{"id":10090,"date":"2022-10-24T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10090"},"modified":"2023-01-30T08:09:32","modified_gmt":"2023-01-30T13:09:32","slug":"halloween-countdown-scary-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10090","title":{"rendered":"Halloween Countdown: Scary Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As Halloween approaches, memories of the disturbing 2016 horror movie The VVitch<\/em> recur. Those Puritans! Below is a shortened review of that movie and info on the most horrifying movie I ever saw. Well, it\u2019s a tie with Psycho<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an old-timey flourish, the opening credits for writer\/director Robert Eggers\u2019s unconventional The VVitch<\/em> (trailer<\/a>), use the ancient Latinate \u201cdouble v.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s 1630s New England, and William and his family have been exiled from their Puritan community and must find a new home, alone together in the wilderness. Their expulsion has dangers that are obvious from the strength of the stockade surrounding the sad village buildings, the armed Indians who look on the departing family with curiosity, the gate so firmly barred behind them. From this ominous beginning Eggers builds a horrifying tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William (played by Ralph Ineson), his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), their pubescent daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, later Emma<\/em> and the chess whiz in The Queen\u2019s Gambit<\/em>), and their three younger children must create a new farm, and he selects land near a stream and a dense old-growth woods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some time passes, and the family has a house and an outbuilding, a chicken house, a stable for the horse, and a small corral for the goats, including a suspect animal named Black Phillip. They also have failing crops and not enough food for the winter. They also have a new baby boy, who disappears while Thomasin is minding him. All the lengthy prayers and the catechism the family recites are powerless in the face of this calamitous loss. Was it a wolf? Or did a witch emerge from the woods and snatch him?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for atmospherics, the winter sky is ever thickly clouded. The film\u2019s color palette ranges from gray to dark gray to greige. Brilliant color is saved for the carmine of a cape, and, of course, the blood. The music, by Mark Korven, shrieks in all the right places. These new Americans\u2019 old Yorkshire accents are sometimes hard to understand, but the emotional current is so clear that words are almost unnecessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of your answer to \u201cwitches\u2014yes or no?\u201d the film is a chilling portrayal of what all can go wrong in a family alone in the wilderness in that very particular culture and era. Though critics liked it, audiences expecting a typical horror film apparently are disappointed<\/a> that it is heavy on thinking and light on exsanguinating! Available on Amazon Prime, HBO MAX, and Apple TV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here is one of the scariest films I ever saw: The Vanishing<\/em> (1988). There are lots of movies with similar titles and a US remake of this one. If you want to be haunted by a truly nightmarish scenario (do you?), see the original Dutch film (Spoorloos<\/em>)(trailer<\/a>), directed by George Sluizer, adapted from the novella The Golden Egg<\/em>. In the U.S., it was judged one of the top foreign films of 1991, when it was released. Says Wikipedia, \u201cStanley Kubrick thought The Vanishing<\/em> was the most terrifying film he had seen.\u201d So it\u2019s not just me. According to Rotten Tomatoes, which gives it a critics\u2019 rating of 98%, it\u2019s available through Prime Video and Apple TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Halloween approaches, memories of the disturbing 2016 horror movie The VVitch recur. Those Puritans! Below is a shortened review of that movie and info on the most horrifying movie I ever saw. Well, it\u2019s a tie with Psycho. In … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Movies that give a Halloween chill. More than just a scare, good filmmaking too.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1160,57,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horror","category-movies","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2CK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10092,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10090\/revisions\/10092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}