This is Halloween, everybody make a scene.
Author’s note: This is the eleventh installment of my weekly column, Barely Relevant.
Good morning, Field Gullers; it’s Halloween, and other than a potentially frightening Thursday Night Football game for New York Jets fans, there are not a lot of spooky Seattle Seahawks topics to cover (although I could probably write an entire Halloween post on Aaron Rodgers). As a result, I’m going to downshift into some delectably dissonant darkness.
What’s your favorite horror movie? It seems like an easy question, but as I pose it to you, I’m having trouble with my own answer. If some random sports blogger had asked me, I normally would have just blurted out “The Shining,” but now that I’m actually taking a moment to dust off the old memory banks and sift through the disgusting library in my head, I’m not so sure.
“The Shining” has it all for me. Stanley Kubrick is one of my favorite directors, and the film is based almost entirely in an isolated cold place – which is an entire genre, let me tell you. Not only a cold place, but the interiors of The Overlook Hotel – the fictional hotel in the movie – were copied entirely from the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park… which happens to be the coolest in the world. Seriously, Stanley Kubrick went in there, took measurements, and copied the lobby and elevators exactly.
But, once I started thinking about the cold and isolated genre, I remembered John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Now, that’s gotta be the best cold place horror/sci-fi film of all time. Not only is Kurt Russell in fine form, but it poses Jungian existential dilemmas and the creepiest – all-natural – gore effects from the one and only special effects guru, Rob Bottin himself, way before CGI. And, as always, John Carpenter soundtracked it with synthesizers in only the way that John Carpenter can.
But, now that I’m thinking about John Carpenter, I don’t even know if “The Thing” is his best movie. How could I omit his crown jewel, which was so influential they named a holiday after it, “Halloween”? Halloween was an independent slasher film (close to being the first) that absolutely horrifies me to this day. I’m a tough guy – and could easily watch “The Thing” while home alone at night. But Halloween? Hell no.
I’m pretty sure that “Halloween” was also the first movie to make the daytime scary. And Carpenter wrote, directed, and soundtracked it all by himself. Can you hear the theme song in your head right now? Did you pee your pants a little?
The late seventies and early eighties were a prime era for slasher and splatter movies. Along with John Carpenter, savants like Sam Raimi and Dario Argento arrived. “Evil Dead,” “Dead Alive,” “Suspiria,” and “Deep Red” must all be considered (Dario Argento had the brilliant Italian synth band Goblin compose all of his soundtracks, and nobody did it better). And the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th sagas began.
But you can go much further back than that, of course. Way back before “Psycho” even, to perhaps the creepiest film ever made, 1922’s “Nosferatu” with hands-down the creepiest portrayal of Dracula ever captured on film – by Mr. Max Schreck. Max Schreck was so terribly creepy that an entire movie called “Shadow of the Vampire” was made in 2000 about how Max Schreck, the actor, was truly a vampire pretending to be an actor playing a vampire. It was a meta thing.
If horror movies aren’t your thing, I’d like to open up the discussion to personal ghost stories as well. Have you ever had anything paranormally surreal happen? I can only think of one time for myself, but I’ll quickly convey it here:
I was in my twenties and living in a giant rented house off Olive Way on Capital Hill. This was sometime in the nineties. Three friends and I got the place dirt cheap. The house was scheduled for demolition, but they didn’t have a date yet, and the owner decided he wanted to collect rent until demo day. So, we all moved in on a month-to-month basis with the understanding that we could be booted out at any time.
The minute I walked into that place, I knew that something f-cked up had happened there. There were strange carpet stains and weird holes in some of the walls. The vibes were so heavy that I made my roommate (who got us the house) ask the owner what the hell had happened. Sure enough, somebody had died right before we moved in. He didn’t go into detail but told us it was in the bathtub. Of course, we all speculated wildly.
We lived there for a while, and little things would happen from time to time. The TV would shut off (but it was old), the walls would creak, and it would sound like someone was walking around upstairs when everybody was downstairs. Our circle of friends quickly named it “The Death House.”
So, of course, we had a giant Halloween party that year, and someone thought it would be a good idea to bring a Ouija board over. We set it up, and everyone crowded around, and a few of us put our fingers on the planchette – the plastic piece that is supposed to move around when controlled by spirits. The thing zoomed away – like took off from my finger. I don’t see how anyone with one finger on the thing could have manipulated it like that. It took off and instantly started spelling the name of the one roommate who wasn’t with us. He was upstairs, alone, sleeping in his room.
He had to work early the next morning and wasn’t interested in partaking in our revelry. After the Ouija board kept spelling his name, we all freaked out and ran upstairs. I was first from the crowd at his door and kept turning the doorknob to try and get in – I twisted the thing repeatedly, but his door was locked. It wouldn’t turn. We all banged on the door and yelled his name. He woke up and yelled back at us: “What the hell do you guys want?!”
“The Ouija board!” we yelled, “it spelled your name. Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine, leave me alone!”
Oh well, okay. We left him alone.
The next morning, I stopped by his work for a cup of coffee. He was working as a barista at a local café at the time. He frowned at me when he saw me. “What the hell were you guys doing at my door last night?”
“Oh, we were playing with a Ouija board. It kept spelling your name over and over again, so it freaked us out. We wanted to check on you.”
“Why didn’t you just come in? Why did you keep f-cking with my door?”
“Because your door was locked.”
“I don’t have a lock on my door. And you kept coming back and scratching on it. I couldn’t sleep.”
I went home after that and checked his door. The thing opened like butter… and, indeed, there was no lock on it. I wouldn’t have been able to get in with a sledgehammer the night before.
I moved out quickly after that and into holy ground – an old church, actually. And as creepy as that sounds, it was way less creepy than The Death House. Some entrepreneur purchased that old church and turned it into a bar called Captain Blacks. When I get homesick for the old days, I can still go there and sit at the bar and say to anybody who will listen, “Over there, that’s where my bed was.”
The Death House got torn down about a month after we all dispersed. It’s a fancy condominium now.
If you’ve made it this far (this one got away from me), hop into the comments and share some seasonal stories or favorite flicks. Anybody ever egg a house?