Bronies in the Mist pt III - How Bronies Think They're Perceived By Outsiders

It would not have been unreasonable for readers to conclude from the wrap-up of the previous post that this post would be up relatively quickly.  That being said, I'm nothing if not easily distracted - Between having to go out of town for work and then taking a vacation with the Wife for our first wedding anniversary, it would not be entirely untrue for me to say that I kind of forgot about my Brony research for a while.  That being said, I'm now back again and ready to soldier on.

In Which We Discuss the Wording of Questions and Answers
I've never been a fan of 5-point responses to survey questions.  You know what I mean: "Rate statement X on a scale of 1-5, where 1 means that you strongly disagree and 5 means that you strongly agree."  It's not that I have any evidence to back up my dislike of them, it's just that they irrationally bother me.  Thus, when I was designing the questions used in my Brony study I had a notion that I would leave them largely open-ended, the better to get more precise data.

This was an error.

I say this because many of my survey questions were poorly worded to the point of clearly confusing the respondents.  Furthermore, when I decided that I would use graphs to represent the answers, I found that having that nice 1-5 agree-disagree scale would have been hugely preferable to trying to manually categorize freely worded answers.

For example, the question we'll be discussing to today ought to have been worded thusly: "Bronies are unfairly thought of in a negative light. Do you agree or disagree with this statement?".

It was, unfortunately, worded like this: 'Do you feel Bronies as a group are stigmatized on the internet or society as a whole?"

That's...well, that's just pretty terrible.  In addition to the fact that it's actually two questions ("Are Bronies stigmatized on the internet?  How about in society as a whole?"), it was so open-ended that the responses I got varied in length and content to the to degree that it was not at all easy to categorize them.  Here are two sample responses:

From Respondent 6, a 14 year-old male:

A little.

Certainly to the point, maybe indicating weak agreement on a 5-point scale.

From Respondent 7, a 36 year-old male:

I'm not going to say that. For various perspectives to be optimally told. I could simply say that bronies are the most misunderstood part of the fandom. Hate groups or people are in fact out there. We can be as loving and tolerant all we want but that currently is a fact we cannot deny. But hate is really just living and judging things based upon a lot of things that funnel into this thing called ignorance, and what is ignorance other then ignoring your own insecurities and fear and not thinking.

That's a response that requires a bit more unpacking.

Do Bronies Feel That They are Portrayed Unfairly?
Be that as it may, I have attempted to categorize all of these responses into four categories for ease of graphing.  "No" and "Unsure" seem to me to be self-explanatory.  Looking at Fig. 4 below, you'll then see "Somewhat" and "Yes".  Answers which were placed into the "Yes" category were unequivocal in stating that the respondent felt that Bronies get a bad rap wherever they go.  "Somewhat" implies some degree of equivocation - specifically, a number of respondents stated that they believe Bronies to be looked down upon on the internet, but that the average "real-life" person has no opinion about them.

Fig 4.  n=64

Because of the artificial groupings I had to impose upon the responses in order to graph them, these numbers are necessarily even less scientific than those presented in the previous section.  That being said, I think we can still see that a significant majority of respondents would agree that to at least some extent Bronies are the victims of negative stereotyping.

This is borne out to some degree by the occasional appearance of negative news reports about the subculture in the news media.  For example, a host on a FOX affiliate once famously compared Bronies to "baby lifestyle" fetishists.  Internet humor sites such as Cracked, as well as pop culture oriented sites such as Topless Robot, also occasionally poke fun at the Bronies, although usually in a rather more good-natured way.

Straight From the Brony's Mouth: Bronies Discuss Misconceptions about the Fandom
At this time I think it may be illustrative to allow some Bronies to speak their minds at length.  I had the pleasure of doing in-depth interviews with two of my survey's respondents.  The first was a 20 year-old man who asked to be identified by his forum moniker Antismurf9001.  I asked him what he thought was the most common misconception about Bronies.

Antismurf: While I don't have a huge amount of experience with those that are intolerant of bronies, my guess is that the most common misconception is that we're all homosexuals (which I can confirm to be false, considering that I'm heterosexual).  This is probably a large part of the reason that I choose to not let people know that I'm a brony.

I posed the same question to Ashley, a 20-year Pegasister, and got a similar response.

Ashley: [People assume] That we're all sexually repressed, mentally ill, homosexual, or perverts.  Basically that there's something different or "wrong" about us.  We can't be seen as normal people who happen to be at peace with who we are and who are happy as a whole.

Later on in my conversation with AntiSmurf, we turned the discussion to how expectations of gender roles may or may not color an outsider's perception of Bronies:

Antismurf: I'd say that it's definitely more acceptable for females to like male things than it is the other way around, or at least that's the case in the US....In fact, I'd go so far as to say that women being masculine is now seen as attractive, whereas men being feminine is often the punchline of a joke...It's hard to say whether or not this colors people's perception of Bronies, since there really isn't a masculine element to compare it to.  I can say though, that male Bronies are certainly less socially accepted than female Bronies...Even in the infamous Fox News segment, I believe it was said something to the effect of "Well, I suppose there are worse hobbies for my son to get into...", specifically saying 'son' and not a gender-neutral term such as 'child'.

I asked Ashley a similar question: Does she think that in society it is more accepted for a woman to be interested in traditionally masculine things than for a man to be interested in something that is thought of as feminine.

Ashley:  Yeah, I do feel that. In society, men are supposed to be the head of the household, the strong member of the family who works and holds everyone together. Women don't have that. We stay at home, work, and care for the kids. We're not watched nearly as closely, I think. More people care about what the men do, if they're taking good care of their family and such.

Antismurf also had a message for outsiders who may run into tales of rabidly obsessed super-fans online:

Antismurf: To the non-Bronies, I understand that there are fans that are overly obsessed and/or completely intolerable within the Brony fandom...All I ask is that you please, please, don't assume that every Brony is this way.  I've met some amazing and wonderful people in the fandom, and it really isn't fair to them if you stereotype them as irritants, creeps, child-molesters, and/or jerks.  You don't have to like use, and you certainly don't have to join us, but please don't hate us before you know who we are.

From the interviews I did with Antismurf and Ashley, as well as from the survey responses I received, it seemed pretty obvious that many Bronies chafed at the labels that are sometimes applied to them just because they're fans of a particular cartoon franchises.  Specifically, many of them feel that assumptions are being made about their sexuality or even their mental health due to the "feminine" or "cutesy" nature of the My Little Pony cartoon.

