning, I decided to give it a chance. To my shock, I thought it was the best film since the first and eagerly awaited part 5. I did not expect it to take another 11 years, the death of Craven, and a quasi-relaunch to get it going again…but the relaunches have worked for me as well, in ways that many other remakes, reboots, and “requels” have not.

There’s something unique about the way the franchise has been crafted. One of the strengths, I think, is Ghostface himself. Unlike most other horror franchises, the “face” doesn’t belong to a singular villain that comes back from the dead time and again. Ghostface is merely a mask, picked up by a different character (or more than one) each time to wreak havoc all over again. This allows the franchise to maintain the mystery of who the killer is each time (something that Friday the 13th had to abandon after the first installment). It also doesn’t have to worry about how to resurrect the villain time and again, with increasingly complicated supernatural rules that can get confusing and run the risk of being contradicted by future installments (such as what happened to A Nightmare on Elm Street). And unlike most other long-running horror franchises, it has never been rebooted (just TRY to explain the Halloween timeline to someone who isn’t already a fan). That really means something to people like me.

“So in the FIRST continuity Michael had a niece named Jamie and in the SECOND continuity he had a nephew named John and in the FOURTH continuity he wasn’t related to Laurie Strode at all and in the ROB ZOMBIE continuity — hey! Why aren’t you taking notes?”

I think this also makes it easier to accept changes in the franchise, the fact that there’s a singular figure, but not a singular character propelling the plot along. Replacing the actor behind a horror icon is tricky. If you ask most fans, Robert Englund IS Freddy Krueger, Doug Bradley IS Pinhead, and efforts to recast them have at most been grudgingly tolerated, and at worst, outright rejected. Even icons who wear masks and have been portrayed by multiple actors still spark a heated debate. Ask any group of fans who the best Jason Voorhees was and you’ll find the room sharply divided between those who believe it’s Kane Hodder and those who are certifiably insane.

The closest thing Ghostface has to an icon performer is Roger L. Jackson, who has provided the voice of the killer in every movie. He would be difficult to replace, because he’s so damned good at delivering a voice that can shift between charming, snarky, and terrifying at the snap of a finger, but when the time comes that he’s unwilling or unable to keep going, it wouldn’t be a death knell for the series.

There’s no point in arguing who the “best” Ghostface is because every Ghostface is different and brings something different to the table, and that’s by design. It would be bonkers to argue whether Billy Loomis was a “better” Ghostface than Mickey Altieri, because they’re not the same character. Sure, one could (and will) argue about which performance or story or motivation or one-liners they enjoy more, but there’s no room for arguing that one of them goes against the “spirit” of the character the way one could do with Michael Myers. (Is he supernatural? Is he not? Is it Tuesday? What was with that guy with the black boots?)

I know it seems like I’m picking on the *Halloween* franchise a lot. That’s because for every masterpiece of horror in that line, there are two movies full of crap like this.

It’s this versatility in the main villain that allows the franchise to be malleable and re-started every so often without the kind of pushback you had against Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger. It also allows the tone of the series to shift slightly as sensibilities change. The original Scream was a slasher movie about people who had watched too many slasher movies. As the franchise continued, it got deeper into the metafictional aspect of the concept. Scream 2 was a sequel about horror movie sequels, and introduced the “film-within-a-film” Stab, which was based on the events of the first movie and proved to provide fuel for the rest of the franchise going forward. In Scream 3, we saw the conclusion of a trilogy about trilogies. Scream 4 was a movie about remakes (but not really). The 2022 Scream was about “requels” and included a joke at its own expense about dropping the number even though everybody knew it wasn’t an actual continuity reboot. With Scream VI they’ve finally embraced the idea of the rules of franchises, as opposed to specific installments. Where they go after this, I’m honestly not sure, but I’m along for the ride.

First the Muppets, then Jason, and now Ghostface takes Manhattan.

Some people will ask how I can stack Scream up against other horror franchises, many of which I enjoy very much, but this is without a doubt the series that I’ve rewatched more than any other. It helps that there are (for now, at least) fewer of them than most of the other really iconic series. There are currently six Screams, and until January of last year, there were only four to throw into a quick binge. When you put together every iteration of the franchise A Nightmare on Elm Street has given us nine films, Friday the 13th is at 12, and Halloween has churned out a weekend-slaughtering 14. The less said about how the Amityville name has been pimped out, the better.

The fact that it’s never been rebooted makes it feel a bit more – and I hesitate to use this word, but I can’t think of another one – a bit more real. Freddy’s seventh film went into an entirely different continuity, although it did so brilliantly. The Friday movies never technically had a reboot until the remake came out, but it also plays fast and loose with what actually “counts,” especially the later films. The last three of them make virtually no attempt to directly follow the earlier movies at all. Get somebody who doesn’t watch horror to watch the first Friday the 13th and then Jason X and see if they can figure out how the dots connect. The upcoming Crystal Lake prequel TV series will probably not make things any clearer, for that matter.

And then there’s Michael. You know the rest.

