Recent Stories with tag halloween

Halloween is almost upon us, which means time to trick or treat, consider our own mortality and/or revel in it, or just take the convenient excuse and dress slutty.  It's also a good time to watch scary movies, which have been airing pretty much nonstop lately on AMC and IFC (if you've got the cable).  If not, you can always head over and visit our good friends at Scarecrow Video.  Here, we've got a few recommendations for you:

Constance: Pretty much anything by Tim Burton--because he's TIM BURTON--is good for Halloween. But for true horror, I like The Craft. Neve Campbell whines, Fairuza Balk scowls, Skeet Ulrich smirks...the only thing wrong with this movie is that there is no teen-witch-orgy scene. Otherwise, it's utter perfection, right down to Robin Tunney's weave, which is arguably the scariest part of the film. It's HORRIFYING!

And The Witches of Eastwick, in which a great cast does their very best to make a terrible film and succeeds. It's a trainwreck: Nicholson drunkenly shreds scenery, while the four main actresses spin in place. The script is so uneven that it requires a backhoe, and director George Miller was so busy fighting with the producers that he let the production spiral out of control. By the end, I just can't look, which is fine because the ending makes no sense, and in fact has no relation to the rest of the movie at all, it was just a way to use up the rest of the FX budget. Oh, the HORROR!

Jeremy: Okay, there's lots of great horror movies out there, but these days, the best of them are usually cross-genre works, a la Shaun of the Dead (horor-rom-com?), or ironic comments on horror movies, because apparently we're all too knowing to actually ever enjoy a scary movie. For my money, I've only seen one outright horror movie--no irony, no meta--made in the last decade or so, which actually managed to be scary: the Spanish zombie flick [REC]. Sadly, this movie was awfully remade as Quarantine in the US a couple years ago, but the remake pales in comparison (in [REC] you don't actually want the main characters to die). The ending actually induced nerve-wracking tension and at least one scream. So, um, yeah. Seriously. Check it out.

Seth: I do not like scary movies, they make me whimper like a girl. I saw The Shining when I was 16 and I couldn't sleep well for a week. It features Jack Nicholson playing himself. I suggest the Halloween classic It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, with music by Vince Guaraldi. Lovable Charlie Brown awaits the appearance of the legendary Great Pumpkin. Existentialist hijinks ensue. Airs at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday nights on KOMO-4.

Constance:  I'm with Seth, I don't like actual scary movies. They *scare* me, and I'm high strung. If I had to be serious or something, three movies that kept me from sleeping are:

1. Hound of the Baskervilles, 1939, starring Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce.
2. Cat People, 1942 (the 1982 remake with Natasha Kinski is more sexy than scary)
3. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956 (not the 1979 remake with Donald Sutherland, never seen that one)

RvO:  Constance, you named a couple of great ones. Hound is fantastic, and at the end, Rathbone actually says "Quick, Watson, the needle!" referencing Holmes' lamentable cocaine addiction. As for the 1979 Body Snatchers, it's actually very, very good. It has a great final scene and Kevin McCarthy, the star of the '56 version, shows running down the highway yelling, "They're here! They're here!," a nice riff on what should have been the finale of the earlier film.

Clint: Cue the hollowly-screeching Donald Sutherland pod-clone: I watched that Snatchers a couple of weekends ago to see if it was as horrifying as my still-bruised inner child's psyche believed.

It is.... (more)

Wednesday, October 27th

• It doesn't make total sense to us either, but if you want to be in a Ford Fiesta-related Hulu reality show, grab your road rally teammate and head out @ Pyramid Alehouse
• Tonight gives you the veritable indie rock sophie's choice between Deerhunter @ the Showbox, Women and Elf Power @ the Vera Project, or the surely completely wackadoodle stage show of Of Montreal and Janelle Monae @ the Paramount
• Edward Albee's "charming, vicious, and wretched" Three Tall Women opens @ the Seattle Rep
• The Beetlejuice/Poltergeist double-feature continues @ Central Cinema
• Girish Karnad's play Broken Images, starring Shabana Azmi, has a one-night-only performance @ Benaroya Hall
• Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Andrew Tsao, opens @ the UW's Hughes Penthouse Theater

Thursday, October 28th

• It's a night of music and raising money for non-profits at TeamUp4TeamUp with Grand Hallway, Lindsay Fuller, and the Royal Bear @ the Hard Rock
• It's the last night for sparse Swedish drama (is there any other kind?) The Anchorage @ NWFF
• The First Annual First Hill Pumpkin Carving Contest kicks off at 6 @ Vito's
• Queer comedy with Three Geeks One Mic @ Eclectic Theatre
• Seattle Police Chief John Diaz talks with Seattle Channel's urbane C.R. Douglas @ Seattle Central Public Library
• Halloween kicks off early, with a free show with Champagne Champagne + Ononos @ Neumo's

