Weekly Watchlist: October 1st to 7th, 2017 [Pt. 2]

Watching movies this first week of October was not only interrupted by the various television shows I was bingeing (on top of my normal duties as a stay at home dad) but also a free HBO weekend on Hulu. Once I discovered that HBO had made their library free to all Hulu customers until Monday morning, that became all I watched. I knew I wouldn't be able to get through a series, but I watched as many movies as I could, focusing primarily on the Oscar nominated films I had not yet been able to catch. Of course a horror film or two snuck in there, but it just wasn't my priority over that weekend, meaning the 1st, and part of the 2nd, contained very little in the way of seasonal viewing. What follows below is the complete list of what I watched this week, and some brief discussion about a few of the more noteworthy films.

The Films:

Circle (2015) This one hopped to the top of my Netflix queue due to a very loose connection I have to it. Or should I say, my wife has. One of her coworkers is dating an actress who appeared in the film, and my wife said it had sounded interesting. She was right; it did sound interesting. A group of 30-some people awake to find themselves standing in a completely black room, circled around a podium where an orb sits and occasionally crackles with electric energy. The people are standing shoulder to shoulder, each in their own red circle. If they step out of the circle, the orb in the center of the room shoots out some lightning and kills them. If they try to touch another person, the orb kills them. Every two minutes someone is killed by the orb, and the people in the circle quickly conclude that they can vote for each other, and the person with the most votes gets killed off. Circle is one of those high-concept sci-fi films full of psychological hokum that I almost always enjoy, like Cube, Coherence, After, or the similarly premised Belko Experiment. Circle is also a film I happened to not enjoy.

I think my main problem with it was the pacing, and the speed at which the story moves before it slows down a bit towards the end. The characters all figure everything out way too quickly, within the first ten minutes, in order to get to what the filmmakers probably considered the meat of the story: how groups of people will turn on each other to survive. The problem is that this removes any real mystery or sense of discovery from the beginning of the film, as we're presented with the rules very early on and then just have to watch increasingly shrill and awful people decide to kill the weakest among them. This also leads to some groan-worthy exposition and leaps of logic as people figure out how to control who gets killed with no real effort, just some quickly babbled nonsense. At first I thought this implied a mole in the group, but (spoiler alert) no, it was just lazy writing There was also a problem with the pacing of the film, as I said. The orb kills someone every two minutes, no more no less, and so the dwindling group of survivors has two minutes to talk and try to discover a way out of their predicament once somebody is killed. The film is presented in real time, yet for the first 20 minutes of the film the orb often gives the group much less than 2 minutes, while by the end it's giving more than that amount. A small quibble, maybe, but it was annoying.

The Purge: Election Year (2016) My second year working at Halloween Horror Nights the theme was The Purge, and it was decidedly un-Halloween. Guests would walk around a corner and someone in an intentionally cheap mask (mimicking the masks in the film, of course) wearing a tuxedo would walk up and point a gun at their heads. Sometimes people with chainsaws would lunge at them, too. I was disappointed all season long, because nothing about it seemed appropriate, or in the proper spirit. Personally, I would not consider the Purge films to be horror, or at least I would consider them horror in only the loosest sense. I'm not trying to be a pedant here, but the films have just never been scary, and don't really seem interested in scaring people beyond a couple obligatory jump scares. The only thing that causes the films to be filed under horror are their general aesthetic and focus on gore. I would actually consider the films to be grimier-than-most action flicks. But these films are categorized as horror, and labels can be so slippery when discussing genre films anyway, so I'll go ahead and add it to the scorecard for my Halloween viewing.

Or perhaps I should be more forgiving to the Purge films. Certainly they do what all great horror movies do by tapping into a prevalent fear of the day. These days, when we have more mass shootings then there are days in the year, when every large gathering brings with it the fear that some madman with a gun will choose to cut down dozens of civilians, when every parent worries about not whether their child will fit in at school, but whether one of their classmates came to school with their parent's gun, and our elected politicians respond to the largest mass shooting we've seen by explaining to us why we can't do anything about gun violence, the Purge films do tap into something. It certainly seems in this country that we've become resigned to random mass shootings, and it's beginning to feel like the victims of those shootings are our sacrificial offerings in order to live in America. In that light, a film about an annual culling of the poor and helpless orchestrated by wealthy politicians seems like the perfect vehicle for exploring very real anxieties. It's so obvious that you can't even call it a metaphor; the films directly address the world we live in today. The problem is, the Purge films just aren't very good.

