Recently Rated Movies #4 (Halloween Weekend Edition, Day 1)

This October has probably been the smallest one in the last twenty years for me as far as Halloween is concerned. I usually gear up for Halloween around mid-September and keep the party rolling until well into November. I would usually average around three movies a day in that time, never repeating a movie over the Halloween month, and would ceaselessly haunt every video and music store in town for more additions to my ever-growing collection. My home, already jam-packed with all manner of movie effluvia to begin with, would become even more rife with monstrous action figures and statues, posters hanging from every inch of the walls and ceilings, constantly running horror films, a dry ice fog drifting from room-to-room (just for the hell of it), and party decorations dangling from corner to corner, all in an apartment too small to actually throw a decent Halloween party for more than, oh, say, five or six people. 

For much of the month, the only lighting that I would endure was from candles or from Jack-O'-Lanterns, both real and electric, and I often worked out plans for several costumes each year, finally working it down to the last-minute victors. And I gloried in working for my friends' theatrical company each of the past few years, running the box office for their Halloween productions, helping them create a series of increasingly elaborate Halloween lobby tableau, and getting the chance to not only scare the younger set and their parents, but also bring joy to their faces with our post-show trick or treating.

To say that Halloween and its attendant month of October is my favorite time of year is to put it mildly.

But this year is different in so many ways. I am far removed from my friends and family, but it is a self-imposed exile, so don't feel so for me in any way. For most of the year since I arrived in California, I have been fine with this feeling of remoteness, and have embraced the many changes in my life with open arms and a certain sense of long overdue bravado (if I may say so myself). There are so many new things in my life, and not a whole lot of time to worry or reflect on things right now. My birthday pretty much passed without incident, Thanksgiving has little importance to me except as a day of extreme gluttony (which I can do without), and Christmas will be nothing like it has been the past twenty years either, and I am fine with this. I will miss my family and friends, in some cases, to a severe level, but this really has nothing to do with the holiday (which I pretty much dismiss outright at this point), and simply has to do with the fact that I miss my family and friends. Period.

But, for some reason, Halloween is the most important time of the year for me, even if all of my friends are not on the same page as me. I get wound up for it far more than for any other time of the year (I often do a little wound up over Xmas, too, but this is more of a case of exasperation and checkbook shock than the joy I find in Halloween). My friends, quite adroitly, nicknamed me The Boogieman in high school all those years ago. Hell, they named me The Boogieman (or Boog, or Boogie), since many of them have practically called me nothing else since that time. I fought against the moniker at first, but have settled into embracing it wholeheartedly in the intervening years, and perhaps this is why I have fallen into such deep regard for this darkest but most playful of holidays. Every Boogieman's got to have a home.

So, here are the movies that I have seen since the last report. Another Lewton classic that is so gorgeous and creepy, it almost hurts; and a Rupert Everett-as-Sherlock Holmes case (he and Ian Hart as Watson acquit themselves better than the script does, but it was enjoyable. And it held some mild foot fetishism, which was an interesting touch).

I Walked With A Zombie (1943) (DVD) - 8
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004) (PBS) - 6

And now, the first day of my three-day Halloween Movie Marathon, somewhat truncated by the fact that I will have to work on Halloween day, also the first time that I have done so in nearly twenty years. (Let's hope that nothing too untoward or terrible happens, like when I went to work for the first time in a long time on my birthday a few years back. Hint: my birthday is on the eleventh of September. Yes, that's right...)

The films:

The Leopard Man (1943) (DVD) - 8
The Body Snatcher (1945) (DVD) - 9
Isle of the Dead (1945) (DVD) - 7
Rabid (1977) (DVD) - 6
The Thing (from Another World) (1951) (DVD) - 9
The Ghost Ship (1943) (DVD) - 7
The Legend of Zorro (2005) - 5