Spooky Repost: James Wan and How To Not Ruin Your Horror Movie

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‘Tis the season for horror, so I recently decided to check out The Conjuring, a movie that got a lot of praise from horror fans when it came out and was ludicrously slapped with an “R” rating solely for being scary. The movie isn’t worth writing a full review on- it’s an overlong convoluted mess with way too many poorly fleshed out characters (although whoever designed that poster should win an award)- but I thought I’d use it as a springboard to talk about horror in general and how often people fuck it up.

The Conjuring was directed by James Wan, who also made Insidious, which was also hyped up by horror fans despite being largely terrible. Wan as a director of horror specifically infuriates me intensely because he has moments of incredible originality despite seeming to have no idea what he’s doing most of the time, and it’s all the more frustrating because the mistakes he makes are largely the same mistakes everyone else makes when they fuck up horror. Let’s take a look at a few of them!

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Spooky Repost: Paranormal Activity 1-3

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Spooky blog season is right around the corner, and to prepare I’ve decided to repost some horror reviews from my old blog

Back in 2009 Paranormal Activity came out, and everyone thought it was awesome.

Actually wait, back in 1999 The Blair Witch Project came out and everyone thought it was awesome (well, if you want to go back even further The Last Broadcast came out the year before (and there was also Cannibal Holocaust) but no one really noticed). The found-footage genre laid low for a while, The Blair Witch Project existing mostly as a unique novelty, but the financial legacy of the film couldn’t be ignored forever. Anything that makes literally ten times its minuscule budget is going to cause studio executive’s eyes to light up, even taking the film’s expensive marketing blitz into account.

But why make a shit-load of money on one cheap movie when you can repeatedly make a shit-load of money on a whole series of cheap movies? There was already a precedent for this, with the relatively inexpensive Saw franchise becoming a yearly Halloween staple, so it made sense for Paramount to drive Paranormal Activity into the ground with a whole boatload of sequels. We’re going to look at two of them today!

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Trash TV: The Equalizer & The Equalizer 2

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Yes, I know it says trash TV and this is a movie and not a TV series. But I watched it on Netflix, and new movies are just getting slapped up onto streaming services now. What even is a movie? The film/telvision membrane has dissolved, people! Nothing means anything anymore!

So anyway, I recently found myself with very low amounts of brain juice, due to migraines. I was “low on spoons”, as the kids like to say. I needed something to pass the time, something that would involve absolutely no mental effort or concentration whatsoever.

And that’s how I ended up watching both Equalizer movies back to back.

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A Quiet Place

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If you’ve been paying attention to the horror scene lately, you’ll know that A Quiet Place ushered in a bold new creative direction for the genre: movies about monsters that kill you if you do a certain thing. This is an idea that’s just rife with potential. So far we have A Quiet Place, which is about monsters that kill you if you make noise, Bird Box which is about monsters that kill you if you look at them, and The Silence which is about monsters that kill you if you, uh...make noise.

Maybe it doesn’t have that much potential after all.

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Captain Marvel ramble-a-thon

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I saw Captain Marvel, the latest frontier in the Marvel Extended Beach House Fund. It's gotten what you could call "mixed" reviews (81% on Rotten Tomatoes, but 65% on the more granular Metacritic), which instantly dampened by expectations since I apply a 20% reduction to the critic score of any Marvel movie (the elusive and mysterious Ronan Factor).

Well, surprise: I fucking loved Captain Marvel. It's now hands-down my favourite MCU movie, beating out last year's Infinity War.  To explain why, I have prepared a rambling, unstructured (spoiler-free!) list of thoughts.

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Grindelwald.mp3 (feat. unannounced guest appearance by my cat)

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Merry Christmas, everyone! Please enjoy this extra bonus content, which I recorded on my phone and put very little effort into.

Trying something a little different for the dawning of a new year. Writing blog posts is great, but I rarely have the energy for it these days. So what if sometimes, I could just deliver my opinions directly from my brain to your face? Over the internet?