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Well, that just about wraps up this section.  I may take a break from the Brony study for a while, although I'm likely to post the full interviews with Antismurf and Ashley at some point.  The fact of the matter is that the bulk of my survey questions were so poorly designed as to be nearly useless for generating meaningful data, so there's not much point in my fist-fighting responses into graphs from which we can't draw many meaningful conclusions.  Regardless, I've had fun working on this little project and I've enjoyed my time amongst the Bronies.  I'm not sure when or if I'll come back to this subject, but I'm glad you chose to join me along the way.
 

Bronies in the Mist pt II - Age & Gender Distribution of Bronies

The first thing I wanted to know as I began to beat a path through the Bronyverse was simple: Who are these guys?  Well, there’s no better way to get an answer than to ask a question, so I posted a (poorly designed) survey on the My LittlePony: Friendship is Magic Brony Forums.  In this post I’ll address the two most basic facets of Brony demography – gender and age.

             

The survey received 49 responses – not nearly the number that I’d hoped for.  At the time of this writing, the membership of the MLP Forum is reported to be 12,753, excluding myself. ¹  This means my sampling size was a paltry 0.38% of the community and is therefore hardly representative.  Nonetheless we shall plunge boldly forward, keeping always in mind that our conclusions must necessarily be tenuous in light of our small pool of responses.

Colts & Fillies – The Brony Gender Gap

In a testament to  my nigh infinite foresight, gender was not a question on the initial survey; it simply did not occur to me that there would be female members of a forum for Bronies.  (Here we see my own preconceptions at work already – hardly promising.)  It was only after the fact that I chose to gather this data, and to accomplish this I used the publically available user profiles of the forum users who responded to the survey.  From this, we see that in 49 respondents we have 41 males, 5 females, and 3 who declined to specify a gender. (See Fig. 1)

Fig 1. - Respondents by Sex.  (n=49)

As you can see from the graph, respondents were approx. 84% male.  Although the sampling size is small, the disproportionate representation of males here is nonetheless interesting.  While I was unable to find data on average gender breakdown of internet message boards, I was able to find a recent Pew study² of overall social media use which indicated that women  are actually somewhat more likely to make use of social media websites than men.  Granted, the Pew studied focused on specific websites such as Facebook and Pinterest and so is only of limited use to us as we compare it to the demographics of a single specialized fan forum, but it still drives homes the striking gender disparity among the Brony survey respondents.

When we add to all this the fact that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is specifically targeted at female viewers, it becomes rather more puzzling that the users of a forum dedicated to the show are preponderantly male.  Perhaps it’s the case that there aren’t more female users of this particular forum because it is specifically known as a Brony forum and females interested in discussing the show assume, as I did, that it is intended solely for male fans.³  I would be curious to know if there are more female users on other MLP forums elsewhere on the internet, but that’s a question for another day.  (At this point it may be worth noting that there does not appear to be an “official” MLP forum anywhere - I looked for one to see if perhaps the  more "traditional" fans of the show are congregated there. There is an official My Little Pony website however, which offers among other things a fetching printable iron-on image of the character Rainbow Dash for free download.)  Of course, it may also be the case that females are simply underrepresented in the sample because of the small pool of respondents.⁴

Looking a Gift Brony in the Mouth – Age Distribution of the Sample

All 49 respondents provided an answer to the survey question “How old are you?”  Of these, 47 responded with a numerical age, while two responded with ranges (for example, “early 20s”).  I attempted to privately contact (via the forum’s personal message feature) both of the respondents who gave age ranges to request clarification – one responded with an exact age; the other did not respond.  Many of the responses did, however, have qualifications or addenda such as stating that the respondent would be “turning 22 in a few weeks”.  In these cases, I used the current age of the respondent at the time of survey, not the projected age.

Fig. 2 - Respondents: Adults vs. Minors (n=49)

           

As can be seen in Fig. 2 above, approx. 59% of survey respondents were adults aged 18 or older.  The lone respondent with a non-specific age is included in this statistic, as they reported  being in their “late 20s”.  I was surprised to see that 41% of the respondents were minors, given the online reputation of Bronies as an older group that remains fairly distinct from younger fans.

Using only responses supplying a numerical age (n=48), we see a strikingly large range in reported ages of some 31 years; the youngest respondents being 13 and the eldest being 44.  The mean age of all respondents was 19.875 – still within the range of my expectations but assuredly at the lower end.  The mean age of female respondents (n=5) was 18, lower than the mean age of males(n=40), 19.8.⁵  However, as we’ll see below, the mean age doesn’t tell the whole story.

Fig 3- Age Distribution of Respondents (n=48)

(Click for larger image)

Looking at Fig. 4, it becomes apparent that the ages of survey respondents largely cluster around the mid-teens to early twenties.  85.42% of all respondents reporting a specific numerical (n=48) are under the age of 25 and 64.58% are under 21.  The mode of all reported numerical ages (n=48) was 14 years. 

Rather than consisting almost entirely of adult males, we see then that this sampling of Bronies is composed largely of teens and young adults.  It appears from the survey data that the mean age of the group is pushed upwards by a handful of significantly older respondents who may be outliers.  A much larger sample size would be highly desirable in order to search more definitively for  patterns of age distribution and to minimize the possible effects of sampling bias; e.g. younger forum users might be more likely than older ones to take a random survey on a message board.

             

To sum up this section, I have to say I was surprised by the demographics of the sample.  I had not expected females to be present at all, so their appearance as even a small percentage of the sample caught me off guard.  It was the age distribution, however, that surprised me the most, as Bronies are typically portrayed online as adult men, when in fact we see that a significant portion of them are in their mid to late teens.

So far I've had my preconceptions of Bronies challenged on both of the subjects I've attempted to measure. That's already pretty exciting and we're still just getting started.  Please join me next time as we discuss the portrayal of Bronies across the web and talk to Bronies themselves about the bad rap they get online.

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1.) This is according to a running counter of registered users on the front page of the site.  It was not possible for me to determine how many of these users are currently active in the forum on a regular basis.

2.) Duggan, Maeve and Brenner, Joanna; The Demographics of Social Media Users – 2012. http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_SocialMediaUsers.pdf

3.) I have since learned that adult female MLP fans who associate closely with Bronies are sometimes called “Pegasisters”.  Equine wordplay is in abundance in the My Little Pony community.

4.) I hasten to remind readers once again that these statistics are not meant represent the demographics of My Little Pony fans as whole, merely the demographics of this particular internet forum of self-described Bronies and Pegasisters.

5.) Savvy readers will note that the mean ages of males and females are lower than the total mean – This is because the three “gender unspecified” respondents were aged towards the higher end of the range.

Bronies in the Mist: An Outsider Studies the Internet's Most Misunderstood Subculture

Introduction

Long ago, from the primordial mists of the 1980s, there emerged a toy line and attendant animated series called My Little Pony.  I was a kid at the time, and I remember being aware that this cartoon existed.  I also knew that it was a “girl’s cartoon”, like Rainbow Brite or Jem and the Holograms; there was no doubt in my five year-old mind that I would burst into flames faster than a vampire in a church were I to watch it.¹  I have no firsthand memories of the particulars of the show, but a quick look around Youtube does not reveal it to be a thought-provoking piece of art.

