From the beginning, the Brahmin tastemakers of the City of Angels have wanted the Brahmin tastemakers of the east to recognize the culture and arts of the west coast.  Southern California has always been culture-rich in the arts, crafts, and architecture of indigenous tribes such as the Tongva, as well as Spanish missionary and Mexican ranchero influences. The eastern and Midwest newcomers to the area, though embracing (even idealizing--think Ramona) local southwest culture, wanted to infuse it with European/Anglo culture, and to demonstrate to the establishment "back home" that Southern California could be as highbrow as, say, Boston, or Manhattan, or northside Chicago.

Southern California's artistic and architectural movements, opera companies, legitimate theatres, and museums have, from an objective perspective, made the point long ago, and continue to do so.  It remains true, however--not a bad thing at all, except perhaps from the Brahmin point of view--that the west coast's popular culture, from the movies to cool jazz to the many rock, rap, Latin, punk, and pop bands spawned in Los Angeles, LA's vivid street murals and even its street foods, have always overshadowed LA's "culture" with a capital "C".

In the autumn of 2015, high art and pop culture combined in a really interesting way when the Broad Museum opened near the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Grand.  A gift to the city and its people from philanthropists and art collectors Eli and Edythe Broad, the striking little music box of a museum welcomes the people of LA for free--yes, for free--to view its frequently updated general collection.  You do have to book your visit as much as a month in advance, or wait in hours-long lines that wrap the structure's sleek, ultra-cool facade and its oculus.  But either option is worth it to view the more than 2,000 pieces of postwar and contemporary art in the main collection.

The Broads know what they like, and have assembled quite the collection of pieces dating from about 1940 onward, by artists from around the world.  Many of the pieces were considered shockingly experimental in their day, but with the passage of time, these establishment-rocking works of art have acquired their own patina of venerable respectability.

I guarantee you won't like everything the Broads like, but it is a broad collection (pardon the pun), and you will like a lot of it.  It is a thrill for anyone with an interest in high art or pop culture to stand two feet from one of Warhol's original Campbell soup endeavors, to almost be able to reach out and touch a Jasper Johns flag (and, of course--please don't touch the art), or to see your own reflection in one of Koons' fanciful statues, which make stainless steel appear as buoyant as any balloon animal (see above)..

Some pieces will leave you in awe, and some pieces will leave you scratching your head, but you will leave the museum enriched in some measure.  There are special installations, like Yayoi Kusama's humbling Infinity Room, which require advanced reservations, and special exhibits that do require a paid ticket.  There is also a museum gift shop with lovely and correspondingly pricey wares that is almost a little gallery unto itself.  Mind that you "exit through the gift shop".

In the last decade, Los Angeles has, more than ever, been recognized for its museums and its multicultural culture, high art and pop art both, and the Broad is a sterling example of this reconciliation.  I don't know if Buff Chandler and her Culture-championing crowd would have cared for danger dogs, or street murals, but they would champion the Broad.  Make the time to visit this new local landmark with an open mind.  When a jewel like this is free, there's simply no excuse not to.  Thank you, Eli and Edythe Broad.

The Broad is located at 221 S. Grand, Los Angeles, CA 90012.  For hours, special event ticket information, collection details, and directions, please visit http://www.thebroad.org/.

[Leslie Le Mon is the author of the Downtown Los Angeles in Photographs series and Highland Park in Photographs.  She has lived in Los Angeles since 1992.] 

#thebroad #broadmuseum #artinlosangeles #dtla

Spring in Highland Park is a hopeful season, and a welcome one after the grey post-holiday months.The other day, in that hopeful spring spirit, I strolled up Mount Angelus. I was so taken with the sunshine and the hedges of flowers that I climbed higher than intended and got lost in the winding lanes. After several blind turns into cul-de-sacs flanked by stone cottages and storybook architecture, it was like being adrift in a fairy-tale labyrinth. A poster for a lost iguana added to the sense of the surreal. I never did encounter the iguana, but I finally found some Mount Angelus residents who pointed me back down the hill. 

Mount Angelus is one of Highland Park's many points-of-interest. Owned in the late 1800's by transplanted Boston socialite Cora Pond Pope, the steep, green acropolis was cut into gracefully meandering lanes and nooks per Pope's wishes. She christened said lanes and nooks after notable persons, including Abolitionists whom she admired.

Cora Pond Pope was a woman of vision, and she intended to crown Mount Angelus with a grand hotel. But the hotel was never built. Pope was a leader in the Women's Movement, and in the end she sold Mount Angelus to raise funds for the cause. It was her opinion that women needed rights more than Highland Park needed a grand hotel. And few would disagree.

The day after getting lost on Mount Angelus, I saw a notice for an open house on N. Avenue 66. The home in question was the Suffragists' House, built in 1887. People interested in LA and Highland Park history, and prospective buyers, were invited to drop in that afternoon for tours of the property. I was intrigued to read that one of the original owners of the house was none other than Cora Pond Pope. 

  

It was yet another fine spring day, perfect for touring a local historic landmark. The mansion--for it's large enough to deserve that title--at 200 N. Avenue 66 is set back from the street and fronted by beds of flowers, perching high above the picturesque Arroyo Seco. Inside, room flows into room, giving the house an airy, spacious feel, but there are also clever nooks for reading or quiet conversation, and spaces where the creatively inclined can write or paint or play musical instruments while contemplating killer views of the arroyo that originally drew fine artists and craftspersons to the Highland Park area.

Tours were self-guided, but there were plenty of pleasant people on hand to answer questions, members of the Highland Park Heritage Trust, and representatives of the realty firm handling the sale of the historic property. These guides were dressed in bygone fashions, bringing to life the old bohemian, arty days--as opposed to the new bohemian, arty days--of Highland Park.

A guide in the attic confirmed that the 1887 house is part of the Highland Park "Historic Preservation Overlay Zone"--or "HPOZ"--which means that the new owners won't be able to make any incredibly radical or damaging alterations to the property. That is certainly welcome news! I wish I had the means to buy the place. I would install myself in the ground floor writer's nook overlooking the arroyo, my niece in the art studio, my mother in a second-floor suite-of-her-own.

The guide in the attic spoke knowledgeably about Pope and the co-owner, Anna Howard Shaw, a tough and brilliant pioneer. Also a strong player in the National Suffragist Movement, Shaw, with Pope and others, was instrumental in organizing women's movement meetings in Highland Park, back when such meetings had to be held secretly. It was a secret society, because--although difficult to imagine it now--it was a dangerous undertaking, a brave endeavor in those days to advocate women's rights.  The clandestine group met often at the 1887 house. If it can be proved that Pope and/or Shaw also used the house as a residence--documented proof of residency is elusive--the house will qualify for additional protections that will safeguard its status as an important local landmark.

Unlike the beautifully, simply furnished rooms of the house (like the writing room above), the attic is ghostly and unfinished, and after a little more conversation with the guide I was ready to return to terra firma. I descended the steep and narrow attic steps, tripping on the lipless step that a second-floor guide had already warned me against. I managed to right myself, and not fall down the stairs in a face-plant. After a final, wistful tour of the ground floor, I went out to the terrace.

The terrace is reached via semi-circular steps of the type used to gradually descend into a swimming pool. I wonder if the terrace area once was a pool. The vista is a knock-out, the arroyo stretching north and south, all smoothed stones and trickling water and new spring greenery. You could look at this view forever while you read, meditated, debated, created.

This view and this house make me hopeful. I hope that an artist or other creative type will buy the property, and invite their friends over, constantly, for music and laughter and artistic or literary collaboration. I hope that, perhaps, a creative family will buy it, and tumble up and down the stairs and in and out of the rooms with the riotous, hopeful, lively spirit of the visionaries and suffragists and bohemian types who preceded them.

And maybe the new occupants will find the proof that has eluded everyone so far, documentation that Pope or Shaw actually resided on the premises. Perhaps a scrap of journal will come to light in a back cupboard, or a scrap of photograph of some gathering with the proof inked across the back in an old-fashioned hand. It may be a long-shot. But this is a season, and a house, for hopefulness.

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Leslie Le Mon is a local author and designer who has lived in Highland Park since 1992. She is the author of "Downtown Los Angeles in Photographs 2014 - Broadway" and "Highland Park in Photographs 2015" as well as a number of other non-fiction and fiction titles. To contact her (especially with interesting historical tidbits about #LosAngeles, #HLP, and Disney) please email Leslie at les.lemon.author@gmail.com and/or follower her on Twitter @leslemonauthor.

Los Angeles is a city still falling in love with its history, still learning to recognize, appreciate, preserve and revitalize its past. Its efforts are, therefore, still hit-or-miss. For every triumph (the resurrection of Clifton's Cafeteria on Broadway, for example--in fact, the whole 'Bringing Back Broadway' initiative), there are losses and missed opportunities. Take the Subway Terminal Building pictured above. It has been beautifully restored for luxe apartment usage. Well done. But the original subway terminal, which routed thousands of rail cars a day during the 1920's - 1950's, remains a ghostly, moldering wreck deep below the luxurious building.

Last year, my sister and research associate began telling me there's an old "Red Car" somewhere on the Subway Terminal Building property, at surface level. She had learned about it via an old PBS program hosted by the one-and-only Huell Howser. "I'm sure there was," I told her, "when Huell filmed the program years ago.  But it wouldn't still be there now." "Why not?" "Well...they wouldn't just leave a historic old Red Car rusting away outside the terminal building."

Except...they did.

In early January of 2016, I finally popped into the enclosed surface car-park area at the southern base of the terminal building. And I found a historic LA rail car protected by bars and barrel-wire, but otherwise, apparently, left to rot. Rail car #1435, as I learned from my research, was not one of the "Red Cars" but one of the earlier "Yellow Cars," part of LA's first extensive intra-urban rail network. Around the turn of the millennium this genuine, vintage Yellow Car was purchased from a collector in Northern California and returned to the terminal building as part of a push to revive LA's downtown trolley and rail system.

A noble gesture, and, given the many ways in which Downtown LA has been revitalized in the past couple of decades, rather visionary too. But despite many advances and revitalizations downtown, we have yet to bring back trolleys. And so car #1435 sits neglected in its little cage, rather splendidly vandalized by talented graffiti artists, an unheralded and in many quarters utterly forgotten gem of Los Angeles history. Rubbish blows about its great metal wheels, and rats scamper about it.

Is this the end of the line...or could Yellow Car #1435 still have a new beginning?

[UPDATE:] 02/16/2016 - According to information released at "Night on Broadway" (01/30/2016) and by the Los Angeles Downtown News (02/15/2016), supporters of reviving a DTLA streetcar line continue to push forward. The LA Streetcar Project as presently designed will include a 3.8 mile route that loops around the downtown district anchored to a "main spine" on Broadway. Projected costs are $281.6M, and projected resources are not sufficient. Ernst & Young has been hired (to the tune of $1.49M per annum) to find resources to make up the $144M funding gap. While it's encouraging that the project hasn't been abandoned, the large financial gap is rather discouraging, and E&Y's option to extend its contract for an additional two years hints this will not be a speedy streetcar revival--but one, no doubt, worth the wait.
 

Even in Southern California, where the weather has been unseasonably warm (thus far) this winter, there is nothing that hits the spot during the holiday season quite the way a cup of coffee does. Be it simple instant coffee or a finely crafted barista concoction, the earthiness of coffee cut with whatever sweet or spicy or creamy ingredients one prefers can banish a chill or a case of the holiday blues immediately--if not for any longer than it takes for the beverage to cool, or disappear. It's an ephemeral joy--but lovely while it lasts.

Helping Angelenos stave off winter colds and boredom and the blahs is a new coffee joint on Figueroa Street in the #HLP. Yes--the question that instantly leaps to mind is: "Does Fig Street actually need yet another handcrafted-coffee joint?" Answer: "When that handcrafted-coffee joint is Civil Coffee, yes--yes it does."

Civil Coffee is the dream of the brothers Morales, who have been popping up at a variety of locations in the area for the past several years, brewing and blending their precise coffee magic here, there, and everywhere. Now you can catch them in a bricks-and-mortar spot, them and their accomplished beverages. You can do as I did: Place your order, savor the atmosphere, and then savor the coffee. Or if you're a member of the coffee cognoscenti, linger to chat with the staff about the finer points and subtleties of coffee-crafting.

It is certainly a comfortable if spare, elegant if utilitarian place to linger. Meet your friends here. Or bring a book. Chill with your mocha or espresso on the red banquette-style sofa. It's all good. The only word to the wise--bring your wallet. The coffee here is delicious, but will run you over $5 for a regular cup--pricey if you're feeding a cup-a-day java habit, but perfectly in line with what most handcrafted joints charge, and well worth it for that occasional indulgence.

Cheers! Y salud!

Civil Coffee is in the 5600 block of Figueroa Street in Highland Park, CA.  @CivilCoffee

Leslie is the author of "Highland Park in Photographs 2015" [Amazon and Barnes & Noble]. The author is not affiliated with this coffee shop in any way, other than being a fan of their concoctions.

“What’s your favorite scary movie?” is the iconic line from Scream (Dimension, 1996), and it’s the question we all should be asking at this time of the year.  Leaves are falling, midterms are looming, and Starbucks is serving toasted-graham lattes.  That means Halloween soon will descend upon us—in the fun, trick-or-treating, All Hallow’s Eve party way, I hasten to add, and not the ravenous, undead, “We need braaaaainsss” way.  Now is the time to prep our Halloween playlists and Netflix queues.

Therefore, I'm resurrecting this Halloween-movie blog post from last year.  Remember:  Whether you’re hosting a Halloween party or spending a quietly terrifying night at home, a program of guaranteed chillers is a must.  The best Halloween lineups include a variety of monsters—vampires and ghosts, werewolves and zombies, witches and serial killers—from a variety of eras.  And there's nothing wrong with adding a scary sci-fi title (or two) to the mix (think Them! (1954); The Thing From Another World (1951); The Thing (1982); or War of the Worlds (whether the campy 1953 movie or the grittier 2005 Spielberg production)).

Just don’t forget the humor.  The best scary movies layer their horrifying thrills with laughter (whether intentional or not!), giving viewers a chance to release that awful, awful tension and catch their breath before the next hair-raising shocker.

Below are capsule reviews of thirteen horror flicks (plus a bonus * sci-fi-horror picture, plus a bonus ** John Carpenter thriller) guaranteed to deliver terror and laughter to you and your guests on All Hallow’s Eve.

And here are three chillers I've seen since last year's post:  As Above So Below (2014), a fast-paced, tightly wound example of found-footage horror in which a cast of mostly unknown actors lose their way (and maybe their souls) in the catacombs of Paris; The Conjuring (2013), a well-crafted haunted house tale in which James Wan gets all the 1970's details right and Lili Taylor steals the show as a mom battling possession; and, finally, the disturbing existential funhouse of The Marked Ones (2014), among the most recent and best offerings in the Paranormal Activity franchise.

There’s also a list of kid-friendly fare at the end of this blog, in case you’re hosting a children’s party where psycho Norman Bates and vamped-out Kiefer Sutherland would be too-too terrifying.