But every installment of Scream (save for the in-name-only TV series from a few years back) is part of the same continuity, despite playing with the rules of remakes and requels. Every film not only counts, but is recounted in the later films. There are scenes in the most recent film that are full of what film nerds like me call “continuity porn,” full of elements and items that not only recall all of the previous films, but are ripped straight from them, but it’s done in a justifiable way. I’m anxious to find the website where someone (inevitably) has cataloged all of the Easter Eggs that can be spotted by going through that scene one frame at a time, because I’m sure there’s a lot that I missed.

In a surprise crossover, Ghostface takes decorating advice from Tony Stark.

Speaking of the most recent film, the one that came out earlier this year, it’s an interesting anomaly. Without getting into spoiler territory, it’s the one where the “rules” seem to matter least, but it pulls it off without sacrificing the love of movies that is at the core of the story. Ghostface is behaving differently this time around, and the film pulls off some great red herrings that work because it plays with the expectations of horror movie fans, but at the core it still has Scream in its DNA. And this is where I think they’ve got to start figuring out how to keep the franchise going, if that is indeed the intention. (Seeing as how they’ve already done preproduction for Scream VII, it seems clear that it is.) They’ve touched on pretty much everything they can on horror movies of the last few decades. If they don’t want to wait another 10 years or so for horror to evolve again, they’ve got to find different ways to make the story work. They’ve built a solid and likable core group of characters that is sufficiently different from the original trio of Sidney, Dewey, and Gale to not just feel like a remake. At the same time, they’ve also kept the window open to bring back the legacy characters, which this film does in a mostly satisfying way. This film – being the second story with these characters – also has some echoes of Scream 2 in terms of setting and motivation, without just being a copy. And that leaves the question about the next one…eh, More on that in a minute.

Wherever they go, I will be there to watch, and anxious to see who the next people are to don the Ghostface mask and cause a little terror and a lot of laughs. Whereas once I was satisfied to let it lie, I now feel optimistic for the future of this story, and happy to note that there is, indeed, life after Wes.

If you’ve already watched every Scream movie to date, including VI, skip below my standard plug for a little bonus – I pontificate about the identity of the killer in Scream VII. By necessity, my theory will have spoilers.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Roger L. Jackson has got to have one of the sweetest gigs in Hollywood, right? Every few years he comes in, spends a few hours recording lines off-camera, and is one of the most recognizable horror icons of all time.

You back? Great. Okay, so I think I’ve already figured out the killer of Scream VII, and it’s before they’ve even filmed a frame of it. Actually, I have two theories, and it really depends entirely on how dark they’re willing to get. The new series is, in essence, “requeling” the original trilogy. Scream (2022) is the requel of the original: a girl (Neve Cambpell/Melissa Barrera) is stalked by a killer indulging ties to her past (Sidney’s mother/Sam’s father). In the end the killer – or one of them, at least – turns out to be her boyfriend (Skeet Ulrich/Jack Quaid).

I made it through this whole column without a *Star Trek* reference, so let me just quickly say how awesome Quaid is on *Lower Decks*.

Scream VI requels Scream 2: the characters are now in college, and the main killer turns out to be a side character (Laurie Metcalf/Dermot Mulroney) who was secretly the parent of the previous killer and is seeking revenge for his death.

Laurie Metcalf murders considerably fewer people on *The Big Bang Theory.*

If they continue following the pattern, Scream VII would logically requel Scream 3. This was the only film in which the killer went solo (which is called out in VI), and it turned out to be Sidney’s long-lost half-brother Roman Bridger (Scott Foley). So for Scream VII, are they going to go the long-lost half-sibling route again?

Nah. I think they’re going to go for the half-sibling that’s right in front of our face. I think it’s going to be Jenna Ortega’s Tara. She’s the half-sister of the main character, so she would fit the pattern. There’s even a bit of dialogue in VI that points out how logical it would have been if, at some point, Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers had snapped from her repeated trauma and become a Ghostface herself. That could easily be seen as teeing up the ball for it to be Tara in the next go-around.

Let’s call that Theory A. The biggest question mark is if the series would REALLY go that dark, allowing us to grow attached to a character for two movies before pulling the twist and making her the villain. They MIGHT…but if they don’t, I still think the killer would have to have a family connection. In that case, Theory B: the killer will turn out to be Tara and Sam’s absent mother. She’s never appeared on screen. Sam rejected her for lying about who her father really was, and when the truth came out it ended her marriage to Tara’s father. When Tara learned the truth in her first film, she cut off ties to her mother as well. She could be coming after Sam for “stealing” her family from her. Still dark – a mom wanting to murder her daughter – but not QUITE as dark as making Tara the killer.

Of course, these are theories and – with the Hollywood strikes continuing – who knows what’s going to happen with anything? Whatever is currently planned might wind up on the scrap heap of history. But as of right now, I’m calling it. That’s what I think is likely to happen in Scream VII, Theory A and Theory B.

Then again…A+B=C? In most Scream movies, after all, there have been two killers…