Like almost all 1980s children’s franchises, My Little Pony existed for a while, vanished, and then languished in shadowy undeath for a couple of decades; a lingering specter in the consciousness of former 80s kids.  A collector’s market for the original merchandise existed and periodically a new animated property, such as the Disney Channel’s My Little Pony Tales would make a brief appearance, but the franchise’s best days seemed behind it.

Then something unexpected happened – My Little Pony’s owner Hasbro, which was still counting the money from Michael Bay’s Transformers film and the subsequent surge in that property’s merchandising prospects, decided to resurrect My Little Pony in the hopes of hitting another rebranding homerun.  Animator and director Lauren Faust, who had previously worked on such well-regarded Cartoon Network properties as The Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends², was brought in to develop the new series with an eye towards steering the franchise away from its ooey-gooey, saccharine-soaked plots and clichéd depictions of female characters.  Thus, in 2010, premiered My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

So why in the hell am I telling you this?  My last post was a review of the freakin’ Giant Claw, so what in the world does My Little Pony have to do with anything?  Well..not much; BUT while I don’t have all that much reason to talk about My Little Pony itself, I think there may be an interesting discussion to be had about the show’s unintended fan base.  As anyone who’s been on the internet in the last three years or so is no doubt aware, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, while aimed squarely at young girls, has also attracted a very vocal contingent of adult male viewers.  They call themselves “Bronies”, and they are what I’m interested in discussing.

Maligned in many corners of the web as everything from pederasts to bestiality enthusiasts to just plain weirdoes, Bronies tend to do their, well, Brony-ing largely amongst themselves.  They have their own internet forums and their own conventions.  Some of them, when posting on Brony-friendly forums, even adopt terms from the TV series, such as using the phrase “anypony” instead of anybody”.  It’s hard for an outside observer to get a bead on these guys.  On the one hand, they’re fans of what’s probably the most inoffensive show currently on television and devote lots of effort and creativity towards generating fan content that is often fairly impressive in both scope and execution. On the other hand, a Google image search for My Little Pony will quickly yield results for such creepy items as fan-made erotic artwork bearing titles like My Little Pony: Lingerie is Magic.  Frankly, some of the creepy stuff is also strangely impressive in its scope and execution.

The bottom line is that I want to know who the Bronies are.  How old are they?  Why are they so interested in this particular property?  Are the ones pinning chapter after chapter of erotic fan fiction the norm, or just highly visible outliers who attract unwanted negative attention to the group?  I want to know all that and more.

To that end, I’ve enlisted the aid of a cadre of Bronies over at the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Brony Forums.  They’ve generously agreed to answer my questions and talk to me about life on the inside of Brony culture.  From these surveys and interviews, I hope to paint a more accurate picture of this subculture than was heretofore available to outsiders.  This post is the beginning of  a multi-part essay during which we will try to get a firmer grasp on these often talked about, but rarely talked to web denizens, these Bronies in the Mist.

Hypotheses

To start off, I recognize that the term “hypothesis” may be inappropriate here, as this “study” of mine is almost staggeringly unscientific in nature.  That said, I’m going to cling to the delusion that I’m above using the word “assumption”.  In any event I hypothesize that my survey will show the mean age of self-identified Bronies to be between 19-23 and that the majority of them will have at least some college education.  Furthermore, it is my expectation that slightly less than half (perhaps 40%) will self-identify as members of “Furry” subculture.  I suspect that many of them will report feeling as though their group is thought of negatively and perhaps even unfairly treated by other groups present on the internet and that at least half of them will not be “out”, such as it is, to their non-Brony friends.

In more broad terms, I think we shall see that the perceived biases of others against Bronies will strengthen the in-group commitment of Bronies and that this in-group, out-group interplay will contribute to insularity with the community and may result in some distrust of outsiders.  Likewise, I think we may see that the creative aspect of the group is likely to be highly valued by members and may also contribute to in-group solidarity, i.e. “Look what we have generated.”³

Finally, I’m interested to see if the accepting, friendly message of the Friendship is Magic TV series is personally important to Bronies themselves.  Specifically, I’m curious to see if Bronies consciously see their interest in the show as something of a statement against the increasingly hyper-masculine image of males often portrayed in the media.^4<.sup>

Potential Problems

In advance, I would like to say that I foresee huge problems with any statistics I generate based on what I anticipate to be a vanishingly small sample size of survey respondents.  The forum on which I have posted my survey questionnaire appears to have approximately 1240 members, based on the site’s Member List, and I expect to receive usable responses from less than 5% of them.  This would obviously make it impossible to draw any scientifically meaningful conclusions about Bronies as a whole.

I also expect that there may be some reticence on the part of the Bronies who’ve agreed to speak with me with regard to talking about the less savory aspects of Brony culture.  By this I mean such things as the large amount of erotic fan-generated materials about the show’s characters or the group’s relationship to the Furry subculture.  This may be made all the worse by my decision to administer my initial “survey” as an open thread in a message forum; That is to say, my respondents are aware that their answers are visible to others.

It also goes without saying that I’m wholly ignorant of the principles of this sort of experimental design, so I think we can safely assume that gaping holes in my methodology will erupt throughout the process.   

Regardless of all this, I expect to have a good time exploring the world of the Bronies, I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

______________________

1.) The lone exception to this proscription against“girl shows” was arguably She-Ra.  Since she was He-Man’s sister it was okay to watch her show, although I seem to remember that those of us who did kind of kept it on the down-low.

2.) And also, weirdly, that old MTV show The Maxx.

3.) See Samuel F. Gaertner’s work on common in-group identity.

4.) For more on the portrayal of masculine imagery in the media, I highly recommend Jackson Katz’s short film Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity.

The Giant Claw (1957)

The forties, fifties, and sixties spawned something of a pantheon of schlock movie producers, men whose names are still spoken of in hushed tones even today: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Henry Saperstein, K. Gordon Murray.  Also standing astride that B-movie Olympus is "Jungle Sam" Katzman, whose enormous body of work includes everything from Mark of the Gorilla to the Elvis Presley flick Harum Scarum.¹.  Katzman is well-known for producing a number of very influential sci-fi flicks in the 1950s, including a pair of Ray Harryhausen classics, It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.  Still, you can't have your hands in that many films without leaving your fingerprints on a few steamers, and today we're going to talk about one of them: The Giant Claw.

