Session 9 or GET OUT OF MY HEAD, MOVIE!!!

Some movies scare me. Some movies make me think. And some movies get into my head and fuck around in there until I want to tear at my skull with an ice pick because it won't go away.

Session 9 is the third type of movie. I cannot stop thinking about it. Since last night after I turned it off to when I was in the shower this morning to right now as I type this review. Questions, visuals, and sounds keep swimming in my thoughts which not only make me discover more about the movie but also makes the movie more frightening with every thought I have.

Out of my head, movie!

Of course it didn't help that I was watching this alone, in the dark, at my computer, while Stac was on YIM telling me how many nightmares this movie gave her. AH the power of suggestion! Remind me to never watch something recommended by Stac in the dark again...EVER.

If you find me curled up in a fetal position in my closet, rocking back and forth as I drool on my own shoulder you'll KNOW who's fault it is.

The movie is a simple film if you try to write a synopsis. A team of asbestos workers are hired to work on an old broken down mental hospital so it can be used for office space. One of the workers finds audio tapes of therapy sessions with a patient named Mary. Mary suffers from multiple personalities and one in particular, Simon who doesn't show up until Session 9. Meanwhile, shenanigans...horrible horrible shenanigans occur to our team. To say more will be to give the movie away. And part of the fuckery of this movie is the surprises it has.

The film is one of those wonderful less is more type of movies. There is very little gore and absolutely no cat scares at all. But the very few moments of violence are intense and disturbing. You expect some evil thing to pop out of a door and scream in your face but there is never a heart stopping scare. What you do get is this overpowering feeling of dread, horror, and fear that suffocates you until you finally give in. The visuals are simply stunning using stark lighting, creepy rusting old furniture, and dilapidated rooms.

What I loved (and what disturbed me the most) about Session 9 was its use of sound. The use of screams in everyday sounds, the sounds of victims in their death throws, the strange tones of Mary's personalities, and the off putting music created the environment of the movie, making mundane images feel strange and alien.

The long shots that follow our actors from doorways to windows, sweeping across vistas of blackness as they pass a wall or a hallway make the viewer feel like someone was watching the team or workers at all times. In fact someone WAS watching them at all times. But I can't say who or it will give everything away.

The movie is all questions. From the beginning and almost to the very end. While the ending does wrap up the lose ends, it still leaves just enough mystery for the viewer to think "huh...wait..did what I see really happen?".

...crap I'm not sure what else to say about the movie without giving it away...
So before I give away spoilers and you don't want to read further let me say that if you like movies full of total mind fuckery this is a movie to check out. Don't let the slow pace and the beginning fool you. Its really freaky.

If you've seen the movie or if you like spoilers, continue on down.

SPOILERS!

Do not read further if you hate spoilers!

To tied you over, here's a picture of a kitten.

And a watermelon.

And a kitten with a watermelon.

Okay...Back to my thoughts.

So I went to do some research on IMDB...if you can call it research. What you usually find on IMDB are screeching Internet harpies claiming "OMG! This Movy is SOO nut SCARRY!!1!" on every message board. But if you wade through the crap, you can sometimes find a decent interesting post.

While reading through the forums I found that numerous people assumed that Simon was a demon. That Simon possessed Mary as a child during a moment of trauma and convinced her to kill her family. When our team of workers came in to tear the hospital apart, it awoke Simon and he took over Gordon and the cycle continued. I think that's a reasonable conclusion since the film is so ambiguous in its ending. But it really isn't the conclusion I came to.

I never really saw Session 9 as a supernatural horror film. Its creepy, strange and horribly unnerving but I really didn't see any supernatural elements in it. For me Simon isn't a demon but that deep, dark, nasty side that lurks in all of us. That dark side that threatens to come out whenever we're subject to trauma or pain or an overabundance of stress. Simon said "I live in the weak and the wounded". Both Mary and Gordon were weak and wounded. And when their time came, Simon took over and convinced them to kill. For me, knowing that Simon is an entity that lurks in all of us is far scarier than a demon someone happened to stumble upon.

I also found that the use of the camera movements were very symbolic of what was happening to Gordon. Throughout the movie he was losing his mind. He was always lurking about the building, watching his fellow team mates even though the audience never knew so. The camera would take on a voyeur style of filming with the other characters. But whenever Gordon was in the shot or the primary focus it went back to standard movie shots. VERY subtle and VERY clever.

