“Hey Saundra, I saw you post about ’31 days of horror’ which I’m hoping is a movie watching binge. The alternative concepts are somewhat disconcerting.” – Chris
I don’t particularly like horror movies. Or I didn’t, until I was nursing a broken heart a few years back and found that jump scares provided a great distraction from circular reasoning and constant rumination.
Faith in love long since restored, I still like a good mindf&*$ and I love a project with a hard and fast deadline. So what’s this #31DaysofHorror I’ve been hearing so much about? Is it for abs? Productivity?
Quite the opposite. So much the better.
I devoted a good 11 minutes to researching the origins of this 54-hour-long hashtag burgeoning cultural tradition. The earliest mention I found was actually on AOL (still a trendsetter in 2007 — who knew!?). More recently, I found suffocatingly Type A instructions on how to “do” the 31 days. This is wrong. There’s no “leg day” in #31DaysofHorror. You pick that evening’s film based on wherever The Muse — a screaming Lovecraftian personification of your basest fears — leads you. Some days that’s going to be Berberian Sound Studio, some days Tremors 2.
A friend of my beloved metalhead cousin (his bandmate in the incomparable Gravehill) laid out the essentials, and I figure he’s as good a source as any:
1. Only watch movies you’ve never seen before.
2. Horror shorts are allowed if you’re strapped on time (I’m expanding this to include single episodes of Twilight Zone classic, and possibly long-forgotten episodes of The Real Ghostbusters, the Saturday morning cartoon that first taught me how to fear)
My personal rules:
1. No slash. Nothing about the evil humans hath wrought (Rosemary’s Baby being a possible exception, but I’ve already seen it and the remake was unwatchable/sacrilege)
2. No haunted dolls.
3. No puppets.
4. Minimal zombies.
5. No “found footage” (one exception).
6. No “brides of.”
7. I get to cheat. I work full-time, I have a social life to maintain and a cat to medicate (two already very contradictory elements), and I’m not comfortable with what will happen to my psyche if I subject it to such a steady diet of horror and surrealism. So some days I’ll pass off films I’ve seen in the past year and pretend we’ve just met.
This should be fun, especially since hiding under the blanket simply isn’t an option for me.
Further reading…
Rotten Tomatoes: 100 top-rated horror movies (a little confused as to why Mad Max: Fury Road and arthouse classic Russian Ark made it on, but otherwise the methodology checks out)
also: Experience Music Project Museum of Seattle, I like your style
Recommended listening
Judge John Hodgman mediates a discussion of the basics of the horror genre
