The Queue: What have we here?

It’s pumpkin season, people. I don’t mean the season of everything being pumpkin flavored (though there is that too), but the gloriously spooky season which the jack-o-lantern has come to symbolize. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer, and who knows what’s lurking in the dark.

So let’s cover some questions, and celebrate the season.

I’m a sucker for everything in Nightmare Before Christmas, though I would bypass what are likely the obvious choices for “Oogie Boogie’s Song.” I love Oogie’s theatrics. “Grim Grinning Ghosts” is another favorite, but by virtue of it being a short segment of an amusement ride soundtrack, it is a bit brief.

But I expect an answer from everyone, now. We can’t properly celebrate the season without a good soundtrack.

I’ve heard other grumblings about this, but mine aren’t among them; I’m perfectly happy to hearth into the middle of town, a few steps away from anything I need.

The Haunting (1963). It’s great precisely because it never shows you anything. You don’t meet a ghost or a monster. It’s in the atmosphere, the sound, your head.

That’s the thing about scary movies. Or at least I think that’s the thing about scary movies. The more they show you, the more they present the horror as a visible thing you can see, analyze, and understand, the less scary it becomes. It’s the imagination that conjures terror beyond what you can see on screen.

Lots of modern movies go the way of flashy CGI, showing how detailed their effects can be, how elaborate their monsters. Or they go for buckets of blood and gore, gruesome scenery. But subdued stories can be all the scarier for what they don’t show.

I think similarly monsters are at their best in such films when they are lightly used. Guillermo del Toro does some great monsters, and I think for two reasons: firstly, his films themselves are full of so much atmosphere it almost overwhelms, you are almost overwhelmed before you see the monster; and secondly because it’s almost always Doug Jones in a rubber suit. It sounds silly when I write it like that, I know, but there’s a physicality to practical effects that can make them feel more real than another CGI monster, and Doug Jones is singularly talented at bringing unusual creatures to life, giving them uniquely alien sorts of movements that somehow feel believable, real.

But when I think about terrifying monsters, I think about one in particular: the alien in Alien (1979). Today we know all about the alien in these movies. We’ve seen them in great detail. But in Alien we mostly saw the terrifying facehuggers, the destructive chestbursters (admittedly, which fell more on the gore side), and of the alien itself we mostly saw its extended series of mouths, through the smoke. The fact that you had no idea of what the rest of that thing was made it all the more terrifying. (How many more mouths could it have? And where are they??) I guarantee you that every image in my head was more terrifying than the whole alien we saw later. (Or did the mouth thing not happen until Aliens? Either way, still very creepy.)

Whatever it is, it should be topped by a tiny pumpkin made of icing. It’s October! It has to be topped with a tiny pumpkin made of icing. I’m pretty sure that’s the law, though I suppose the scale of the pumpkin could vary.

Well, I suppose I’d celebrate any holiday with cookies. When, exactly, are we supposed to celebrate her blessed Azsharaness, though?

Okay, Queue, I’m calling it a day. I’ll see you in the comments section and we’ll all hopefully be back next week.