So my Fergless weekend has proceeded much as predicted: With much eating of pizza and watching of movies with vomit in them. (For those who don’t know, the missus is emetophobic. The slightest glimpse of vomiting, dry-heaving, retching etc. in a film and she goes fetal for about half an hour. It’s unpleasant.)
Re: The Ring–holy moses! This is a frightening, frightening movie. Please do yourself a favor and watch it in the dark by yourself–boy, what a great time you’ll have! Dead faces in mirrors, bizarre noises, frightening phone calls–it’s a recipe for having a blast when you’re all by your lonesome!
Yeah, it scared the crap out of me. Which of course meant that I was delighted, since I am an enormous horror aficionado. I wrote my senior thesis on the types of imagery in horror films that I feel are the most effectively horrifying (as opposed to gross or jump-out-and-scare-you startling), and it’s as if The Ring’s filmmakers simply read it and applied everything I said. Plus, for a horror buff it’s just a smorgasbord: I caught allusions to The Shining, Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, The Blair Witch Project, Shivers, Videodrome, Candyman, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Twin Peaks and Eraserhead (and Scream, but hey, they can’t all be winners*). This is a geniunely frightening film, and there aren’t a lot of those anymore.
Case in point: Ginger Snaps, the other movie I watched this Fergless weekend. It’s actually pretty bright: it’s an indie film that uses werewolves as a metaphor for female adolescent sexuality, menstruation, etc. A sharp concept is undercut by the fact that the filmmakers don’t seem to know whether they want the main characters to be sympathetic or not; you can practically feel their indecision as the film careens from mood to mood and ratchets up the violence with seemingly very little regard for pacing or believability. It has its moments–mostly clever ones rather than scary ones–and the monster’s behavior could compare favorably to Clive Barker’s monumental short story “Rawhead Rex” (in which the titular character is basically the final word in “monster runs amok” genre stories), but by the end of the interminable climax, you really don’t know what you’re supposed to be feeling, nor do you care.
Oh hey, she’s back! Hooray! Cold pizza for everybody!
*I actually liked Scream when I first saw it–which was at a drive-in with famed dopey-movie aficionado Kennyb, so that explains a lot. It was clever and scary, but it doesn’t stick in your mind any more than, say, Men in Black, and it was a terrible thing to base half a decade of horror movies on. Thank God for Shyamalan.)