A Small Dose of Traditional Horror

I am a big fan of horror, the good, the bad and the so-bad-it's-good. Much has been written to decry the torture porn movement and I am in complete stride with such disapproval. When it comes to scaring an audience, I believe less is more. While extreme gore, mutilation, torture and cruelty can be unsettling, it is only initially shocking, then it just becomes tepid, like jumping into a cold pool. Another lukewarm foray in the horror genre is the remake niche. When A Stranger Calls, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, have all been poorly remade with exponentially bigger budgets than the originals. These remakes are half-hearted and toothless, relying on slick production value to win over audiences, instead of improving on the original concepts or at least sticking to what worked for the original films. And perhaps the zeitgeist that these respective films were addressing doesn't exist anymore. "The calls are coming from inside the house," were some of the scariest words I'd ever heard in my life. Would they even resonate today? Who uses a land line phone anymore? It's probably just some asshole upstairs on his Blackberry anyway. Horror does seem to be in a sad state, saturated with uninspired, shock-filled remakes. But there is hope and it lies in the few and far between, the independent film, the director willing to take a chance. Or more importantly, the production company willing to take a chance.

Trick R' Treat is a small horror film that lingered in distribution limbo for two years awaiting a theatrical release that never came. It was released direct to DVD in 2009 amidst the overwhelming amount of direct to DVD horror content that has been flooding your Netflix queue. It is not widely popular, but it has gained a following online. (I learned about the movie while perusing different movie sites and blogs only weeks ago. I am, admittedly, late to the party.) It is a breath of fresh air in the current state of horror. What I found most interesting about the movie is that it is based in usual horror plots and themes and yet still seemed original.

The plot is made up of five stories that all converge and diverge throughout Halloween night. Each story is a play on a typical horror device: the mild-mannered man who is actually a serial killer, the scary house and the frightening horrors within, the innocent virgin and her promiscuous friends, the practical joke that goes horribly wrong. In all the stories there is a diminutive man/boy? with a pumpkin for a head, who is the harbinger of bad things to come, and sometimes the perpetrator. This little guy is the spirit of Halloween, seemingly, and someone you will definitely end up rooting for. The way the stories intertwine, in both the past and the present, is done well. There are a few twists, and they were not all telegraphed.

Dylan Baker, Brian Cox and Anna Paquin offer up some good acting, and bring some credibility to the production. These are not exactly deep dramatic roles, but they could be played a lot worse. Even the child actors turned in believable performances. The movie has a pitch perfect tone that is mostly mischievous, never threatening or frightening. It feels closed. Your are definitely on the outside looking in, as there is no individual protagonist to latch onto. This is a moral or a fable with more character types than characters. Leaving you with the reassuring feeling that bad things will happen to them, and not you. Which is altogether different from most horror, but still a pleasure to watch.

Mad Men Season 4 Episode 1 - Public Relations

"Who is Don Draper?" This is the question asked in the opening scene of the fourth season of AMC's Mad Men, and has been the perennial question that Matthew Weiner, the show's creator, has been asking us since the show first premiered. We come into the new season with much of the show's dynamics drastically changed. Sterling Cooper as we've known it has ceased to exist, having been swallowed by a large advertising firm Y&R. The agency is now Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and has in its employ Joan Holloway, Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell and Harry Crane, leaving the rest of the firm behind to Y&R. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is a small operation with a confident face forward that is struggling behind the scenes to obtain and keep clients. On the home front Don and Betty are divorced. Betty is now married to Henry Francis living in Ossining with Sally and Bobby, while Don is now living in an apartment in Greenwich Village. We see Betty and Henry are adjusting to living in a house still owned by Don, and Thanksgiving with Henry's family, the building of new family dynamics.
The question, "Who is Don Draper", and the episode title, "Public Relations" are connected in both a literal and metaphorical sense in this episode. Literally because Don is the center of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Riding the success of a recent advertising gem, Don is interviewed by a reporter from an ad newspaper. At the interview Don fails to play himself up or the firm for that matter. His modesty is taken for arrogance or perhaps complacence. This causes the loss of an account and thereby forces Don to reconsider his role at the firm. His creative success is linked directly to the financial success to the firm, and now so is his face. There is no more hiding for Don Draper. Finding out don Draper's secrets has taken three seasons of bread-crumb-trail-following for the audience and even for the characters on the show. Don is a man who exists most comfortably in the shadows, in mystery. He is a cautious man who has had to protect his identity for a long time and has successfully built a wall around himself. It would appear now that we are starting to see the bricks crumble and not from the outside in, but from the inside out. Perhaps his path lies outside of his wall and that is path he is starting to walk. At the end of episode he throws out the Jantzen's people for being too safe, for being unwilling to take necessary risks. Maybe Don Draper is ready to take those risks as well. To shed his shell and step forward into the light and out of the shadows. To begin public relations. Perhaps this is a new man.
Just a word on Betty, this is a woman who has been slowly unraveling as the story progressed. Betty's position in the show is sympathetic. From the outset she is a bored and lonely (and rich) housewife. Her husband comes home late and leaves early, married more to his job and his mistresses than to his wife. Essentially she is alone, and we know she feels it when we see her reaching out to Glenn, the neighbor's prepubescent son. As her marriage fell apart and she became increasingly alone she regressed into more and more of a child. This is most evident in the presence of her father, and she shifts back to daddy's princess almost immediately. As Henry's mother put it, "She is a silly woman."