Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Josh McNeil, and John Perich to overthink Halloween including costumes, haunted houses, and the titles of Steven Seagal movies.

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Download Episode 70 (MP3)

Yes, the author is a huge dork. Now you have visual proof.

This Halloween, I fulfilled one of my lifelong ambitions by constructing my own Terminator costume. However, at my office party, only about half of my co-workers correctly identified me as a Terminator upon first glance. Most guessed “robot.”

They will be the first to be co-opted by Skynet. Robot? A Terminator is no mere robot.

My fellow Overthinkers: I know we’re facing economic and foreign policy crises in our world, but this shocking inability to recognize a hunter-killer cyborg from the future needs our full and immediate attention. We need a Terminator Awareness Campaign, and it starts now.

While Halloween is the perfect holiday for horror films, we shouldn’t give short shrift to the more family oriented fare that comes out at this time of year.  Nowadays, Halloween is arguably a kids’ festival, so it’s no surprise that Hollywood would want to cater to those who love and celebrate the holiday but are too young or, like me, too wimpy to watch The Exorcist.

Perhaps it’s fair to say, then, that there are two major genres of Halloween film: the scary and the family friendly.  (There’s also the funny or the romantic goth-y, but those subgenres are much less popular, and, moreover, the films that fall under those categories usually also fit into the aforementioned dichotomy.)  Real horror films can shock or disgust, but the very best of them terrify us by confronting us with things we are scared of in real life: dead bodies, foreigners, nature, pregnancy, clowns.  Family friendly Halloween movies, like all other family friendly films, have happy endings and seek to comfort us.  The only difference is that these films, being Halloween-based, tend to be a bit quirkier than usual.

You’d think that It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown would fit in the second category, not the first.  I disagree.  It may be the scariest Halloween movie there is.

There exist within the horror genre certain films that are concerned less with scaring you than with making you question the essential goodness of mankind.  I don’t really want to write about most of these movies, because it means that I have to think about them.   Nevertheless, if you want to kick your Halloween off with a bang – or you just enjoy counting gross-out coup with friends – you’ll want something from this list.  Of their uniquely loathsome kind, these are the most perfect examples that exist.

5) Dead Alive

This image has nothing in particular to do with the moive, btw.

This gonzo kiwi zombie movie is actually pretty tame for this list, and that’s despite the zombie sex scene, the zombie baby, the disembodied zombie gastrointestinal tract, and the infamous “lawnmower” and “ear in the soup” scenes.  Peter Jackson invests the proceedings with a dose of levity and humanism, and the central love story is just too sweet for words.  Plus, where else are you going to find a kung-fu fighting priest who dives into the thick of a zombie uprising while shouting “I kick ass for the lord!”  And yet… the various puppet effects ARE decidedly unpleasant, especially the aforementioned zombie gastrointestinal tract and the slow disintegration of the protagonist’s mother.  And just when you think there’s nothing Jackson can do to gross you out physically any more (the lawnmower sequence required fake blood to be pumped onto the set through a fire hose), the climax of the film takes a startling left turn into psychologically disgusting territory.  I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so suffice it to say that it is very surprising.  And gross.  Definitely gross.

In the aftermath of the lawnmower scene.

On the whole, Dead Alive is a remarkably enjoyable film, so much so that I do sometimes sit down and watch it again.  I always think I’m ready for that ending – that it will have lost it’s power over me.  So far, it hasn’t.

Dan O'Bannon, apparently wearing some sort of bathrobe or kimono.

If you’re any kind of a geek, you’re currently saying to yourself, “But wait, isn’t George Romero the undisputed creator of the modern zombie?” Night of the Living Dead did indeed make zombies into one of our collective nightmares. But it was Dan O’Bannon’s lesser known Return of the Living Dead that introduced some of the big “rules” for zombies that are now almost universally accepted in the genre.

What’s interesting about the zombie is that it’s the only major movie monster that didn’t reach maturity in the 30’s or 40’s. Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941) created pop culture archetypes that were pretty cemented by Pearl Harbor. There were also plenty of zombie movies being made during this period. In fact, I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Kenemore, the author of the very clever self-help guide The Zen of Zombie, and he told me one of his favorite zombie films is actually from 1941.

[As we count down to Halloween, Overthinking It presents you with a guide to some of the best in horror, compiled by our resident master, Stokes. --Ed.]

At first we were just going to do a top ten list… but after three rough drafts, I got tired of comparing apples and oranges.  Is Murnau’s atmospheric classic Nosferatu a better horror film than Hiltzik sublimely, uh, campy Sleepaway Camp?  Well obviously it is (by most rational standards of goodness)… but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to slap it in the DVD player at my Halloween party.  So instead of one top ten list, we’re bringing you four top fives, beginning with the horror comedy.

A couple of notes on the selection process:  I didn’t bother putting Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness on the list, because I couldn’t figure out anything to write about them.  Suffice it to say that if you haven’t seen them already, you should do yourself a favor and add them to your netflix cue.  I also disqualified all movies that are unintentionally funny, like the infamous Plan Nine From Outer Space.  In my experience, these movies might make you laugh, but they don’t make you happy.  That much failure crammed into 90 minutes is never anything but depressing. Now on to the winners!

I have just finished All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, the debut novel by the late Jack Torrance, and I do not hesitate to call it the greatest English work of the past 50 years. It is nothing short of a complete rethinking of what a novel can and should be.

At the risk of spoiling the book, let me repeat what you may well have heard from the tabloid press and late-night comedians. All Work consists of a single sentence, repeated over and over for hundreds of pages. Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that’s like dismissing a Pollack canvas as mere splatters of paint.

It’s true that, taken on its own, All Work is plotless. But like the best of Beckett, the lack of forward momentum is precisely the point. If it’s nearly impossible to read, let us take a moment to consider how difficult it must have been to write. One is forced to consider the author, heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence. It’s that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power.

Sadly, Mr. Torrance’s legacy has been tarnished by his widow. The couple and their young son spent the last winter of his life as caretakers of a remote mountain resort, where he put his masterpiece to paper. Mrs. Torrance has claimed that he tried to kill her and the boy in a fit of madness. Personally, I believe she is the real murderer. Mr. Torrance was found frozen to death in a hedge maze, days after his wife and son abandoned him. I find it likely that this betrayal drove him, if not to suicide, then at least to ignore his own safety during a treacherous Colorado snowstorm.

Thankfully, Mr. Torrance was able to complete All Work before his untimely death. (Although truthfully, the book’s unconventional nature makes it difficult to say whether it’s “complete” or not.) For most of his adult life, Torrance has worked as a teacher, his genius going to waste. Call it poetic justice that the resort at which he became an author is called the “Overlook Hotel.”

All Work out-moderns modernism. It surpasses post-modernism. I can only refer to it as “most-modernism.” I could easily write thousands of words on Mr. Torrance’s accomplishment, but I’ll heed the book’s advice and end my work here. Suffice to say, All Work and No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy is a shining achievement.