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The Fran Magazine Brave era sale
Good news and bad news. The latter first: the Fran Magazine subscriber numbers are DROPPING. What is HAPPENING. Are you at all MAD AT ME OR SOMETHING? Like I said, I had three migraines last week, and now everyone is pissed off at me, which is the ultimate migraine-havers worry. (Did you know that part of having a migraine involves lying in bed and thinking about all the bad things you have done?)
The good news is that for the next week — YES, ONE WEEK ONLY, to celebrate the “Halloween season” — you can get put the Fran Magazine Brave era sale to good use and get 50% off your annual subscription, well, forever. But that’s just this week! That means you get an annual subscription for $25 forever. Doesn’t really require THAT much bravery if you ask me, but we’re all nervous in our own ways…
Jokes aside, financial support does allow me a certain ease of living, access to screenings, time and energy to go towards reading and writing and watching things that then get funneled into points of interest for this magazine. The freelance economy is ever-worsening, ever-unreliable, but having a steady subscribership can offer a sense of calm during otherwise tumultuous times.
Maestro moment
The official Maestro trailer is here. What is your favorite #MaestroMoment in the trailer?
My brave era
As long as I can remember I have been a huge baby when it came to “horror movies,” which is as large and all-encompassing a genre such that I should just say “movies.” But it’s true that for the longest time in my own film education — let’s not even talk about TV or books here — that I put off, ignored, or refused to engage with horror as an enterprise. Trying to identify why I don’t want to deal with something is often more of a complicated mental exercise than trying to figure out why I like something. If I saw a horror movie on anywhere that I was, I’d simply walk out of the room for fear of seeing something I don’t want to see.
When I’m teaching, we talk about word clouds and systems mappings, which can feel silly or corny in the abstract but useful in practice. What was it I didn’t want to engage with in horror movies?
They’re scary: well, duh. But what was it specifically I was afraid of? I spent my childhood watching Buffy and Angel, so the abstract concept of a “monster” was not especially scary to me.
They’re violent: yes, this was the sticking point for a while, as I have a weak stomach when it comes to blood specifically. What kind of violence was I avoiding? I knew I didn’t want to see anything like a Saw movie, or the Hostel movies — anything that really seemed to indulge in gore that felt like a forbidden text from when I was in high school. But violence exists on a large spectrum — what was it specifically I didn’t want to see?
Of course, I had seen some horror movies: I had seen, um, Nightmare on Elm Street (the original — though they shot the remake that no one likes very close to where I grew up!), I had seen The Omen, I had seen Signs at basically every slumber party I ever attended.
A few years ago I decided I needed to grow up and start watching some horror, bit by bit. It felt disingenuous to claim to be any kind of film critic with a straight face and have a whole genre of movies I didn’t watch. That said, my horror self-education began in a way that many moviegoers would say is “cheating,” which is to say that I watched it at 10am, or with friends at two in the afternoon. I say who cares, you’re still getting an amazing issue of Fran Magazine.
The first horror movie I can remember watching on my own at ten in the morning was Robert Eggers’s The Witch (sorry — VVitch), an indie horror darling that most people agreed was more THEMATICALLY SCARY than ACTUALLY SCARY and had SOME VIOLENCE but MINIMAL VIOLENCE. I found the the movie unnerving, its climax briefly unbearable to watch and then it was mostly over. Like with a lot of horror movies, I thought the most comforting thought I could come up with: that wouldn’t happen to me. I don’t live in the past, for one.
From there I moved into the hybrid genre of “horror comedy” or “violent comedy,” the latter of which has proven to be a genre I mostly kind of loathe but we’ll get to that in a second. With Aubrey, I watched Scream — which remains to this point the only Scream movies I’ve seen (there’s some rule here? The even ones are good? There’s some ranking? I’m sort of like — when it comes to myriad horror sequels I check out). Scream was scary but Scream was funny, and the ending of Scream — “the reveal of the Scream” — feels more satisfying than a number of other horror movies I watched. I also watched Us (in theaters — with my brother, also not brave [sorry Owen]) and Ready or Not (on a plane — another great place to be brave) and The Cabin in the Woods (on laptop at 10am). The latter two proved fun while watching, but the self-aware horror comedies or violent comedies otherwise don’t appeal to me. Typically they are both NOT scary AND NOT funny, instead of being scary and funny.
When Phil and I started dating it was immediately clear that I would have to ramp up my bravery — he said something to the effect of, “if we keep hanging out, it would be great to watch horror movies.” Okay, threat!!! Okay, ULTIMATUM!! Well, it worked. The first horror movie I recall watching together was The Strangers which everyone agreed for a long time was a very scary movie. It is a very scary movie, I agree, but it is also an exercise in watching one of the more effective longform improv shows. I do think a big mental hurdle I had to work through was coming to understand that the last act of horror movies — the scariest part, if the movie is any good (or bad, even) — usually comes down to “putting on a show.” They just want to impress you! The ghosts wanna scare, the killers will start behaving insane. This is all very showbiz, Broadway, whatever. Horror and comedy are so similar as genres, in that it’s very easy to do a bad job at BOTH but feel self-satisfied anyway. After The Strangers was over, Phil left me in his house alone to run to the bodega — the most unforgivable event in our relationship.