If you've ever seen the (much better) film Rodan, you've pretty much seen the The Giant Claw.  Both  films structure their action around hazy sightings, close calls, and finally destructive attacks by an impossibly huge avian monster.  In both cases the creatures are too fast to be tracked by aircraft and in any event are nearly impervious to conventional weapons.  I'm not making any claims that The Giant Claw was influenced by Rodan, but I will point out that Rodan debuted in Japan a year before The Giant Claw and in fact came out in the U.S. just a couple of months before it in 1957.  Just sayin...

In any event, The Giant Claw centers on ace test pilot Mitch McAffee, who's the first man to encounter the bird during a training flight.  Initially unable to convince his bosses in the military that he actually saw something and isn't just losing his mind, it's McAffee who eventually figures out the bird's flight pattern and allows the armed forces to intercept the beast.  You see, McAffee is able to deduce that the bird is flying in an enormous spiral pattern...despite the fact that all of its attacks, as shown on an on-screen map, take place in a line moving directly southeast. ²



Now that they can predict the bird's course, the air force sends a flight of jets to engage the monster.  This marks the first time in the film that the audience really gets to see the bird...and it's a noodly mass of feather dusters and flaring nostrils topped off by a huge white mohawk.  As anyone who watches these sorts of movies no doubt expects, conventional weapons are "worse than useless" against the bird.  In the best sequence in the movie, the bird swats the aircraft out of the sky and then devours the pilots as they try to parachute to safety.

We soon find out that the vulture-like beast is a space monster.  It's nearly invulnerable because it can project an anti-matter force field for reasons that are only half-explained.  In any event, worldwide air traffic is completely grounded in the hopes of cutting off the bird's food supply.  Unfortunately, this only provokes the monster into attacking targets on the ground, gulping down cows like popcorn and laying waste to cities in its quest for food.  Eventually McAffee, who's the only character in this movie that actually does anything, tracks the bird to an enormous nest in the forest.  He discovers the beast roosting on a huge egg, which he immediately shatters with rifle fire, provoking a series of terrible reprisals.

Finally, McAffe - who at this point is apparently also the smartest theoretical physicist in the world - single-handedly builds a ray gun that fires muonic atoms.  In the movie world, this is somehow the only thing against which space birds are vulnerable.  The weapon is mounted onto a B-52 and stock footage ensues as the heroes rush to destroy the bird as it lays waste to New York City...but also specific buildings from L.A. and Washington D.C. because they had some footage from War of the Worlds and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers laying around.  With its force field disrupted by the muonic ray, the bird is anticlimactically felled by about three bottle rockets and the film very abruptly ends.

Although it's pretty infamous these days, The Giant Claw is pretty much par for the course in terms of cheap 1950s monster flicks in terms of its mad-lib of a plot and ultra-cheesy "science".  Although it's honestly not that much worse than a lot of other flicks from the era, The Giant Claw has gained prominence in the internet zeitgeist in the last few years thanks in no small part to its inclusion in the 2009 edition of James Rolfe's extremely popular Monster Madness series of Halloween film reviews.  If nothing else, it's known for its utterly laughable monster design, which looks like a cross between Jimmy Durante and one of those old Limber Louie marionettes  Legend has it that at one point in the film's production the creature was intended to be a stop-motion effect, but budget issues forced the use of a puppet monster that looks, to borrow a phrase from Chaucer, totally flippin' ridonculous. 

Make no mistake, The Giant Claw is a bad movie.  I'm just arguing that it's not as -uniquely- bad as some folks would have you believe.  I really can't recommend going out of your way to see it, especially since the only licensed DVD version of it available in the U.S. is part of a relatively expensive Sam Katzman boxed set.  More than anything else The Giant Claw is just kind of boring; just another paint-by-numbers 1950 sci-fi flick.  If you're a huge fan of giant monster movies then maybe The Giant Claw is worth a look, but there are a lot better "death from the skies" flicks out there.  For your average Joe looking to scratch that specific itch, I'd recommend either Rodan or Q, the Winged Serpent.

________
1.) Mark of the Gorilla was a Jungle Jim film, one of several Katzman worked on and which were based on a popular adventure comic strip. It was due to his early work on these sorts of films that he came to be called "Jungle Sam".
2.) It's the McAffee character who first refers to the monster as "a flying battleship", a phrase that will be uttered at least a dozen more times throughout the film and which has now become something of an internet meme.

Mortality Sucks

For the most part, I do my best to avoid talking about personal matters on the blog.  Blogs are inherently something of an ego trip, and while I may have convinced myself that some small portion of the world may care about my opinions about faith healing or Godzilla, I'm not far enough down my own rabbit hole to think that anyone wants to read my life story.  I made it a rule from the beginning that I would never ever post anything about any drama going on in my own life - I have friends to help me deal with that so I have no need to turn to the internet for it.

Tonight, I'm going to break that rule.

One of my cats died today - he had to be put down.  I know, I know, that's the sappiest first-world yuppy problem, right?  Doesn't matter.  I loved that cat, and more importantly my wife loved that cat.  His name was Tigger, and I caught him from the wild about nine years ago when he emerged from an abandoned garage near my parents' house.

Tigger the Cat, aka Sluggo, Mr. Underpants, El Tigre, and Fart Nards

He was...a cat.  Hobbies included sitting on tall things, chewing his toenails loudly, and carrying around a rainbow-colored rattle mouse.  His original role in the household was as a gift to my wife, and he got the point that he followed her around everywhere.  I'm not going to go on about him, but rest assured that he was an awesome cat for all of the reasons that anyone who owns a cat thinks their cat is uniquely great.

He started having some health issues before Christmas and despite our best efforts he went downhill very quickly.  We never got a firm diagnosis as to what was wrong with him - he just started wasting away day by day.  We did extensive - and expensive - tests for the better part of a month.  Today he went in for more lab work and they found that his liver had failed.  He had already lost more than half his body weight, could barely stand, and was unlikely to survive any aggressive treatments.  We had to let him go.

I'm kind of very extremely childishly sad that he's gone.  It's a shitty thing, to have something...someone... you care about sicken and die so suddenly.  A few weeks ago he was a happy, chubby cat and now he's just gone.

In one respect though, I feel good about it.  He died with peacefully and without pain in the arms of people who cared about him.  Plus, I can honestly say I have nothing but good memories of that cat.  That's a perk of pet ownership - you never have arguments with them.  There's no bickering, jealousy, or grudges with a cat.  They just want hang out with you and rub their buccal glands all over your stuff.  It's an amazing thing, really, to have a critter running around in your life that you feel 100% positive towards.  It means when he's gone you don't any regrets, no "coulda'-saids" or "but-I-meants" to haunt you.