The original Purge was a forgettable home invasion film that introduced the concept of an annual murder-fest in a film that never actually revolved around said murder-fest. It was decent enough, bolstered mainly by Ethan Hawke giving it his all in a film that did not deserve it, and the reliable thrills of vicariously watching characters mount a makeshift defense of their home. I had a lot of issues with both the plot and also the general world building of the film, as the purge did not make sense to me. Not only could I not see it actually becoming the law of the land, but I had serious questions about how the rules of that society as presented would function. Putting that aside, the biggest flaw was that The Purge never became about the purge, it was a standard home invasion flick with some lip service towards dystopian horror. The second film, The Purge: Anarchy, was a massive improvement over the first, and while not a film I've ever felt driven to revisit, it was one I actually enjoyed. It took the major problems of the first film and seemed to address them all. The world was fleshed out significantly by shifting the focus from one family being stalked by rich kids to an ensemble piece focusing on several characters over the night in question. The film's varied locales and multiple points of view pointed a way towards the Purge films becoming almost an anthology series of desperate characters struggling against a violent dystopian society.

At first glance Purge: Election Year continues to make good on the promise of the second film. It expands our knowledge of the world by shifting the focus to politics, and also to the groups of people who try to fight the purge (a pair of women who drive around in a fortified ambulance and help victims when they find them, an underground resistance movement focused on more violent means of governmental overthrow). In practice, however, the film represents a marked step backwards. Not only is Election Year the cheapest looking of the Purge films by far, it features some of the weakest acting in the series, and definitely the worst dialogue. Five minutes in I had lost count of how many times various characters had used the word 'cunt' in casual conversation.

By the end of the film I had quite lost interest in any of the events, and lost track of the plot for awhile as my mind drifted off to more engaging things. I realized I am probably done with The Purge, though I see a fourth film is in development for release next year, and I have to admit I'll probably watch it eventually.

A Ghost Story (2017) Lest you think I watched nothing but shitty movies all week, I did watch at least one film I believe is destined to become a classic. A Ghost Story's release came and went with generally positive, but also pretty divisive critical reactions. Myself I'm going to have to watch the film again and spend some time pondering it's dreamlike conception of our place within the vastness of time, but I do want to list it here as a recommendation. The film has a deliberate and elliptical pace that may not be for everyone, and certainly its level of pretension is higher than that of your average blockbuster, but I've always been a fan of pretension, and of unconventional chronology in films. A Ghost Story is definitely not a horror film, despite its title and the fact that it is about a literal ghost, but it is a very moving and engaging piece of work. The central image, of a ghost that is actually just the old Halloween standby of a sheet with eyeholes cut into it, may strike some as amusing at first, but it evolves to become a strikingly evocative and expressive figure. Worth your time.

The Incident (2014) This is the feature length debut from Isaac Ezban, who seems eager to make a name as the Mexican Rod Serling. I'd seen his second feature, The Similars, previously, and his contribution to the Mexican horror anthology Mexico Barbaro, and while neither film exactly set my world on fire, they did intrigue me enough to check this one out. At the time I said about The Similars that it was an odd, funny movie, but that I wasn't sure how in on the joke the filmmakers were. It was such a ridiculous concept with such ridiculous visuals (while sheltering in a bus station during a near-apocalyptic storm a group of strangers all begin transorming into the same bearded man), but also treated completely seriously. It was as if the film had no real sense of humor about itself. It was not a great film, but it appealed to me for many of the reasons I cited above when discussing Circle. It also explicitly acknowledged its debt to The Twilight Zone through some voiceover and distressed visual style meant to evoke an older lost film.

The Incident is very much more of the same. The film follows to parallel storylines, one in the present day, and on in the mid-eighties. The first storyline follows two criminal brothers and the cop that is chasing them. After trying to escape through their apartment's stairwell, one of the brothers is shot by the cop, and they find the stairwell has become an eternal loop. Going down to the first floor takes them back to the 9th, and going up takes them to the 1st. In the second storyline, set 35 years earlier, a married couple and two children embark on a roadtrip to take the children to visit their biological father. On a deserted stretch of highway the daughter begins suffering an asthma attack, and when they turn around to race back home and get her inhaler, the family discovers the highway has become... an eternal loop. Are the two stories connected? I think you can figure that part out on your own.

I enjoyed The Incident at about the same level, and for many of the same reasons, as The Similars. In fact I was ready to say that The Incident was the superior film, as it seemed to have a firmer grasp on the message it was trying to convey. The film has some interesting things to say about how violence can be almost like a physical illness, passed on from perpretator to victim to witness, creating an endless chain going on to the end of time. It ruined that, however, in a silly ending that tries to hard to explain what was already obvious, and by bringing in some really ridiculous metaphysical elements that were not even hinted at in the preceding film. Anyone who's read this far will probably have a good idea of whether they'd want to see it or not, but I would call it a qualified recommendation for those looking for a little Twilight Zone weirdness.

