As is a longstanding family tradition, on the Friday before Halloween I host a movie marathon for my kids, when I’ll just keep throwing spooky movies on until everyone gives up and goes to bed. Only my 22-year-old still lives at home, but the others make sure their calendar is clear to come home for it.
Of course, now that even the twentysomethings have life roles and responsibilities, they’re not accustomed to staying up late regularly, so even though I had six movies on deck, we only got through four of them.
Coraline (2009) – This was a request by one of the kids; I’d never seen it before. A movie made by those vaguely in the orbit of Tim Burton, from a book by Neil Gaiman, that looked like a charming little animated feature… before it turns into high-grade nightmare fuel. I wonder how many children this scarred back in the day. (And gotta love those shots that remind you, “Oh, yeah, this was released in 3D!”)
Robot Monster (1953) – I always try to include one corny schlock sci-fi monster flick, and hoo boy. This one induced the highest ratios of facepalms-per-minute among the viewing audience since I first showed the kids Plan 9 From Outer Space. It actually sort of makes sense in the end, as [SPOILER FOR A MOVIE THAT’S SEVENTY-TWO YEARS OLD] it turns out to be the dream of a nine-year-old boy, who can’t be expected to have his science right [/SPOILER], but as my son exclaimed, “What was the economic structure that made this movie happen? Who could have decided to write and direct and fund it?” (Also originally in 3S, though there’s nothing really that’s an artifact of that.)
Return of the Evil Dead (1973) – To my mind, this is the best of Amando de Ossorio’s four “Blind Dead” movies, or at least it’s the one with the least bad parts, which isn’t quite the same. The “Blind Dead” movies are best when they ignore the human drama (or melodrama, rightly identified) and simply focus on sepulchral dread.
Dawn of the Dead (1978) – It having been a number of years since I last watched this, I had misremembered one thing: Because it dwells on the slow dissolution of social bonds, it’s a looong movie in which nothing much happens for minutes at a time. I’m not complaining at all — those “nothing much” stretches are still fantastic visual storytelling — but this may not have been the best movie to occupy the post-midnight slot.
Movies I had on deck that we didn’t get to: American Werewolf in London (1981), Waxwork (1988).
Ah, yes: I not only watched Coraline in the theater when it was released, but in 3D with a pair of those special glasses provided. Gimmicky as that whole 3D thing was (and clearly intended to justify the boosting of the movie’s ticket price by several dollars), it did make a few moments of the movie rather memorable, such as when at one point in particular a tinsel spiral thingy in Coraline’s room seemed to come swirling right out of the screen at me. Of course, having long graduated from college by this point and had some experience with this world’s wicked ways, I didn’t have much trouble figuring out early on that the indulgent pleasures the “other world” was offering the titular protagonist would ultimately come with some kind of nasty price tag attached; all the same, it was still rather entertaining trying to catch some of the foreshadowing (e.g. noticing some subtle physical changes occurring in the “other mother” as her mask of congeniality began to slip) on the way to the morality tale’s rather nightmarish (but cathartic) outcome.
Something truly scary children’s horror movies like that help remind us is that true horror doesn’t typically require loads of blood and gore and rotting flesh and other disgusting imagery to be scary; if anything, once the initial shock of seeing such things as a child wears off, we get desensitized to it so rapidly that future attempts to scare us the same way only end up amusing us with their histrionics. As an adult, what’s scary about Coraline isn’t so much being shown the awful truth underlying the “other mother’s” pleasant facade as realizing in advance that she’s up to no good while watching the naive child protagonist fall for her lies. That makes it the kind of movie parents can watch together with their (slightly older) children with both kinds of viewers getting a kind of catharsis from it—the children from seeing the protagonist ultimately escape the villain’s trap and learn her lesson, and the adults from knowing their children have now learned not to trust offers like the villain’s that seem too good to be true (because—of course—they almost invariably are).
Yes, viewing at least one “corny” flick like Robot Monster that belongs on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (and—in this case—totally did get an episode on there) is practically a requirement for this kind of movie marathon. However, did you know that in his childhood, little Stephen “Stevie” King actually considered this movie “art of a high nature” according to his autobiography? Sometimes, there’s nothing like a little hilariously bad schlock to get those creative juices flowing in the youngsters.
While I haven’t seen those other movies, something I do notice about your assessment of the “human drama” is that where I draw the line between well-written and poorly-written horror stories is whether the target audience finds the parts where the story gives us the backstories of the various characters who are about to meet some terrible fate engaging and worth seeing before they get to the parts where they meet said terrible fate. It’s rather like the difference between erotic literature and pornography: with the latter, the whole point is just to come up with some excuse (however lame and nonsensical) to get the characters involved to the parts with all the exposure of their anatomical plumbing and subsequent heaving and thrusting; whereas with the former, the point is to make the readers care about these characters and how they relate to each other so that when they get all naked and sweaty, it’ll come as a climax to the story rather than just to the scene, and the readers will (probably) care enough to read on about what happens to the amorous couple(s) after that.
By that standard, it sounds like these Blind Dead movies are rather badly written since they’ve got viewers like you saying “Enough with all the melodramatic filler about these characters who are obviously zombie food already; just get to the zombie attacks, man!” Conversely, Dawn of the Dead must have been written a lot better if it has you saying “We get to watch society fall apart to show us why these people deserve to get eaten by zombies; cool!” That’s how unapologetically lowest-common-denominator movies like Violent Night and Cocaine Bear (both made by roughly the same batch of low-budget filmmakers) managed to be so entertaining: the writers made enough of an effort from the start to make those of us in the audience care about what Santa and that cocaine-crazed bear are going to do to the characters they introduced to us earlier in each movie.