Last year, I decided to do a little thing in celebration of Halloween on my oft-neglected film blog (which you can find at thunderplanet.blogspot.com if you feel like torturing yourself). It was a list of 10 spooky movies that I thought were really damn good, so I thought I would put a good word in for those with my nonexistent readers, so that they might try the movies out themselves and perhaps a few new favorite movies. I didn’t really give myself enough time to really work on the thing though, I think I wrote and posted it the the week of Halloween, and several of the films were those that didn’t need that much help, like John Carpenter’s The Thing. Like most things in my life, it was ultimately disappointing.
Cut to one year later and I decided to break out the movies and do another list for Halloween. Not a piddly 10 item list like the previous one, but a full-on 31 item list, one for each day of October (originally it was going to be 50, but I cooled down a bit). Compiling the list of movies, watching all the movies and doing the writeups took out a big chunk of my month, and sometimes I’m still tempted to make some alterations, but in the end I think I’m pleased with the results. As it turns out, seeing the culmination of all your efforts can actually be a pretty rewarding experience. Who knew?
Before any of you continue on to the list, please keep this in mind: although this is indeed a list of movies to watch on Halloween, not a list of horror. There are indeed plenty of horror movies on this list (the top 10 is exclusively so), but to me Halloween has always been about more ‘scary’ things. It’s about fear, the macabre, all the strange and weird and dark things that don’t get much attention the rest of the year. So on the movies that aren’t of the horror genre, I tried to give a short explanation it fits the tone of the holiday. You’re free to accept my reasoning or not, it doesn’t matter either way. Also, even though this is a numbered list, the numbers don’t really indicate quality so much as they show the order in which I watched the films, with a couple of exceptions. Lastly, this list was largely an excuse for me to watch a lot of movies that I hadn’t seen up until this point, so there will be several entries that are on The Thing levels of public knowledge. I’ve included a lot of lesser known films to try and balance it out, and I worked to provide a diverse compilation as well, different monsters, different countries, etc. I tended to return to the 1980s a lot, but that’s just how I am as a horror fan.
Now, feel free to take a look over the list, peruse the entries, and see if there’s anything that catches your eye. Happy Halloween!
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What better way to start off a marathon of Halloween movies than with one of the most important monster movies of all time: King Kong, released in 1933 by RKO Radio Pictures. Yes, before Godzilla was butting heads with space dragons and Cloverfield was being disappointing, King Kong was punching dinosaurs and eating people to the delight of audiences everywhere. No magic involved, no radiation, just an improbably large ape on the most badass skull island that time forgot. There’s other bits of plots too of course, like an awkward and unconvincing romance between Fay Wray and Jack the misogynistic sailor, a self-righteous film director willing to risk lives for his movies and themes with Nature and the Old World’s incompatibility with modern society, but the story isn’t of that much importance when you have a giant ape to ogle at. Which is probably true in any circumstance, given the choice between doing something or watching a gigantic ape do stuff, I imagine most people would rather go for the gorilla.
There had been monster movies before this of course, Dracula and Frankenstein had come out under Universal a few years prior, but where King Kong surpasses those other movies is in its sense of scale. From the skyscrapers in New York City to the overgrowth of Skull Island, every location has this enormous sense of scale and power, where even crowds of people seem miniscule in comparison. Add to that the extensive use of stop-motion animation and animatronics it took to accurately depict Kong and the creatures of Skull Island and you can tell that King Kong was built with breaking the boundaries of film in mind. The characters may be somewhat dull and the plot is simplistic, but to me the film speaks to an era of history that none of us living today experienced but what endlessly fascinates; the turning-point years of the 20th century, when the explosive advancements in technology were still mingling the last vestiges of the 19th century, before World War II would place us firmly in the post-modern age. It was still a horrible time to be poor, female, a child or any type of ethnicity that wasn’t Caucasian, but in an idealized form it speaks of a world that still holds some mysteries, that there are some islands in the Pacific or some region in the Amazon that holds some wonders long forgotten by man just waiting to be rediscovered. Perhaps I’ve just read too much classical fiction in my youth, but that’s what I liked about King Kong, and maybe this Halloween that’s what you’ll like about it as well.
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