So carve the pumpkin, pop the popcorn, crank up the fog machine, mix the Zombies and Bloody Mary’s, and dig up that Freddy mask you tossed into the closet a few Halloweens back.  Get ready for one hell (or heck) of a Halloween night!  [Major SPOILERS Ahead!]

Thirteen (Plus) Scary Movies

* Alien |Brandywine/20th Century Fox, Rated R, 1979 | In this Ridley Scott nail-biter, the spaceship Nostromo serves as a claustrophobic haunted house.  All exposed pipes, grates, and conduits, the utilitarian interior of the craft looks and feels more like a spooky old haunted factory than a futuristic spaceship.  And that’s perfect, because once a scouting party brings aboard a deadly alien parasite, that’s exactly what this vessel becomes, a floating house of horrors where an extraterrestrial creature slithers in the shadows, pops out of cabinets, and even bursts out of a (very) unlucky character’s abdomen!  The creature can also attach itself to your face like a slime glove (that’s the facehugger, the aliens’ second stage of maturation).  As the crew is picked off one-by-one by the acid-blooded alien, the tension grows, augmented by a moody, spare orchestral score by Jerry Goldsmith.  The story is set in space but its centuries-old conceit is right out of the supernatural playbook:  if you’re too curious an explorer, and too cavalier (or greedy) about what you discover, you’re going to stumble onto something deadly which will destroy not only you but anything with which it comes in contact.  Cursed diamonds or cursed mummy scrolls or exotic ETs—once you’ve touched them, your doom is inevitable, and your demise will be gory.  H.R. Giger’s sleekly chilling alien designs won him an Oscar, but Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ripley owns this film.  She’s not the über-ripped matriarchal superhero she becomes in the sequel Aliens, but she’s the smartest person on the ship with the keenest sense of self-preservation.  As bodies drop fast around her, she’s the main one putting together the puzzle pieces and crafting a viable escape strategy.  But this is sci-fi-horror.  And true horror forbids happy endings.  So although Ripley escapes, her escape carries a sting in the tail, and her trauma will haunt her through multiple sequels.  As in any good horror film, Ripley has been cursed.  Alien is an excellent movie to screen on Halloween night, whether you get sucked completely into it, or your party guests merely enjoy its iconic images in fragments between drinks and conversations.

An American Werewolf in London | PolyGram/Guber-Peters/Universal, Rated R, 1981 | One of the fun things about 1980’s horror was that it often revived classic monster genres, breathing new life into them, jolting them with electricity.  Tales that had become creaky clichés were reborn as modern, irreverently witty, yet thoroughly chilling films.  What The Lost Boys would do for the vampire genre (see below), An American Werewolf in London did even better for the werewolf genre.  The story begins simply enough:  Two young American men, best friends, one rather brash, one sweetly innocent, backpack through the UK countryside and end up on the wrong Yorkshire moor at the wrong time.  When the pub you stop at is called The Slaughtered Lamb and filled with silent, glaring locals, you know you’ve taken a wrong turn.  Even worse, the boys don’t heed the warning to keep on the path.  The next thing you know one boy (the brash one) has had his throat torn out, and the other (David, the sweet one) has been savagely bitten by … something.  He blacks out, then wakes in a hospital.  Nightmares ensue for the survivor, as well as waking nightmares that are grotesquely comic, dipped in the darkest gallows humor.  Shacked up with pretty London nurse Alex Price (a fresh-faced Jenny Agutter, now nun Sister Julienne on Call the Midwife) while he recovers, David continues to be tormented by vivid bad dreams, even as London is terrorized by some vicious fiend, an eviscerating savage.  Perfectly nice, inoffensive Londoners are being torn to pieces in parks and in the tube.  It simply won’t do—and David’s brash best friend, back from the dead and looking none too well (like a loaf of sandwich meat gone bad) explains in a waking dream that David, bitten by a werewolf, is now a werewolf himself; it’s David who’s terrorizing London!  Naturally David doesn’t want to believe this, nor does Alex when he confides in her.  But as more and more pieces fall undeniably into place, David’s dead best friends and deceased victims urge him to end his life before he kills again.  David must choose between self-sacrifice and life as a werewolf—a choice Alex helps him make in an emotional finale that might leave you reaching for a handkerchief (and earned Agutter a Saturn Award “Best Actress” nomination).  Hilariously and darkly funny in a way that only the Brits can be hilariously darkly funny (it’s a joint US-UK production), with lots of colorful footage of early 80’s London, attractive stars, and a werewolf transformation scene that was revolutionary at the time and still packs punch today, An American Werewolf in London , if you screen it, will have your guests howling your praises!  (Don’t worry; the movie’s a lot funnier than that joke!)

Burnt Offerings | UA/MGM, Rated PG (should be PG-13 or R), 1976 | “Bette Davis, we love you!”  One of America’s all-time great movie actresses was known for standing up to mogul Louis B. Mayer back in Hollywood’s golden age, demanding high-quality scripts.  But in her later years Miss Davis blithely kicked up her heels and seemed to find the fun in any role that came her way, cashing the paycheck and tearing into each part with her signature gusto.  (Miss Davis always seemed to deliver her lines as if she was biting into a crisp apple, and found that it tasted very good.)  In Davis’ sunset years, no film or TV role was too loony.  This explains why we find an actress of her caliber portraying a beloved (if somewhat annoying) elderly aunt in Burnt Offerings, one of the best bad horror films ever made.  Supernatural shockers (often adapted from novels) were popular in the late 1960’s through the 70’s (think The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976—see below), Rosemary’s Baby (1968—see below), and The Shining (1980—see below)), but for every supernatural cinematic masterpiece there was at least one zany, low-budget good time like Burnt Offerings.  The plot is classically simple.  A husband, wife, son, and the aforementioned old aunt vacation at a once lovely, now ramshackle mansion.  The elderly woman who owns the mansion—so they are told—lives in seclusion on the top floor.  Except for bringing her meals on trays, the family is to leave her the old recluse alone.  The property is beautiful, though run-down, and at first it seems the family might be happy there.  But their fondness for the house is short-lived.  Increasingly bizarre and disturbing accidents occur, and the family soon notices that the house seems to be repairing and rejuvenating itself.  And it is repairing itself, using the energy generated by their fear!  (Or their life force, or something like that.  Close enough.)  Old Aunt Elizabeth, no fool, is the first to realize something evil is afoot, but because she’s elderly no one pays attention to her concerns—even after her sudden demise.  Son David senses and sees things, too—but, after all, he’s just a kid.  Plus, dad Ben (Oliver Reed) is too preoccupied by visions of an evil, grinning chauffeur whose eyes are hidden behind dark sunglasses (an image that, once glimpsed, will never leave you; I promise!) to pay attention to his son’s fears, and as for mom Marian (the wonderful Karen Black), she’s too busy cleaning the house, dressing like a Victorian matron, and spending an awful lot of time in the attic.  (Hmmmmm.  Should the family be worried?)  Burnt Offerings is a bit of a misnomer.  Nothing is burnt in this movie (except 116 minutes of your life that you’ll never get back).  But figuratively speaking, the family is a sacrifice (an offering) that fuels the house’s regeneration.  Just when you think Ben, Marian, and David have achieved escape velocity, and will break free of the mansion’s supernatural claws, Marian dashes back into the house to say goodbye to that nice old lady in the attic.  (Horror Movie Rule 10e:  Never dash back inside a haunted house to say goodbye to anybody.  Also known as the “Get while the gettin’ is good” principle.)  When Marian doesn’t return, Ben ascends to the attic, where he discovers the old woman is actually his wife!  Yes.  It’s true.  Marian has been possessed (by the former owner, or the house, or something), resulting in a hot mess of an old-timey hairdo and sinister wrinkle makeup!  Ben goes flying out a window, crash-landing in a gruesome bloody mess on the family car; a traumatized David is then mashed by a toppling chimney.  The father and son’s horrific deaths return the house to its original glory, over which the possessed Marian will preside.  Not the feel-good family film of the year, this (often unintentionally) funny and truly chilling scare-fest is a fun, over-the-top choice for a Halloween screening.  (Burnt Offerings Drinking Game:  Take a drink every time someone watching the film correctly predicts what’s going to happen next.)

The Changeling | Associated Film, Rated R, 1980 | No, not the gripping historic thriller starring Angelina Jolie (2008), but a gripping 1980 haunted house tale starring the one-and-only George C. Scott and his gravelly voice.  In this movie, the erstwhile General Patton plays a composer who loses both his wife and daughter in a tragic accident.  Deep in mourning, he moves into a gorgeous old mansion which he soon learns contains paranormal activity.  The best ghost stories begin rather slowly and rise, steadily, inevitably, to a horrifying crescendo—and The Changeling doesn’t disappoint.  Subtle hints that the house might be haunted become clear signs, and then terrifying disturbances, prompting Scott and love interest Trish Van Devere to investigate the history of the house and its former inhabitants.  Perhaps because of their palpable chemistry (Scott and Van Devere were real-life spouses), they work well together, and they eventually uncover the house’s morbid and murderous secret.  Can they use this knowledge to prevent another dramatic tragedy?  (Um … no.  Remember:  A happy ending is against the rules in true horror films.  But points to Scott and Van Devere for trying!)  Lavish yet somber settings, a story that moves along at a good clip, Scott’s dry wit, séances, exhumations, poltergeist activity, and a vengeful ghost—what doesn’t this finely crafted film have?  A winner whether you watch it with your full attention or screen it for intermittently attentive party guests, The Changeling should be near the top of your Halloween lineup.

** The Fog | AVCO Embassy, Rated R, 1980 | There’s something disturbing in the fog—and it’s not (just) the lovely Adrienne Barbeau’s weirdly creepy rasp as she portrays a DJ trapped in a lighthouse during a supernatural attack on coastal California.  John Carpenter’s follow-up to the far superior Halloween (see below) has a thousand-and-one problems, but the hilariously terrifying whole rises well above its problematic parts.  The fog, eerily lit, is genuinely creepy, and the Carpenter-composed soundtrack masterfully gooses the audience, keeping us on the edge of our seats.  Carpenter exercises laudable restraint, hiding the monsters/ghosts/whatev in the swirling fog for most of the movie; it might have been a costume/effects-budget issue, but shrouding the monsters in the fog delivers maximum suspense.  The plot is “ghost story traditional” on the one hand, the casting and execution fabulously wonky on the other.  There’s the requisite drunken and disillusioned priest; John Houseman as the worst babysitter ever (who is letting him tell ghost stories to their kids on a lonely beach?); a charmingly miscast Jamie Lee Curtis, who isn’t believable for a second as a hitchhiking runaway, but you don’t care; a wry Nancy Kyes (aka Nancy Loomis) stealing scenes left and right; and Janet Lee (Jamie’s mother, best known for her shocking end-of-Act-I demise in Psycho (1960)) stealing the scenes back again.  The small coastal town of Antonio Bay is all geared up to celebrate its centennial, but alas--all is not well.  A cursed gold coin transmogrifies into a cursed piece of driftwood that bleeds seawater; the glowy fog rolls in; pirate hooks and knives slash indiscriminately, seeming to slay the innocent as well as the guilty; decapitated head and body parts roll; and, finally, the town’s greedy secret is revealed.  Oh—since all that isn’t enough (!) there’s an earthquake, too!  Word to the wise:  If someone knocks on your door while you and your friends are watching The Fog--don’t answer!  Because, as the disembodied voices warn in the film, “Six must die.”  If you haven’t seen this movie yet, you’ll thank me after you do.  Very few bad movies are this good.

Halloween | Falcon Intl/Compass Intl/Warner Bros., Rated R, 1978 | John Carpenter directed and co-wrote and scored this indie film; he probably served the coffee and snacks too!  This low-budget movie (made for less than half-a-million dollars!) benefits from being the work of one main auteur, a single captain of the ship; Carpenter was able to shape it exactly as he wished without being buried under a blizzard of “notes” and “suggestions” from some remote producer.  (Cowriter Debra Hill, with whom he presumably saw eye-to-eye, was the main producer.)  The resulting film is a minimalist work of art, and was a game-changer for the horror genre.  Halloween’s plot is skeletally simple and unencumbered, a small-town tale of innocence lost and the ties that bind.  Wholesome and brainy Haddonfield high school student Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, in a career-launching role) babysits two children on Halloween night; she prefers to babysit rather than to join her friends in their late-1970’s hedonistic pursuits.  Unfortunately for everybody, this is the night that notorious local murderer Michael Myers escapes from his psychiatric hospital, steals a series of vehicles, and heads home to Haddonfield.  The doctor who knows just how blankly, pitilessly evil Myers is tries to locate the disturbed young man before he can kill again.  But the doctor (all of the authority figures in the film) is clueless when it comes to running Myers to ground.  Myers, the infamous local “boogeyman,” stalks Laurie, kills her friends, and then tries to kill her and her young charges.  While Laurie’s bravery and motherly instincts save her and the two children, she is deeply traumatized.  What happens to Michael Myers?  He survives multiple stabbings and a two-story fall, vanishing into the darkness from which he came.  Halloween clearly had no effects budget to speak of, but it’s a movie of iconic images and powerful, ever-increasing dread, achieved solely through the camera-work, the tense score, and the actors’ deft performances.  Carpenter and Hill nail the small-town details (the sweet but slightly bratty Tommy; the bullies; the genially inept sheriff; the broad expanses of lawn and shrouding hedges that alienate middle-class houses from each other) and lace the script with plenty of humor, relief valves for an audience being drawn ever-closer to the characters’ grisly dooms.  The tremendous success of this one small film spawned a mega-franchise of Halloween sequels and merchandise that propelled Myers to an almost comical supervillainy.  Halloween is how it all began.  If you watch one movie on Halloween night, or screen one movie for your guests, you’re well-advised to make it Carpenter’s original Halloween.

The Lost Boys | Warner Bros., Rated R, 1987 | Equal parts comedy and horror, The Lost Boys is a vampire flick worth watching for the mid-80’s hair alone.  Jason Patrick’s heroically moussed locks, Kieffer Sutherland’s bleached Billy Idol spikes, and the massive curly mane sported by hippie-ish vamp Jami Gertz threaten, at times, to take over the film.  The actors’ hairdos are ably supported by heavy makeup (including eyeliner for the vamp dudes) and incredibly cool mid-80’s fashions.  Guests watching this movie at your Halloween party with the sound turned down and no subtitles might assume this is a really long, really stylish video about an 80’s glam rock band with musicians that turn into (sometimes violent) vampires.  And, well, it kind of is.  But if you activate the subtitles, or turn up the sound, your guests will catch the sweet side of this movie; it’s not just a glam-vamp tale of temptation, it’s also a family story.  Put simply, a divorced mom drags her two sons to a new town and a new life living with her dad.  Dianne Wiest portrays the mother—and who plays endearingly inept-but-well-intentioned moms better than Dianne Wiest?  In this seaside town where the big attraction is the amusement park, the brothers have to adjust to life with no father, no money, no friends, and a weird grandfather.  The older boy (Jason Patrick) falls in with the vampire crowd, while his younger brother befriends the goofy local vamp hunters.  When Patrick decides the reckless and cruel vamp life isn’t for him, the vampire gang and their mysterious leader mark Patrick (and anyone who helps him) for extinction.  For the 80’s “latchkey” generation left so often to their own devices, with parents who worked multiple jobs, this is a tale of lost children and how they find (or further lose) themselves.  In The Lost Boys, brotherly love and family solidarity prove to be the key to fighting off bad influences.  That sounds preachy … But the film doesn’t feel preachy.  The funny moments are well-orchestrated, falling right on beat, breaking the tension generated by the film’s more horrifying moments.  Sutherland brings true menace to his role as the Lost Boys’ lieutenant.  He is a bitter blond Peter Pan with a cut-glass, ice-cold sparkle in his eyes that viewers won’t see again for decades, not until Sutherland becomes icy patriot Jack Bauer.  The Lost Boys twists and turns and surprises us as it unspools, and it even presents a satisfying conclusion.  A scary movie; a funny movie; and everybody just looks so great through the whole thing in that slickly perfect 80’s way.  So fire up The Lost Boys, a vamp pic your guests can really (wait for it … wait for it …) sink their teeth into.  (Ouch!)