Elsewhere in the week I also watched The Attic (2007), a horror film from Mary Lambert, director of Pet Sematary, and starring  Mad Men's Elizabeth Moss. It's a film that is almost inconcievably bad, considering it was made by an experienced director who has done good work in the past. It's not just a creative misfire, but a laughably amateurish production that should be expunged from her record. In response to wasting time on The Attic, I lost any urge to watch something new and so popped in a movie I knew I would enjoy: It Follows (2014). This is my first rewatch of the year, and it will be my unending shame that I had tickets to the AFI Festival screening of this film in 2014, and skipped out on going because I was too tired after a long day of work. It Follows is a genuine masterpiece, and even on second viewing had me on the edge of my seat.

I watched a Godzilla flick with my daughter: Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah. My daughter is an emerging Godzilla fan, and I was happy to revisit one of the Heisei films, featuring one of my favorite running exchanges about peoples inability to grasp that a spaceship is actually a time machine (a gag ruined by the fact that I originally watched this film dubbed, and the subtitling, which is probably more accurate, simplifies the exchanges). Through Shout Factory's website I streamed Bad Moon (1996), a werewolf film I had somehow never watched. It was fairly mediocre, but I always enjoy a monster. I also thought that, for the time, the digital composite effects used to create the transformation, while nowhere near as good as something practical like American Werewolf in London, were still surprisingly solid. Also on Scream Factory I checked out Nomads (1986), which I only knew about from seeing the cover in the video store as a kid. It was surprisingly dull and convoluted, with Pierce Brosnan trying out the worst and most inconsistent French accent I think I've ever heard.

It Comes at Night (2017) was an artful post-apocalypse of the killer virus variety. The film never explains exactly what is going on, but relies in part on our overfamiliarity with the genre to dispense with the boring expositionary scenes and get straight to the dramatic struggle between the survivors in their isolated refuge. I found it a handsomely staged production on all accounts that still never quite wowed me. And finally, Long Weekend (1978) was the most surprising film of the week. A nature run amok film from Australia, Long Weekend follows a truly despicable married couple as they go on a weekend camping trip, seemingly to save their marriage. Along the way they casually kills a variety of animals and destroy their environment by throwing their waste everywhere, until the very earth itself seems to rise up in revolt. I went in expecting a gonzo horror film with animals attacking and maybe some shocking gore, but ended up watching a surprisingly eerie film about two people being swallowed by nature. It was truly creepy, and more haunting than horrific. One that I'll definitely be returning to.

To see my numerical ratings, and follow along with everything else I'm watching, you can check out my letterboxd profile here: https://letterboxd.com/theworkingdead/

Weekly Watchlist: October 1st to 7th, 2017 [Pt. 1]

Well, this Halloween sure is off to a slow start for me. I'm watching horror movies when I can (which is, as always, not as often as I'd like), reading some spooky stories before bed, working on some seasonal writing projects both solo and with my pal Rik (proprietor of The Cinema 4 Pylon, and my partner in We Who Watch Behind the Rows and Visiting & Revisiting), but still it just doesn't feel like Halloween yet. Partly that may be due to the weather, which has turned unseasonably warm once again after a few refreshing weeks of near-autumnal cool in September (well, Autumnal for Southern California, which isn't really very cool at all). The biggest factor, I feel, is that this year I'm not working the Halloween Horror Nights event at Universal Studios, which I did for the last three years.

Halloween Horror Nights worked as a great jumpstart to the season, beginning my Halloween in mid-September when I would begin spending four nights a week down at the Bates Motel, in the open night air surrounded by Walking Dead zombies the first year, Purge killers the second year, and killer clowns the third. It was without a doubt the most fun thing I've ever been paid for. My first year I was a new hire, but my second and third years I went back as a team lead in charge of the Bates Motel. I loved it each year, even the third year, when various managerial frustrations became so bad that I almost walked away from the event and rejoined day operations in the park. Even though I would come home with a laundry list of complaints every night, and I really was annoyed and frustrated, part of me also still loved it. Just to be in that location, seeing and hearing people getting scared all night, spending time with my coworkers who were uniformly great, eating lunch at a table packed with zombies, was great. It relaxed me in a way, though I spent each night on my feet and running back and forth putting out fires (figuratively, of course). 

This year I am without that framework that would normally get me into the Halloween spirit, but on top of that, I am fully unemployed. I don't necessarily mind that part, as it has been allowing me to spend the last few weeks as a stay-at-home dad, taking care of my kids and preparing meals and trying to relax. but it does have some very real drawbacks. And lets not even get into the socio-political landscape we live in, which seems to become more nightmarish with every passing day. I want to say that I am not actively depressed, and am generally in a pretty good mood every day, but all of these things together have left me feeling less seasonally festive than normal.

All of that will hopefully explain why I got a bit of a late start on my Halloween viewing this year. While I usually begin the month of October with a vague framework of movies and books set aside to watch and read, this year I've been playing it by ear. What follows is the list of what films and television shows I've been watching so far to get into the Halloween mood.