From there we watched some canonical horror classics including:
Halloween
Black Christmas
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Thing
Prince of Darkness
House of 1,000 Corpses
Poltergeist
The Slumber Party Massacre
The Blob
The original Halloween did very little for me — sorry — but I love Black Christmas, possibly the most platonic ideal of what I like to see in a horror movie, which is: memorable characters, memorable kills, genuinely scary thing happening with mounting sense of dread. Unlike, say, The Witch or The Thing, Black Christmas could maybe happen to me? Above all else, movies are good or bad based on whether they could happen to me. The Slumber Party Massacre repeats the formula, kind of; I found this less satisfying though also quite enjoyable. The Blob is great — I’ve learned I love when horror happens to a whole town, which is what makes Halloween enjoyable when it is. Poltergeist I immediately forgot all of ??? and House of 1,000 Corpses was much less unpleasant than I anticipated though I hate having to see Chris Hardwick on my TV.
The Thing — this situation wouldn’t happen to me, but I admire that it is about grad school, like John Carpenter’s other film Prince of Darkness, which I found SO scary. The Thing is gross, but Prince of Darkness is deeply unsettling for a movie that is mostly about a church flooding with slime. I don’t need a horror movie to end well — that catharsis is not that important to me, but Prince of Darkness is so intent on building dread and letting it go absolutely nowhere. Prince of Darkness is Fran Magazine’s official John Carpenter pick.
The scariest movie I have probably seen since all of this start is Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which everyone agrees is both a really incredible but also very scary movie. Longest 80 minutes of my life!! Not unlike The Strangers, it is a movie about putting on a little show for a bad audience, but unlike The Strangers, it is full of such terrible images that it did make me want to die or be dead already. It did not help that I watched this movie at my OLD APARTMENT where the NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORS were having a PARTY where people kept leaving to go down for a CIGARETTE and then BUZZ THE DOOR to come back up. After going to bed after watching Texas Chain Saw Massacre, our buzzer went off a few times between three and four in the morning, waking me from otherwise brave slumber. Bad!!!
There are a few movies I was brave enough to watch on my own or with friends, some of them even at night:
Carrie
The Brood
Hereditary
Carrie had the benefit of being based on a book I’d already read; I mostly just think this is a very, very sad movie with some obscure scares throughout. The Brood is nonsense, but like Prince of Darkness, it builds to such an effective level of dread that it can’t be counted out. Hereditary, of course, was a whole thing. I watched this at — of course — 11:30 in the morning, even though I’d long known most of what happens in the movie. I found it a little too uneven to build dread effectively, but those last fifteen minutes are so relentless. The movie is always scariest when it’s following Alex Wolff and not when it’s following Toni Colette. Resurrection…………… this thing is mostly about having a coworker who is insane.
I’ve been brave enough to catch a few recent (and one not recent) horror films in theaters too… X, for instance, which sucks; I hate X — terrible movie, none of you will trick me into watching Pearl. Lindsey and I saw Barbarian at the most cursed Regal location in NYC (Battery Park) and the movie set off my Apple Watch because it thought I might be going into cardiac arrest while watching. Also: a funny movie, probably funnier than it is scary? Smug in a way I usually don’t care for but I do think the structure is pretty inspired and the movie makes for such a compelling first watch that it’s not to be discounted. I saw Halloween Ends at 10 in the morning in 4DX: that’s mostly just an exercise in nausea. And Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I saw with Veronica and is simply just a regular good movie.
The biggest thing I’ve learned during my brave era is that it does not take a horror movie to actually disturb me, it might be something dumber and most existential like our relationships to animals and nature (Andrea Arnold’s Cow documentary, for instance, is not for the faint of heart; neither is Jaws which I finally saw this summer). Silkwood and Strange Days are two harrowing, political films — mostly about labor abuses, but both sit quite poorly in the stomach. I always think about rewatching In The Cut, and then I am forced to remember how much of that movie is about terrible things happening to an English teacher named Fran.
In this year’s attempts at bravery, I’ve watched Ginger Snaps, The Exorcist, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Gonjiam: Insane Asylum. Ginger Snaps falls into the Black Christmas genre of bad things happening to girls who can really hang — sad. Probably the best thing I’ve watched so far this Halloween season. There’s little to say about The Exorcist that hasn’t been said: I love how William Friedkin hates bureaucracy across several of his movies; I also think having seen this movie in close proximity to Hereditary cheapens the latter. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer has the Texas Chain Saw Massacre thing of accumulating the worst energy with the worst characters, but it has the benefit of being set in Chicago. I was at least comforted to know that all these bad people and their terrible crimes were happening on a street I knew how to pronounce. Gonjiam: Insane Asylum did feel truly scary — I slept poorly after, and more than a lot of these classic titles scratched the itch of actual unknown. The truth is that the more of these I watch, the more I am able to categorize and sort what is or isn’t scary about them to me. Found footage still feels quite unapproachable, and I don’t think I’ll ever leap at the idea of watching a zombie movie — my least preferred monster. Some of that is probably just generational fatigue; it’s so crazy that Mel Brooks’s son wrote a whole book about zombie survival and then culture just responded to that for fifteen years after. I don’t feel brave enough for Cure, but maybe next year!
I applaud your bravery, Fran 🫡
Prince of Darkness is so good...that climactic image with the broken mirror is all-timer. I like horror but would swear off sight unseen a lot of like torture porn-ish stuff—Salo or Irreversible or Kotoko. Perhaps this makes me a prude.