Every time Halloween rolls around, I have a problem. See, I like some of the Halloween trappings, and Gothic tales (Crimson Peak!), but I’m a wuss when it comes to horror, whether gory or psychological. Finding movies to watch that fall in the sweet spot? Almost impossible. Especially because my spouse and I have developed a bad(?) habit of quitting.
See, when we met, he was a Film Studies major and I was an English major and film buff. We’ve seen a looot of movies together. We’re also both storytellers, so what we generally do is watch a movie and then dissect it. By now, we’re having trouble finding movies that engage us. It doesn’t help that we prefer science fiction and fantasy, which is currently dominated by the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) and we grew tired of that several phases ago.
So looking for spooky seasonal enjoyment, we tried:
- The Adventures of Ichabod Crane and Mr. Toad. (Much too slow and dated, and not in a fun way.)
- The Nightmare Before Christmas. (Very pretty, of course, but when does the story start?)
- Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. (Shaping up to be good at what it set out to do, we just weren’t that interested in seeing it play out.)
- A Haunting in Venice. (Trying very hard to be stylish, but listening to Kenneth Branagh do a French accent was too distracting (we haven’t seen his other Poirot films), and we didn’t believe a word of the dialogue from Tina Fey, playing his authoress friend.)
- Coco. (We had the entire plot pegged in minutes…and it’s not that we don’t like animated children’s entertainment.)
We didn’t last longer than 15 minutes with any of them. And it’s not a matter of attention span — we both read novels still. It’s just…have we seen too many movies in our lifetime? Has all that dissecting meant that we can spot the lines of the Matrix from a mile away and can’t blur them back into an entertaining tale?
Every once in a while, we happen on something we enjoy enough to watch to the end. (And then still dissect, because it’s fun.) It doesn’t have to be a “perfect” film, whatever that means. It just has to be interesting and fresh enough to be worth talking about afterwards.
The latest film we actually enjoyed (besides a rewatch of Aliens, because yes please) was a recent viewing of I Am Mother (2019), a science fiction flick about a robot apocalypse. The worldbuilding is thin, and gets thinner the more you look at it, but watching something that’s not part of an established universe is so refreshing, and as a psychological thriller it’s tense and fascinating. Who to believe? Who deserves our protagonist’s loyalty? Where is the truth? Who is lying, and just how deep do the lies go? And what will our protagonist do with the information she gains over the course of the story?
We also watched all of The Lost City (2022), but that was in a misguided hope that it would somehow get better, because how can you waste a cast like that in such an unabashedly wacky story? Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe (who’s having such an interesting career as a grown-up actor), Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Brad Pitt…I mean, come on. But alas…we wished we had quit.
What should we watch 15 minutes of next?