The Television Shows:

I want to briefly discuss a show I did not watch this week, but that more or less started the ball rolling in my Halloween preparations. Stan Against Evil,  the horror-sitcom from comedian Dana Gould that is about to begin its second season on IFC. If I were to be strictly objective about the show, it would in no way convey how much I actually enjoyed watching it. If I were being brutally honest, I would say that much of the Stan Against Evil is overly familiar, the jokes all seem a bit too easy, and the gore is primarily of the digital variety, but I would also say that I didn't mind any of that and had a lot of fun watching the show. A lot of that lies in the casting, with John C. McGinley as the title character, a recently retired sheriff in a town where, due to a witch's curse in the 1600s, every sheriff has been killed violently on the job. Stan is in fact the only sheriff ever to make it to retirement age, for reasons that are revealed in the pilot episode. Actress/comedian Janet Varney plays Stan's replacement, brought in after Stan violently assaults an elderly woman at his wife's funeral. Don't worry, the woman was a witch threatening his life, so he's not entirely unhinged.

If the show works, it's generally due to John C. McGinley's performance as the gruff ex-sheriff. The character was modeled after Dana Gould's own father, and the specificity adds a lot to the character's general appeal. I wouldn't say he has charm, because he's never less than insulting or intentionally offputting towards every other character we meet, but it's hard not to like McGinley in the role. McGinley specializes in verbose macho jerks, and it would be easy to just slot his Dr. Cox character from Scrubs into this series, but McGinley turns down his normal energy for a much more grounded New England stoicism.

I began watching Stan Against Evil on the night of the day I got fired from a new job that I had been very excited and hopeful about. In general I was in an unproductive malaise for a good week or two after the firing, and Stan Against Evil was a great help during those first few days. The night I began watching, I was sitting like a lump on my couch, while my wife worked on some cross stitching next to me. I couldn't think of anything to watch that I wanted to expend the energy to concentrate on, so after a few minutes of scrolling through Hulu and Netflix and Amazon, I settled on Stan Against Evil. I recognized straightaway the problems with the show that I've already mentioned, but it also completely won me over from the opening scene. It was visual comfort food, a supremely silly and lighthearted series that required little investment on the part of the viewer. I could start it up whenever I felt like it and for 22 minutes just let the goofiness wash over me. Owing to my lack of a cable package, I'll have to wait awhile for season two to make it to Hulu, but when it does I'll most assuredly be binging the entire thing. In fact, I may squeeze in a rewatch of the first season just to keep myself sated.

More pertinent to the topic of this piece, which is ostensibly about movies and shows I watched during the first week of October, is the seventh season of The Walking Dead, a show which should need no introduction from me, and if I'm being honest I don't have a ton to say about. I wasn't a huge fan of this show at first, which started with one of the best pilot episodes in recent memory, but then became a little less interesting with each subsequent episode. I stuck around the dismal second season more out of stubbornness than anything else. The show was not only boring, but it was too easy to see the hands of the writer guiding every character. Characters would do idiotic things not because that was in their nature, but because the writers needed to spice things up, or move pieces into position for a planned confrontation. Characters would behave inconsistently from one scene to the next, motivations would change or be forgotten, and it became more and more embarrassing that the show would only add a new black character once the previous one had been killed. Season three showed marginal improvement, mainly by getting characters out of the farmhouse that killed momentum in the previous season, but it still suffered from many of the same writing problems that plagued the previous two seasons. Season four started to really come together, and although it still wasn't great, it was consistently improving to the point that even the episodes I didn't like I at least appreciated for the way they were trying to course correct. At this point, I look forward to each new season dropping onto Netflix, and my wife and I usually burn through the season in a couple days.

When this latest season premiered I was actually working in the Walking Dead attraction at Universal Studios. Since I watch the shows on Netflix, I'm behind the times and have to make sure I leave the room when people start talking about the show, which I knew would be a must once the new season premiered. If you remember season six, it ended with a cliffhanger where we knew someone in the main group had just been killed, but we had no idea who it was. Amber and I had already planned on purchasing the episode on Amazon so we could watch it quickly and discover who had died before it could be spoiled for us, but unfortunately we just didn't act quickly enough. The season premiered on a Sunday, and I had no time to watch the episode due to conflicting work schedules. I showed up to work early Monday morning to set up the venue for the day, planning on watching the show as soon as I got home. I was the second person in after the supervisor, and my job was to get the place set up, do safety checks and equipment checks, and prepare daily paperwork. My plan was to get through the day without engaging in discussion of the television show, and I was already prepared to shush people who wanted to talk to me about it. I arrived at work, grabbed the daily meeting paperwork the supervisor had printed out, and right there taking up half the page was a picture of two prominent Walking Dead cast members and the large-type caption "Rest in Peace [names redacted]." Shit. Surprise ruined. I'm not overly sensitive to spoilers in general, although I do try to avoid them, but this struck me as a bit cruel. Of course, I was able to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the day and not ruin it for Amber, although when we watched the episode later that night most of the tension had been removed from the long buildup to revealing who had died.