Night of the Living Dead | Image Ten/Laurel Group/Market Square/The Walter Reade Organization, Unrated (but consider it R), 1968 | “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”  So begins one of the scariest movies ever made.  Barbara’s brother Johnny is clowning around in the graveyard; guess no one told him that horror movie jokesters with no respect for the dead—or undead—are often among the first to go when the claws and incisors start to fly!  George Romero’s classic zombie film has inspired legions of undead sequels, parodies, and reimaginings (some by Romero himself), but this is the source, the original.  Starkly shot in black-and-white for what appears to be the price of a cup of coffee, the film has no heroes, no villains, just a handful of ordinary people trapped in a claustrophobic farmhouse while flesh-chomping undead try to break inside.  The lights and shadows and lurching zombies make this an outstanding video backdrop for your Halloween party.  For those who get sucked into it, well, they can view the film as a fable of mindless 1960’s materialism, or the spread of communism, or conformity, or a prescient dark fairy tale about coping with mass disease and/or bioterrorism.  Or they can just enjoy it as a white-knuckle horror film.  What no one can do is escape.  Because “Johnny’s got the keys.”  And Johnny isn’t himself any more.  You don’t watch Night of the Living Dead so much as you survive it.

A Nightmare on Elm Street | New Line, Rated R, 1984 | Before he was Captain Jack Sparrow or John Dillinger or even Edward Scissorhands, superstar Johnny Depp was part of the ensemble cast in a sweet little film called A Nightmare on Elm Street.  OK.  It’s not a sweet little film.  It’s another 1980’s “latchkey kid” fairy tale, this one pitch-dark, about what happens to kids when their navel-gazing, neglectful parents aren’t paying attention.  In this case, the children of Elm Street are taken by demented custodian Freddy Krueger to his infernal boiler-room lair.  Once the parents (finally) catch on that Krueger is a predator, they solve the problem by torching him in his boiler room, burning him alive.  Years later, when the children of Elm Street become teenagers, Krueger begins to invade their dreams.  He is horribly burnt and maimed.  He sports a striped red sweater, a fedora, and gloves with razor-sharp knives affixed to the fingers—these are his signature accessories.  Teens comparing nightmares soon realize that they are all dreaming about the same monster, and they investigate the mystery of who Krueger is, and why he torments their sleep.  Eaten with guilt about burning Krueger alive, the parents are close-mouthed and obstructive.  As the movie unfolds the persistent teens learn who Krueger is—was—and why he’s targeting them, but not until most of the teens have been slain (often in comically grotesque ways), one-by-one, while they’re asleep and dreaming.  Clearly the only thing worse than parents neglecting their children (thereby giving nuts like Krueger a chance to hurt them) is parents trying to protect their children, which results in charbroiled custodians who exact vicious revenge from beyond the grave.  As is usual in these “latchkey” fables, adults are the cause of the problem and/or are somehow complicit in it—yet they refuse to believe that anything supernatural is happening.  Adults are evil or clueless and controlling (just like in real life, kids!) … so if anything is going to be set to rights, the latchkey teens are on their own.  Another trend that emerged in the 80’s was that heroines (rather than heroes) began to save the day.  In A Nightmare on Elm Street we not only see Depp’s character Glen devoured by a mattress and churned into a bloody milkshake, we see an almost equally shocking thing:  a young woman, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), emerging as the heroine of the story.  It felt startlingly fresh to those of us who watched Nightmare in theaters in 1984; woman-as-hero is old-hat now, but this is one of the films that opened that door.  As with Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street was a watershed movie in other ways, birthing multiple sequels, crossover movies, and a merchandising empire.  A certain little nursery rhyme from the film entered the culture; just try not to chant it after you see this film.  (It starts “One, two, Freddy’s comin’ for you,” and ends “Nine, ten, never sleep again”.)  If you haven’t seen Nightmare in years, now’s the time to see it again and share it with your party guests.  “What the hell are dreams, anyway?” asks the heroine’s drunken mother.  Who knows!  But “Whatever you do, don’t … fall … asleep”!

The Omen | 20th Century Fox, Rated R, 1976 | Gregory Peck will forever be Atticus Finch in the brilliant film adaption of To Kill a Mockingbird—one of the greatest cinematic performances.  Ever.  But for horror fans, he will also forever be the horrified and disillusioned foster father of the antichrist.  I refer, of course, to (fictional) American diplomat Robert Thorn in The Omen.  When Thorn (Peck) is told that high-strung wife Katherine (Lee Remick) has miscarried at a Rome hospital, Thorn is only too happy to accept an orphan from a Catholic priest and pass it off as his and Katherine’s own infant.  Katherine doesn’t know that little Damien isn’t her natural-born child—but she senses it.  Something’s not … right.  Thorn receives an appointment as ambassador to the UK.  He and his family settle in a manor house that appears to be larger than Buckingham Palace, where life should be a dream.  But Katherine still can’t bond with the boy (now five years old), or get past his oddities.  Zoo animals go bughouse-crazy when Damien’s around, and the wee tot freaks out (to put it mildly) when brought into a church.  And then Damien’s nanny hangs herself at his lavish birthday party.  This sets in motion a parade of carnage, a nightmare centering, somehow, around Damien.  His new nanny, Mrs. Baylock, and her Rottweiler, are fanatically protective of the boy but cold toward Katherine.  A series of people—a priest, a photographer—try to convince Ambassador Thorn that there is something wrong with his boy.  As the supporting-character death toll mounts, Damien injures Katherine by ramming his tricycle into the stepladder she’s standing on, pitching her over the rail (!)  Thorn finally wakes up and smells the unholy cappuccino, embarking on a quest to discover Damien’s true parentage.  What he learns is so distressing that he attempts to vanquish the child with sacred daggers on a church altar—but Mrs. Baylock and the Rottweiler and Damien’s fanatical followers and the local police are having none of that, and Thorn is killed before he can harm a hair of Damien’s unholy head.  The Omen is among the best of what can be classified as tales of “unholy children”.  During the 1950’s, 60’s and ‘70’s a bizarre “fear of offspring” seemed to invade the zeitgeist.  Frequently repeated themes included children that were tainted or evil and/or children that were not the parents’ true child.  This intergenerational unease was expressed in pictures like The Bad Seed (1956) (the child is psychologically/emotionally disturbed), Village of the Damned (1960) (the children are coolly evil alien spawn), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) (the child is the antichrist).  These films can be seen as modern variations on traditional changeling myths, driven by deep-seated fears of modern science in general and modern medicine in particular.  In the case of The Omen, adorable little Damien survives to wreak more havoc in two sequels.  With its stylish European and UK locales, Peck and Remick’s fine performances, and dramatic, Goldbergian death scenes every ten minutes or so, The Omen is a perfect horror flick for any grown-up Halloween fête.

Paranormal Activity IV | Paramount, Rated R, 2012 | Yes, the original Paranormal Activity (2007) is leaner, meaner, and more riveting if you’re watching by yourself or with a small group, eyes glued to the screen to catch every nuance and subtly ratcheted notch of terror.  But if you’re screening films at a party, the much more colorful, action-packed, and visually interesting Paranormal Activity IV is the way to go.  The editing is faster-paced, the Kinect infrared scenes are just plain cool, and the visual effects come at you fast and furious, so even someone half-watching while gabbing with other guests will find the flick entertaining.  Those who do play close attention will learn more about the franchise’s mythology, the demon at the heart of it, and the worshippers who will stop at absolutely nothing to serve their evil master.  Though you’d expect it to be getting stale at this point in the series, the “found footage” conceit is handled creatively.  And the conclusion, as is usual with Paranormal Activity movies, is jaw-dropping.  You’ll sleep with the lights on!  (The next sequel hits theaters in 2015.)

Psycho II | Universal, Rated R, 1983 | The same disclaimer as above:  Yes, the original Psycho, released in 1960 (one of Alfred Hitchcock’s leanest, meanest, black-and-white triumphs), is the one to watch if you’ll be paying close attention.  Its slow-blossoming flow, which gathers momentum with the inevitability of a nightmare, rewards attentive viewers, as does the Bernard Herrmann score.  By turns soporifically mesmerizing and viciously alarming, Herrmann’s soundtrack, like the film, both tranquilizes and assaults us.  When the violins screech at key moments we feel the knife plunging into our own bodies.  Psycho II is not such a masterpieces, but it is in its own right a horrifying little gem.  Long wished for (at the time) by Psycho fans, the sequel Psycho II picks up immediately after Norman Bates is discharged from the asylum where he was confined for the murders he committed in the original film.  During the time that this film was released, many psychiatric hospitals in the U.S. were being closed and patients were being sent back into the general population en masse.  Psycho II seems to vibrate with the pervading public anxiety of the times; were the patients being released actually cured?  Were they safe?  In Act I, Norman certainly seems to be rehabilitated—but it’s a horror movie, so what fun would that be?  Bodies begin to drop like flies as Norman labors to reopen the Bates Motel, and the viewer is left to wonder whether Norman is “up to his old tricks again” or whether he’s being framed or whether the ghost of “Mother” is protecting her boy.  As the horror unspools, questions about Norman’s past that weren’t addressed in the first movie are resolved here; there are a few surprisingly tender moments; and the tables are turned as the villain becomes the victim (and vice-versa).  Psycho II, filmed in vivid color with dramatic camera angles and swoops of the lens—not to mention an affecting score by Jerry Goldsmith—is  the film in the Psycho canon to play at your Halloween party to provide a visually interesting and entertaining horror backdrop.  (Look for a pre-NYPD Blue Dennis Franz as a seedy motel manager, and watch for Vera Miles, who had a key role in the original Psycho.)

Rosemary’s Baby | Paramount, Rated R, 1968 | Another “unholy child” movie (see The Omen above), Rosemary’s Baby centers on the banality of evil as expressed through a (mostly) elderly coven of New York witches.  They convene at an apartment in the Bramford, a once-grand, now-decaying NYC building where two of the coven leaders live.  (In this movie, the fabulous old Dakota serves as the fictional Bramford).  During most of the picture the audience isn’t sure whether young Rosemary (the mother-to-be) is imagining or truly experiencing the witchcraft and devil worship that she suspects is happening all around her at the Bramford.  Rosemary is an exemplar of the “noble mother”.  As the movie progresses and she becomes more-and-more convinced that she is surrounded by evil, she will go to any lengths to protect her unborn baby.  Of course, as is always the case in the true horror film, no matter what the heroine does or how noble she is, there’s no winning.  Rosemary’s neighbors, her doctors, and even her husband are revealed to be participants in witchcraft and dark masses.  The ordinariness of these people stands in stark (at times even comic) contrast to their powers.  You understand why they have turned to the dark side:  Their ambition vastly exceeds their reach; without occult assistance, they are merely banal men and women, including a flute-playing dentist.  Ruth Gordon steals all of her scenes as the tacky neighbor who married up and then climbed even higher through devilish means.  Young Rosemary, not a native New Yorker, has no fancy ambitions.  She wants to be a good mother—which turns out to be the noblest and most dangerous thing anyone can try to be at the accursed Bramford!  As the curtain falls on this dark fairy tale, we sense that Rosemary will be a good mother to her unholy child—at any cost, a grace note to the movie’s horrifying conclusion.  This film will look grand on your big screen, a visual feast for party guests.  The Dakota, with its dark, decaying beauty, has never looked better than in this film, and every frame sports a “Mad Men”-like late 60’s sheen, from the clean lines of Mia Farrow’s ensembles to her sleek Vidal Sassoon haircut.  This is a movie that shows old New York transitioning into modern New York.  Stylishly shot, witty, and nightmare-scary.

The Shining | Warner Brothers, Rated R, 1980 | Inspired by his 1970’s stay at the luxurious (and apparently very, very haunted) Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, Stephen King penned one of his most widely read and widely praised novels ever:  The Shining (1977).  The wildly successful book spawned a wildly successful movie—but genius director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining strayed far afield from King’s source material.  King didn’t like Kubrick’s movie—apparently still doesn’t like it.  Years after Kubrick’s version hit theaters, King had a new version of The Shining filmed, a mini-series that hewed closely to his book.  It was a very good mini-series, and, yes, it stayed true to the novel—but Kubrick’s Shining is still the superior cinematic work.  Haunted hotels are haunted houses on heavy vitamins—more angst, more trauma, more stairs to trip you up and more rooms in which to trap and torment you.  Kubrick’s Shining is a hallucinogenic funhouse filled with agoraphobia-inducing expanses, western and Native American artwork, the color red—and ghosts.  Lots and lots of ghosts.  Ghosts that shapeshift.  Ghosts that touch you, and physically hurt you.  Ghosts that mix you a tasty cocktail while convincing you to axe your entire family.  This is not a nice place.  Like a mystical battery, the Overlook Hotel has recorded a century of negative energies charged by scandalous revelries and gruesome murders.  The hotel plays this energy back for special guests like winter caretaker Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic (played by Jack Nicholson with alternating fits of lunatic gusto and catatonia) and his psychic son Danny.  From spectral twins with creepy Village of the Damned British accents to elevators vomiting gallons of blood in dreamlike slo-mo, the hotel in Kubrick’s Shining is a wall-to-wall carnival of searing images that will haunt you long after the closing credits.  And how about that Room 237?  Sheer lunacy.  (Room 237 is even the title of a fascinating exploration of Shining conspiracy theories.)  Jack’s wife Wendy is mind-blind to the hotel’s ghoulish goings-ons.  She helplessly watches her husband and son unravel before her eyes, her psychic son sinking into trances (it might be that lush and menacing synth score!) while her husband becomes a cold-hearted, murderous caricature of his worst self.  The hotel wants Danny’s psychic energy, you see (his “shine”), and it wants Jack Torrance to deliver that energy via a spot of familial axe murder (hapless Wendy will just be collateral damage).  As the cold Colorado snows encroach on the grand hotel, cutting it off from the outside world, Jack lifts an axe and stalks his loved ones in the haunted red halls.  The chilling (literally) conclusion is a victory for another “noble mother” character, but even those who escape have clearly been scarred for life.  If you screen The Shining at your Halloween party, be prepared for the nightmare visuals and entrancing score to traumatize your guests, too—but, you know, in a good Halloween kind of way!

