In an effort to not completely burn myself out writing about on-screen private investigators and the audiences who love them, I figured I’d send out a normal newsletter for the first week of every month.
I am not very good at watching scary movies. I don’t like HORROR horror, but I do like what is controversially called “cozy horror.” I have had good and dear friends rail at the concept or at least the phraseology, but I do think we need to have a concise way of saying that I do not want to watch or read something that involves the threat of being murdered but I do want to experience, say, the soft and ready acquiescence to the pall of death that settles upon us as we move forward in linear time through the slow decay of Autumn.
When I was younger, I couldn’t abide by slasher movies because the threat of an unknown man-coded figure breaking into my home to murder me was, frankly, a real possibility. Though I go through life as a nearly 40 year old person whom no one has pointedly tried to kill (a privilege that is getting rarer and rarer), I realize today that I’m more statistically likely to be taken out by medical misogyny or an LA-area freeway car accident than pretty much anything else. There are a handful of body-horror storylines I can think of about this that I have no intention of writing, but they would make exceedingly boring movies.
No, what I really long for is something that is truly about the thinning veil between life and death, which is what we generally call “aging,” and what I have considered more and more frequently as my 40th birthday looms large. (December’s monthly newsletter is going to be a big upper, I can tell you now!) If you are of the ilk to assume that all the people who have passed before us are currently sitting around, eating popcorn, and observing us like we are corporeal reality TV for the spirit world, what are they saying to us? What grand bit of beyond-the-pale knowledge do they wish us to know, in the celestial play that includes grand swaths of dramatic irony? What monsters are lurking behind us, and why are the people on the couch of the afterlife begging us to turn around?
What I Read Recently:
September was about educating myself on a few things, mostly Old Hollywood and Classic Film so I can be a better host of Ticklish Business.
I was wholly absorbed by Criss-Cross, Stephen Rebello’s account of making Strangers on a Train. I have a lot of feelings about Patricia Highsmith (most of them not positive, aside from her writing, which is thrilling, but perhaps that is because she was a f*ing sociopath), but Strangers is one of my favorite Hitchcocks. I love it when Hitch let himself really marinate in sexuality politics. All of Hitch’s movies are about sex, but it’s a shame that most of them (save Strangers and Rope, so it might just be a Farley Granger thing) are not queer. Hitch excels so much at the subtle touches, the nudges, the glances, the details that makes a queer story so rich, especially for the time period in which he was working.
And speaking is sexuality politics, let’s talk about Pre-Code Essentials. A nice book of essays about pre-Code Hollywood which gave me a whole new list of must-see movies– the chapter on I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang has me wanting to watch the film ASAP.
And though it’s not about Hollywood, there is something wonderfully filthy about Isabella Stewart Gardner. I feel like we, as a society, don’t talk about her as much as we talk about the heist that happened in her museum. The author of this biography, Natalie Dykstra, does an excellent job to temper the fervor we all have about eccentric women who like to push boundaries, by reminding us that she wasn’t a fully progressive rich woman, as much as we enjoy her personal portrayal and many of her sexual politics. (Gardner got a lot cooler once her husband died.)
What To Watch:
Like I said, I don’t do spooky slasher horror, but I do like a certain kind of terrestrial, tangible horror and few movies embrace that better than King of Scream, John Carpenter’s, Assault on Precinct 13. Taut and bloody and brilliant, I’ve been toying with working with this conceit of a movie (trapped and under siege) on a new idea, but I don’t know how to write what I want to write. Isn’t that always the way.
Because I was born a chicken and will die a chicken, the only Halloween programming I ever watched as a kid was Disney’s Halloween Treat. It’s essentially a clip show of anything even remotely spooky put together by Disney animators for the Sunday night Magical World of Disney spot on ABC broadcast, but it includes the excellent Night on Bald Mountain bit from Fantasia and (apparently) Bing Crosby telling the tale of Ichabod Crane. There were a few different versions of the special; this isn’t the one I recall but the others aren’t embeddable.
Okay, so, way back in 2006, I decided I was going to learn to like scary movies. Everyone was raving about THE DESCENT, so I was like… surely this is a great place to start!
Note: it is not a good place to start.
Let’s Discuss:
If you have any “cozy horror” suggestions, please leave them below. I’m always at a loss of what to watch this time of year, and I would appreciate suggestions!
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