The show has become remarkably consistent over the past few years, and I find myself more and more engaged with the characters on screen, even characters I had previously not enjoyed. The widening of the scope of the show that started with season six's introduction of additional communities continued with this season, with the introduction of the incredibly entertaining Kingdom, the inscrutable trashpeople, and an isolated community composed of only women survivors of The Saviors. I know everyone loves Negan, the larger than life leader of the Saviors, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is really chewing the hell out of that part, but I was actually a little flumoxxed by how inconsistent he was as a threat. He's introduced beating two main characters to death, and then continues to terrorize everyone who crosses him in truly horrific manner. And yet, each time Rick's group defies him, his punishments never live up to what he's promised, and he spares the lives of people who have done far worse than others he has punished brutally.

I think the thing that keeps me engaged with The Walking Dead at this point, despite the continued flagging of my interest in zombie entertainment, is that the show learned awhile back how to inject a bit of humor, and that the point of the show should be hopeful rather than nihilistic. Sure, death comes to characters beloved, hated, or unknown, and it often comes at seemingly random intervals. Sure every few steps forward seem to come with a commensurate step back, but those steps forward are being taken. No matter how dire the situation gets, the takeaway is that we can regain our humanity, we can find a way forward.

Also, the effects team has really risen to the challenge of coming up with interesting zombie kills. Some really amazing practical effects on that show. That alone would keep me coming back, I'm just glad the rest of the show has caught up.

If you read my previous piece about Fear Itself, the fourth season Buffy the Vampire Slayer Halloween episode, you'll recall that my daughter was interested in the show enough that she asked if we could watch the rest of the series. We started that this week, and due to her spending a day home sick, and the general brevity of the first season run, we finished that on Friday night. It was the first time I'd seen the series in at least ten years, and it was an interesting experience revisiting it with her. In that earlier piece I already briefly went over my history with the show, so I'll skip that for now and just discuss the first season on its own.

Season one of Buffy, like most genre television shows, in retrospect feels more like a dry run for what the show would eventually evolve into. It's the rare show television show indeed that comes out of the gate fully formed and firing on all cylinders, but genre television shows in particular have a hard time in the beginning. I can think of only one sci-fi/fantasy show that has jumped onto our television screens with everything more or less in place, The X-Files, and even that show had its share of missteps in the first season. When it came to Buffy, my thought was always that the show only started to get interesting in season two, give or take a couple of bright spots in season one. Season one just came across as too silly, while much of the humor never quite landed. The actors weren't quite used to their roles, the writing hadn't yet deepened these characters in a manner that made their personal turmoils interesting, and visually the show could be unpleasant to look at. I had thought about starting my daughter off with season two, as the show develops in such a way that a new viewer could pretty much jump in whenever they wanted up until the final season, but in the end we started at the beginning (my completist nature would accept no less), and I withheld my opinions so she could make up her own mind. If she lost interest, I'd just tell her that the show improves and forge ahead.

So color me mildly surprised that I actually found myself really enjoying the first season. Maybe it had to do with the length of time since I had last seen it, and the nostalgia that had built up around the pop culture surrounding me in the late 90s (though I didn't watch Buffy during it's first season, I was certainly aware of it and the various pop culture accoutrements the show dressed itself in), or maybe it was my lowered expectations, but I found myself wondering why I had been so hard on the first season. Sure, the visual look of Buffy is altogether too dark and the film is too grainy, the action is amateurishly staged compared to what the show would be doing from the next season onwards, a lot of the humor falls flat, and some of the threats the gang faces are downright laughable, but it's also not nearly as bad as I remembered.  The show may not have been firing on all cylinders, to reuse that phrase, but you could see the pieces coming together over the season.

Definitely a real low point in the series.

The entirety of Buffy season one was filmed before a single episode had aired, which has some positives and some minuses. One of the positives is that it allowed Joss Whedon and Co. to pepper in some foreshadowing in a fairly organic manner, allowing the season-long arc dealing with The Master and the prophecy that he will kill Buffy to simmer along in the margins for the majority of the season. It also allowed the showrunners to develop a stable of extras so that the high school was filled with faces we would occasionally see again over the course of the season. Teachers would show up in the background, or students would pass by that we had seen before, making the high school feel more like an actual school. The biggest drawback, however, is one that is a danger to all television shows that are developed without audience reaction: they had no idea how the audience would react to the cast or the plot. A lot of shows undergo course correction as they run, as audience reaction can help writers discover what is and isn't working and react to that input. The fact that Buffy was written and directed before any audience had a chance to see it meant that they would not be able to react to any criticisms, they would have to trust that the show was on the right track. So it might count as a minor miracle that the show not only struck a chord with audiences, but found the right track on its own. There's a clear point at which season one seems to find the right balance of humor, horror, and high school dramatics, so that by the end of the twelve episode season a remarkably sturdy framework has been constructed that six future seasons will be built atop.

