Dedicated Horror Nerd Thread

[Hoecs]

Calvaire/The Ordeal. I hardly ever hear people talk about this film but it's so fucking good. Pity his follow up, Vinyan, was an absolutely boring piece of shit.



Don't know whether it counts as 'horror' but I just watched Threads, the BBC nuclear holocaust documentary from the 80s and it's pretty disturbing.

[ifear]

Don't know whether it counts as 'horror' but I just watched Threads, the BBC nuclear holocaust documentary from the 80s and it's pretty disturbing.

it's in the bfi's list at the top of the thread, so i suppose it counts. i went on about it at length upthread. unsettling shit.

[Motherwell]

calvaire is quality stuff but if you really feel that way about vinyan you're insane

[Kevin McCallister]

I named my dead cat after Casper Van Dien.

Innkeepers is about as good as it gets. Ya'll are nuts. I can't think of a film that better captures that crushing, melancholy feeling of the death of a small business/mid-20s ennui & aimlessness. And then to make those stories thematically parallel/intersecting with a ghost story? Brilliant.

This is interesting but I feel that the "mid-20s ennui" overshadows it. They don't seem to mourn the inn, there's no owner-figure around to add to the tragedy.

[Kevin McCallister]

Also, I stopped searching for horror VHS sometime last year, but I was curious enough about this doc to throw in five bucks.
Plus I love that camcorder typeface so much.



http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/186 ... -the-vhs-c

[Ampersand]

I named my dead cat after Casper Van Dien.

Innkeepers is about as good as it gets. Ya'll are nuts. I can't think of a film that better captures that crushing, melancholy feeling of the death of a small business/mid-20s ennui & aimlessness. And then to make those stories thematically parallel/intersecting with a ghost story? Brilliant.

This is interesting but I feel that the "mid-20s ennui" overshadows it. They don't seem to mourn the inn, there's no owner-figure around to add to the tragedy.

Yup, but I wonder if that's sort of the point (I love that the owner is on vacation or something and couldn't even bother to be around for the final weekend). The hotel itself becomes the major figure worth mourning over. We get lots of little intimations that it has a real history, and that the hotel itself is actually sort of resisting being obsolete, forgotten, and unoccupied (it's making new ghosts, after all). The characters' disregard for that history is what sort of dooms them, too--Luke wants to preserve the hotel's paranormal history on his Geocities website only in order to launch himself as a Ghost Hunter, while Claire fails to realize she has literally no place else to go (which is where the two strands I've pointed out entwine: the end of the business is, for all intents and purposes, the end of her aimless wheel-spinning. The economy leads to the ends of both, and, yeah, the chilling part is that no one else in the film seems to care about that.)

[Bob511]

This is interesting but I feel that the "mid-20s ennui" overshadows it. They don't seem to mourn the inn, there's no owner-figure around to add to the tragedy.

I don't know, even aside from the old guy, stuff like the Schlitz scene seems plenty mournful, in a way that merges the loss of that kind of low-pressure, low-profile job with their unassuming, non-judgmental sort-of-friendship. There's probably nothing at the center of the movie that's as intense as "tragedy," but it seems like they've both identified with the hotel enough to feel like they're losing something in its closing (and in Claire's case, to want to grab at even something absurd about the place for just a bit longer than is healthy).

[Motherwell]

Ampersand, the premise you listed sounds great on paper, and your next post offered some great insight, but unfortunately I got very little of that from the film itself.

[Bob511]

I mean, we both just wrote more-or-less the same post independently, so it seems likely there's something of that in the film.

[Motherwell]

It feels like you guys are forgetting that Luke admits to being a fraud about ghost hunting.

[Ampersand]

It feels like you guys are forgetting that Luke admits to being a fraud about ghost hunting.

Yeah, but that gels with my reading. He's (poorly) exploiting, not celebrating or commemorating the hotel.

[Bob511]

I don't know why you'd feel that, with

(and in Claire's case...)

...meaning, implicitly, not in Luke's case.

[Motherwell]

Well, I could see him exploiting the hotel's history to "launch himself as a Ghost Hunter" if he actually believed in ghosts. The fact that he owns up to the opposite seems to suggest he actually cares more about the hotel, i.e. he was trying to drum up interest in the failing place by highlighting its ostensible spectral richness.

