Halloween movies

This year’s Halloween Movies

Dear Liza,

It is monster movie season, as usual. But with it also being a rather tense Election season here in the States, none of our household was feeling the need of adding more terror to the mix. So we have focused on animation, both drawn and stop-motion, for our Halloween entertainment.

I avoided “Hotel Transylvania” for years because it just looked too silly. But it is really fun. Dracula, a widower with a just-come-of-age daughter, has created a “safe space” for monsters, where they can vacation away from villagers with torches and pitchforks. There is also a nice culture clash storyline with a human fellow who wanders in. No gore, no stress, lots of fun animation and puns galore.

“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” has been Auntie Bridgett’s favorite her whole life. It is sweet, with Linus faithfully waiting in the pumpkin patch for his unorthodox hero to arrive. Every year, I get irritated at Lucy’s casual cruelty to Linus and Charlie Brown, only to see her redeem herself when she fetches her broken hearted little brother from the Pumpkin Patch and tucks him into bed.

Our choices are not all so lighthearted, though. Frankenweenie features a boy who uses his newly-acquired scientific knowledge to bring his dog back from the dead. This year, because we lost our dear Mousie, it felt sad and a little too close to home.

Paranorman, a stop motion animation created by Laika Studios here in Portland, is also a favorite. A little boy who sees (and is very polite to) ghosts is tasked with keeping the local witch spirit in her place. The crisis brings out the best in some and the worst in others, and the characters are delightfully quirky.

For me, the darkest of all the movies we watch is Coraline, also created by Laika Studios. The girl who wishes for a perfect world with attentive parents and fun activities gets what she asks for, and it takes help from a bossy cat and odd neighbor boy to get her out of it. Neil Gaiman wrote the original story, and it is wonderful, deep, and scary.

This is what we have been entertaining ourselves with these getting-darker evenings, as it gets too chilly for after dinner walks.

Have a wonderful weekend, stay warm, and we’ll chat later.

Love,

Grandma Judy

This Year’s Halloween Movies

Dear Liza,

This year, Auntie Bridgett gave herself a challenge. She would watch a Halloween movie every evening of October and draw a cartoon of it. Lucky for me, we like the same kinds of movies!

Here is our list so far, and a few of her delightful drawings.

Bell, Book and Candle
Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (with Frederick March… we couldn’t finish it. Ick.)
Boxtrolls
Young Frankenstein
Ghost and Mr. Chicken
Hotel Transylvania 1,2,3 and 4 (First is the best!)
Arsenic and Old Lace
Nightmare before Christmas (My first time, and I didn’t care for it.)

The Blob (with Steve McQueen)
Hocus Pocus 1 and 2
Paranorman
Dracula (the original)
Haunted mansion (NOT Eddie Murphy’s)
Skeleton dance (old Disney short)
Haunting in Venice
Frankenweenie
Blithe Spirit (with Rex Harrison and Margaret Rutherford!)
Ichabod and Mr. Toad
It’s the Great pumpkin, Charlie Brown

The animated Addams Family (2019)

Room on the Broom

Monster House

Oh no!! We have run out of October before we ran out of movies!!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Dear Liza,

Since it is October, we have been watching ”monster movies”. But we don’t like gory stuff or really scary stories, so we are pretty fussy about what we watch.

We start with the silly ones, because we like to be silly. Charles Schulz’s ”It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”, and Mel Brooks’ ”Young Frankenstein” are two of our favorites.

The old classic movies, like Boris Karloff’s 1932 “The Mummy” and the 1954 “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, have such delightful dialogue, characters and stories that they feel like old friends that we visit once a year. This year we tried a ”new” one, 1953s “The Magnetic Monster.” It was interesting, but I think maybe one watching is enough.

“The Blob”, which starred a very young Steve McQueen in 1958, had pretty ridiculous special effects, but it was just so much fun. The courageous teenagers who worked so hard to make the adults believe that the monster was real, and to save everyone, always give me hope. And the early rock n’roll theme song is just adorable.

Our bow to the Disco era is ”Love at First Bite”, a Dracula spoof with handsome George Hamilton playing the ancient count in modern New York City.

We watched the modern stop-motion film “ParaNorman”. It is a stunning homage to classic horror movies and created by our local Laika studio. They use thousands of hand made sets and pieces to create better-than-lifelike characters. The story is so sweet and moving, I cry just a little when the ’evil witch’ can finally stop haunting and rest.

The newest film we watched this year was a remake of “Blythe Spirit”. Judi Dench played the eccentric spiritualist Madame Arcati, who accidentally brings a lady back ’from the other side’ and then can’t figure out how to send her back. It wasn’t as good, in my humble opinion, as the 1945 version, with the delightful Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati.

We are coming up on Halloween pretty quick, so we are about done with our monster movie watching for this year. But that’s okay! In just another month, it’s Christmas movie time!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Our Halloween Movies

Dear Liza,

You know we don’t like gory movies, but we do like monsters, witches, aliens and such. Our movie selections this year have been a fun mix of really old and newer ones.

The Mummy, Dracula and The Creature from the Black Lagoon are household favorites. They have the benefit of not being a re-make of anything, but the first of their genre. We enjoy the old sets and costumes, and the dialogue about ‘modern day’ science vs. superstition.

Some classics are not as popular. We dislike every single character in the original Frankenstein and its first sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein. There just isn’t anyone to root for. The vain doctor, his fiancé-greedy best friend, his loving but idiotic fiancé, all act against their own interests at every turn. We can only sympathize with the Monster, who hasn’t got a chance. It is frustrating.

We enjoy the 1950’s scientific monsters, which usually involve the monster arriving on an asteroid. The Day of the Triffids, The Blob, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers have different levels of scariness, but all show regular folks dealing with really weird stuff.

It Came From Outer Space depicts the aliens as just a ship full of (really ugly) guys who have engine trouble, needing a few spare parts and a little help, just hoping to get off the planet alive. The movie shows the small minded Earthlings as “hating anything they don’t understand”. This is a refrain in many of the movies from the 1950s.

Maybe my all time favorite, The Day the Earth Stood Still shows the alien (played by Michael Rennie) as a messenger of subtlety and intelligence.. Arriving as he does at the height of the Cold War, he puts our petty planetary squabbles into perspective. “Live in Peace”, he warns, “Or face obliteration.”

Vincent Price, of course, features in our Halloween selection. His House on Haunted Hill and House of Wax are eerie and surprising and just gruesome enough to have the spirit of the season.

Kay Hammond shows Margaret Rutherford that she is indeed “there”.

British post-War silliness is delightful in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (starring the dotty Margaret Rutherford and a very young Rex Harrison). Rex Harrison is also handsome in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, from the same era.

Newer movies we have enjoyed are the musical Little Shop of Horrors and Bette Midler’s slightly shrill Hocus Pocus. They are much less atmospheric than the older movies, but a little levity is welcome in these odd times.

I hope you will try some of our favorites and add them to your own list!

Love,

Grandma Judy