Currently, my daughter and I are a couple episodes into season two. With school all week we may only get through a handful of episodes by the time my next Watchlist piece goes up, but I'm really looking forward to rediscovering this old favorite.

Note: This piece was originally intended to cover both film and television, but I took so long with my intro, and the television discussions took up so much space, that I've decided to split this article in half. Check back soon for discussions of the eleven seasonally appropriate feature films I watched in this period.

A Very Special Episode: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fear Itself

Growing up, one of my favorite parts of the Halloween season were the Halloween specials that would air more and more frequently towards the end of the month. Possibly I enjoyed this even more than the act of trick or treating, which was undeniably fun and rewarding in terms of acquiring piles of candy, but also sometimes a chore. Halloween night in Anchorage, Alaska was often not the most pleasant time to be wandering around outdoors. The temperatures would have dipped to the point where I would have to wear my costume over bulky snow gear, if I was lucky, and under the snow gear, if I was not, so that all that was visible of my costume would be my face. That is not to say I ever avoided trick or treating. Some nights I would make multiple trips, never to the same house twice, so that I could head home and warm up for a few minutes and empty my often stuffed-to-the-brim bag of candy. But still those nights are cold, in  a way that can cut through even the thickest jacket, and heading inside for the night would become more and more appealing as the night wore on. Once inside, with my pile of candy in front of me, after my mom had gone through and checked to make sure everything was factory sealed and had no tears or holes in the packaging (Providence Hospital provided free screenings of candy for parents nervous about poisoning or razorblades, but I grew up in a pretty nice neighborhood where we knew a large number of our neighbors personally, and so a cursory visual exam was usually all we needed to make sure things were safe), I would sit on the floor or couch and gorge myself on candy while watching whatever Halloween programming I could find.

Halloween specials started to fall out of fashion eventually, but when I was a kid it seemed every sitcom or procedural drama on the air would do a spooky Halloween themed episode. Sometimes the Halloween trappings would amount to nothing more than some costumes and decorations, though sometimes the showrunners would take the seasonal opportunity to indulge in a little supernatural hijinks, maybe explaining it away as a dream, maybe just letting it stay there, never to be remarked upon again. On one end of the spectrum is a show like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which does a Halloween episode every year, but keeps it within the reality of the show as the characters indulge in some seasonal shenanigans. On the other end is something like the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, in which all rules that normally govern the show are thrown out in favor of anthology horror tales where, often, some of the regular cast dies. These types of episodes are usually non-canonical, and take place in a sort of Elseworlds version of the show. The sweet spot for me lies somewhere in the middle; a show where the Halloween episode exists within the show's overall reality, but allows the supernatural to creep in in a way that would otherwise not be possible without, as they say, jumping the shark.

For this Halloween season, on top of my regular viewings of horror movies and my regular readings of horror books, I've decided to revisit some of my favorite Halloween specials. I'll be discussing five of them here this month, and though I'll be watching a lot more than that I think I've already narrowed it down to my desired list. But, of course, things may change. So now, without further ado, allow me to welcome you to the first entry in A Very Special Episode, charting some noteworthy, at least to me, Halloween specials from, (generally) my childhood.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Fear Itself (Season 4, episode 4)

Written by David Fury, Directed by Tucker Gates

Original Air Date: October 26, 1999

This episode is the most recent of the specials I've chosen to cover this year, and the only one that aired after I could be called, legally if not emotionally, an adult. It is also the only show in which the dark supernatural aspects present in the Halloween special are actually part of the normal makeup of the show. I almost saved this one for later, or bypassed it altogether because it slightly breaks the pattern of the rest of the shows I'll be talking about, but then I remembered how great Fear Itself is, and that watching it again would give me an opportunity to introduce my thirteen year old daughter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I came late to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, mostly missing out on the first two seasons. This was owing mainly to the fact that in the pre-DVR era you were at the mercy of the television schedule, and if something conflicted with that schedule, of you weren't the only one in the house with an interest in the television, you were out of luck. I didn't actually start catching episodes regularly until the third season, when I was in college and my schedule meant that I frequently caught episodes while other students watched it in the common room. And it still wasn't until the fifth season, when I was living in an apartment on my own, that I began to actively watch Buffy every week as it aired. For the rest of its run I would not miss a single Buffy episode, and by the sixth season I was watching it semi-regularly with friends. Also, by the end of the sixth season, I was living with my future wife, who has had little patience for my Buffy fandom over the years. Now, twenty years after the series first premiered, I decided it was time to introduce my daughter to the show, and used this opportunity to start her off with one of my favorite episodes.