It's not nearly so easy with people.  There's no afterlife in which to make amends, no matter how much we may wish there was.  The time we have is incalculably precious because it's the only time we have.  I can't help but think today that instead of a cat passing away, it could have been my wife or one of my parents, brothers, or friends - members of  the occasionally complicated, sometimes difficult, but always worthwhile network of relationships that I'm privileged to be a part of.  It's not nearly so easy to maintain those relationships as it is to be buddies with a cat, but it goes without saying that it's more than worth the effort.

I like to think that atheists...well, materialists in general, have a more...tangible, I suppose, grasp of the beauty, worth, and fragility of life than the folks who spend their days hoping for heaven.  If this is the only life we get - and I honestly believe that it is - the it's all the more important to say and do good things for the people in our lives while we have the chance.  We all lose sight of this sometimes, but tonight, at least, I can see it very clearly.

I promise the next post won't be so maudlin, but please allow me the final indulgence of posting one last picture of my pal.

Eons of matter flowing from spot to spot throughout the universe,

combined with millennia of random feline sex,

gave us nine years of this pudgy cat with underpants and a cowlick.

I miss you already, buddy.   

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Over the years there have been a number of Christmas-themed horror films.  From Bob Clark’s proto-slasher film Black Christmas in 1974 to the surprisingly funny Santa’s Slay in 2005, Christmas horror is a subgenre with a long – but not particularly illustrious – history.  Still, if you bring up Christmas slasher flicks in casual conversation most people’s minds immediately jump to 1985’s controversial cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of those movies that a lot of people have heard about but a relatively small number have actually seen.  Yeah, it’s one of those movies.  It’s famous (to use that term in the loosest possible sense) due the controversy surrounding it, while the actual film is really fairly obscure.  As one might imagine, a film in 1984 depicting a guy in a Santa suit killing people really riled up a number of parent’s groups.  Even then, sometimes the outrage about this movie tends to be overstated – many parents, understanding that any children young enough to be disturbed by the film would also never actually see it, were instead angry about the placement of commercials for the movie on television.  Of course, you also had the good ol’ “War on Christmas” brigade waiting to leap out and be angry, but if they hadn’t had this movie to be angry about they’d have found something else to complain about.  Ultimately the film only lasted about two weeks in theaters, supposedly as a result of the public outcry.

            Before we begin, I’d like to point out that the version of the film I’m reviewing today is the 2003 Anchor Bay unrated DVD release.  It’s unfortunately a two-sided disc (the second side holds one of the film’s four sequels), but it does have some deleted scenes that didn’t make it into the theatrical cut of the film.  The extra scenes are from a badly degraded source, but it’s nice to have them included.

            The film opens on Christmas Eve 1971 as young Billy, his baby brother Ricky, and their parents have set off to visit their ailing grandpa in a mental institution.  Anyone who went against my advice and watched Enter the Ninja will recognize Will Hare, the actor playing catatonic grandpa, from his appearance in that film as Dollars the street merchant.  I like to think that it’s the same character in both movies – That Dollars from Enter the Ninja was so traumatized by the nonsensical insanity of that film that he ended up institutionalized back in the States.

            In any event, the instant Billy’s parents leave him alone with crazy ol’ gramps, the old man suddenly snaps out of his trance just long enough to spout off some crazy gobbledygook about Santa Claus killing people.  Needless to say, Billy's little mind is blown and he spends the drive home fretting to his parents about Santa coming to kill him.  It just so happens that his parents encounter a stranded motorist in a Santa suit on a remote back road, so they pull over to help him – and to defuse Billy’s fears by letting him “meet” Santa.  Unfortunately, this Santa Claus is actually a psychopath who only moments ago blew away a gas station attendant over $31 during a robbery.  Santa shoots Billy’s dad, then inexplicably tries to rape his mom before cutting her throat.

            Billy and Ricky end up in a church orphanage in a sequence that lasts far too long.  Billy’s unable to put his trauma behind him and has violent outbursts every single Christmas.  His mental problems are exacerbated by the harsh Mother Superior, who delivers brutal beatings to anyone who’s “naughty” under her care.  (The tottering old woman even somehow manages to deliver a beating to a pair of nearly-grown teens she catches humping.)  A sympathetic nun named Sister Margaret tries to provide him with a gentle upbringing, but is constantly at odds with the authoritarian Mother Superior.  The entire orphanage sequence takes up way too much of the film, though it’s highlighted by an uproarious sequence where Billy lays out a costumed Santa with a Hail Mary haymaker.

Billy ends up outwardly fairly normal, but he’s internalized bizarre ideas about what’s naughty and what’s nice.  “Punishment is absolute, punishment is necessary, and punishment is good,” has been the Mother Superior’s creed, and this idea is always lurking on the periphery of Billy’s psyche, even after he’s grown up into a hulking teen played by Robert Brian Wilson in his lone theatrical role.  Although he still apparently lives at the orphanage, Billy finds a community job working at a local toy store.  Everything’s going pretty well for him (as the audience sees during a happy montage set to the incongruously cheerful song “The Warm Side of the Door” by Morgan Ames), but then Christmas time rolls around again.  The upcoming holiday, combined with his guilt surrounding his burgeoning attraction to his coworker Pamela, starts bringing Billy’s neuroses to the fore once again.

When Billy is forced to play the role of Santa Claus at the toy store on Christmas Eve, his mental state is pushed to the absolute limit.  Playing Santa is bad enough, but the ensuing naughtiness of the office Christmas party manages to shove him over the edge of insanity. (Hasn’t that happened to everyone?)  When he walks in on his supervisor Randy trying to force himself on Pamela in the stockroom, Billy totally loses his shit and strangles Randy to death with a string of Christmas lights.  He then decides that she too was naughty and eviscerates her with a box cutter.

So begins about 40 minutes of Billy wandering the streets in his Santa suit bellowing “naughty” and dispatching people in the usual slasher movie ways.  The most creative sequence in the film, and one which was apparently heavily edited in the theatrical cut, involves Billy impaling a woman on the antlers of a deer’s head hanging on a wall.  Horror fans will recognize the antler victim as Linnea Quigley from such films as Return of the Living Dead, Pumkinhead II, and The Guyver.  Otherwise it’s a lot of hammer-to-the-face, arrow-in-the-back, axe-to-the-neck 1980s horror staples.  It’s not bad, but they didn’t run with the Christmas theme as much as they could’ve.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of those odd early-ish slasher movies that tries to take itself super seriously.  I’m not opposed to that per se, but this movie spends a lot of time early on trying to establish Billy’s character only to immediately have him devolve into more or less your standard slasher villain. Also, making a good “serious” horror movie requires a fair amount of finesse that this movie just doesn’t have.  The ultra-dramatic music and camera work at the ending are textbook examples of unintentional humor.  Also, the violence in this movie is pretty lingering and uncomfortable at times.  That’s kind of a staple of early slasher flicks, but it doesn’t work especially well here given the ludicrous subject matter.  I’m not saying that this movie should’ve been a comedy or anything, but I think it might have been more enjoyable to watch if hadn’t tried quite so hard to be a brooding, serious film. 