Friday, October 29th

• The documentary on singer Feist, Look at What the Light Did Now, makes its Seattle debut @ the Henry Art Gallery
• Dr. Dog and Here We Go Magic serve up plenty of delicious pop goodness @ Showbox SoDo
• How about a gloomy Danish...prince? It's opening night of Hamlet @ Seattle Shakespeare Co.
• Modern Dance behind the Pink Door, Alice Gosti's quarterly dance event @ the Pink Door
• Expect zombies to make appearances all over town @ ZomBCon
• There's a 21+ "Spooky Soirée" (costume party/fundraiser for street kids) with Jason & Molly Mesnick of "The Bachelor" and other celebrity guests  @ The Hawk's Nest Sports Bar and Grill
• Anthony Sonnenberg (a UW MFA student) hosts a Highly Opinionated Public Tour of the art @ SAM
• Kremerata Baltica, led by Gidon Kremer, give you a little Bartok, Schumann, Pärt, and Nyman @ Benaroya Hall

A red ruffed lemur explores a pumpkin at Woodland Park Zoo's Pumpkin Bash. The event, held Sat.-Sun., Oct. 30-31, treats the zoo's animal residents to pumpkins and zoo-goers to trick-or-treating, live entertainment and more. Photo credit: Dennis Dow/Woodland Park Zoo

Saturday, October 30th

• It's just a jump to the left. Costumes and props encouraged at two showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show @ the Theatre at Meydenbauer Center
• Even with Elliott's Slurp Up and Oyster New Year, there's still room for more all-you-can-eat seafood ($35 tickets available only by calling 206-728-8595), with the 8th annual Oyster Frenzy @ Flying Fish
• Sweet and newly-schizophrenic Sufjan Stevens is sold out @ the Paramount, but there's still tix available to the fuzzed-out lo-fi of Best Coast @ Neumo's
• Chop Shop North, a new extension of Eva Stone's popular East Side Dance Fest, kicks off @ Edmonds Community College...

Do you have a favorite Halloween-themed or scary book, story, or poem? Let us know in the comments!

In the meantime, check out this week's readings and signings, brought to you with some truly horrifying haiku.

10/25/10 6 p.m. Pilot Books
Writer's Group
"New exercises every week. Come prepared to write and discuss." Aye, Cap'n!

10/25/10 6:30 p.m. Secret Garden Books
Christina Wilsdon
For Horse-Crazy Girls Only
Kids can nab a blue ribbon at this launch party.

10/25/10 7 p.m. Elliott Bay Book Company
Yiyun Li
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
Yiyun conjures hope
with rare delicacy in
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.

10/25/10 7:30 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Cristina Eisenberg
The Wolf's Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades and Biodiversity
Do you remember
the old program, Wild Kingdom?
The food chain at work.

10/25/10 7:30 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Ingrid Betancourt
Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle
Six years captive of
Columbian terrorists
yet she lives to speak.... (more)

Even famous authors aren't famous faces. Unlike Britney Spears or Brad Pitt, the average writer can walk through a crowd of fans and not be recognized by a single person. For most authors, that is considered a perk, not a problem.

Authorial anonymity may be on its way to the boneyard, though. Last month, literary news website GalleyCat threw down the gauntlet and asked "Should authors dance?" initiating a drive to get a writer on the TV reality show Dancing with the Stars.

Inspired by the successful campaign to get Betty White on SNL, GalleyCat launched a Facebook petition, and the votes are in: Claire Cook, author of seven novels, is the winner. GalleyCat will send a final version of the petition to the producers of Dancing with the Stars, along with our best wishes. Seriously, Ms. Cook has got to be a better choice for a guest star than Bristol Palin.

Speaking of famous faces, 80's heart-throb Andrew McCarthy, once known for brat pack movies like Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo's Fire, has won 2010 Travel Journalist of the Year in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition. McCarthy has made quite a career in journalism, appearing in Slate, The Atlantic, and National Geographic Traveler.

Famehound Tucker Max, who was in town last week promoting Assholes Finish First, got a boost this week when San Francisco bookstore Books, Inc. featured his title in a Halloween end-row display, under the heading "Oh, the horror!" (See photo.) I couldn't agree more. Author Mike Adamick is the shutterbug who shared the joy with the Interwebs, bless his heart.... (more)

Oh, corn. It's in everything we eat, we hope to power our cars with it someday, and when October rolls around, we even go play in it. Truly, Americans have a corn problem. But of the three, the last really is the best: October is prime agritainment time, with corn mazes opening up around the region offering a fine excuse to get out of the city on the weekend, whether you've got kids or not.

For a lot of people, a corn maze and pumpkin patch sounds like family-friendly hell if you don't have kids, but the truth is, they're actually a great way to spend a weekend day, and an excuse to get a better pumpkin than you can find at Safeway. There's basically three types of people who go to the mazes: horny local teens (who come out in droves for "haunted" mazes nearer Halloween, which are never worth the effort), families, and hip urbanites.

There's a lot of variation between "corn mazes," some of which aren't really mazes at all. And while five years ago plenty of farms offered little more than a roadside fruit stand... (more)