The first thing I noticed when watching Fear Itself for the first time in at least a decade, compounded by the fact that I was watching it with someone who had no prior information about the world of the show, was how integral the serialized elements of the show were to what I mostly remembered as a standalone episode. A lot of time is spent in the first half of the episodes following the characters as they navigate their daily lives and the problems, mostly romantic in nature, that plague them. Buffy is in a funk brought on by the fact that the boy she was falling for turned out to only be interested in a one night stand, while she also steadily falls behind in her college course work. Willow is experiencing her own romantic strife with her werewolf boyfriend Oz, who expresses concern that Willow is diving too quickly into witchcraft. Xander is still trying to figure out where he stands with ex-vengeance demon Anya, who at this point he has been kinda-sorta dating for a short time, while also fending off strong bouts of insecurity brought about by the fact that he's the only member of the gang not going to college, and without any supernatural abilities. Also lurking around the edges are future Buffy boyfriend Riley, subtle intimations of the health troubles that will plague Buffy's mother in the next season, and the shadowy government agency that's been stirring up trouble in Sunnydale.

All the personal drama takes up almost half of this episode, and there aren't even any intimations of the threat the gang will be facing until 15 minutes in, when Oz accidentally bleeds onto a decorative occult symbol that some frat boys are painting on the floor as part of their Halloween preparations. Unseen by anyone else in the room, a plastic spider within the magical circle becomes a real spider and crawls away. Cut to commercial. And still it takes another ten minutes of interpersonal drama before the gang arrives at the haunted house party (a metaphorical haunted house, the house itself is not normally haunted) and discovers the threat inside. Cut to another commerical. This is an awful lot of screentime to devote when you've only got 43 minutes, minus opening and closing credits, to tell your story, and yet it's integral to not only why the episode works, but why Buffy as a television series was so successful.

A lot of people claim season three to be their favorite season of Buffy, owing to the introduction of some fan-favorite characters and, in the Mayor, the best season villain (or Big Bad in the show's parliance, a term coined by the show that has since entered the common lexicon) the show would ever have. Season three is when Buffy really began to fire on all cylinders. The first two seasons are still great, but season three is when the show came into its own and the humor, scares, drama, and general writing quality all began to work in harmony. For my money, however, season four beats season three in all but one aspect: the villain. It's true, the Mayor is an incredibly charismatic, engaging, and entertaining villain, a man who's aw-shucks Boy Scout demeanor belies a ruthless devotion to the dark arts that has kept him alive for over a century, a perfect foil for Buffy. No other Big Bad quite matches his appeal, but season four suffers for placing perhaps the show's weakest villain so closely to its best. 

Adam also looks fairly silly.

The main villain of season four is, for much of the season, The Initiative, the shadowy government agency listed above. It's a bit of an odd addition to Buffy's mythology, bringing a dash of X-Files conspiracy to a series that had primarily been interested in myth and magic. They don't mesh with the rest of the show, and fail to become very interesting. Eventually the threat of The Initiative leads into the threat of Adam, a Frankenstein's Monster style reanimated corpse being trained as a super soldier. I actually enjoy the performance of the actor portraying Adam, but the character himself is dull by design and lacks the dynamic personality of the Mayor. 

If you look at the season beyond merely its villain, season four shines in every other category. Season four contains some of the series' sharpest comedic writing and its most successful blending of serialization and standalone episodes. The trend in dramatic television these days is towards tighter seasons and an emphasis on serialization, where every episode needs to be about the show itself, and needs to be focused on moving the story forward. This has led to some great television, without a doubt, but I do miss the days of 22 episode seasons, where every once in awhile you would get an episode that was just the characters hanging out together, dealing with one specific threat, without it having to be about only moving the story forward (for the record, I think Breaking Bad is maybe the best-case example of the current trend towards hyper-serialization, as each episode pushed the storyline forward but also kept its focus solely on character). Buffy in its fourth season had the best handle on this balancing act, as even the throwaway episodes that have no bearing on the overarching plot include some incremental movement forward. There's even an episode that hinges on a magical wish changing reality, that ends with everything back the way it began and the episode's events more or less erased from existence, and it still features one major development that sets the course of events for the finale. This has always been my go-to explanation for Buffy's greatness: the show knew when to switch gears and allow the fans to just enjoy these characters being their charming likable selves, but also knew how to weave in more long-form storytelling. 

