{"id":11913,"date":"2020-10-31T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-31T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/?p=11913"},"modified":"2020-11-01T11:37:50","modified_gmt":"2020-11-01T15:37:50","slug":"brians-month-of-the-macabre-october-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/2020\/10\/brians-month-of-the-macabre-october-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian&#8217;s Month of the Macabre &#8211; October 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while since I&#8217;ve done a blog like this about my October horror movie watching. I kind of wanted to this year.<\/p>\n<p>I began this in October of 2003. It served a primary purpose initially of working on getting through the horror movies in my Netflix Queue at the time, but over the years, the selection has been less about watching new-to-me movies and more about rewatching some of my favorite from the genre. In 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2013, an added wrinkle happened when I was so inspired by what I was watching, and hearing, that I began to write music that captured the essence of horror I was experiencing each year. This month, to honor that part of my Octobers, I did a virtual concert over Facebook of several of the pieces I&#8217;ve written over those years, which you can watch below.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ya6uQPwBXWM\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>One thing that is different in this year&#8217;s post about my viewing is that I will not be listing the movies I&#8217;ve watched this year like normally. Over the past couple of years, I&#8217;ve started to chart my moviewatching on Letterboxd, and this October was no different for horror movies. You can find that list <a href=\"https:\/\/boxd.it\/8SFea\">here<\/a> to get a glimpse of everything I&#8217;ve seen.<\/p>\n<p>The picture accompanying this blog on the News page of Sonic Cinema is one of all the horror films I was originally planning on limiting myself to watching this October, save for my four Repertory Revue selections (<i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/an-american-werewolf-in-london\/\">&#8220;An American Werewolf in London&#8221;<\/a><\/i>, <i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/the-ghost-ship\/\">&#8220;The Ghost Ship&#8221;<\/a><\/i>, <i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/videodrome\/\">&#8220;Videodrome&#8221;<\/a><\/i> and <i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/wes-cravens-new-nightmare\/\">&#8220;Wes Craven&#8217;s New Nightmare&#8221;<\/a><\/i>. Part of that has to do with my Patreon-exclusive project involving the directorial career of Clive Barker, which is available for all subscription levels at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.patreon.com\/soniccinema\">www.patreon.com\/soniccinema<\/a>, which involved the most significant level of book reading I&#8217;ve done in many years, but also, I did not feel like over-exerting myself after two straight months of film festivals. When my full-time job went back on furlough at the start of the month, however, I found myself with more time than I anticipated, so I figured, &#8220;why not?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The truth is, horror has become a significant part of my 2020 movie diet between the releases that HAVE happened this year, and the film festivals I&#8217;ve covered this year. A lot of the best, and my favorite, movies of the year- none of them were part of my October watching this year, but I hope that many are in the years to come, and I&#8217;ll break down some of those at the end of the year. I understand the reticence to back away from the genre for a lot of people this year given the state of the world, but this has become a tradition for me, and I wanted to uphold it as much as possible.<\/p>\n<p>Of the 59 horror (or horror-inspired) films I watched this past month, 21 were new watches, unless you include the director&#8217;s cuts of Clive Barker&#8217;s &#8220;Nightbreed&#8221; and &#8220;Lord of Illusions&#8221; I saw for the first time as part of my Barker deep-dive. Of those 21, there were only a few I can see making it into a regular rotation year in and year out, like the clever <i>&#8220;Found Footage 3D&#8221;<\/i> or the original <i>&#8220;The Wicker Man&#8221;<\/i> and <i>&#8220;Candyman&#8221;<\/i>. Hulu&#8217;s film, <i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/2020\/10\/episode-73-david-spaltro-and-i-on-books-of-blood\/\">&#8220;Books of Blood&#8221;<\/a><\/i>, was a fun addition to my month of Clive Barker, but only one of the segments is really strong. Of the four films released in Amazon&#8217;s <b>Welcome to the Blumhouse<\/b> series, only <i>&#8220;Black Blood&#8221;<\/i> is one I might revisit, and that&#8217;s mainly as a possible review. Three of my 1980s horror first-time watches, <i>&#8220;Slumber Party Massacre&#8221;<\/i>, <i>&#8220;Pieces&#8221;<\/i>, and <i>&#8220;C.H.U.D.&#8221;<\/i>, are probably never going to be watched again. (The fourth, <i>&#8220;Dead &amp; Buried&#8221;<\/i>, will very much be rewatched for a full review in the future.) The recent remake of <i>&#8220;Suspiria&#8221;<\/i> is a big meal I&#8217;ll definitely rewatch in the future and write about, but it&#8217;s not going to be a regular fixture for me. Why do <i>&#8220;Found Footage 3D&#8221;<\/i>, <i>&#8220;The Wicker Man&#8221;<\/i>, and <i>&#8220;Candyman&#8221;<\/i> stand out? Because they all have both entertainment value, and a hook that draws us in to a wonderfully unique macabre world, and keep us intrigued every step of the way.<\/p>\n<p>The reason we rewatch movies is because of not just a comfort level with them, but because we also find ourselves finding something we didn&#8217;t necessarily realize before. Like the symmetrical storytelling of the first two <i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/friday-the-13th-friday-the-13th-part-2\/\">&#8220;Friday the 13th&#8221;<\/a><\/i> movies (and I&#8217;m really looking forward to digging into Scream Factory&#8217;s box set next October). Rewatching the two chapters of the recent <i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/it-2\/\">&#8220;IT&#8221;<\/a><\/i> <a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/it-chapter-two\/\">movies<\/a> in quick succession for the first time in a year, and finding that they actually go together much better than I originally thought they did last year. And finally watching Stanley Kubrick&#8217;s <i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/the-shining\/\">&#8220;The Shining&#8221;<\/a><\/i> and Mike Flanagan&#8217;s <i><a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/doctor-sleep\/\">&#8220;Doctor Sleep&#8221;<\/a><\/i> almost back-to-back, it was easier to piece together the ways the latter was inspired by the former. Or seeing what a fresh watch can provide after almost two decades, such as the case with the films I discuss in my <a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/2020\/10\/episode-74-horror-in-the-year-2000\/\">podcast<\/a> about four horror films from the year 2000. And was I surprised by the reaction I had on Halloween night to the cult classic, <a href=\"http:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/movie\/carnival-of-souls\/\"><i>&#8220;Carnival of Souls&#8221;<\/i><\/a>, which I had last seen during a RiffTrax Live event; after this rewatch, I might have a new regular film in the rotation.<\/p>\n<p>Inspiration will have to strike in the future for me to write about another October, especially if it&#8217;s a musical inspiration. Until then, though, the spirit will live on in horror-themed podcasts in the years to come.<\/p>\n<p>Viva La Resistance!<\/p>\n<p>Brian Skutle<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sonic-cinema.com\">www.sonic-cinema.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while since I&#8217;ve done a blog like this about my October horror movie watching. I kind of wanted to this year. I began this in October of 2003. It served a primary purpose initially of working on getting through the horror movies in my Netflix Queue at the time, but over the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-news-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/120659652_10158010885718214_9148459811475855934_o.jpg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11913"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11951,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11913\/revisions\/11951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonic-cinema.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}