Like a lot of the general movie-going public, Jamie and I plunked down some change to check out Paranormal Activity Friday night. First, my quick review: very, very good. The story is simple, and the audience is really supposed to focus on the characters as they sink ever deeper into their fear over what is in their home. The film’s style is much like that of The Blair Witch Project from ten years ago. But, I didn’t find that movie at all engaging, much less frightening. Part of the issue for me was the migraine I left the theater with after enduring nearly an hour and a half of people who couldn’t hold a camera steady. Paranormal Activity solves both of those problems. In short, if you enjoy thrills and confronting your own fears, you need to go see this film.
Movies don’t frighten me very often. In fact, I’ve tried to remember the last film that really unnerved me when I saw it in the theater, but I came up empty.** Paranormal Activity actually left me rather shaken. It is frightening in a way I have never experienced with a film. [click to continue…]
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Time for our second October Giveaway! A couple weeks ago, Amy mentioned the release of the new Barnes and Noble edition of Lovecraft’s fiction – complete and unabridged in one volume! One lucky Hog’s Head patron will find themselves the owner of a brand new copy.
To enter the drawing, you have to submit a comment with a personal Halloween story, joke, or happening – anything will do, really, whether it be something funny that happened to you on a Halloween night, your favorite costume, a scary Halloween incident.
Submit your comment by 12noon EDT on Halloween. The drawing will take place that afternoon.
Good luck!
I was participating in the conversation surrounding Pete Peterson’s Lovecraft tribute, “The Stephen Hills Horror” when Andrew Peterson threw out a question:
So what is it about ghost stories, anyway?
I decided to take a stab at it, and gave a quick bullet-point answer.
- Ghost stories are part of the genre of imaginative literature, though its darker side, so naturally, those who love imaginative literature will love ghost stories. Lovecraft defended the genre using a lot of the same type of defenses Tolkien used in defending imaginative lit. Lovecraft called imaginative lit “art in its most essential sense.” (Amy Sturgis has a forthcoming essay on this point by Lovecraft in the 2009 volume from Apex Books, Cthulhu’s Grandfather).
- Ghost stories are a place to grapple with fear. When Maurice Sendak was asked to defend his scary monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, he noted that the most frightening thing is for children to have fears and nightmares and find no parallel in the real world. Ghost stories provide a mirror for our fears.
- Ghosts are about history. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving makes a point about how there’s no encouragement for ghosts anymore, because people leave their hometown so quickly, there’s no one familiar for ghosts to haunt after their first nap in the grave. Ghosts remind us of a certain historical rootedness that most of us don’t feel in our transient, fast-paced, forward-looking culture.
Other thoughts? Why do we love scary stories? (And if you don’t, why don’t you?)
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