Fear Itself is written by David Fury, and it's his fourth script for the series overall, but his first after being hired on as a regular writer and producer. David Fury would become one of the most reliable names in the Buffy credits, alongside Jane Espensen, Marti Noxon, Douglas Petrie, and Whedon himself. He would also go on to become an important voice in the spinoff series Angel, helping that show find its footing and grow out of its awkward phase into more than just a Buffy clone. Fury's episodes tended to hit the sweet spot between funny and scary, and showed a deft hand at serving the individual characters as well as the genuine schocks, which is evident in Fear Itself when the gang arrives at the frat party (filmed, coincidentally, in the same house as season one of American Horror Story) to discover that something is making everybody's fears manifest: rubber spiders become real, decorative skeletons become rotted zombies, peeled grapes actually do become slimy eyeballs. Good stuff. All of the personal drama in the front half of this episode may seem in the broad strokes to be a perfunctory attempt to keep all of these running storylines moving before going on to the good stuff, but the two are actually so closely intertwined that it would be impossible to have either section of this episode work without the other. 

Oz's fear that he won't be able to control his lycanthropic tendencies and will eventually hurt someone he cares about manifests itself when he begins to change into a werewolf despite it not being a full moon. Willow's insecurity over being always stuck in the sidekick role causes her conjuring of a spirit guide to split off into dozens of separate guides, one for each course of action she can't decide on. Xander feels that he is being left behind by his friends both socially and mentally, and he becomes invisible to them, lost in the house unable to communicate (in a callback to season one episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight). Buffy's fear is the least remarked upon in the episode itself, but also perhaps the most complicated. She finds herself alone as the house separates the group, and it underlines the fear she has that she will never be anything but the Slayer, that no matter how she tries she will only ever be defined by this one aspect of her life, and will never have a normal existence.

If all of this sounds a bit too involved, or possibly even dull, for a series about a bubbly blonde teenager fighting back the forces of darkness, it should be noted that Fear Itself is a legitimately scary hour of television, punctuated by some great bits of humor (Giles' continuing descent into Dad On Vacation mode with his garish Halloween decorations and giant sombrero; Anya's revelation that there is nothing scarier to this ex-demon than bunnies; Giles responding to the mystical forces creating a maze of the frat house by simply using a chainsaw to cut a path through the building). Buffy The Vampire Slayer did two other Halloween-specific episodes over the course of its seven seasons, and while both of them are good fun, Fear Itself is a true classic, aided in large part by its abrupt and somewhat unexpected ending. 

As should surprise no one watching this show, the occult symbol painted on the floor turned out to be part of a summoning ritual, in this case a ritual to summon a fear demon called Gachnar. Gachnar, in the woodcut drawing we see of him, resembles a more feral cousin of Clive Barker's Cenobites from the Hellraiser series, all sharp teeth and long claws and tight leather straps. He appears to be an opponent worth fearing, and in Buffy's rush to avoid a fight she inadvertently completes the summoning spell and unleashes Gachnar on the world. I'm not going to actually spell out the ending of this episode, on the off chance that anyone reading this has not actually seen the episode in question and yet still plans to do so, but it does involve a fantastic visual gag and a terrific punchline of a closing line. 

There was a point about a decade ago where I thought Buffy would eventually join the pantheon of great television shows, shows that illustrate what the medium is capable of while also pushing forward the standards to which a television show should be held. That hasn't quite turned out to be the case, as Buffy's reputation has slightly fallen over the years. To be sure, the fandom behind Buffy, and also Joss Whedon, remains fervent and supportive, but the public conversation has also died down a bit. Gone are the days when fans would organize singalong screenings of the Buffy musical episode from season six, and even Whedon's own longrunning and very popular fansite was recently shuttered. Part of that probably has more to do with certain revelations regarding Whedon's personal life than it does with the quality of his work, but it also coincides with a general lack of interest in his style. Despite creating two of the cornerstones of modern nerd culture (Buffy and his short-lived space opera Firefly), and despite being one of the architect's of Marvel's current cinematic dominance, Joss Whedon's star has fallen somewhat, and the cultural discussion seems to be in the process of passing him by.

For myself, I'm still a fan. He's done too much intriguing and entertaining work for me to ever write him off, and I'll probably continue to check out whatever new projects he has. If it's a little dated, that is unfortunately unavoidable, and something you'll just have to get over if you expect to appreciate anything made more than a decade ago. As an example, I will say that this episode intrigued my daughter enough that she asked if we could watch the rest of the series. We are currently midway through season one, which is not the high point of the show, and she loves it. She wasn't even born yet when the series went off the air, and she's finding herself drawn into the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not for a minute is she put off by the incredibly dated fashions or odd Whedonesque slang. Beneath all of the cool-in-1999 trappings, beyond the vampires and demons and monsters, Buffy's themes remain universal.

Next on A Very Special Episode: Quantum Leap; The Boogieman