The Uninvited | Paramount, Unrated, 1944 | One of the first movies to present spirit hauntings as a (mostly) serious subject, The Uninvited is one of the best early ghost films.  Like many pictures made under the old studio systems, it offers a bit of everything for everyone.  Costumes by Edith Head.  Oscar-nominated black-and-white cinematography.  A score by Victor Young (including the deathless classic “Stella by Starlight”).  An adorable little dog that often seems smarter than the human characters.  All that, plus Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey in top form, and a half-creepy, half-loopy ghost story on the oh-so-veddy-English coast.  The film is moody, atmospheric, and sometimes downright silly—witness Milland’s character reeling queasily from seasickness when he goes sailing with his (much-too-young) love interest.  But as the picture unwinds the menace becomes more and more real, and the disturbing origin of the haunting slowly comes into focus.  Séances, seemingly vengeful ghosts, possession, phantom scents, and liberal little dashes of humor--The Uninvited serves it all up like a savory stew on a cold English night.  Whether you’re riveted to the screen, or only dimly aware of it playing in the background, what you catch of The Uninvited will make you laugh and shiver while the Halloween good times roll.

Other Titles:  Consider chillers like The Blair Witch Project (Artisan, Rated R, 1999) which put “found footage” horror flicks on the map; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Decla-Bioscop/Goldwyn, Unrated, 1920) a brilliantly demented German Expressionist film; Damien:  Omen II (20th Century Fox, Rated R, 1978) Three words:  “Say it, Mark.”; Bela Lugosi defining the vampire count in Dracula (Universal, Unrated, 1931); Gary Oldman updating the count in the sumptuous and dark Victorian-era reboot [Bram Stoker’s] Dracula (American Zoetrope/Osiris/Columbia, Rated R, 1992); the pea soup-spewing, neck-revolving The Exorcist (Warner Bros., Rated R, 1973), a finely crafted tale of possession in spite of the over-the-top language and fluids; Boris Karloff defining the man-made monster for all time in Frankenstein (Universal, Unrated, 1931); the laugh-and-scream fest Gremlins (Warner Bros., Rated PG, 1984); The Haunting (either version, 1963 (Warner Bros., Unrated) or 1999 (DreamWorks, Rated PG-13)); the ethereally beautiful Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the lavish New Orleans-based period piece Interview with the Vampire (Geffen/Warner Bros., Rated R, 1994); Lady in White (New Century Vista, Rated PG-13, 1988), charmingly nostalgic as well as deeply disturbing; Nosferatu (Film Arts Guild, Unrated, 1922) a rogue re-telling of Stoker’s novel Dracula; Lon Chaney, Sr. revealing a face that still terrifies in The Phantom of the Opera (Universal, Unrated, 1925);Spielberg’s smash-hit Poltergeist (MGM, Rated PG (now it would be PG-13), 1982); the inimitable Vincent Price discovering a spine-tingling parasite in The Tingler (Columbia, Unrated, 1959), the Castle classic which zapped movie-goers with buzzers under their seats; and Lon Chaney, Jr., the one-and-only true The Wolf Man (Universal, Unrated, 1941).

Tasteful Host Tip:  Avoid screening super-gory-and-dark slasher films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and early Wes Craven efforts; they might be too gruesome for your guests.

Themed Suggestions:  If you and your guests are the laugh-a-minute type, make it a supernatural parody night, with movies from the R-rated Scream (Dimension, 1996 – 2011) and/or Scary Movie (Dimension/Weinstein, 2000 – 2013) oeuvre and camp classics like Love at First Bite (American International, Rated PG (it would be PG-13 now), 1979), or the G-rated comedy of the Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (and The Invisible Man, and the Mummy, etc) series (Universal, 1948 – 1955).  Or if you’re hosting a party for your teens and their friends, load up on teen-focused supernatural flicks like Blood and Chocolate (MGM, Rated PG-13, 2007), The Craft (Columbia, Rated R, 1996), and the Twilight Saga (Summit, Rated PG-13, 2008 – 2012), as well as screening TV eps of Angel (The WB, 1999 – 2004), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB/UPN, 1997 – 2003), Grimm (NBC/Universal, 2011 – Present), Supernatural (The WB/The CW, 2005 – Present), and The Vampire Diaries (The CW, 2009 – Present).  (A few episodes of paradocs Ghost Adventures (Travel Channel, 2008 – Present) and Ghost Hunters (SyFy, 2004 – Present) wouldn’t go amiss, either.)

Kid-Friendly Frights:  Younger children should be safe with the mildly spooky scares and quality family fare of:  Coraline (Focus, Rated PG, 2009) | Hocus Pocus (Walt Disney, Rated PG, 1993) | Hotel Transylvania (Sony/Columbia, Rated PG, 2012) | It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Warner Bros./CBS, Unrated, 1966) | The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (Walt Disney, Rated G, 1949) | Monster House (Relativity/ImageMovers/Amblin/Columbia, Rated PG, 2006) | ParaNorman (Laika/Focus, Rated PG, 2012) | Sesame Street:  A Magical Halloween Adventure (Sesame Street, Unrated, 2004)

Bottom line:  There are so many fantastic (and fantastically awful) horror movies out there that as long as you include some humor and a variety of monsters and eras on your playlist, and tailor it to your guest list, you can’t go wrong.

Happy Halloween!

[Leslie Le Mon is the author of the delightfully disturbing Cold Dark Harbor Redux:  And Other Tales of Ghosts and Monsters, available at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com.  She lives in Los Angeles, two blocks from the haunted mansion in Insidious:  Chapter 2 (PG-13, 2013).]

#halloweenmovies #scarymovies #happyhalloween

Across the country, fans rejoice at the opening of the baseball season.  Season tickets are carefully tucked into wallets and behind car sun visors.  Season schedules are pored over until they become creased and crumpled.  Fans' team caps and T-shirts are laundered—perhaps for the first and last time of the season, depending on their superstitions.  Lucky talismans—lucky socks, lucky rabbits’ feet, lucky antenna balls, lucky coins—are donned or pocketed or suspended from rear-view mirrors.

In the United States the love of baseball is reverential, a nearly religious sentiment.  Modern baseball is one of those uniquely American inventions that—unlike movies, or blue jeans, or jazz, or rock ‘n’ roll—has never quite translated to the rest of the world.  There are strong pockets of enthusiasm in Canada, South America, and East Asia, but baseball has never caught fire on a global scale to the degree that other sports have.  

America’s pastime has its roots in English games of the early-and-mid 1800’s.  Immigrants brought this proto-baseball to the North American continent, where it was quickly adopted and shaped and codified.  By the end of the 1800’s, baseball had established itself as a fully, traditionally, wholeheartedly American sport.  

Baseball has always been a beautifully scalable endeavor.  Kids play it in empty lots and fallow farm fields, just for the immense fun and glory of it.  The better athletes go on to play baseball in high school, then college, then for farm teams and the minor leagues.  The best-of-the-best may be invited to the pros.  This trajectory accounts for the immense local and national fervor that baseball fuels.  

Nine players, nine innings, a bat, a ball, a glove.  A simple game that any kid can pick up, yet woven with nuanced complexities.  Baseball is a game of both muscle and strategy, both patience and lightning reflexes.  Like music, baseball is often played during its intervals.  Pitchers and catchers communicate via a secret, silent language.  Basemen and base runners glare each other down like duelists, like gunslingers, of a bygone age.  Games are often defined by the rhythms of those intensely quiet moments when nothing much seems—but only seems—to be happening.  

The magnificent hushes of each game are punctuated by explosive cracks of the bat, by leathery clonks of a ball hitting a glove’s sweet spot, by the crunch of earth under a runner’s feet as he tries to steal home.  Fans cheer or groan as the fortunes of their teams rise and fall.  These sounds are the notes of baseball, the harmonies and melodies that demarcate the intervals.  They are sometimes anticipated but often unexpected.  Baseball is a form not of classical music, but of jazz.  

I am not an expert in baseball other than as all Americans are experts in baseball:  I love the game, and I played it around the neighborhood when I was a kid.  Every year, my brother and pulled our gloves out of the garage attic as soon as the snow melted and we could see the grass.  With our friends—our little sister often tagging along—we played catch in back yards, front yards, and on quiet streets where cars only passed every ten minutes or so (such are the rhythms of life in a small Massachusetts mill village).  We took a bat and ball to the Little League fields when there were no games on, practicing our pitching, our batting, and our fielding.  

Our baseball equipment was nothing to speak of.  We had bats, balls and gloves purchased on the cheap at King’s—a kind of Wal-Mart decades before we would ever hear of Wal-Mart.  Cheap as the gloves were we treated them like real big-time gloves, stretching them and breaking them in as carefully as if we were pro players.  We had blue plastic batting helmets emblazoned with Red Sox logos; these were treasured possessions.  Wearing the Red Sox helmets we could imagine ourselves at Fenway Park, playing in the big leagues, jumping to snag pop flies before they sailed over the Green Monster.  

We played ball with the passion of big leaguers.  We hurled the ball as hard as we could, swung the bat as hard as we could, and dove for every ball as if missing it would mean a World Series loss.  We were just a few kids running around a back yard, a grassy field, a Little League diamond.  We were like millions of other kids playing ball those summers, demonstrating more heart than skill—but what heart.  Those games were as glorious to us as if we were really playing at Fenway.  

My brother did play Little League, at least one season, maybe two.  Being a girl I couldn’t play.  Girls didn’t play ball in small Massachusetts mill villages in the 1970’s.  I remember being proud of my brother as he took the field.  He wasn’t destined for the pros (any more than I would have been), but he played earnestly and deliberately and well.  The sun shone hot on the ball fields, the air heavy and humid with a smothering density that descends on rural New England in the heart of summer.  

I wished I was playing, and comforted myself that the uniforms looked uncomfortable, those uniforms that local businesses—insurance companies, power companies, hardware stores—sponsored and splashed with their business logos.  It was a wound, not to be able to play, the kind of wound that scabs over but never fully heals.  It is a salve to read, in these more enlightened times, about young athletes like Little Leaguer Mo’Ne Davis who show that girls have a place in baseball, not as tokens but as stars. 

Major league baseball has had some rough going in the last two decades.  It was celebrated by documentarian Ken Burns in his elegiac 1994 PBS series “Baseball”.  But as Burns acknowledged in his 2010 documentary “Tenth Inning,” big league ball has been tainted by steroid and doping scandals that tar some of its most revered players, and call into question the records set in the last quarter century.  And baseball has been tainted by the specter of greed as top (and even middling) players demand—and receive—multimillion-dollar contracts that would have been unthinkable even twenty-five years ago. 

Babe Ruth was something of an anomaly.  Traditionally, players have been lean, lanky, hungry-looking gladiators.  Modern players have been increasingly—suspiciously—muscle-bound.  Many of the star players are multimillionaires.  They tend to jog nonchalantly between the bases, not racing with the desperate greyhound grace of their predecessors, but ambling with a well-fed ennui.  The notes of the game have become muted, and the intervals, no longer crackling with electric intensity and meaning, are slack silences.  Modern big league baseball simply lacks the heart of playground ball.  All across the country, kids swing at and dive for every ball as if lives depend on it. 

The shine is off today’s bloated and blunted professional game.  There are still great players, great moments—even great games.  And the fans are still great—witness their loyalty during the last two decades of tribulations, their willingness to keep the faith.  But the league as a whole, the pro apparatus, no longer feels great.  That greatness has been diminished, and in some measure lost. 

But everything cycles, and the pendulum always swings.  The future saviors of baseball are, literally, the kids in the vacant lots and grassy fields, the kids on the playgrounds and Little League diamonds right now, right this moment, even as I type these words.  Some of these kids are going to play college ball, and a smaller percentage will go on to the minors, and a golden few will make the pros.  Play hard kids.  Run your hearts out.  Leap for every line drive and fly ball.  Play baseball like everything depends on it—because in some ways, it does.  America is baseball and baseball is America in a weirdly and beautifully reflective way.  Let’s hope the next generation of ballplayers restores hunger and jazz and glory and honor to the game.  Because as baseball goes, so goes the country. 

[Leslie Le Mon is an American author.  Raised in New England, she has lived in Los Angeles since 1992—but still roots for the Red Sox.]

 

The other evening my sister and I met for holiday shopping and a sisterly gab in Glendale, California. We have both lived in California for more than 20 years, our brother more than a decade. We all love So Cal, but what a far cry it is from the tiny Western Massachusetts village where we were raised.  As sis and I wandered the brightly lit, professionally decorated Galleria and the Americana at Brand, I remembered Christmases long ago in our small-town world.

Our parents worked hard, always, to keep a nice roof over our heads and food on our plates, but there was rarely money to dine out. If we went to a restaurant, it was usually a fast-food place where we feasted on little paper-wrapped McBurgers or a bucket of chicken. But as Christmas Eve drew near, as the snows swirled and houses and hedges were woven with twinkling lights, we knew we would soon be dining at "Famous" Bill's Restaurant.

Not Bill's Restaurant. "Famous" Bill's Restaurant. (I'm not sure what made it "Famous". Certainly it was popular with local businessmen and with tourists and locals alike.) Somewhere along the line Christmas Eve at "Famous" Bill's had become a family tradition. Dad and Mom must have pinched quite a few pennies to save up for this annual outing. Dad had to call ahead to be sure they'd have a table for us. You couldn't just breeze in unannounced on Christmas Eve. This wasn't the Colonel's place. This was a real restaurant.

Dad wore a suit. Mom and sis and I wore dresses. Our brother wore nice slacks and a nice shirt and possibly a little clip-on tie. Mom, a true New Englander, was usually sparing with makeup and scent, but for a meal like this she would wear her pretty red lipstick and a splash of perfume.

"Famous" Bill's was on Federal Street, one of the main drags in Greenfield, the county seat. Greenfield was big-time compared to our hamlet of 2,000 just a couple of miles across the Connecticut River. Greenfield had a population of about 25,000, and a Main Street with banks and a courthouse and a movie theater built in 1929 and an elegant old department store that opened in 1882 and a stationer's and a bridal shop and a five-and-dime. 

Dad drove us through the bitter cold from our house on the hill, across the river, past homes with electric candles in the windows and webs of lights--icy white, or frosty blue, or twinkling multi-colored lights--draped over their houses and trees. When we arrived at "Famous" Bill's on Federal Street Dad parked the car very carefully, as was his habit, and we navigated the frost-heaved sidewalks glazed with thin layers of black ice and went into the restaurant.

"Famous" Bill's opened in 1927 and it seems it hadn't changed much of anything by the 1970's, when we ate our Christmas Eve dinners there. It was a classic American steakhouse in the best possible ways. You were greeted at the door by the scents of cigarette smoke and the astringency of gin and warmth of hops and the mouth-watering fragrance of sizzling steaks, and by Mike, a diminutive man with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair, merry eyes, and a rather reedy voice. MIke was aces. He always wore a suit, and he was always glad to see you. He greeted our father and our family--and all guests, no doubt--as if we were the Rockefellers, and he couldn't be more pleased to see us. He was charming in that down-to-earth way that New Englanders (some New Englanders) manage so effortlessly.

We hung our coats in the cloakroom, a ritual that we never enacted at any other eatery. The elegance of it always impressed me. At "Famous" Bill's, you sat at table unemcumbered by coats and scarves. "Famous" Bill's was quality.

