Halloween: Go Obscure of Go Home: An Homage to G. Kuchar

This is what I'm going to be for Halloween: Nurse Ginger from George Kuchar's 1975 film, The Devil's Cleavage. I am aware that 99% of the people I encounter with this costume will have no idea what I am specifically (unless people actually read this blog entry). However, Halloween is about enjoying yourself and being someone different for a night. It doesn't really matter if people know what my character is, I just know it will still creep people out. And it's not me, so that's step one of having a great costume. Oh no, I'm not a sexy nurse, not a zombie nurse, just a nurse with severe makeup that carries a bottle of fake vomit with her. You know.

Me on 10/31/11

 

Halloween is also about respecting the dead. Director George Kuchar passed away on September 6th of this year. And it was just this year that my love for the films of him and his brother Mike was ignited. After viewing the documentary, It Came From Kuchar, I realized I had seen one of his movies in a film class: Hold Me While I'm Naked.  The film really touched me in it's pre-Water's campyness, but I never knew about the other films until recently. George was teaching film at San Francisco Art Institute and still making awesomely weird movies until his death. 

So this year, in honor of a great film-maker/makeup artist, and a weird character, I will try to do Ginger justice. Stay tuned to see the finished product.

Nightmares in Red White and Blue

Have you ever recalled one of your dreams and really analyzed it? Did you gather all the elements and realize that they represented deeper desires and fears you have in the material world... and that you are really f'ed in the head?
We could say from looking at what America has produced in cinema, that America has it's own collective conciousness. America's hopes and fears are fairly obvious up front, but when America dreams and makes art, something very scary comes out.
Nightmares in Red, White and Blue is an excellent documentary for the horror buff, history buff, and anyone asking the question, "Why the heck are American's obsessed with violence?"

If you enjoyed Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments (one of my top favorite countdown shows!) you will love Nightmares. You see the evolution of the horror movie genre shaped by social upheavals, changes in standards, politics, and most importantly, war.

Psychologically, we see the movie monsters alter to society's changing fears.  In 1910 Thomas Edison made a film adaptation of Mary Shelly's Frankenstien. A decent attempt at adapting a novel to film, it was a failure in theaters. It wasn't until after The Great War (WWI), when men were coming back injured and deformed like from no other war in history, film makers responded with the horror genre. They made their "monsters" mortal men who were hideous and cast aside by society, their ill fate causing them to be bitter and evil.

Nightmares explains how each decade's events, events that shapped the American psyche, were latently placed in horror movie topics, such as foreign evil-doers, body snatching, atomic insects, zombies, etc. Post Manson murders (and the end of the hippie era in general) gave way to extreme sexual blood lust movies, films about gangs of murderers senselessly terrorizing good people, and movies about the occult.

You thought that the b-movies, exploitation and slasher films were just mindless fun, but like the rings in a tree trunk, they reflect our own history back to us. So you sit down with America. Because you love America, you read between the lines of their dream journal and say,
"America, that's some heavy stuff. I think you might be paranoid about communists, have ptsd from the war, and were disenchanted by how the hippie movement went. Maybe you should talk to someone... Pft! Who am I kidding!? Repression is the backbone of these films. Get off on the blood and violence, or enjoy the allegory, who really cares? You got a good thing going America, don't change."