I really don't know why this movie got me in the gut as hard as it did. But it REALLY did. Possibly because I don't like discussing my dark side. Oh I KNOW its there but I rather not have it come out. Session 9 gives us the idea that anyone at any time can turn into a monster. You can give to charity, have a loving family,or be a product of total normalcy but it still cannot stop that horrible monster from coming out of you and killing everyone. Everyone at some point feels weak and wounded and everyone at some point will fight the urge to let Simon take over.

Personally I don't want to deal with my inner Simon.

Session 9 makes you ask a lot of questions, not just about the film but about yourself as well.

Definitely worth the watch. And to sweeten the deal you can watch the entire movie on Hulu.com for free...like I did.

Trust me...its worth it.

Just don't watch it alone...in the dark....while Stacy is poking you on YIM about how this movie will drive you insane.

Okay we weren't just talking about that. We were also talking about our creepy Japanese Dolls but STILL!

The next damn film I'm going to watch is going to MUCH more light hearted.

...I have the sudden urge to pop in Nightmare on Elm Street to cleanse my pallet.

CAT FIGHT! Who will win!?!

Sorry about the late post, folks. Cins here got stuck on the split shift which screwed up her schedule.

Unfortunately I'm rather brain dead to write an in depth article so instead I am posting some fun filled discussion fodder.

CAT FIGHT!
In an all out balls to the walls cat fight, who would win?

Samara from The Ring

VS

Kayako from Ju On (aka The Grudge)


My money's on Kayako. I think she's more prone to being a sneaky bitch. Samara has to wait seven days to freakin' do anything.

And while we're at it...

Toshio from Ju On (aka The Grudge)

VS
Gage from Pet Cemetery.

I think Gage can wipe the floor with that meowing little bastard. Afterall, he's already skilled with a razor at the tender age of 2.

3 2 1

FIGHT!

Creepy Kiddie Reads

I'm a voracious reader; I taught myself to read when I was 3 years old and have never looked back. I drove my mother crazy because she'd catch me reading instead of getting ready for school, and my math teachers hated me because they'd find my copy of whatever I was reading at the time tucked into my math book.

Many of my childhood reads I still bust out and re-visit, so I thought I would share some of my favorites. Feel free to contribute your own in the comments, so that I can agree, mock, stare at you blankly, whatever I feel like doing at the moment.

The first, and most obvious is, of course, Bunnicula.



(The cover above is the version I've got.) It was written originally in 1979 by James and Deborah Howe. The writers were a contributing factor for my fascination for these books; Deborah Howe was never listed as author on any of the subsequent sequels. I found out later that she died at a very young age, and for some reason that made me love the book more, like it needed a little bit more attention.

This book is amazingly great, even now. To the best of my knowledge it's never been out of print, and it guaranteed to make a morbid kid like me happy. Bunnicula is about a family, and their adoption of an orphaned rabbit, found at a showing of Dracula. The story is told by Harold, the family dog, and the discovery by the family cat, Chester, that the bunny, named Bunnicula, is in fact.. a vampire! Shenanigans, of course, ensue.

Chester feels that Bunnicula is dangerous-- as he puts it "Today vegetables--tomorrow, the world!" and tries to kill the poor rabbit. Garlic, vegetable vamping, and bunny abuse abound! But I'll ruin it for you: since there are sequels and none of them are named "The Cat and his Rabbit Skin Rug", the rabbit lives.

The storyline is several books long now, and I think more come out occasionally. So far there is Bunnicula, Howliday Inn, The Celery Stalks At Midnight, Nighty-Nightmare, Return to Howliday Inn, Bunnicula Strikes Again, Bunnicula Meets Edgar Allen Crow, and there's also a Christmas book. These are great for kids (and those like me who are essentially over sized children), so it's a good gift idea. I still have the original copy that I got from the Troll book order when I was in third grade. Give it a read if you're like me and will read almost anything. Be like me. C'mon, all the cool (big) kids are doing it!



My next childhood favorite, one I literally read to pieces, is The Prisoner of Vampires, written by Nancy Garden and with cool illustrations by Michele Chessare.



This is a book that I find I appreciate more and more; it's intended for 9-12 year olds, but there is a lot of vampire lore in here aside from Dracula. This book references Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, as well as Lord Ruthven the Vampire (written by John William Polidori, conceived of the same night that Mary Shelly came up with Frankenstein), and Night Visitor to Croglin Low Grange, a story I didn't even get a chance to read until a few years ago. (If anyone knows who the last title is by, please share; I couldn't find anything online, and was having a hard time finding the author in the Time-Life Enchanted book it's featured in.)