Let me know if you enjoyed this and I'll do more like it. Maybe I'll even get a real microphone! And a camera! 

Spoilers for The Crimes of Grindelwald by the way.

The existential horror of CG Pokemon

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It was more or less inevitable that someone, one day, would make a live action Pokemon movie. Talk of such a thing has been doing the rounds since the late 90s when the franchise was at its cultural peak, but now it’s finally happening.

And it’s taking the form of…a loose adaptation of a 3DS spin-off where Pikachu is a detective. Voiced by the Deadpool guy.

Huh.

I’ll say this for it, the Pokemon designs don’t look nearly as horrifying in motion as they do in the still images that have been doing the rounds on Twitter. That isn’t going to stop me from making fun of them.

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Ronan Wills x Ferretbrain

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Ferretbrain has been one of my favourite websites for a long time. Hosting an absolute treasure trove of reviews and opinions, it’s seen me through a lot of boring commutes (and lately, time spent resting in bed).

Last year, I wrote most of a review on the Purge series, which I had to abandon due to Brain Issues. I managed to pull together enough energy to finish it off following the release of The First Purge a few weeks ago, and I decided to submit it to Ferretbrain in order to give back to the site.

You can find the post here. I’d like to contribute more content in future, so keep a close eye on the latest article feed for more of yours truly.

In which I over-analyse two seconds of a Harry Potter trailer

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The final trailer for Warner Bros Presents JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (a Wizarding World™ Product) has landed, and it shockingly features a slimy, hideous creature whose inclusion in the movie is both capital-P problematic and a dubious decision from a creative standpoint.

But as well as Johnny Depp, it’s also got a big snake in it. In keeping with the strange and inexplicable-even-to-myself fascination I have with this spin-off franchise, I immediately gave it a look.

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Avengers: Infinity War spoiler hootenanny

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I saw it. I actually liked it! I'm ambivalent at best about a lot of Marvel movies, and I was extremely bored by the first half of the last big cross-over movie they did, but this one kept me entertained. When the end came, I was surprised because I thought there was another forty minutes left; for a movie that's over two and a half hours long, that's impressive.

Below, find some spoiler-filled discussions of specific parts of the movie.

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Movies That Annoyed Me: The Open House

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We're quietly going through a sort of horror renaissance at the moment. It made big bucks at the box office, and there's horror projects and adaptations and TV series getting green-lit all over the place. You can barely swing a cat these days without hitting a new horror project. 

At the forefront of all of this are the major streaming platforms, who now have the cash and resources to fund or purchase horror projects that the big studios might have been too risk-averse to take on. At least, that's how it works sometimes. Other times, they just scoop up some pile of crap that the traditional movie world didn't want to touch.

Which brings us to The Open House.

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Movies That Annoyed Me: Blair Witch

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Apologies, y'all--I meant to write the next Kvothe post this week, but I'm lacking the energy at the moment. Please enjoy this horror movie rant instead.

I love 1999's The Blair Witch Project. I know it quickly became popular to dunk on it as an Actually Not Scary movie where nothing happens, but I watched it alone at night and it freaked me out like nobody's business.

If you're somehow unfamiliar with the movie, it's the popularizer (but not inventor) of the whole found footage thing, telling the story of three documentarians who venture into the woods, get spooked by a mysterious supernatural force, then disappear. The movie is semi-infamous for revealing absolutely nothing about the nature of whatever was menacing the characters ("you don't even see the witch" became a smirking complaint among people who don't get how horror works).

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Why Star Wars fans hate The Last Jedi

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I saw The Last Jedi last night. I liked it. I liked it a whole lot. I might even go so far as to say that I loved it. A lot of people didn't love it. A lot of Star Wars fans seem to absolutely hate it with a burning intensity that I initially found baffling, but which I think I now understand. If you're one of those people, here's a spoiler-filled post where I explain your own thought processes to you in a mildly condescending way.

And hey, stick around to the end of the post, where I unload my space-guns on some parts of the movie that I also didn't like.

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