October 31, 2005

Happy Halloween -- We'll Be Hiding Behind The Chair

punky power!In honor of sometime CC contributor Lisa's awesome costume at her party last night on the Upper East Side, we bring you the Punky Brewster picture at right. God, we loved that little plucky, color-blind orphan and her golden retriever puppy, Brandon. Cinecultist did not dress up after all, however we did carve two mini pumpkins, eat a cupcake decorated to look like a spider and went home with the jar of candy that we correctly guessed the number of pieces inside.

When most people think of Halloween, they don't think '80s TV though, they think horror movies. By popular demand, aka from our friend Michael who lurves horror movies, for Halloween we meditated a bit on the horror movies that kept us from the genre for many years.

This may sound like cinema sacrelige but it's only recently that we've watched things like the Shining or Psycho. And this was in an academic setting, though we still watched the scary bits with our eyes covered. Basically, CC comes from a long line of movie scaredy cats. Our Dad tells about how as a kid he hid under the chair during Bambi and there's many movies our siblings weren't allowed to see because we didn't want them to have nightmares. This is the prevalent philosophy in our household: that too many scary movies will disrupt delicate sleep patterns and that would be really bad.

At various sleep over parties, other six grade girls tried to get us to watch memorably schlock like Poltergeist III or Children of the Corn and mostly we spent the movie hiding behind an overstuffed chair. Perhaps we'd heard too many times that we didn't like scary movies that we never had the chance to decide for ourselves? Kind of like our dislike of nuts in cookies, a persnickety habit inherited from family members taste. For some reason, gore we're okay watching (like in our growing taste for Takashi Miike movies) but suspense is still something that brings out the skittish 12 year old in us. Oozing wounds? Fine. Something jumping out from the bushes? No. Thank. You.

Posted by karen at October 31, 2005 8:58 AM