It's October! Er, almost. Kind of.

Well, hey, look at that. It's been five months since I last posted. I guess time really does fly. Don't worry, though, this isn't another boring catch-up post where I just list a bunch of movies I've seen without comment (although I will give a count of 39, which is how many first-time viewings I've had since my last accounting). No, I'm here to talk about something much more important: Halloween! Typically, I make a holiday out of the entire month of October, with lots of trips to haunted houses and a plan to view at least 31 new horror movies over the 31 days. However, this year I'll be doing some traveling, and spending some time with people from out of town, so I'm a little worried about whether I'll be able to accomplish everything. The solution? Start early. If the twelve days of Christmas can last two months (since all the stores seem to have their decorations up by Halloween day. Which, by the way, fills me with an unspeakable rage), then there's no reason the 31 days of Halloween can't become 50 days. Or so.

So what does this mean? Well, for one, it actually has me feeling motivated enough to start writing about what I watch again. Secondly, while building my queue of movies to watch this season, I've been reading a lot of "best horror movies" lists, and that's inspired me to generate my own. I'll be posting the list, in groups of 10, periodically throughout the month, with the entire thing hopefully finished by the beginning of October. That way, anyone looking for something seasonal to watch will know objectively and absolutely what the best options are.

One thing that I struggled with a bit was what exactly qualifies as horror? A lot of lists that I saw included movies such as Silence of the Lambs, Seven, or King Kong. I can certainly agree about the quality of those films, but when I think about horror movies, they just don't fit. To be honest, I'm even dubious about calling Psycho horror (fortunately, that movie won't be found anywhere near my top 50 list of anything, so the genre is moot). I tried several different criteria, but nothing worked consistently. A requirement that there be an "otherworldly" element got rid of Silence of the Lambs and Seven, but not King Kong. Plus, it didn't explain why Alien qualifies, but Aliens does not. Plus, that would eliminate 70% of the slasher genre if it was applied strictly. I also thought about defining horror in a negative sense - it's horror if there is not another specific genre that it fits - but that eliminated all manner of things, from the afore-mentioned Alien to Shaun of the Dead. Ultimately, I just had to define horror like obscenity - I know it when I see it.

Just to kick things off, I'm going to make a liar of myself by listing a bunch of movies without comment. These are the runners up, numbers 51-75, in alphabetical order:

[REC]
Audition
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Black Sunday
The Changeling
Day of the Dead
Demons
Dracula, Prince of Darkness
The Exorcist
The Haunting
The Innocents
Kill, Baby. . . Kill!
Leviathan
Lifeforce
Marebito
The Mist
Night of the Demon
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Phantasm
The Phantom of the Opera
Phenomena
Pumpkinhead
Revenge of Frankenstein
Tales of Terror
The Wicker Man