Aaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnd We're Back, and Just in Time for Halloween.

I apologize for the delay between posts - my actual honest-to-goodness job has been occupying a lot of my time recently, and my leisure time has been drained dry by Minecraft. Seriously, don't play it. It is time poison.

(Seriously, play it. It is awesome.)

I view October (rather, Halloween) with some mixed feelings. I love the fall, the crisp, cool weather, the leaves changing, all of that. It's my favorite time of year. My relationship with Halloween is more ambivalent, though. I stopped trick-or-treating at the age of 8, when I realized that I was going from door-to-door in a costume (typically layered over a sweater so I didn't catch cold)  begging for candy mostly from total strangers. The begging for candy made me uncomfortable, and I didn't have that much of a sweet tooth as a kid, so I stopped trick-or-treating early. My most enduring memory of Halloween is, around age 12 or so, a party my parents threw where they decorated the house to look something like the site of the Manson Family murders. I sat upstairs in my bedroom, reading my copy of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide.

Now, I appreciate the abundance of horror movies on TV (especially since I have a long-standing fondness for Saturday afternoon horror matinees on television), but I sort of feel like Halloween is for the amateurs, the way April Fool's Day is for amateur pranksters and St. Patrick's Day is for amateur drunks. The real pros are holding it down the rest of the year. The whole "ooh, monsters and ghosts and spooky and moo hoo hoo ha ha ha" thing gets a little old for me.

So, out of a sense of willful perversity, the majority - if not totality - of my posts for October will be horror films with an absence of the supernatural. Scary stuff which is, for all intents and purposes, plausible. Though, interestingly, as I was reviewing the movies about which I thought it'd be good to write, I found that many of them feature realistic elements exaggerated to monstrous proportions. So, at least at first, I want to deal with what I'm thinking of as ambitious failures - movies that try to get by without a "monster", and don't quite make it.