I’d also be curious to know the details of the filming schedule for this movie.  See, even though it’s set at Christmas, there’s not much snow to be seen.  In fact, in some sequences you can see that snow has been laid out in a fairly small area while yards and trees in the background are completely clear.  It’s kind of an odd thing to note, but the unseasonal weather is something that always sticks out to me about this movie.  The other special effects are pretty simple as well, though the antler murder is done nicely.  For a sense of perspective, this movie came out the same year as Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, which has vastly better visuals (and, to be fair, twice the budget).

            Silent Night, Deadly Night isn’t an easy movie to judge.  It doesn’t approach the quality of genre classics like Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street, but it’s also head and shoulders above films such as Happy Birthday to Me or Sleepaway Camp.  Like so many horror movies, this is kind of a case of personal taste.  I kind of like it, but if someone were to walk up to me on the street and ask me to recommend a good Christmas horror film (Hey, it could happen.) I’d probably recommend Santa’s Slay over Silent Night, Deadly Night, as the former is just plain more fun to watch.  Silent Night, Deadly Night is kind of interesting for the history behind it and it’s certainly not unwatchably bad…but it’s not necessarily easy to recommend either.  Also, a remake of this flick, with the abbreviated title Silent Night, came out at the end of November…so there’s that.

           As I alluded to in an earlier post, most of the movie reviews I’d planned for December are instead getting the podcast treatment over at Joe’s Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything.  The first two episodes of the 2012 Christmas special are already up, so go check it out.

Santaclysm!

Last year I got the chance to take part in a really awesome Christmas episode of Joe's Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything.  That particular Christmas episode is currently unavailable for download, but happily brand spanking new Christmas episode just went up!  It's first part of a fairly long special JATHE presentation we're calling "Santaclysm" and it deals with various offbeat film incarnations of Santa Claus through the decades. The first episode, wherein we discuss the portrayal of Santa in a couple of beloevd Rankin-Bass specials, was a ton of fun to tape.  Plus I got upgraded from regular guest to temporary guest host (kind of) for this one.  Check it out!

On a semi-related note, Tommy can apparently read my mind, because the next three episodes of Santaclysm just happen to be the exact three movies I had planned to review for my holiday festivities for the blog.  That said, I've been forced to change up my plans a bit.  I had intended to kind of avoid the most obvious Christmas horror movies this year, but my hand has been forced...so screw it.  Coming up soon will be my review of the grand-daddy of all Christmas horror flicks, that oft-maligned but rarely viewed cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night.  Please come back and join me for it!

Christmastime With Skippy

As the dozen or so of you that come by the blog for reasons other than Google Images sending here you to look for ninja pictures may have noticed, it's been pretty quiet around here since Halloween.  There are a few reasons for these, not the least of which being that the Halloween Horror Countdown was more work than I expected and I wanted a break.  It's also the case that I probably watched about 50 horror flicks in October, so I needed a break from that, too.  Not feeling like writing or watching movies makes it pretty darn hard to run a movie blog.

Wait Skippy, you might say, why worry with horror movies?  You post seasonal stuff too, so why didn't you post any Thanksgiving-related reviews?

Thanksgiving movies, huh?  Name three.  Other than Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  Not easy, huh?  That's also why there weren't any movie reviews this month.

Now December is upon us.  As you're no doubt aware, there's no dearth of Christmas movies out there, and many of them are weird enough to fall under my purview.  There are plenty of weird Christmas-themed horror flicks out there, as well more than a couple of "straight" Christmas flicks that are more than bizarre enough to warrant inclusion here, so we've certainly got enough to work with.  I'm not going to do a countdown or anything, but things are going to start picking up around here between now and the holidays.

'Tis the season for weird movies, and I hope you'll come join in the fun.
 

Halloween Horror Countdown #1: The Evil Dead (1981)

Halloween is nigh.  We've talked about a lot of great horror movies this month, and I hope you've had fun along the way. We've come to the end of our list and now there's only one movie left.  It's a film that exemplifies what a horror flick should be.  It was made for practically nothing by a group of buddies who just wanted to make a scary movie, not concocted by an unholy mishmash of focus groups and mad-libs like so many recent flicks..  Shot in an isolated Tennessee cabin using jury-rigged equipment and homemade special effects, this film proved to be a genre masterpiece.  It's not only my top Halloween Horror Movie, but it's one of my favorite scary movies of all time.  Coming in at number one in the Halloween Horror Countdown is The Evil Dead.

When I was a kid, I used to hear my older brothers talk about The Evil Dead with something akin to frightened awe.  When I was old enough to buy these kinds of movies on my own, I picked up a VHS copy of The Evil Dead 2 at a local Target.  Frankly I was a little disappointed at the time with some of that movie's absurd humor, though I eventually grew to appreciate it.  I soon went back to Target and found the original film, also on VHS.  I hadn't seen that many horror films at this point in my life, but the night I watched The Evil Dead in my parents' darkened basement, I knew I was seeing something special.

Evil Dead is not a film that's heavy on set-up.  A group of five friends travel to a cabin in the woods for a vacation.  While fooling around in the basement of the cabin, they find a gnarled old book and a strange skull-hilted dagger.  Investigating further, they listen to an old audiotape that reveals that the book is in fact the Naturan Demanto¹, an ancient Sumerian compendium of demon resurrection spells and other nasty stuff.  The voice on the tape recites some of these spells and all hell breaks loose as demons begin to possess members of the group and even the trees themselves spring to malevolent life.



Okay, maybe that doesn't sound so unique.  So what makes this movie so good? Evil Dead succeeds in spite of its simplistic plot and shoestring budget by playing the horror straight and to the hilt.  Once the movie gets going, it doesn't break up the atmosphere with humor or irony.  The viewer gets precious little room to breathe.  This isn't a film where there's a creepy killer skulking in the shadows, it's a movie about monsters - demonic zombies - trying to rip people apart in a foaming frenzy of violence.  No one is ever killed with a quick knife in the belly.  Every single monster attack quickly turns into a brutal wrestling match, always festooned with veritable buckets of gore.  It's visceral stuff, not entirely dissimilar in tone to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it works extremely well.

The movie does allow for some creepier moments.  When Linda, the girlfriend of our protagonist Ash, is possessed by one of the demons, she doesn't bother to attack Ash outright.  Instead, it torments him by switching back and forth between Linda's regular appearance and its grotesque demonic visage.  When Ash is attacked by another monster, the possessed cadaver of his own sister Sheryl, Linda doesn't bother to join in - she just sits in the doorway and laughs and laughs and laughs....It's unnerving stuff.  It also goes to show that even though the demons are flesh-tearing murder machines, they're also possessed of a malevolent intelligence.

