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November 08, 2005
Pop Tarts | A pop culture critique: Where have all the horror movies gone?
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. It involves candy, parties, and all things spooky and supernatural. While there are holidays I consider more important than Halloween, there’s just that special something that it always has that no other holiday has: It can never let you down. There’s no disappointment in Halloween, no having to pretend you like gifts, no feeling bad because you’re alone, no feeling miserable because of family drama.
There is no obligation with Halloween nobody gets forced into doing anything they don’t want to do. Halloween is simply a holiday where those who want to celebrate can, and those who don’t get off guilt
free. Nobody expects you to write four dozen Halloween cards or prepare a massive meal or house extra guests. Just find a costume, buy some candy and slap up a skeleton or two to make the house festive.
Those who want to go all out and treat it as the most important day of the year are just more entertaining for the bystanders. Yep, Halloween is definitely a lot of fun and never disappointing until this year where all of television decided that it wasn’t worth celebrating.
Every year for the week leading up to Halloween there is an endless array of gore, thrills and horror to be found scattered through the cable channels. We all have memories of staying up a little later than usual to watch some scary movie, destined to haunt our dreams that night. I always look forward to the nostalgia of seeing Freddy, Jason and Pinhead come back each October. It’s a good excuse to curl up with some popcorn and spend an evening in. This is what my roommate and I tried to do this year, but to our shock there wasn’t a fright fest to be found.
We scanned the TV guide, flipped through all the channels and lamented the death of our DVD player.
Even TNT, traditionally the most macho of the super-stations, couldn’t even muster up a thriller. Actually, TNT decided to spend the entire weekend playing Julia Roberts movies. While I must admit the thought of watching Runaway Bride or Stepmom is terrifying, it’s just not terrifying in the way I’d like. And while her freakish lips, bad hair and horse teeth do seem like something out of a creature feature, I’d rather have Frankenstein any day.
The scary movie at Halloween is an icon, an institution, and completely indispensable. But this year it was disposed of. The only network that played horror movies was Bravo, which just played Nightmare on Elm Street and New Nightmare on repeat the whole time. Other Halloween viewing options included touring decorated homes on HGTV or whatever the hell was happening on the Family Channel.
Actually, the Family Channel bit was pretty interesting They made families attach cameras to themselves and locked them in haunted buildings at night. Interesting, but not thrilling and the Blair Witch Project rip-off camera work wasn’t helping matters. Yep, all in all this was the Halloween that television forgot, like a jack-o-lantern left out to rot.
There was some good to come of this terrible atrocity, however. That’s the fact that it made me leave the living room earlier than planned and go exploring as an alternative Halloween activity. Luckily my decision to do so coincided with an eerie fog descending upon Midway and blanketing the greater Hamline area. So instead of curling up on the couch we stalked around the neighborhood looking at all the decorations. It was spooky and fun, anything but disappointing, just like Halloween should be.
Posted by msveum at November 8, 2005 12:06 PM