[Ampersand]

Do you think the people on all of those ghost hunting television shows actually believe in ghosts? It seems like a pretty decent gig he's aiming for...
I think he's trying to establish his own brand name. May I remind you of "Real Hauntings": http://www.paranormalinvestigations-web ... index.html

And of course the other angle is that he's using it as a real half-assed way to spend more time with Claire. In either case, his interest in the hotel in itself is negligible-- it's not as if he has much going on in his life either, so a possibly-haunted hotel is enough to inspire this bare minimum entrepreneurial effort, regardless of his own feelings on ghosts.

[Ampersand]

AND: if you want to see his efforts as drumming up interest and business for the hotel (even though the closing is inevitable), I'd argue the intentions behind that would be his disinclination to search for a new job/desire to continue working alongside the lovely, Muppety Claire.

[Motherwell]

the pretense for spending more time with claire makes sense to me.

as for ghost hunters, i always assumed they did believe in ghosts. not really the people on television (i assume the majority of them just want to be on tv), but like the people who do it for a hobby and make websites devoted to it. to them a job at an old hotel with a spooky past (and so little business that they can spend entire shifts searching for spirits) would seem to be heaven. but i do think that fact that luke actually doesn't believe makes more sense for the movie since its supposed to have a depressing undertone.

[Motherwell]

i think there's a cool movie to be made (wouldn't be surprised if it already exists. actually session 9 is kinda like it) where the characters spend the movie looking for ghosts in a place supposedly rife with them, only to come up empty, and then instead one of the characters turns out to be a sick fuck and tries to and successfully kills the other. and the movie ends with an implicit statement to the audience like, you wanted ghosts but there aren't any so here's the gore w/o all the spooky bullshit.

[Ampersand]

That sounds exactly like Session 9 (tho it's left a bit ambiguous as to what influence supernatural entities played on the events).

There are a bunch of other films that play this Scooby Doo card as well, although nowhere near as frighteningly (it's usually played for fun and most are straight up murder mysteries)-- I'm thinking mostly of 70s Euro cinema: Murder Mansion, The Red Queen Kills 7 Times, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave.

[Ampersand]

This eve's feature review: Terence Fisher's FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967). This gothic Hammer goodie is a personal favorite and one I'm writing about a little for a larger paper on Shelley's book. So stop by my blog, if you are so inclined, and check out what I have to say about women, creatures, and lady creatures.

http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2012/0 ... 6-dir.html

[manvstrees]

i mean i got the ennui and business dying and everything but it's also important that the ghost story involved not suck complete shit and go nowhere

[Bob511]

listen i enjoy an hour and a half of a cute girl wandering around doing trivial shit, but some attempt at atmosphere is not enough to justify a total lack of payoff, by-the-numbers endings completely devoid of creativity or originality. i mean how banal and apathetic do you have to be to write or film one of these?

also the blair witch project is one of the best horror movies of all time

[manvstrees]

you surely aren't saying that thats a contradiction

[Bob511]

I would have a hard time describing Heather Donahue as "cute," I suppose.

[manvstrees]

I would have a hard time describing Heather Donahue as "cute," I suppose.

me too.
also if you need me to explain how the mythology behind the blair witch stacks up against this nonstory in the inkeepers then there's just nothing i can do with you

[Bob511]

Honestly, I'm torn, but it probably wouldn't be the best thing for the thread.

[Motherwell]

Anyone hear anything about this likely godawful creation?



If Jake Busey plays Wagner on one of those neon violins I might have to watch it.

[Bob511]

It's funny, I looked at that page on what must have been the 24th, and at the top IMDB helpfully offered to find local showtimes for me.

I admit, the thought of seeing an Asylum film in a theater had a small, momentary appeal.

[Sharmoota]

I'm curious about Slavic horror films. Would appreciate any recommendations. Something along the lines of The Cremator or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, though I do know that the latter is not really a horror film per se.

Also, are Night Watch/Day Watch worth watching?

[Mesh]

Terror on Tour

Glacially paced dialogue to stretch a thin plotline, but this has tons going for it: 4 or 5 pairs of 70s boobs, unknown IL power pop band the Names as the shock-rock band The Clowns, some good slasher stabbings, and an unforgettable early performance by Larry "Soup Nazi" Thomasof. "Shock rock is ruining our youth" theme is fun too. And some amazing t-shirts.

[a is jump]

That looks pretty cool, Mesh, I'll have to track it down.

The Names are actually going to be anthologized on a Numero Group compilation coming out later this year.