Once we were divested of our coats and hats, Mike escorted us to our seats. LIke all excellent steakhouses "Famous" Bill's was dim and smoky, all dark woods and dim lights, with rows of tables and rows of leather banquettes and a bar off somewhere in a nearby room. (You could hear the murmur of voices from the bar and the clink of glasses all through the meal.)  We sometimes sat at a table and sometimes in a booth.

The first order of business was to order cocktails. We kids would get mocktails, of course--Shirley Temples for the girls, and, I believe, a Rob Roy for our brother. Not caring for ginger ale, I would let my brother have my Shirley Temple

The menu items seemed unbelievably fancy. As I recall, Dad would order steak, mom seafood, my brother a burger, my sister chicken, and I would order the ham steak. The napkins were cloth, and true to our well-mannered upbringing, we placed them on our laps.  The food and beverages were served at a leisurely pace, in a gracious manner, on real plates, with real utensils, the heavy plates, and heavy metal utensils, of the old-time steakhouses, of the Perry Mason and "Mad Men" eras.

We would talk and laugh and linger over our meal. This was a special event and it truly felt special. There was very little squabbling among us kids at these Christmas Eve dinners. We were on our best behavior and didn't mind because that was how you behaved at "Famous" Bill's--you were your best self, and liked being your best self.

After dessert--little sundaes or silver dishes of ice cream for us kids; I believe Dad capped his meal with coffee--it was time to collect our coats and scarves and mittens and head back out into the bitter cold. Dad drove us home again, through Greenfield and across the river, and we watched the sparkling Christmas lights all the way home.

Those were always a bittersweet few moments for me. From the time I was a child I have always been conscious of the flow of time, and the poignancy of its passing. Another wonderful Christmas Eve at "Famous" Bill's had ended. But there was Christmas Day to look forward to, tomorrow. Finding stockings from Santa Claus at the foot of one's bed, and opening all the prettily wrapped presents under the tree while Dad played Christmas carols on the upright piano. Granparents and aunts arriving for Christmas dinner--Dad's "roast beef of old England" and Mom's delicious desserts. A play or concert written and peformed by us kids after dinner. And next year, there would be another Christmas Eve at "Famous" Bill's ...

We stopped going to "Famous" Bill's for Christmas Eve sometime when we kids were teens, maybe around the time my brother and I left home for college and the military, probably somewhat before that. Going to "Famous" Bill's is pretty clear in my recollection; stopping is not. Somehow the tradition just ended. And with all of us kids ultimately moving to California, and Mom and Dad moving to Maine, it was never revived.

"Famous" Bill's isn't "Famous" Bill's anymore. It was sold in 2008 to local businessmen. It has been a grill and a seafood place but hasn't made the impression, hasn't become the indelible local fixture, that "Famous" Bill's was for more than eighty years.
 
This evening I am meeting my brother and sister and their spouses and children at a local family restaurant in Pasadena where we will order, no doubt, a melange of burgers and steaks and seafood and vegeatarian fare, as well as coffee and pie. It won't be "Famous" Bill's, but it doesn't have to be, and in fact it shouldn't be. Life moves forward.

We won't hang our coats in a cloakroom, and Dad, who passed on in November of 2011, won't be driving us to the restaurant. But he is in our hearts, and will certainly be remembered during our chatting and story-telling this evening. And though Mom is in Maine, she will be present in spirit too, as will our aunts. My brother and sister and I will laugh and trade tales and catch up on each other's lives. We will refrain from squabbling and be our best selves. We will dote on the kids, and together we will all create new memories, and perhaps even new traditions.

Life moves forward. Farewell, "Famous" Bill's.

And "Merry Christmas" to you and yours!

Leslie Le Mon
December 21, 2014

As the winds grow chill—even in Southern California—we turn our attention to family and friends, to Thanksgiving, and to winter holidays like Christmas and Chanukah.  These are the traditional months of plenitude and gratitude.

The roots of this gratitude are sunk deep in the land.  In the early farming days of the United States—way, way back when some of the founding fathers thought that the U.S. would become a utopia of farmers—this was the time of year when most of the crops had been harvested, the fruits were gathered, the cider pressed, the preserves shelved, and the meats smoked, salted and stored, a cornucopia of foods to carry folks through the long winters.  Seasons of hard work had paid off with abundance.  People would survive the winter to begin the cycle again in spring.  Thanks be!—and therein is the heart of “Thanksgiving”.

In modern times, very few of us farm.  We accumulate abundance in other ways.  In office cubicles, in retail, in healthcare, in the arts, in manufacturing—a patchwork quilt of occupations.  But whatever we do, the great majority of us, even in difficult times, have some measure of abundance, some reserves to celebrate and share with our loved ones as the cold winds begin to blow.

As Charles Dickens wrote in his winter ghost story “A Christmas Carol,” it is during this season of plenty and celebration that “want is most keenly felt” by those without means.  The elderly, the poor, the unemployed and underemployed, the disenfranchised, the disabled, and, of course, their children, struggle just as hard during the holiday season as any other time of the year, and do so amidst gleaming Christmas stars and Chanukah candles.

So as you prepare your Thanksgiving shopping list, perhaps add some items to donate to a local food drive.  As you set aside Christmas funds, perhaps include a few dollars to donate to a local charity.  As you buy holiday presents, perhaps buy a few toys or games for a children’s Christmas charity.  As you plan your holiday itinerary, include a few hours to volunteer at a shelter or food bank or soup kitchen, or to sing Christmas carols at a senior center.  And in these endeavors, involve your kids or grandkids.  Model generosity.  Make giving a lifelong habit for the next generations.

Giving doesn’t have to be big.  Keep it simple.  Sometimes the smallest gestures, in the aggregate, make the greatest impact.  If most of us just give a little of our money or our possessions or our time this holiday season, we can, together, bring light and joy to those for whom “want is most keenly felt”.

Enjoy your time with your family and friends, dear readers.  I wish you continued abundance in all things.  And, always, an abundance of generosity.

“What’s your favorite scary movie?” is the iconic line from Scream (Dimension, 1996), and it’s the question we all should be asking at this time of the year.  Leaves are falling, midterms are looming, and Starbucks is serving pumpkin lattes.  That means Halloween soon will descend upon us—in the fun, trick-or-treating, All Hallow’s Eve party way, I hasten to add, and not the ravenous, undead, “We need braaaaainsss” way.  Now is the time to prep our Halloween playlists and Netflix queues.

Whether you’re hosting a Halloween party or spending a quietly terrifying night at home, a program of guaranteed chillers is a must.  The best Halloween lineups include a variety of monsters—vampires and ghosts, werewolves and zombies, witches and serial killers—from a variety of eras.  And though supernatural purists balk, more kicked-back viewers give the nod to adding a scary sci-fi title (or two) to the mix (think Them! (1954); The Thing From Another World (1951); The Thing (1982); or War of the Worlds (whether the campy 1953 movie or the grittier and more horrific 2005 Spielberg production)).

Just don’t forget the humor.  The best scary movies layer their horrifying thrills with laughter (whether intentional or not!), giving viewers a chance to release that awful, awful tension and catch their breath before the next hair-raising shocker.

No, most guests don’t give TV screens their undivided attention at parties (they’re too busy mingling, noshing, and imbibing), but looping your petrifying playlist on the big screen with the sound turned down and the subtitles on provides constant background entertainment.  An eerie electronica soundtrack punctuated with shrieks, groans, and creaking doors will add to the ambiance.  (And the guests who do get completely sucked into the films will tell you it was the best Halloween party ever!)

Below are thirteen horror flicks (plus a bonus * sci-fi-horror picture, plus a bonus ** John Carpenter thriller) guaranteed to deliver terror and laughter to you and your guests on All Hallow’s Eve.  (And there’s a list of kid-friendly fare at the end of this blog, in case you’re hosting a children’s party where psycho Norman Bates and a vamped-out Kiefer Sutherland would be too-too terrifying.)

So carve the pumpkin, pop the popcorn, crank up the fog machine, mix the Zombies and Bloody Mary’s, and dig up that Freddy mask you tossed into the closet a few Halloweens back.  Get ready for one hell (or heck) of a Halloween night!  [Major SPOILERS Ahead!]

Thirteen (Plus) Scary Movies

* Alien |Brandywine/20th Century Fox, Rated R, 1979 | In this Ridley Scott nail-biter, the spaceship Nostromo serves as a claustrophobic haunted house.  All exposed pipes, grates, and conduits, the utilitarian interior of the craft looks and feels more like a spooky old haunted factory than a futuristic spaceship.  And that’s perfect, because once a scouting party brings aboard a deadly alien parasite, that’s exactly what this vessel becomes, a floating house of horrors where an extraterrestrial creature slithers in the shadows, pops out of cabinets, and even bursts out of a (very) unlucky character’s abdomen!  The creature can also attach itself to your face like a slime glove (that’s the facehugger, the aliens’ second stage of maturation).  As the crew is picked off one-by-one by the acid-blooded alien, the tension grows, augmented by a moody, spare orchestral score by Jerry Goldsmith.  The story is set in space but its centuries-old conceit is right out of the supernatural playbook:  if you’re too curious an explorer, and too cavalier (or greedy) about what you discover, you’re going to stumble onto something deadly which will destroy not only you but anything with which it comes in contact.  Cursed diamonds or cursed mummy scrolls or exotic ETs—once you’ve touched them, your doom is inevitable, and your demise will be gory.  H.R. Giger’s sleekly chilling alien designs won him an Oscar, but Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ripley owns this film.  She’s not the über-ripped matriarchal superhero she becomes in the sequel Aliens, but she’s the smartest person on the ship with the keenest sense of self-preservation.  As bodies drop fast around her, she’s the main one putting together the puzzle pieces and crafting a viable escape strategy.  But this is sci-fi-horror.  And true horror forbids happy endings.  So although Ripley escapes, her escape carries a sting in the tail, and her trauma will haunt her through multiple sequels.  As in any good horror film, Ripley has been cursed.  Alien is an excellent movie to screen on Halloween night, whether you get sucked completely into it, or your party guests merely enjoy its iconic images in fragments between drinks and conversations.

An American Werewolf in London | PolyGram/Guber-Peters/Universal, Rated R, 1981 | One of the fun things about 1980’s horror was that it often revived classic monster genres, breathing new life into them, jolting them with electricity.  Tales that had become creaky clichés were reborn as modern, irreverently witty, yet thoroughly chilling films.  What The Lost Boys would do for the vampire genre (see below), An American Werewolf in London did even better for the werewolf genre.  The story begins simply enough:  Two young American men, best friends, one rather brash, one sweetly innocent, backpack through the UK countryside and end up on the wrong Yorkshire moor at the wrong time.  When the pub you stop at is called The Slaughtered Lamb and filled with silent, glaring locals, you know you’ve taken a wrong turn.  Even worse, the boys don’t heed the warning to keep on the path.  The next thing you know one boy (the brash one) has had his throat torn out, and the other (David, the sweet one) has been savagely bitten by … something.  He blacks out, then wakes in a hospital.  Nightmares ensue for the survivor, as well as waking nightmares that are grotesquely comic, dipped in the darkest gallows humor.  Shacked up with pretty London nurse Alex Price (a fresh-faced Jenny Agutter, now nun Sister Julienne on Call the Midwife) while he recovers, David continues to be tormented by vivid bad dreams, even as London is terrorized by some vicious fiend, an eviscerating savage.  Perfectly nice, inoffensive Londoners are being torn to pieces in parks and in the tube.  It simply won’t do—and David’s brash best friend, back from the dead and looking none too well (like a loaf of sandwich meat gone bad) explains in a waking dream that David, bitten by a werewolf, is now a werewolf himself; it’s David who’s terrorizing London!  Naturally David doesn’t want to believe this, nor does Alex when he confides in her.  But as more and more pieces fall undeniably into place, David’s dead best friends and deceased victims urge him to end his life before he kills again.  David must choose between self-sacrifice and life as a werewolf—a choice Alex helps him make in an emotional finale that might leave you reaching for a handkerchief (and earned Agutter a Saturn Award “Best Actress” nomination).  Hilariously and darkly funny in a way that only the Brits can be hilariously darkly funny (it’s a joint US-UK production), with lots of colorful footage of early 80’s London, attractive stars, and a werewolf transformation scene that was revolutionary at the time and still packs punch today, An American Werewolf in London , if you screen it, will have your guests howling your praises!  (Don’t worry; the movie’s a lot funnier than that joke!)

Burnt Offerings | UA/MGM, Rated PG (should be PG-13 or R), 1976 | “Bette Davis, we love you!”  One of America’s all-time great movie actresses was known for standing up to mogul Louis B. Mayer back in Hollywood’s golden age, demanding high-quality scripts.  But in her later years Miss Davis blithely kicked up her heels and seemed to find the fun in any role that came her way, cashing the paycheck and tearing into each part with her signature gusto.  (Miss Davis always seemed to deliver her lines as if she was biting into a crisp apple, and found that it tasted very good.)  In Davis’ sunset years, no film or TV role was too loony.  This explains why we find an actress of her caliber portraying a beloved (if somewhat annoying) elderly aunt in Burnt Offerings, one of the best bad horror films ever made.  Supernatural shockers (often adapted from novels) were popular in the late 1960’s through the 70’s (think The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976—see below), Rosemary’s Baby (1968—see below), and The Shining (1980—see below)), but for every supernatural cinematic masterpiece there was at least one zany, low-budget good time like Burnt Offerings.  The plot is classically simple.  A husband, wife, son, and the aforementioned old aunt vacation at a once lovely, now ramshackle mansion.  The elderly woman who owns the mansion—so they are told—lives in seclusion on the top floor.  Except for bringing her meals on trays, the family is to leave her the old recluse alone.  The property is beautiful, though run-down, and at first it seems the family might be happy there.  But their fondness for the house is short-lived.  Increasingly bizarre and disturbing accidents occur, and the family soon notices that the house seems to be repairing and rejuvenating itself.  And it is repairing itself, using the energy generated by their fear!  (Or their life force, or something like that.  Close enough.)  Old Aunt Elizabeth, no fool, is the first to realize something evil is afoot, but because she’s elderly no one pays attention to her concerns—even after her sudden demise.  Son David senses and sees things, too—but, after all, he’s just a kid.  Plus, dad Ben (Oliver Reed) is too preoccupied by visions of an evil, grinning chauffeur whose eyes are hidden behind dark sunglasses (an image that, once glimpsed, will never leave you; I promise!) to pay attention to his son’s fears, and as for mom Marian (the wonderful Karen Black), she’s too busy cleaning the house, dressing like a Victorian matron, and spending an awful lot of time in the attic.  (Hmmmmm.  Should the family be worried?)  Burnt Offerings is a bit of a misnomer.  Nothing is burnt in this movie (except 116 minutes of your life that you’ll never get back).  But figuratively speaking, the family is a sacrifice (an offering) that fuels the house’s regeneration.  Just when you think Ben, Marian, and David have achieved escape velocity, and will break free of the mansion’s supernatural claws, Marian dashes back into the house to say goodbye to that nice old lady in the attic.  (Horror Movie Rule 10e:  Never dash back inside a haunted house to say goodbye to anybody.  Also known as the “Get while the gettin’ is good” principle.)  When Marian doesn’t return, Ben ascends to the attic, where he discovers the old woman is actually his wife!  Yes.  It’s true.  Marian has been possessed (by the former owner, or the house, or something), resulting in a hot mess of an old-timey hairdo and sinister wrinkle makeup!  Ben goes flying out a window, crash-landing in a gruesome bloody mess on the family car; a traumatized David is then mashed by a toppling chimney.  The father and son’s horrific deaths return the house to its original glory, over which the possessed Marian will preside.  Not the feel-good family film of the year, this (often unintentionally) funny and truly chilling scare-fest is a fun, over-the-top choice for a Halloween screening.  (Burnt Offerings Drinking Game:  Take a drink every time someone watching the film correctly predicts what’s going to happen next.)