The story is about a 12 year old boy named Alex. He lives in Massachusetts, and has a serious knack for getting himself into trouble. He's not a trouble maker, he just lacks common sense. Alex is a horror buff and decides to write on vampires for a school paper.

While deep in the basement of the local library (which abuts a mortuary) he ends up meeting the phenomenally creepy Radu, who promises to school him in true vampiric legend. Alex agrees, and I'm sure you could see what a huge mistake that was from space.

At the same time a strain of the flu is sweeping through their city, and soon a classmate of his teen aged sister dies. Then his sister becomes ill. It's around this time that he meets the young woman with the tight, frightening braces, scary because of what they are trying to conceal, sitting next to him on the bus.

This is still a really, really strong book, and I'm glad to have a copy. I think I'll reread this over Christmas, in fact.

I was going to go on, but this wall 'o text is threatening to crush the neighboring county. I should probably at least pretend I care, huh? Please, feel free to share more titles with me! I'm always looking for something else to read!

Cin's Top 5 Childhood Tramas

So Stac has posted a rather fab article on things that scared her shitless as a child. Well keeping in theme, and since this blog is currently in its infancy, I thought I would follow suit with the subject of childhood. As you can see, Stac has a gift for the written word. She really has a knack for writing about and describing things vividly.
Me?
I make lists.
I typo a lot and I make lists.
In fact I'm a list addict. If you toss me a top ten list chances are I will read it no matter how uninterresting the subject may be. Top ten uses for peanut butter, top ten japanese accountants in outer mongolia....
I have a problem. I will admit it.


So for my kick off post here are the top 5 films and scenes that tramatized me as a child. Any of these ring a bell or make you want to go back to therapy? Read on!


5-That Freaky Boat Ride- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Okay...what child WASN'T completely terrfied of this moment? Just about every person I talk to about this movie mentioned how this moment scarred them for life and how Gene Wilder now pops up in their nightmares to this day. Its seems Freddy Kruger and Gene Wilder are top reasons for insomnia. Just seconds before this moment we had a lovely whimsical musical number about imagination while everyone frolicked in the technicolor land of candy and rainbows. Then suddenly you've taken a hard left onto the corner of crack street and LSD avenue. The 60's where a scary time, kids.




4-The Great Owl -The Secret of NIMH
I'm still a big lover of this film. The animation is incredible and the story is wonderful. Its one of the few films that I like better than the book. But during my tender first grade years, this guy haunted my sleep. This ain't no Hedwig the owl, folks. The Great Owl is a creepy old scary bastard! And did you catch his Exorcist head turn there? UGH! I'm 32 years old and that moment still gives me the willies.






3-The Shining Commercial...JUST the Commercial.
My parents love to remind me that at one time I was terrfied of just about anything on the TV when I was a toddler. They still think my love of horror films is a blatant lie to cover up the chicken shit I was when I was a kid. Now, I don't remember this but apparently when I was very little, I would scream whenever any comercial for The Shining came on the tv. Not just a scared kid scream but a primal, blood curdling, help I am being torn apart by wild dogs scream. This caused my parents much in embarassment at many a party and sent them vaulting over furnature and relatives to turn the TV off. Luckily, I grew out of that.





2-The Vomit Monster - Poltergeist 2
I was forced to watch Poltergeist 2 against my will by my cousin who was calling me a chicken. We were around 8 years old at the time. To save face I managed to watch most of it from in between my fingers. But the vomit moster was the last straw and I hid behind the couch for the rest of the movie. Of course, now I can handle just about any horror film that makes my cousin cringe. Who's laughing NOW, Brian?!
You know what? Even as an adult this scene is pretty fucked up.




1-The Watcher in the Woods
I recently rented this movie to see if its as scary as I remember. Its not. But at the time, this was the scariest damn thing I had ever seen! My 6th grade self and my cohort at the time, Lina would watch this movie at night in the dark on the ye olde VCR and squeal in delight on how it made us jump. Now a days its pretty dated and well...kinda lame. It does have some genuinely creepy moments and Betty Davis looking like 50 miles of bad road is pretty off putting. but I would say its best for nostalgia viewing. Here's a trailer.




So there you have it! The beginings of what scared me as a kid. And as you can see, I was a huge chicken shit.

Shit What Scares Me.. PART ONE!

Hey all!

I see Cins made the inaugural post, other than my first test drive. I am Stac, one of your humble hosts here on our delightfully dark corner of the internet.