Evil Dead's does a great job of allowing the setting to play naturally into the pacing of the film.  We learn early in the film, thanks to a surprisingly graphic sequence in which a woman is assaulted by animated trees, that the cabin is the only remotely safe place available to the protagonists.  Unfortunately, one of their number is soon possessed and thus the shelter is compromised.  It forces the characters to face certain death in the woods or take their chances with the monsters already inside the cabin.  There's no real safety, no time to stop and think.  In the few sequences when any of the characters are forced to venture outside of the cabin, it's a pretty harrowing experience.  The audience knows that there are things in the woods, as we've spent much of the film watching the "evil cam" streak through the darkness in first person, shattering windows and knocking down trees.  We have no idea what they look like or what they're capable of, but we know these things are there.  Thus it makes sense for the characters to remain in the cabin to face the demons inside - they aren't stupid horror movie characters, they're just choosing the lesser of two terrible options.

I've avoided mentioning him so far, but Ash is kind of the elephant in the room here.  This character is, of course, the most famous role of Bruce Campbell, b-movie actor extraordinaire.  Most viewers think of Ash as a snarky, sarcastic bad-ass.  That's true of his later incarnations in the sequels, video games, and comics that Evil Dead would eventually spawn, but in the original film nothing could be further from the truth.  Ash is portrayed in this film as the most unlikely hero of all; a lanky, uncoordinated fella' who spends most of the initial demon attack pinned under a bookcase.  He's not a  pre-destined monster fighting machine, he's not the chosen one, he's just a guy. 

If anyone in this movie seems like a likely hero, it's Ash's knife-toting buddy Scott.  Hell, Scott fistfights his own possessed girlfriend, then hacks her carcass apart with an axe.  Pretty awesome, huh?  Unfortunately he also abandons his friends and tries to flee to safety through the woods.  Ash is left to fend for himself until Scott, torn to shreds by his possessed trees, staggers back to the cabin.  The moment when Scott expires, leaving Ash, and the audience, to realize that he's the last one left, is a chillingly despairing scene.  For the rest of the movie he's not so much fighting the monsters as he is just trying to survive until morning.  Alone, desperate, and frankly scared shitless, Ash may be one of the most genuine horror movie protagonists ever.

Evil Dead's special effects have a crude genuineness to them.  Caked on makeup, makeshift prostheses, and more Karo syrup blood than you can imagine all combine to create something more than the sum of its parts.  Everything looks gritty and tangible.  Granted, some of the effects look pretty primitive, such as the sequence in which Ash slices off a demon's head with an shovel, but in this sort of movie it works.  Keep in mind that this movie was made by a relatively small crew that was more or less making up the special effects as they went along.  In that context, it's pretty impressive stuff despite the occasional rough edges.

As you may have guessed, I strongly recommend this movie for anyone with even a passing interest in the horror genre.  It's been imitated, parodied, and has even spawned an upcoming remake, but the original Evil Dead remains a titan among horror films.  I've spent many a Halloween night sitting around with the lights off watching Evil Dead and passing out candy.  In terms of mandatory Halloween viewing, the only film I can imagine ever supplanting this one in my own pantheon is a certain John Carpenter flick...

Well, there you have it.  The Halloween Horror Countdown is complete.  It's been a lot of work, but it's also been a lot of fun.  I hope you've enjoyed spending October here with me.  Thanks for reading and Happy Halloween!

_____
1.) It's not called the Necronomicon until the sequel, much to the annoyance of those of us who've tried to make "super-cuts" of all three films put together.

Halloween Horror Countdown #2: Trick 'r Treat (2007)

You know what I really, really, like?  Anthology horror movies.  These are films that combine several unrelated vignettes into one full length film, giving you a grab bag of different stories to enjoy.   Creepshow, Tales From the Crypt, and Tales From the Dark Side may be the best known titles in this sub-genre, but there are plenty of these films out there. Films like these understand that sometimes scares are best served short and snappy, and they tend to eschew the plodding padding that some other horror features are packed with in lieu of a plot.  When I was putting this list together there was one anthology flick that absolutely had to be on it.  It's the newest film in the countdown and one that may not have made onto a general roll call of my five favorite horror movies, but since we're focusing on Halloween, this one just  has to get the nod.  Coming in at #2 on my Halloween Horror Countdown is Trick 'r Treat.  I should note that the dating on this one is a bit peculiar.  Trick 'r Treat was finished in 2007 but didn't actually see the light of day in any kind of a broad release until it came out on DVD in 2009.

Trick 'r Treat consists of four stories connected by a wraparound, which is pretty standard fare for this sort of movie.  In The Principal, we meet Steve Wilkins, the local school principal who just happens to enjoy poisoning kids on Halloween and burying them in his backyard.  The School Bus Massacre Revisited finds a group of youths pulling a cruel prank on a disabled girl by luring her to the site of long-ago bus crash, only to find themselves confronted by the undead. In Surprise Party, Anna Paquin plays Laurie, a self-conscious young woman trying to find a date to a Halloween party thrown by her sister.  Instead she finds herself stalked by a serial killer, but the film twists this old trope into a satisfying ending.  Finally we have Sam, in which a mysterious masked creature torments an old curmudgeon who refuses to participate in the Halloween festivities.  The shorts run the gamut of horror genres, from serial killers to zombies and beyond.



Interestingly, all of the stories are meant to be taking place concurrently on the same Halloween night.  The shorts are somewhat interwoven, and sharp-eyed viewers will be able to see bits of each tale going on in the backgrounds of others.  That's nothing huge, but it's a fun touch.  Also present in each story is Sam, a diminutive figure in pajamas and a burlap sack mask.  Although he only really takes part in the last story, he's around in all of them, watching the grotesque events with a strange look of approval.  A bizarre Halloween imp, Sam stalks his victims with sharpened lollipops, razor blade-filled candy bars, and hard candy laced with broken glass.  Apparently based on a long-ago animated short by the film's creator Michael Dougherty, Sam's a fun, creepy little character and a great mascot.

Sam notwithstanding, Principal Wilkins, played by Dylan Baker from the Raimi Spider-Man films, is easily my favorite character in the movie if only because of the dry-matter-of fact way he goes about his business.  The "serial killer next door" motif is kind of old hat these days, but Baker pulls it off well.  He's also our introduction to the "rules" of the movie - By telling  one of his victims about the role of Halloween traditions, such as jack-o-lanterns and handing out treats, in "protecting" people, he's actually setting up for some of Sam's murderous scenes.  Principal Wilkins also shows up in a second story, but in a rather different situation.

