the groundhog day project

Halloween is only tangentially connected to the classic urban legend about the babysitter and the man upstairs. But common elements to them both are important in the film. This is before the final girl was more defined, keep in mind. Laurie's status as babysitter was less a hallmark to separate her from her friends--remember, Annie is also a babysitter, and Lynda is definitely familiar with Wallace house (though she may have just come by while Annie or Laurie was babysitting before)--but to normalize her. These are everyday, regular teenage girls. They call one another, they call their boyfriends, they call boys for on one another's behalf. Regarding that urban legend about the babysitter, Folklorist Sue Samuelson, who examined hundreds of unpublished "Man Upstairs" stories filed in American folklore archives, concluded that the telephone is the most important and emotionally-loaded item in the plot: the assailant is harassing his victim through the device that is ...

From the Los Angeles Times , April 9, 1967: "Hippies... many officials see them as a serious threat to today's young people." In 1963, counsellors and campers at were run off from a summer camp outside Rosman, North Carolina after "'Hate literature was distributed around [the nearby] town saying some very untrue things about the camp--that we were sex perverts, Communists and God knows what else,' [camp counselor Bruce] Grund said" (NYT, 1963). In 1964, Reverend Frederick C. Wood, Jr. stirred up controversy when he suggested that sex was a "good." "Premarital intercourse need not be 'bad' or 'dirty,' he said. 'Indeed, it can be very beautiful.' (NYT, 1964). In 1959, Leo F. Koch, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Illinois was dismissed from his position after purportedly condoning premarital sex. Koch wrote a letter to the school paper, which included this: With modern contraceptives and medi...

Some of the best horror deals in very down-to-earth details, mundane themes with a twist toward something extraordinary. Rosemary's Baby --today's film--deals in fears about pregnancy and parenthood. The Shining deals in alcoholism and... parenthood. Poltergeist deals in suburbia and... parenthood. I'm sensing a theme. The Omen films also deal with parenthood, and of course, the end of the world (because children are, in a way, the end of the world... Ask any single person.) Ghost stories like Crimson Peak deal in hidden pasts coming back to haunt the present (and that one has almost nothing to do with parenthood). Even the Hellraiser films deal in a sort of fear of the perverse and our own sexual impulses. (And, there's that thing about motherhood .) And, that's just movies I've watched this past month for this blog. How about some more recent fare? It Follows , for example, takes old slasher-film themes about the dangers of casual sex and updates them wi...