The only Oscar snub I’ll hear about is Kathryn Hunter not getting nominated for playing the witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Nice to see Michael Keaton got some love at the SAG awards.
He should probably have an Oscar for Beetlejuice and another one for Birdman. I was disappointed his performance in ‘Worth’ this year never gained any Oscar traction.

This is some John Cazale kind of shit.

In his mid-30’s, he was a complete unknown. Well past the age where most actors get that big break. Boseman got his playing, of all people, Jackie Robinson. How does hefollow up playing Jackie Robinson? By playing James Brown. After that he gets his chance to be a superhero, defining Black Panther on the big screen. Then he plays Thurgood Marshall. Toss in a Spike Lee movie and an August Wilson adaptation with Viola Davis? Incredible.

This is a lifetime of achievements on film but all told, his run as a movie star was 7 years. That’s it.

Gone too young but man did he give us everything an actor could.

Stop me if I’m the only one.

October 31
Beetlejuice (1988)
Watched on DVD

The classics are classics for a reason. I mean, not always, but in this case its true. Beetlejuice is a comedy but it’s about ghosts and the nature of scaring people so I’m counting it. It’s Tim Burton’s best movie. A deceptively simple story that I loved as a kid has turned deepened for me as an adult into a meditation on death and mourning and how life should be lived.

It’s a beautiful thing. Glad I watched it on Halloween.

This movie is great.

October 27-30
The Haunting of Hill House (2018)
Watched on Netflix

Is this cheating? Yes. But we watched about 10 hours or TV, so I’m taking 4 days.

I thought a horror TV show would be a different animal than a movie but it really isn’t. It’s still about telling a scary story, creating compelling characters and then landing the individual moments of scares.

The show works. It, like too many shows of its era, is slower than it needs to be and so it requires some patience in the middle episodes but the family at the center of the show is written well and the best episodes are worth wading through the slower ones. The scares are well earned. I enjoyed it as much as any non-horror show I’ve watched in a while.

This show is pretty good.

October 26
Bug (2006)
Watched on DVD

Based on a Tracy Letts play, Bug takes place almost entirely in a single location but that location, a cheap motel, changes over the course of the movie with the changes that happen inside the main characters. Michael Shannon is brilliant. This might be Ashley Judd’s best performance. It’s a decent into madness story and by the end, I felt a little crazy myself.

It’s not a perfect movie. Some will not get as much mileage out of the single location and some stagey dialogue (neither bothered me) and it is a tough watch. But as psychological horror, it works, and a fitting return-to-form William Friedkin.

This movie is good.

October 25
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
Watched on Amazon

In 1974, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre founded a new era of visceral, gritty horror movies. Over the course of the next decade, that visceral, gritty, and all-too real style made filmmakers a lot of money and morphed into something different.

Texas Chainsaw begat Halloween and Halloween begat Friday The 13th, which itself morphed from sort of campy to full-out slapstick by the times Jason Lives came out in 1986. That same year, Tobe Hooper finally gave the world the sequel to him horror classic, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. It’s a strange film that is billed as a sequel to Texas Chainsaw but is really a response to the movies that came after it. Texas Chainsaw 2 is campy and weird but still has some gruesome images. Dennis Hopper is in it and spends a lot of time sawing things. As a time capsule, it’s quite interesting. As a movie, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Check out a young Bill Moseley (later, of The Devil’s Rejects) being scary as all hell, though.

This movie is good-bad.

October 24
Hereditary (2018)
Watched on Amazon

The scariest movie I saw last year. Toni Collete should’ve been nominated for an Oscar for this movie but then again, this movie could’ve been nominated for a number of awards (the whole cast is great, the cinematography is great, the direction is impeccable, the score is frightening…).

It plays a little differently once you know what’s coming but there are layers below the obvious to dig into so its worth a second viewing if you can handle it. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who wasn’t up to it. This is a rough watch.

This movie is good-good.

October 23
Scream 2 (1997)
Watched on Netflix

Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson try to keep things going but it just doesn’t work. There is some fun, self-aware sequel talk and the killer reveal still works for me (it won’t work for everyone) but this is an otherwise standard horror sequel of diminishing returns.

Let me just take a minute to give some due credit to Kevin Williamson who, from 1996 to 1998, defined an era or horror by writing the first Scream then wrote an adequate sequel to Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, and then created Dawson’s Creek for TV. What a run.

This movie is not good.

October 22
Scream (1996)
Watched on Netflix

Still a classic. And, at this point, it’s not even a new classic. It’s hard for me, at 31 years old, to come to terms with the fact that this movie is 23 years old.

Most of the scares still work. Most of the special effects still work. The horror genre has moved past a lot of the cliche’s the characters discuss in Scream but it’s still fun to listen to movie characters talk movies.

There’s not much I can say about this movie that hasn’t already been said. If you haven’t seen it, see it. If you have, watch it again. It’s worth it.