The Changeling | Associated Film, Rated R, 1980 | No, not the gripping historic thriller starring Angelina Jolie (2008), but a gripping 1980 haunted house tale starring the one-and-only George C. Scott and his gravelly voice.  In this movie, the erstwhile General Patton plays a composer who loses both his wife and daughter in a tragic accident.  Deep in mourning, he moves into a gorgeous old mansion which he soon learns contains paranormal activity.  The best ghost stories begin rather slowly and rise, steadily, inevitably, to a horrifying crescendo—and The Changeling doesn’t disappoint.  Subtle hints that the house might be haunted become clear signs, and then terrifying disturbances, prompting Scott and love interest Trish Van Devere to investigate the history of the house and its former inhabitants.  Perhaps because of their palpable chemistry (Scott and Van Devere were real-life spouses), they work well together, and they eventually uncover the house’s morbid and murderous secret.  Can they use this knowledge to prevent another dramatic tragedy?  (Um … no.  Remember:  A happy ending is against the rules in true horror films.  But points to Scott and Van Devere for trying!)  Lavish yet somber settings, a story that moves along at a good clip, Scott’s dry wit, séances, exhumations, poltergeist activity, and a vengeful ghost—what doesn’t this finely crafted film have?  A winner whether you watch it with your full attention or screen it for intermittently attentive party guests, The Changeling should be near the top of your Halloween lineup.

** The Fog | AVCO Embassy, Rated R, 1980 | There’s something disturbing in the fog—and it’s not (just) the lovely Adrienne Barbeau’s weirdly creepy rasp as she portrays a DJ trapped in a lighthouse during a supernatural attack on coastal California.  John Carpenter’s follow-up to the far superior Halloween (see below) has a thousand-and-one problems, but the hilariously terrifying whole rises well above its problematic parts.  The fog, eerily lit, is genuinely creepy, and the Carpenter-composed soundtrack masterfully gooses the audience, keeping us on the edge of our seats.  Carpenter exercises laudable restraint, hiding the monsters/ghosts/whatev in the swirling fog for most of the movie; it might have been a costume/effects-budget issue, but shrouding the monsters in the fog delivers maximum suspense.  The plot is “ghost story traditional” on the one hand, the casting and execution fabulously wonky on the other.  There’s the requisite drunken and disillusioned priest; John Houseman as the worst babysitter ever (who is letting him tell ghost stories to their kids on a lonely beach?); a charmingly miscast Jamie Lee Curtis, who isn’t believable for a second as a hitchhiking runaway, but you don’t care; a wry Nancy Kyes (aka Nancy Loomis) stealing scenes left and right; and Janet Lee (Jamie’s mother, best known for her shocking end-of-Act-I demise in Psycho (1960)) stealing the scenes back again.  The small coastal town of Antonio Bay is all geared up to celebrate its centennial, but alas--all is not well.  A cursed gold coin transmogrifies into a cursed piece of driftwood that bleeds seawater; the glowy fog rolls in; pirate hooks and knives slash indiscriminately, seeming to slay the innocent as well as the guilty; decapitated head and body parts roll; and, finally, the town’s greedy secret is revealed.  Oh—since all that isn’t enough (!) there’s an earthquake, too!  Word to the wise:  If someone knocks on your door while you and your friends are watching The Fog--don’t answer!  Because, as the disembodied voices warn in the film, “Six must die.”  If you haven’t seen this movie yet, you’ll thank me after you do.  Very few bad movies are this good.

Halloween | Falcon Intl/Compass Intl/Warner Bros., Rated R, 1978 | John Carpenter directed and co-wrote and scored this indie film; he probably served the coffee and snacks too!  This low-budget movie (made for less than half-a-million dollars!) benefits from being the work of one main auteur, a single captain of the ship; Carpenter was able to shape it exactly as he wished without being buried under a blizzard of “notes” and “suggestions” from some remote producer.  (Cowriter Debra Hill, with whom he presumably saw eye-to-eye, was the main producer.)  The resulting film is a minimalist work of art, and was a game-changer for the horror genre.  Halloween’s plot is skeletally simple and unencumbered, a small-town tale of innocence lost and the ties that bind.  Wholesome and brainy Haddonfield high school student Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, in a career-launching role) babysits two children on Halloween night; she prefers to babysit rather than to join her friends in their late-1970’s hedonistic pursuits.  Unfortunately for everybody, this is the night that notorious local murderer Michael Myers escapes from his psychiatric hospital, steals a series of vehicles, and heads home to Haddonfield.  The doctor who knows just how blankly, pitilessly evil Myers is tries to locate the disturbed young man before he can kill again.  But the doctor (all of the authority figures in the film) is clueless when it comes to running Myers to ground.  Myers, the infamous local “boogeyman,” stalks Laurie, kills her friends, and then tries to kill her and her young charges.  While Laurie’s bravery and motherly instincts save her and the two children, she is deeply traumatized.  What happens to Michael Myers?  He survives multiple stabbings and a two-story fall, vanishing into the darkness from which he came.  Halloween clearly had no effects budget to speak of, but it’s a movie of iconic images and powerful, ever-increasing dread, achieved solely through the camera-work, the tense score, and the actors’ deft performances.  Carpenter and Hill nail the small-town details (the sweet but slightly bratty Tommy; the bullies; the genially inept sheriff; the broad expanses of lawn and shrouding hedges that alienate middle-class houses from each other) and lace the script with plenty of humor, relief valves for an audience being drawn ever-closer to the characters’ grisly dooms.  The tremendous success of this one small film spawned a mega-franchise of Halloween sequels and merchandise that propelled Myers to an almost comical supervillainy.  Halloween is how it all began.  If you watch one movie on Halloween night, or screen one movie for your guests, you’re well-advised to make it Carpenter’s original Halloween.

The Lost Boys | Warner Bros., Rated R, 1987 | Equal parts comedy and horror, The Lost Boys is a vampire flick worth watching for the mid-80’s hair alone.  Jason Patrick’s heroically moussed locks, Kieffer Sutherland’s bleached Billy Idol spikes, and the massive curly mane sported by hippie-ish vamp Jami Gertz threaten, at times, to take over the film.  The actors’ hairdos are ably supported by heavy makeup (including eyeliner for the vamp dudes) and incredibly cool mid-80’s fashions.  Guests watching this movie at your Halloween party with the sound turned down and no subtitles might assume this is a really long, really stylish video about an 80’s glam rock band with musicians that turn into (sometimes violent) vampires.  And, well, it kind of is.  But if you activate the subtitles, or turn up the sound, your guests will catch the sweet side of this movie; it’s not just a glam-vamp tale of temptation, it’s also a family story.  Put simply, a divorced mom drags her two sons to a new town and a new life living with her dad.  Dianne Wiest portrays the mother—and who plays endearingly inept-but-well-intentioned moms better than Dianne Wiest?  In this seaside town where the big attraction is the amusement park, the brothers have to adjust to life with no father, no money, no friends, and a weird grandfather.  The older boy (Jason Patrick) falls in with the vampire crowd, while his younger brother befriends the goofy local vamp hunters.  When Patrick decides the reckless and cruel vamp life isn’t for him, the vampire gang and their mysterious leader mark Patrick (and anyone who helps him) for extinction.  For the 80’s “latchkey” generation left so often to their own devices, with parents who worked multiple jobs, this is a tale of lost children and how they find (or further lose) themselves.  In The Lost Boys, brotherly love and family solidarity prove to be the key to fighting off bad influences.  That sounds preachy … But the film doesn’t feel preachy.  The funny moments are well-orchestrated, falling right on beat, breaking the tension generated by the film’s more horrifying moments.  Sutherland brings true menace to his role as the Lost Boys’ lieutenant.  He is a bitter blond Peter Pan with a cut-glass, ice-cold sparkle in his eyes that viewers won’t see again for decades, not until Sutherland becomes icy patriot Jack Bauer.  The Lost Boys twists and turns and surprises us as it unspools, and it even presents a satisfying conclusion.  A scary movie; a funny movie; and everybody just looks so great through the whole thing in that slickly perfect 80’s way.  So fire up The Lost Boys, a vamp pic your guests can really (wait for it … wait for it …) sink their teeth into.  (Ouch!)

Night of the Living Dead | Image Ten/Laurel Group/Market Square/The Walter Reade Organization, Unrated (but consider it R), 1968 | “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”  So begins one of the scariest movies ever made.  Barbara’s brother Johnny is clowning around in the graveyard; guess no one told him that horror movie jokesters with no respect for the dead—or undead—are often among the first to go when the claws and incisors start to fly!  George Romero’s classic zombie film has inspired legions of undead sequels, parodies, and reimaginings (some by Romero himself), but this is the source, the original.  Starkly shot in black-and-white for what appears to be the price of a cup of coffee, the film has no heroes, no villains, just a handful of ordinary people trapped in a claustrophobic farmhouse while flesh-chomping undead try to break inside.  The lights and shadows and lurching zombies make this an outstanding video backdrop for your Halloween party.  For those who get sucked into it, well, they can view the film as a fable of mindless 1960’s materialism, or the spread of communism, or conformity, or a prescient dark fairy tale about coping with mass disease and/or bioterrorism.  Or they can just enjoy it as a white-knuckle horror film.  What no one can do is escape.  Because “Johnny’s got the keys.”  And Johnny isn’t himself any more.  You don’t watch Night of the Living Dead so much as you survive it.

A Nightmare on Elm Street | New Line, Rated R, 1984 | Before he was Captain Jack Sparrow or John Dillinger or even Edward Scissorhands, superstar Johnny Depp was part of the ensemble cast in a sweet little film called A Nightmare on Elm Street.  OK.  It’s not a sweet little film.  It’s another 1980’s “latchkey kid” fairy tale, this one pitch-dark, about what happens to kids when their navel-gazing, neglectful parents aren’t paying attention.  In this case, the children of Elm Street are taken by demented custodian Freddy Krueger to his infernal boiler-room lair.  Once the parents (finally) catch on that Krueger is a predator, they solve the problem by torching him in his boiler room, burning him alive.  Years later, when the children of Elm Street become teenagers, Krueger begins to invade their dreams.  He is horribly burnt and maimed.  He sports a striped red sweater, a fedora, and gloves with razor-sharp knives affixed to the fingers—these are his signature accessories.  Teens comparing nightmares soon realize that they are all dreaming about the same monster, and they investigate the mystery of who Krueger is, and why he torments their sleep.  Eaten with guilt about burning Krueger alive, the parents are close-mouthed and obstructive.  As the movie unfolds the persistent teens learn who Krueger is—was—and why he’s targeting them, but not until most of the teens have been slain (often in comically grotesque ways), one-by-one, while they’re asleep and dreaming.  Clearly the only thing worse than parents neglecting their children (thereby giving nuts like Krueger a chance to hurt them) is parents trying to protect their children, which results in charbroiled custodians who exact vicious revenge from beyond the grave.  As is usual in these “latchkey” fables, adults are the cause of the problem and/or are somehow complicit in it—yet they refuse to believe that anything supernatural is happening.  Adults are evil or clueless and controlling (just like in real life, kids!) … so if anything is going to be set to rights, the latchkey teens are on their own.  Another trend that emerged in the 80’s was that heroines (rather than heroes) began to save the day.  In A Nightmare on Elm Street we not only see Depp’s character Glen devoured by a mattress and churned into a bloody milkshake, we see an almost equally shocking thing:  a young woman, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), emerging as the heroine of the story.  It felt startlingly fresh to those of us who watched Nightmare in theaters in 1984; woman-as-hero is old-hat now, but this is one of the films that opened that door.  As with Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street was a watershed movie in other ways, birthing multiple sequels, crossover movies, and a merchandising empire.  A certain little nursery rhyme from the film entered the culture; just try not to chant it after you see this film.  (It starts “One, two, Freddy’s comin’ for you,” and ends “Nine, ten, never sleep again”.)  If you haven’t seen Nightmare in years, now’s the time to see it again and share it with your party guests.  “What the hell are dreams, anyway?” asks the heroine’s drunken mother.  Who knows!  But “Whatever you do, don’t … fall … asleep”!

The Omen | 20th Century Fox, Rated R, 1976 | Gregory Peck will forever be Atticus Finch in the brilliant film adaption of To Kill a Mockingbird—one of the greatest cinematic performances.  Ever.  But for horror fans, he will also forever be the horrified and disillusioned foster father of the antichrist.  I refer, of course, to (fictional) American diplomat Robert Thorn in The Omen.  When Thorn (Peck) is told that high-strung wife Katherine (Lee Remick) has miscarried at a Rome hospital, Thorn is only too happy to accept an orphan from a Catholic priest and pass it off as his and Katherine’s own infant.  Katherine doesn’t know that little Damien isn’t her natural-born child—but she senses it.  Something’s not … right.  Thorn receives an appointment as ambassador to the UK.  He and his family settle in a manor house that appears to be larger than Buckingham Palace, where life should be a dream.  But Katherine still can’t bond with the boy (now five years old), or get past his oddities.  Zoo animals go bughouse-crazy when Damien’s around, and the wee tot freaks out (to put it mildly) when brought into a church.  And then Damien’s nanny hangs herself at his lavish birthday party.  This sets in motion a parade of carnage, a nightmare centering, somehow, around Damien.  His new nanny, Mrs. Baylock, and her Rottweiler, are fanatically protective of the boy but cold toward Katherine.  A series of people—a priest, a photographer—try to convince Ambassador Thorn that there is something wrong with his boy.  As the supporting-character death toll mounts, Damien injures Katherine by ramming his tricycle into the stepladder she’s standing on, pitching her over the rail (!)  Thorn finally wakes up and smells the unholy cappuccino, embarking on a quest to discover Damien’s true parentage.  What he learns is so distressing that he attempts to vanquish the child with sacred daggers on a church altar—but Mrs. Baylock and the Rottweiler and Damien’s fanatical followers and the local police are having none of that, and Thorn is killed before he can harm a hair of Damien’s unholy head.  The Omen is among the best of what can be classified as tales of “unholy children”.  During the 1950’s, 60’s and ‘70’s a bizarre “fear of offspring” seemed to invade the zeitgeist.  Frequently repeated themes included children that were tainted or evil and/or children that were not the parents’ true child.  This intergenerational unease was expressed in pictures like The Bad Seed (1956) (the child is psychologically/emotionally disturbed), Village of the Damned (1960) (the children are coolly evil alien spawn), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) (the child is the antichrist).  These films can be seen as modern variations on traditional changeling myths, driven by deep-seated fears of modern science in general and modern medicine in particular.  In the case of The Omen, adorable little Damien survives to wreak more havoc in two sequels.  With its stylish European and UK locales, Peck and Remick’s fine performances, and dramatic, Goldbergian death scenes every ten minutes or so, The Omen is a perfect horror flick for any grown-up Halloween fête.

