#watch challenge

My butch and I decided spontaneously to do a spooky season watch challenge, and by "spontaneously" I mean "as soon as I had finished listing hypothetical categories." In case you'd like to follow along, the categories follow with some sample films; the idea is to watch one film for each weekend from the start of September to Halloween.

An animated film (e.g. Coraline, Paranorman, Corpse Bride, The Nightmare Before Christmas)

A classic slasher (e.g. Friday the 13th, Halloween, Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Candyman, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer)

A classic horror flick that is not a slasher (e.g. American Psycho, The Shining, Carrie, The Wicker Man, Rosemary's Baby, Ganja & Hess, Hellraiser, Possession, Suspiria, The Stepford Wives, The Sixth Sense)

A kitsch, camp, or cheesy classic (e.g. Hocus Pocus, Hausu, Labyrinth, The Addams Family, Death Becomes Her, Blacula, They Live, The Craft, or any number of 'exploitation' films... or your favorite DCOM)

A modern horror film (e.g. Paranormal Activity, Jennifer's Body, The Babadook, The Witch, It Follows, Pan's Labyrinth, The Substance, Black Swan, Get Out, Creep, Hereditary, The Love Witch, They Cloned Tyrone, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Menu, Lisa Frankenstein)

A creature feature (e.g. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Night of the Living Dead, Alien, Attack the Block, The Thing, Ginger Snaps, An American Werewolf in London, Blade, The Cabin in the Woods, Cat People)

An episode from any season of The Twilight Zone

Over the Garden Wall

FEMTOBER BLOG: Fridays & Franchises

Happy Friday the 13th!

While no woman has directed an installment of the Jason Voorhees saga, there have been a few franchise films that women have helmed, including one featuring Jason's rival Freddy Kruger, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, directed by Rachel Talalay.

Perhaps somewhat predictably, Freddy's Dead received poor reception but was a modest box office success, outgrossing its previous installment. The movie was relatively tame in its violence; Talalay instead wanted to focus on more surreal meta humor that the series had begun to stray from. True to its name, Freddy's Dead is the last film in the original Nightmare canon. The next three installments (New Nightmare, Freddy vs. Jason, and its 2010 reboot) all existed in a separate canon from the original franchise. While Freddy's Dead is not necessarily looked on fondly, I personally find it to be a very passable installment in a franchise I otherwise don't really enjoy. The 90s introduced the more acerbic side of humor in horror, so the slapstick goofiness of Freddy's Dead feels like a fitting goodbye to the previous decade.

The most powerful man in horror currently, Jason Blum, infamously stated in 2018 that "There are not a lot of female directors period, and even less who are inclined to do horror." He's since rightfully walked back on this statement, and while Blumhouse - under its various labels - has produced a fair number of horror films directed by women on streaming and television, theatrical releases of these films are few and far between. Enter Black Christmas (2019) directed by Sophia Takal.

Black Christmas is an interesting beast. On first glance it seems as though there's heavy studio interference. There's virtually no language or blood, and the story seems fractured. How much interference, it's hard to say. Sophia Takal stands by her vision for the film, wanting to make it as feminist as possible for a PG-13 audience. The end result, unfortunately, is underwhelming. Black Christmas ultimately feels like a shadow of its predecessors. While the 2006 remake is also maligned, there's a certain level of insanity that serves the film well in hindsight. The 2019 version often feels less focused on horror and more on identity, a criticism I hate to make about a female-directed film. Black Christmas's negative reception may have helped it fade into obscurity; in addition to being a critical failure it was also a box office bomb. I'm not the biggest fan of Takal's work, and certainly not of Black Christmas, but I think the most important takeaway we can have from this film is that women should be allowed to fail. We do not need an all or nothing approach to intersectional filmmaking. Sometimes things can be bad, and sometimes they can be worse than bad. We persist.

To date, Black Christmas is the only major theatrically released Blumhouse horror directed by a woman. Of course, this will change in just a few weeks with the release of Five Nights at Freddy's, directed by Emma Tammi. I can't say I'm particularly excited about the content of the film, but the prospect of a highly anticipated studio film directed by a woman is a major milestone. Between FNAF and Barbie, it's a good year for women to be making films, but of course there's always room for more.

