the groundhog day project

Nathan Steinmetz (2016), writing for Bloody Disgusting , breaks down the original Halloween simply: Halloween , the original Halloween , isn't about a lineage of evil, or psychic kids, or Druid cults, or live streamed haunted houses or even Busta Rhymes. Halloween is about Michael Myers and, perhaps most importantly, the concepts of fear and responsibility. It's about The Boogeyman. A specter of judgment and fear designed to scare children into behaving and punish those who don't. I think I can get behind that. Like the horror film version of Bentham's panopticon. Kids, don't go out at night and get up to no good things like smoking pot and having premarital sex, or a mindless killer just might find you, strangle you, slit your throat, or pin you to a kitchen cabinet with a knife, then leave you as part of a tableau of warning ... I've got so many different articles and blog entries, even a couple books on Google Books, open on my phone, plus a binder o...

Taken out of the greater context to come--the slasher film as a thing-- Halloween is almost deceptively simple. Michael is given no motivation but for that Loomis puts upon him. I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding... even the most rudimentary sense, of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child with his blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes. The devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil. And... I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at the wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall, looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. And, of course, after Laurie calls Michael the boog...

I have already written about Halloween in this blog. In fact I wrote about every Halloween film but the Rob Zombie remakes: Halloween - day 427 - he came home Halloween II - day 431 - got angry and started beating her Halloween III: Season of the Witch - day 433 - this whole thing is a big joke Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers - day 443 - maybe nobody knows how to stop him Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers - day 446 - uncle. boogeyman Halloween [6]: The Curse of Michael Myers - day 451 - what's the boogeyman? Halloween H20 - day 453 - no musical sleeping bags, no booze, no drugs, no kidding Halloween: Resurrection - day 455 - every murderous impulse we've ever had I covered slasher films for a month, cited Carol Clover's book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film and Richard Nowell's book Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle , cited numerous published essays, you know, took the genre seriou...

Ottway's father's poem is so simple as to not quite ring true, though it's understandable that a man's man like John Ottway would appreciate it. It's like the epitome of some simplistic, stereotypical version of masculinity... Once more into the fray... Into the last good fight I'll ever know. Live and die on this day... Live and die on this day... In the commentary track, director Carnahan keeps coming back to masculinity, how Hollywood's sense of what it is to be a man has gone wrong. He's never particularly specific, though. Does he think that these men, who are (eventually) able to talk about their feelings and their fears and their love--of course, Ottway never talks about his wife with these men, only his father--are real men? Is he suggesting that the usual macho men of action movies are the wrong version? What kind of men are these men? In an interview with Screen Rant , Liam Neeson talks about men and emotions. He says: I don't think ...

Groundhog Day wasn’t the first exploration of the day-on-repeat phenomena, or its technical term per Star Trek : a temporal causality loop. Though, we shouldn’t confuse this with the causality loop of a “predestination paradox.” And, now that we’ve lost the non sci-fi fans, let’s discuss these loops as represented in a handful of relatively recent (one of these actually predates the release of, though not the writing of, Groundhog Day ) television shows. And, they are all genre shows. And, I watched all seven of these yesterday, declaring on Twitter that it was time loop day. Just to get the list out of the way (and there are more episodes like this left from other shows (and movies) so I may have to do this again sometime ), the seven episodes are: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - “Life Serial” Angel - “Time Bomb” Stargate SG-1 - “Window of Opportunity” Star Trek: The Next Generation - “Cause and Effect” The X-Files - “Monday” Supernatural - “Mystery Spot” Fringe - “White Tulip...