I think this blog is going to be an interesting experience; for starters, we're both (obviously) female. And not only girls, oh no! We're girlie girls, baby! We're just morbid as well, and have an instinctual understanding and enjoyment of making people uncomfortable. But we might talk about shoes, too. Mmm.. shoes..

So we thought we should each talk about childhood, and the trauma that each of us received during that time. Let's be honest; childhood is a scary, scary place. If you want a book that perfectly encompasses the weird magic and horror that kids go through, I recommend Coraline, written by Neil Gaiman. I know mine was alternately populated with some of the happiest times of my life and some of the worst nightmares I've ever had.

One of my most prominent fears, ironically, was horror movies. I was the master of what I named "the accidental walk-through". I would "accidentally" (on purpose) walk through the living room as my parents or my much older siblings were watching something horrible. For some damn reason I always did this at the worst fucking possible time. Poltergeist in particular comes to mind. I always saw one of two parts: Robbie Freeling getten eaten by the tree and Carol Ann's subsiquent absorbtion by her closet, or the paranormal researcher having the happy fantasy about ripping his damn face off.

I was around Carol Ann's age when I saw this. I'm sure you can imagine my joy at being alone, in the dark, in my room after that. Or being around the t.v when it was set to a dead channel. I didn't actually see Poltergeist all the way through until after I was living on my own. I immediately fell in love, and discovered a lot more to the movie than the scares. It's now one of my favorite movies!

Another childhoood terror was The Blob. I saw that movie, of course, way too young, and my older brother quickly discovered it was an effective way to drive me out of the living room. I know I saw the black and white version (with Steve McQueeen! HA!), but the version that scared me the worst was Son of the Blob, directed, bizarrely, by Larry Hagman.

Master Tony managed to cast a guy who looked horribly like my dad. Watching bright red protoplasm eat your father during your formative years tends to leave a wrinkle; as a result I couldn't sleep with anything red on my bedroom floor for years.

I recently rewatched the 1988 remake of The Blob, starring Kevin Dillon's mullet and Shawnee Smith. It's a good movie. One I absolutely could not comfortably watch. The blob still scares me too badly, it seems. Isn't it weird how some stuff we get over, and other things linger, reminding you of the horrified four year old you once were?

I was also afraid of Freddy, Jason, all of the slasher regimin, but we've since made our peace and become pretty decent friends. The blob and I, however, have absolutely nothing to say to each other.

One last fear, and then I'll wrap, for now. This one is non- movie connected, and didn't actually become a full blown fear until I was a very young teenager.

My grandparents both live in northern California: my paternal set in Arcata, and my maternal grandmother in Eureka. My parents would take us to visit frequently, and I loved the house in Arcata, where my dad's parents still live. It's an old farmhouse, more than a century old now, and I've loved every nook and cranny of it for as long as I can remember. It's old, it creaks, it has a ghost, and it sits on a few acres, with giant cyprus trees backing it, and a walnut tree in the side yard.

But as I got older there was one area that I came to love less and less: the closet under the staircase. It's weird; as a kid I loved that closet. That's where Grandma kept the box of toys for us, and my cousin Micheal, my kid brother T.W and I all loved to play in the back of the closet, which tapers down due to the stairs. It was our hide out, and we even discovered a strange little area that had been wall papered but not dry walled off. (we found it by shredding the old cloth wall paper. Let it never be said that property damage has no benefits.)

The area was weird; we took a flash light in, and it's essentially just the space under the lowest step on the stairs above.It was just big enough for two of the three of us (around nine, eight and seven years in age, respectively) to squeeze in, so long as we were sitting. Why it was blocked off, and in such a half-assed fashion, I have no idea. But I do know that this is when the discomfort started.

I lived with my grandparents when I was fifteen, for a school year. That whole year I lived in mortal dread of that closet. I frequently heard things when I was home alone, but only when I was home alone. The door would never stay caught because a spring in the door knob was broken, so the door would often open its self. There was only one bathroom in the house, and it was downstairs, basically underneath my bedroom. Can you imagine what that does to your bladder when you're creeping through the dark, trying to convince yourself that some jibbering, ribbon-fleshed horror isn't going to suddenly spring out at you, and then hearing the soft click of that damn door opening, just as you walk by? It makes your bladder want to void, that's what!

There are other stories I could tell, like the time as a ten or eleven year old that I saw a strange man looking in the backdoor window at me one night, but this wall of text extends far enough for now. Maybe I'll post those another time? Maybe I'll forget.