Paranormal Activity IV | Paramount, Rated R, 2012 | Yes, the original Paranormal Activity (2007) is leaner, meaner, and more riveting if you’re watching by yourself or with a small group, eyes glued to the screen to catch every nuance and subtly ratcheted notch of terror.  But if you’re screening films at a party, the much more colorful, action-packed, and visually interesting Paranormal Activity IV is the way to go.  The editing is faster-paced, the Kinect infrared scenes are just plain cool, and the visual effects come at you fast and furious, so even someone half-watching while gabbing with other guests will find the flick entertaining.  Those who do play close attention will learn more about the franchise’s mythology, the demon at the heart of it, and the worshippers who will stop at absolutely nothing to serve their evil master.  Though you’d expect it to be getting stale at this point in the series, the “found footage” conceit is handled creatively.  And the conclusion, as is usual with Paranormal Activity movies, is jaw-dropping.  You’ll sleep with the lights on!  (The next sequel hits theaters in 2015.)

Psycho II | Universal, Rated R, 1983 | The same disclaimer as above:  Yes, the original Psycho, released in 1960 (one of Alfred Hitchcock’s leanest, meanest, black-and-white triumphs), is the one to watch if you’ll be paying close attention.  Its slow-blossoming flow, which gathers momentum with the inevitability of a nightmare, rewards attentive viewers, as does the Bernard Herrmann score.  By turns soporifically mesmerizing and viciously alarming, Herrmann’s soundtrack, like the film, both tranquilizes and assaults us.  When the violins screech at key moments we feel the knife plunging into our own bodies.  Psycho II is not such a masterpieces, but it is in its own right a horrifying little gem.  Long wished for (at the time) by Psycho fans, the sequel Psycho II picks up immediately after Norman Bates is discharged from the asylum where he was confined for the murders he committed in the original film.  During the time that this film was released, many psychiatric hospitals in the U.S. were being closed and patients were being sent back into the general population en masse.  Psycho II seems to vibrate with the pervading public anxiety of the times; were the patients being released actually cured?  Were they safe?  In Act I, Norman certainly seems to be rehabilitated—but it’s a horror movie, so what fun would that be?  Bodies begin to drop like flies as Norman labors to reopen the Bates Motel, and the viewer is left to wonder whether Norman is “up to his old tricks again” or whether he’s being framed or whether the ghost of “Mother” is protecting her boy.  As the horror unspools, questions about Norman’s past that weren’t addressed in the first movie are resolved here; there are a few surprisingly tender moments; and the tables are turned as the villain becomes the victim (and vice-versa).  Psycho II, filmed in vivid color with dramatic camera angles and swoops of the lens—not to mention an affecting score by Jerry Goldsmith—is  the film in the Psycho canon to play at your Halloween party to provide a visually interesting and entertaining horror backdrop.  (Look for a pre-NYPD Blue Dennis Franz as a seedy motel manager, and watch for Vera Miles, who had a key role in the original Psycho.)

Rosemary’s Baby | Paramount, Rated R, 1968 | Another “unholy child” movie (see The Omen above), Rosemary’s Baby centers on the banality of evil as expressed through a (mostly) elderly coven of New York witches.  They convene at an apartment in the Bramford, a once-grand, now-decaying NYC building where two of the coven leaders live.  (In this movie, the fabulous old Dakota serves as the fictional Bramford).  During most of the picture the audience isn’t sure whether young Rosemary (the mother-to-be) is imagining or truly experiencing the witchcraft and devil worship that she suspects is happening all around her at the Bramford.  Rosemary is an exemplar of the “noble mother”.  As the movie progresses and she becomes more-and-more convinced that she is surrounded by evil, she will go to any lengths to protect her unborn baby.  Of course, as is always the case in the true horror film, no matter what the heroine does or how noble she is, there’s no winning.  Rosemary’s neighbors, her doctors, and even her husband are revealed to be participants in witchcraft and dark masses.  The ordinariness of these people stands in stark (at times even comic) contrast to their powers.  You understand why they have turned to the dark side:  Their ambition vastly exceeds their reach; without occult assistance, they are merely banal men and women, including a flute-playing dentist.  Ruth Gordon steals all of her scenes as the tacky neighbor who married up and then climbed even higher through devilish means.  Young Rosemary, not a native New Yorker, has no fancy ambitions.  She wants to be a good mother—which turns out to be the noblest and most dangerous thing anyone can try to be at the accursed Bramford!  As the curtain falls on this dark fairy tale, we sense that Rosemary will be a good mother to her unholy child—at any cost, a grace note to the movie’s horrifying conclusion.  This film will look grand on your big screen, a visual feast for party guests.  The Dakota, with its dark, decaying beauty, has never looked better than in this film, and every frame sports a “Mad Men”-like late 60’s sheen, from the clean lines of Mia Farrow’s ensembles to her sleek Vidal Sassoon haircut.  This is a movie that shows old New York transitioning into modern New York.  Stylishly shot, witty, and nightmare-scary.

The Shining | Warner Brothers, Rated R, 1980 | Inspired by his 1970’s stay at the luxurious (and apparently very, very haunted) Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, Stephen King penned one of his most widely read and widely praised novels ever:  The Shining (1977).  The wildly successful book spawned a wildly successful movie—but genius director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining strayed far afield from King’s source material.  King didn’t like Kubrick’s movie—apparently still doesn’t like it.  Years after Kubrick’s version hit theaters, King had a new version of The Shining filmed, a mini-series that hewed closely to his book.  It was a very good mini-series, and, yes, it stayed true to the novel—but Kubrick’s Shining is still the superior cinematic work.  Haunted hotels are haunted houses on heavy vitamins—more angst, more trauma, more stairs to trip you up and more rooms in which to trap and torment you.  Kubrick’s Shining is a hallucinogenic funhouse filled with agoraphobia-inducing expanses, western and Native American artwork, the color red—and ghosts.  Lots and lots of ghosts.  Ghosts that shapeshift.  Ghosts that touch you, and physically hurt you.  Ghosts that mix you a tasty cocktail while convincing you to axe your entire family.  This is not a nice place.  Like a mystical battery, the Overlook Hotel has recorded a century of negative energies charged by scandalous revelries and gruesome murders.  The hotel plays this energy back for special guests like winter caretaker Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic (played by Jack Nicholson with alternating fits of lunatic gusto and catatonia) and his psychic son Danny.  From spectral twins with creepy Village of the Damned British accents to elevators vomiting gallons of blood in dreamlike slo-mo, the hotel in Kubrick’s Shining is a wall-to-wall carnival of searing images that will haunt you long after the closing credits.  And how about that Room 237?  Sheer lunacy.  (Room 237 is even the title of a fascinating exploration of Shining conspiracy theories.)  Jack’s wife Wendy is mind-blind to the hotel’s ghoulish goings-ons.  She helplessly watches her husband and son unravel before her eyes, her psychic son sinking into trances (it might be that lush and menacing synth score!) while her husband becomes a cold-hearted, murderous caricature of his worst self.  The hotel wants Danny’s psychic energy, you see (his “shine”), and it wants Jack Torrance to deliver that energy via a spot of familial axe murder (hapless Wendy will just be collateral damage).  As the cold Colorado snows encroach on the grand hotel, cutting it off from the outside world, Jack lifts an axe and stalks his loved ones in the haunted red halls.  The chilling (literally) conclusion is a victory for another “noble mother” character, but even those who escape have clearly been scarred for life.  If you screen The Shining at your Halloween party, be prepared for the nightmare visuals and entrancing score to traumatize your guests, too—but, you know, in a good Halloween kind of way!

The Uninvited | Paramount, Unrated, 1944 | One of the first movies to present spirit hauntings as a (mostly) serious subject, The Uninvited is one of the best early ghost films.  Like many pictures made under the old studio systems, it offers a bit of everything for everyone.  Costumes by Edith Head.  Oscar-nominated black-and-white cinematography.  A score by Victor Young (including the deathless classic “Stella by Starlight”).  An adorable little dog that often seems smarter than the human characters.  All that, plus Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey in top form, and a half-creepy, half-loopy ghost story on the oh-so-veddy-English coast.  The film is moody, atmospheric, and sometimes downright silly—witness Milland’s character reeling queasily from seasickness when he goes sailing with his (much-too-young) love interest.  But as the picture unwinds the menace becomes more and more real, and the disturbing origin of the haunting slowly comes into focus.  Séances, seemingly vengeful ghosts, possession, phantom scents, and liberal little dashes of humor--The Uninvited serves it all up like a savory stew on a cold English night.  Whether you’re riveted to the screen, or only dimly aware of it playing in the background, what you catch of The Uninvited will make you laugh and shiver while the Halloween good times roll.

Other Titles:  Consider chillers like The Blair Witch Project (Artisan, Rated R, 1999) which put “found footage” horror flicks on the map; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Decla-Bioscop/Goldwyn, Unrated, 1920) a brilliantly demented German Expressionist film; Damien:  Omen II (20th Century Fox, Rated R, 1978) Three words:  “Say it, Mark.”; Bela Lugosi defining the vampire count in Dracula (Universal, Unrated, 1931); Gary Oldman updating the count in the sumptuous and dark Victorian-era reboot [Bram Stoker’s] Dracula (American Zoetrope/Osiris/Columbia, Rated R, 1992); the pea soup-spewing, neck-revolving The Exorcist (Warner Bros., Rated R, 1973), a finely crafted tale of possession in spite of the over-the-top language and fluids; Boris Karloff defining the man-made monster for all time in Frankenstein (Universal, Unrated, 1931); the laugh-and-scream fest Gremlins (Warner Bros., Rated PG, 1984); The Haunting (either version, 1963 (Warner Bros., Unrated) or 1999 (DreamWorks, Rated PG-13)); the ethereally beautiful Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the lavish New Orleans-based period piece Interview with the Vampire (Geffen/Warner Bros., Rated R, 1994); Lady in White (New Century Vista, Rated PG-13, 1988), charmingly nostalgic as well as deeply disturbing; Nosferatu (Film Arts Guild, Unrated, 1922) a rogue re-telling of Stoker’s novel Dracula; Lon Chaney, Sr. revealing a face that still terrifies in The Phantom of the Opera (Universal, Unrated, 1925);Spielberg’s smash-hit Poltergeist (MGM, Rated PG (now it would be PG-13), 1982); the inimitable Vincent Price discovering a spine-tingling parasite in The Tingler (Columbia, Unrated, 1959), the Castle classic which zapped movie-goers with buzzers under their seats; and Lon Chaney, Jr., the one-and-only true The Wolf Man (Universal, Unrated, 1941).

Tasteful Host Tip:  Avoid screening super-gory-and-dark slasher films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and early Wes Craven efforts; they might be too gruesome for your guests.

Themed Suggestions:  If you and your guests are the laugh-a-minute type, make it a supernatural parody night, with movies from the R-rated Scream (Dimension, 1996 – 2011) and/or Scary Movie (Dimension/Weinstein, 2000 – 2013) oeuvre and camp classics like Love at First Bite (American International, Rated PG (it would be PG-13 now), 1979), or the G-rated comedy of the Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (and The Invisible Man, and the Mummy, etc) series (Universal, 1948 – 1955).  Or if you’re hosting a party for your teens and their friends, load up on teen-focused supernatural flicks like Blood and Chocolate (MGM, Rated PG-13, 2007), The Craft (Columbia, Rated R, 1996), and the Twilight Saga (Summit, Rated PG-13, 2008 – 2012), as well as screening TV eps of Angel (The WB, 1999 – 2004), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB/UPN, 1997 – 2003), Grimm (NBC/Universal, 2011 – Present), Supernatural (The WB/The CW, 2005 – Present), and The Vampire Diaries (The CW, 2009 – Present).  (A few episodes of paradocs Ghost Adventures (Travel Channel, 2008 – Present) and Ghost Hunters (SyFy, 2004 – Present) wouldn’t go amiss, either.)

Kid-Friendly Frights:  Younger children should be safe with the mildly spooky scares and quality family fare of:  Coraline (Focus, Rated PG, 2009) | Hocus Pocus (Walt Disney, Rated PG, 1993) | Hotel Transylvania (Sony/Columbia, Rated PG, 2012) | It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Warner Bros./CBS, Unrated, 1966) | The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (Walt Disney, Rated G, 1949) | Monster House (Relativity/ImageMovers/Amblin/Columbia, Rated PG, 2006) | ParaNorman (Laika/Focus, Rated PG, 2012) | Sesame Street:  A Magical Halloween Adventure (Sesame Street, Unrated, 2004)

Bottom line:  There are so many fantastic (and fantastically awful) horror movies out there that as long as you include some humor and a variety of monsters and eras on your playlist, and tailor it to your guest list, you can’t go wrong.

Happy Halloween!

[Leslie Le Mon is the author of the delightfully disturbing Cold Dark Harbor Redux:  And Other Tales of Ghosts and Monsters, available at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com.  She lives in Los Angeles, two blocks from the haunted mansion in Insidious:  Chapter 2 (PG-13, 2013).]

In the wee early hours of September 30, 2013, three young men dressed in black leaped off the top of the World Trade Center’s Freedom Tower (also known as 1 WTC), cameras capturing their every movement.  Not WTC security cameras, but the young men’s own GoPro helmet cams, recording their daring escapade in real time as it unfolded.

The daredevils flung themselves from the tower’s roof one-by-one.  After an exhilarating freefall, each jumper deployed his parachute.  They floated down, down, down in the neon-and-halogen streaked darkness, landing near the Goldman Sachs Building, where security cameras finally caught a glimpse of them.

The parachuting stunt made the news that morning.  Sort of.  The police were aware that at least two persons—probably men—had parachuted into lower Manhattan, landing near Goldman Sachs.  What the police didn’t know was where the drop had originated.

As the world later learned, the jumpers are young men in their late twenties and early thirties—an ironworker, a carpenter, and a parachute instructor.  They are thrill-seekers.  BASE jumpers.  They crave the bliss of leaping from great heights, from places that are often—usually—forbidden.  More than whimsical daredevils, they pursue their thrills scientifically, calculating trajectories and factoring in weather conditions and traffic patterns, meticulously calibrating their jumps to avoid injury, death and harm to others.  They craft their jumps as cleverly as Ferris Bueller planned his day off.

On “go” night the jumpers gained entrance to the WTC’s Freedom Tower (nearing completion, but not yet open to the public) by finding gaps—literal, not figurative, gaps—in the building’s security.  The ironworker was actually a member of the 1 WTC construction crew, so he knew the site well.  There were gaps here-and-there in the site’s security fences; the jumpers slipped through a narrow opening in the north fence.  They took the stairs all the way to the top of the tower—more than a thousand feet—without any encounters with security.  As the jumpers later reported, the few security guards on scene congregated together at ground level.