My biggest pet peeve with major films directed by women is the passing of the torch to a male director when the first film succeeds financially (see Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, etc.). Blumhouse is obviously planning on making FNAF a franchise IP, so it would be great to keep the momentum going with Tammi or another woman continuing to lead the series. Fingers crossed!

My 2023 anime watching challenge ! I have a year to watch these 6 animes recommended by mutuals :)

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Happy #SawX Day!

While no film in the main franchise has been directed by a woman, an interesting bonus feature on the Saw II DVD was. The Scott Tibbs Documentary tells the story of the titular Scott Tibbs, who develops an obsession with Jigsaw following the disappearance and presumed death of his supposed best friend Adam Stanheight. The mockumentary is the only found footage entry in the franchise, and even features an appearance by Shawnee Smith as Amanda.

The next group of tied films are just as varied as the films tied for 95th place on this list and I’m starting this batch with Madame de…. by Max Orphus, also known as The Earings of Madame de… here in the states. The film tells the story of Louise, an aristocratic woman who is married to a high ranking general in the French army. The marriage between these two resembles a companionship rather than a relationship, with the two being childless and sleeping in separate rooms. The core drama is centered around a pair of earrings that were gifted to Louise by her husband on their wedding day, which she sells back to the jeweler who made them and then pretends to have lost. The earrings keep reappearing and disappearing throughout the film, representing loneliness, indifference, love, desperation, and obsession all at different points depending on who has given the earrings to whom and why the earrings are forced to move hands once again.

Orphus’ camerawork is so delicate and fine-tuned here. I think it’s rather rare to see a camera that centers a woman like this in the time it was made. A lot of these French romances of the time period tended to focus on a male character’s feelings on a woman, but that’s not the case here. Orphus puts Louise’s feelings first and foremost, with the opening moments of the film focusing on just her hands as she moves through her jewelry trying to decide what she wants to keep and what she wants to get rid off, finally settling in on a view of how she looks in the mirror, holding the earrings to her face. This way of moving the camera and taking control of the space in order to center things on Louise is carried out even in how Orphus weaves the camera in and out of rooms. There’s so many fantastic ways he uses objects as barriers both in shots and as metaphors for the society that Louise, her husband, and her new lover live in.

In the 2012 list, Madame de… was tied for 93rd place with nine other films. Most of these films also made jumps higher in the list and those that didn’t fell off in favor of more recent films and first time appearances thanks to the wider voting base for the 2022 list. I do find it interesting that despite how different Madame de… is from the other films it shared 93rd place with in 2012 is that it made the smallest jump this year even though the expanded voting range theoretically should’ve allowed it to rise much higher in the rankings like other women-centric films did this time around.

Every decade, BFI’s Sight and Sound puts out a list of the 100 greatesr films of all time as decided by a group of critics, programmers, curators, archivists, and academics. The latest poll invited 1,639 of these people to participate on their critic’s choice list, a number that significantly dwarfs the number of participants in ever decade prior. For this reason alone, it makes complete sense why Get Out made the cut, being one four films made during the last then years to make it and one of six films to tie for the coveted final few spots on the list. The expansion of who gets to participate had significantly shifted the positions of films that were present on older lists and added some great new films. Much like the shift in Academy voting for the Oscars, this change shows a dedication to ensuring that the arts truly are open to all

Get Out, of course, is notable on its own for being Peele’s feature debut as a director. It’s so strong in its script, acting, editing, and visuals. It’s clear where Peele’s inspirations come from, watching this film. There’s some Kubrick in there, some Lynch, but Peele makes those styles into his own, combining it all with biting satire. The satire was so good that Get Out practically kickstarted a new form of self-conscious horror, for better or worse. Rewatching this was just a lot of fun. It had been a few years since I last saw it and it still holds up well today. Finding new bits of foreshadowing is always exciting and only serves to keep me engaged on a rewatch. I’m looking forward to seeing how other films that I’ve seen before that also made the list hold up!