Trick 'r Treat, like so many horror anthologies before it, gleefully draws inspiration from the horror comics of the 1950s.  This means that they strive (largely successfully) to balance humor and scares, but they're also all based around twist endings that aren't especially hard to see coming.  At no point will any viewer mistake this movie for brain food, but it's not intended to be.  Trick 'r Treat is all about creepy Halloween fun, and at this it does quite well.  As I mentioned earlier, this movie may not have a had a place in a list of the five best horror films in general, but for Halloween it's required viewing. 

Well, it's just a few days before Halloween and there's only one movie left on my Halloween Horror Countdown. While this list has admittedly been in flux during the entire month, there hasn't been a single iteration of it with the same film in the top slot.  Check back on Tuesday for the conclusion of the Halloween Horror Countdown!

Halloween Horror Countdown #3: Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a teenage horror fan in the mid-90s.  You’re just now getting into the swing of the genre – you don’t know much about it and most of the movies you’ve seen so far have been by way Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs.  There’s no internet, at least not that you have access to, and you’re really only introduced to new movies by way of the video store, your buddies, or wandering into them on television.  Try to imagine then, that one night in the middle of week you happen to turn on TNT and a movie is playing that you ever so slowly come to recognize as a color remake of the classic Night of the Living Dead.  You watch it, amazed, and as soon as you beg or buy transportation to the nearest Suncoast (Because, damn it, Suncoast was still the place to buy movies back then.) you buy your own VHS copy and watch it…well…maybe just a few too many times.

            As you may have guessed, that’s a story from my formative days as a horror fan.  It should come as no surprise then that film #3 on my Halloween Horror Countdown is Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead.  I’m aware that there’s probably some weird dissonance going on when I call the original Romero Living Dead a classic, then omit it from my Halloween top five in favor of the remake.  The Romero film is a classic – not only did it singlehandedly launch the zombie film as modern audiences know it, but it also pioneered the gritty, gruesome style of shooting horror films that would more fully take hold in the 1970s with films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  That said, this is my list, and the Savini remake undoubtedly had more of an influence on me personally, so here it is.

            Starring Tony Todd and Patricia Tallman, Savini’s vision of Living Dead is to Romero’s film what the Hammer series was to Universal’s horror cycle.  Okay, so maybe that’s stretching things a bit, but what I’m getting at is that it’s a recognizable remake that still has enough original content to stand on its own.  Coming 22 years after the original, Savini’s film benefits from comparatively amazing zombie effects and, frankly, a somewhat better script.  The film’s plot is one we’ve since seen many times: a band of strangers, all of whom are fleeing an inexplicable zombie plague, are trapped together in an isolated farmhouse.  With few resources and far too many zombies closing in than can possibly be repulsed in a fight, they have to set aside their differences and try to escape.  The drama still comes from the breakdown of cooperation amongst strangers in a terrifying situation, but in my opinion the Savini film just handles things better.

Most notably, Patricia Tallman’s Barbara is actually, well, a character this time, whereas Judith O’dea’s Barbara spent the entire 1968 film either catatonic or screaming.  That’s not a jab at O’dea, but I just find Tallman’s portrayal of the character a lot more fun to watch.  Tallman’s Barbara actually manages to find the will to fight back despite all the horror swirling around her, but the character is written well enough not to suddenly metamorphose into a clichéd movie badass. (That was one of my few complaints about the 2005 Dawn of the Dead remake – I don’t think anyone in that movie ever fires a gun and misses.)  Tony Todd is fantastic as Ben as well, a fitting heir to Duane Jones from the original.

The film’s zombie effects are some of the best out there, even compared to more recent movies.  Many of the zombies have a gross, slick look…kind of like an old piece of lunchmeat.  The effects crew was also smart enough not to overdo the blood on the zombies to the point that it obscures the other makeup work.  From the ‘autopsy man’ at the beginning of the film to Sarah Cooper, a young survivor who succumbs to a zombie bite at the climax of the film each zombie has a unique, but always high quality, look.  In addition to being gruesome, in-your-face monsters, they manage to be just plain creepy as well.

The sound design in this movie is great as well, with a fairly austere soundtrack but a lot of great musical strikes throughout.  The operatic “haunted castle” music that pops up out of nowhere when the zombies finally invade the farmhouse near the end of the film always seemed out of place to me, but everything else is great.  As the film progresses, the constant low moans and pounding that invades every scene as the undead hammer away at the farmhouse’s defenses always manage to keep the viewer on edge – you never get to forget the danger lurking all around.

I guess I can’t wrap up this review without a few remarks about the ending.  The original film was famous for its dark climax in which none of the main characters survive.  At the time, that was something that simply didn’t happen in horror movies and I can only imagine how shocked 1960s audiences were.  Savini offers us a slightly more hopeful ending in which Barbara survives.  There’s nothing feel-good about it, though: We’re reminded throughout the film’s climax that nearly everyone could have escaped the farmhouse if only things had worked out slightly differently.  Even worse, Barbara finds that after only a single night of the chaos, the worst of humanity has already been brought to the fore.

Before I wrap up, I suppose I’ll make a few remarks about the recent debacle with the Blu-Ray release of Night of the Living Dead.  I should note that I’m an unrepentant foot-dragger when it comes to upgrading my media formats.  I didn’t buy a DVD player until 2001 and I still don’t have any Blu-Ray devices.  The release of the film that I reviewed is the 1999 double-sided (boo) DVD that contains both the widescreen and TV-cropped versions of the film.  It’s widely available and can be had for something like $6 on the internet. 

On the other hand, the Blu-Ray release, which apparently came out only this month, is some kind of limited edition that is already commanding prices of over $100 in most places.  That’s ridiculous in and of itself, but the Blu-Ray release has also had its color levels tinkered with, resulting a bizarre dark blue tint for the majority of the film.  There are screen caps available over at Dread Central, and it looks amazingly bad – like the clumsy day-for-night shots in old Toho movies.  Seriously, head over there and check it out.  It’s a travesty.

In any event, this Savini’s Night of the Living Dead isn’t an especially original zombie film, but there’s something to be said for a formula being done right.  It’s a tense, creepy zombie film that’s certainly worthy of inclusion in anyone Halloween movie marathon.  I strongly recommend it…but only on DVD.

Well, we’ve crossed the halfway point.  Halloween is less than two weeks away, and there are only two more movies to go in my countdown.  Come back next week to check out my second-favorite Halloween movie.  Our runner-up is the newest film on this list, and while it’s inclusion may some as a surprise to some folks who know me as a staunch defender of the old guard, I have a feeling that this one may one day be considered a Halloween classic.  See you then!