The daredevils climbed the tower.  They waited hours—hours—for optimal conditions, then they wished each other well, and jumped.

The footage is invigorating, the rush palpable to anyone who views it.  Landing safely, they stowed their parachutes and lit out for home.  The parachute instructor, known for rogue BASE jumps, was questioned—but not arrested—by the police the next morning.

After the rogue jump, the ironworker went back to work the very next day, and continued to help to build 1 WTC.  All three young men went about their daily lives.  Weeks passed, and then months, with no law enforcement knock at their doors.  But the NYPD and the Port Authority PD were putting the pieces together, bit-by-bit.

On Monday, March 24, 2014, the jumpers and a suspected accomplice (a “lookout”) were arrested.  The daredevils now face up to seven years in prison.

By their own admission, the young men knew they might be arrested—even shot as terrorists—if they had been found on the site, and they are not surprised that they were eventually arrested.  Their jump was extremely embarrassing to those tasked with defending not only NYC in general but the WTC in specific.  The WTC is protected by dedicated members of a siloed network of entities that include the NYPD, the Port Authority, and private contractors.  The leadership in charge of safeguarding the World Trade Center ended up with a big glob of egg on its face.  A head of security resigned on March 28, 2014, only four days after the jumpers were arrested.  Nobody likes to be embarrassed.  Which might be why law enforcement and justice tended to bay for the jumpers’ blood; the young men face up to seven years behind bars for trespassing and glorious stupidity.

Some have rushed to the jumpers’ defense, including groups whose loved ones (9/11 victims and 9/11 first-responders) perished on September 11, 2001.  While everyone can agree that the young men weren’t supposed to jump off the Freedom Tower, there is also a general consensus that it was hardly the crime of the century.  Supporters argue that the young men’s flouting of the rules is much less important than the fact that the jumpers exposed critical gaps in the site’s security.  Rather than tar and feather the boys—plucky, modern-day Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns—supporters contend we should focus instead on the security problems their escapade uncovered.  The jumpers are the charmingly scampish Ferris Buellers to the system’s vindictive Principal Rooney.  Are the daredevils the villains of this event, or those who failed to provide the Freedom Tower with thoroughly inadequate protection?

We are conditioned by post-9/11 films and television programs to believe that our national icons, monuments, treasures, and security targets are being guarded 24/7 by Jack Bauer-like patriots with incredible firearm and martial arts skills and legions of guards, soldiers, attack dogs, weaponry, and tech.  There are cameras everywhere—right?  And sealed doors that can be opened only with complex access codes and retinal scans.  Good guys in Kevlar, armed to the teeth and carrying smart phones that connect back to Chloe-like computer geniuses, are on call at a moment’s notice to take down the bad guys.  That’s the image that we believed in, and clung to, and that let us sleep soundly at night.

The Freedom Tower BASE jumpers lanced that belief, deflated it, exposed it as no more than hot air, smoke-and-mirrors, fantasy.  They exposed the ugly and disturbing truth that even post-9/11 we are scraping by with holes in fences and non-working cameras and thinly stretched guard crews even at high-profile, high-risk target sites like 1 WTC.  It’s unnerving, to say the least.

Did the young men’s BASE jump off the Freedom Tower serve as a wake-up call to those overseeing security at WTC?  Once law enforcement began to piece together how the daredevils gained access to the tower, were lessons learned?  Were security gaps quickly remedied?

Clearly not, as revealed by a kid from Weehawken.

* * *

In the wee early hours of March 16, 2014, about a week before the WTC BASE jumpers were arrested, a teen daredevil decided he wanted to scale the spire on top of the Freedom Tower.

The New Jersey boy entered the site through a hole in the fence.  No guard noticed or stopped him.  He climbed a jungle-gym of scaffolding until he reached the sixth floor, then, allegedly wearing a hard hat to look like a legit construction worker, he asked an elevator operator to run him up to floor 88.  The operator complied.  The young man then walked from the 88th to 104th floor—top of the world—and ghosted past a sleeping security guard (the only rooftop security measure in sight).

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The BASE jumpers leaped off the Freedom Tower on September 30, 2013.  The investigation of their stunt began almost immediately.  Yet on March 16, 2014, there are still holes in the WTC site fencing.  There is an alarming lack of guards.  There are no cameras sending live feeds of intruders to watchful security officers.  Instead, there is an elevator operator who transports a person without any ID or security badge up to the 88th floor.  (He was subsequently reassigned.)  And on the roof, there is a sleeping guard.  (He was subsequently fired.)

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Once he reached the rooftop of 1 WTC, the teen scaled its already-famous spire.  The spire/antenna is an important architectural feature of the Freedom Tower because it raises the building’s official height to 1,776 feet, a reference to 1776, the year the United States declared its independence.  Without the spire, the building tops out at 1,368 feet.  Those good at math are already making the calculation:  The spire is about 400 feet tall in its own right.  400 feet—about the height of a forty-story building.

The teen scaled the spire, taking photographs from his perilous perch.  We live in an age of visual documentation.  Everything from our kids’ first steps to our after-dinner crème brulé is not only memorialized but then posted in photographic and video formats to our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest accounts.  Now, as never before, the entire world is a stage, and we are players on it.  From the excruciatingly dull moments of our lives to those that are dazzlingly epic we frame, record, edit, and share those instants with the world.  It was illegal to sneak into the site, and illegal and dangerous to climb the spire, but having done it, the teen simply had to record his victory.  Top of the world.  Here I am.  Wish you were here.

After a couple of hours—still completely undetected—at the top of New York City, the young daredevil descended the tower.  The way down led him right into the arms of security who (finally) realized something was wrong.  The photographs of the climb that he had captured and posted would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what he had done, just as the BASE jumpers’ GoPro footage was a smoking gun.  Because the Weehawken climber was a teen, and because he didn’t BASE jump onto New York City streets, he faced far less severe penalties than the adult BASE jumpers.

* * *

Sometimes, perception is everything.  We all see the world differently.  What bores one person might interest another.  What frightens one person might magnetically draw another individual.

Security experts tend to be rules-focused individuals.  They like order.  They like to experience order, and they like to create it.  Policy, protocols, rules, regulations—those are the tools of their craft.  We need these logical, rules-focused thinkers in the world.  They shape and secure our civilizations.  Without their input and influence, society might devolve into chaos.  Long may they continue in their vital works.

But …

Security experts often have a rather large blind spot.

Being rules-focused, they often cannot put themselves in the mind-frame of those who are thrill seekers, daredevils, extremists.  Those who color outside the lines.  The tricksters.  The pranksters.  The disruptors.  Someone who, for example, feels hypnotically drawn to leap off a 1,368 foot-tall building.  Or to scale a forty-story spire.  Those who not only bend the rules, but break them into a million splinters, whether for a zealous cause, or just for the sheer fun of it.

Picture a middle aged security director, still fit but starting to run a bit flabby.  When he sees a multi-story jumble of scaffolding at the base of a high-rise for which he’s responsible, what does he see?

An obstacle.

A deterrent.

Who would be loony enough to try to navigate that maze of planks and supports?

Similarly, when he looks at a one-foot gap in a fence, he thinks, Who would be daft enough to try to squeeze through there?

Many—though certainly not all—security personnel have a mental bias toward the logical, sensible, and predictable.  It is difficult for them to conceive of what a mercurial personality would do.  A thrill-seeking daredevil.  A mentally disturbed person.  An anarchist.  A terrorist.  How can a logically minded security leader anticipate and design against the incursions of the illogical—of the disruptor?

To a parkour daredevil like the Weehawken teen, the jumble of scaffolding at the base of 1 WTC didn’t look like a deterrent.  It beckoned him like a playground.  And the enormous spire didn’t scare him.  It drew him like candy.  Most of us would have been scared to death clinging to the slender spire, almost two-thousand feet above Manhattan.  For the teen it was exhilarating.  It was victory.

And to BASE jumpers like the Freedom Tower trio, the roof of 1 WTC emitted a siren song, calling them to leap, to fly—the leap of their lives.

Disruptors don’t think like security leaders.  Being safe might be a priority (the BASE jumpers didn’t want to crash-land and die, for example, and made calculations to ensure safe jumps), but it’s not the priority.  The rush, the fun, the challenge, the danger, the blast of adrenalin, the beauty of falling past the glimmering glass--those qualities trump safety every time.

Even security leaders who can think outside the box then have to contend with stingy funding at times.  If they don’t have the budget to deploy sufficient guards, or for live camera feeds, and so forth, then they are hamstrung.

And even security leaders who can think outside of the box and have a fat budget have to contend with siloed information.  By their very nature security entities tend to hoard and guard the information that comes their way, to compartmentalize it and share it oh-so grudgingly with rival and even partner organizations.  In this fashion intelligence is fragmented, and confusion arises about which organization is responsible for which task.  Conscientious employees, unsure what is or is not their responsibility, sometimes step back and take a wait-and-see attitude.  In the meantime, the disruptors gain access to their targets and execute their pranks—or their terror missions.

So three major things are needed to improve the security of our most at-risk targets:  a) sufficient funding, b) clear communication among silos, and c) security designers who think disruptively.  With those three things we have a better chance to adequately anticipate, deter, and thwart disruptive incursions into our high-stakes locales.

Proper funding and inter-agency cooperation may be pipe dreams.  Those challenges are as old as civilization.

But it wouldn’t be that difficult to enlist disruptor insights.

* * *

It’s September 20, 2014, and a forty-two year old man jumps the White House fence.

He is not overtly brandishing a weapon, nor waving a bomb.  He’s just a guy.  He sprints like mad toward the North Portico.  It’s a distance of seventy yards.  He sprints the distance, and nobody stops him.

He enters the White House by the unlocked North Portico door, knocks over a petite, lone Secret Service agent, and races eighty yards into the heart of the ground floor.  Part of his mad dash takes him past a staircase that leads up to the President’s private residence.

Secret Service agents finally stop his mad dash.  He is taken into custody.  It turns out he is a homeless veteran coping with PTSD.  He is carrying a 3 ½-inch folding knife on his person.  He says he tried to gain access to the White House because he has something important to say to the President.  There are things (the intruder says) the President needs to know.  As the story unfolds over the next week, it becomes clear that there are things we all need to know—about the security of the White House.

It is revealed that the intruder has already come to the attention of law enforcement in recent months, multiple times, for having weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammo in his vehicle, and for strange behavior near the White House.

Early, heavily spun statements to the media claim that the intruder was stopped just inside the front door.  Within days the truth of how deeply the man penetrated the ground floor is revealed.

Almost immediately the head of the Secret Service, still relatively new to the post and having been tasked with improving the Secret Service’s performance, is publicly and privately raked over the coals by enraged (some genuinely, some theatrically, some both) politicians on the House Oversight Committee.  The head of the Secret Service resigns the day after her drubbing, citing a wish not to be a “distraction” detrimental to the investigation and the retooling of the agency.

In the days following the disruption, there is talk of drastic measures like setting up checkpoints around the White House in a one-block radius.  There is talk of adding more agents, more surveillance cameras, more this and more that.  But it becomes readily apparent to anyone following the story that what’s really needed is simply more common sense.  If a few small but crucial things had been in place—locks on the front door; alarms that weren’t muted; a heavier security presence inside the door—the incident wouldn’t have gotten so out of hand.  It’s not about big security; it’s about the right security.  And White House security has to be designed with disruptors in mind.

One thing that became clear in the wake of the incident is how heavily siloed the White House is.  There is a whole coterie of staff, including ushers, running the house, and there are Secret Service agents protecting the President and the First Family, and there is a National Parks presence, since this is a National Parks site.  So … Who knows what, and when?  How is intelligence shared?  Who is responsible for what, and when?  How did the ushers, who complained about the noise of the alarms, convince the Secret Service to mute the door alarms?  Why were ushers dictating security measures?

The detriment of the silos is underlined by an earlier incident, when someone fired a gun at the White House in 2011.  Although shots were heard and reported, agents seemed to be unable to decide what to do about them.  Dismissed by supervisory staff as probably being vehicle backfire or gunfire exchanged between gang members on the streets beyond the White House, the gun shots were not investigated.  It seems incredible in retrospect, but absent the actual sight of someone brandishing a shotgun, no one seemed able to pool data and launch an investigation or take any action, even the simple act of searching the premises for evidence of an attack.  In the absence of clear communication, clear leadership, and imagination, nothing was done.  It was left to a housekeeper to discover shattered glass and evidence of gunfire days later.  At the White House.  The President’s residence.

A similar indecision seems to have paralyzed the agents covering the White House lawn on September 20, 2014.  While it certainly might be overkill (literally) to gun down, indiscriminately, anyone running across the White House lawn, or to release the hounds to mangle the intruder, simply letting the intruder close the distance with an unlocked, unalarmed door is an unacceptable alternative.  Minimal force is indicated, as an intruder might be a mentally challenged individual, or a prankish teen, rather than a terrorist.  But some type of force should have been employed, some type of takedown.  Agents should have swarmed with TASERs or tear gas or rubber bullets—someone should have at least turned on the bl—dy lawn sprinklers.

It felt like no one knew what to do as the intruder raced across the lawn.  No one knew what to do, so everyone waited for someone else to do something—but nobody did.  Nobody stopped the intruder on the lawn, nobody raised a general alarm, and nobody swarmed the unlocked front door to help the lone, petite agent on duty fend off the disruptor.  Fail, fail, fail.

To be clear:  These agents are true patriots doing a vital and important job.  These are dedicated individuals.  But the security designs have glaring blind spots that need to be addressed.  In this instance, the disruption of the White House, think of the Star Wars Death Star principle.  A massive armored fortress might be able to defend against massive threats, but it can be curiously vulnerable to a surprise attack by a small, agile foe.  The White House might have impeccable plans in place to defend against an epic terrorist attack, but it earned an “F” for its handling of a single disruptor.  Two disruptors, if you count the incident of the sniper who shot out White House window panes in 2011.

* * *

Sufficient funding.  Communication between silos.  Insight into the minds of disruptors.

Security designers would do well to consult a variety of disruptors (and those who work with them) when designing security measures and protocols.

When designing any building or site which might be a prime terrorist target, leaders would do well to hire disruptors as consultants.  That parkour kid, with the videos all over YouTube?  That fearless BASE jumper you saw on that news show?  That ex-con who served ten years for infiltrating Fort X?  That psychotherapist who wrote the book on PTSD-driven behaviors?  That award-winning videogame designer?  That ex-con hacker?  Get those experts into the design think tanks.  They will see what the security guys miss.  They will see the gaps, the opportunities, the temptations to which security brass are often blind.

* * *

Anyone who knowingly defies the law, who trespasses at restricted sites, is taking their chances.  If caught they are going to pay consequences.  That is right and fair.

But we need to promote security leaders who are fearlessly imaginative as well as logical.  And we need to enlist disruptors in our security design and testing process.  We can never plan for every eventuality, but the disruptors’ irreverent and thrill-seeking way of looking at the world could ultimately make us all much safer.

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Leslie Le Mon is a Los Angeles-based writer, designer, and manager.  She has worked in four high-rises in Downtown LA ... and one in Hollywood.

#Security #Safety #Disruptors #Pranksters #Parkour #BASEJump