After Friday the 13th

On this beautiful Friday the 13th, I was depressed in the absence of no horror movies being released. I just ended up watching a Malayalam movie, a thriller (https://moviesofthesoul.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/saaradhi). So I am choosing to go after some horror from my memories and bring back a few bad guys to life. No, Uncle Dracula will not be on the list because he was never a real bad person. Here are some of the villains of great horror from my favourite slasher movies. This time, I choose the psycho killers and make them better known.

Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th): This lovely killer from Friday the 13th series needs a mention on every 13th Friday that you have in an year. Having a machete in his hands and murdering people at will, he was a grand character in the 1980s and 1990s only to come back to us with a reboot in 2009. The movie does exactly what it was supposed to do, and it is time Jason come back to us with another sequel. That one even had Julianna Guill who could be one of the best scream queens. Even if the movie name is forgotten, you might not forget his mask which has become the serial killer face that makes the most impact.

Jason needs something for his machete. After all, this is Friday 13th season.

Rusty Nail (Joy Ride): This part-time trucker and more of a serial killer comes from the three movies of the Joy Ride franchise. I like that name – it has something about that draws interest towards him. His face rarely has any chance to come near the camera, and the horror is drawn from the huge truck and his method of operations. Even as the first movie had a better cast, I would prefer the second – the third is not bad either. Rusty Nail in a truck might also be the smarter one around and will make sure that your love for Optimus Prime won’t be that much from admiration or respect.

Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street): Here is a villain who had me scared during my childhood. I remember it to be scarier at that time. Among all the killers here, he has that nice, scary supernatural side that work so well. He rules the dream world and in invincible there. He comes in your dreams and kill you, so there we see that reason for not falling asleep. All your fears come alive in his world as this burnt face and bladed gloves are sure to provide some nightmares and questions your decision to go to sleep. The last movie of the franchise did no justice to the villain though.

Be silent in your dreams. Freddy doesn’t like to be disturbed in his world.

Harry Warden (My Bloody Valentine): The imagery of the miner armed with pickaxe is a nice one, especially when there is that mask bein worn. The remake of the original, My Bloody Valentine 3D which came in 2009 carries the legacy of the killer. There are some nice moments of thrill and gore in the new version too which can establish this killer in your list of villains. This really matches the situation of having Friday the 13th and Valentine’s Day so close to each other, right? You might need to find a mine or a town near a mine to have that special feeling of having this killer though 😛

ChromeSkull (Laid to Rest): I first thought Michael Myers (Halloween) or Victor Crowley (Hatchet) would have been the right choices, but then replaced him with this one. A less known killer here, but he can still be a nice choice for your Halloween or Friday the 13th – even the name is so interesting, isn’t it? It is time this one gets his due as he has been ignored for too long. Moving around and murdering people, sending the video tapes of the murders to the authorities, ChromeSkull is one strange and lethal killer to bring the horror.

So, it is the Valentine’s Day that comes after Friday the 13th. It might sound strange to some people, but not for me, as I don’t find too much difference between the two. My Bloody Valentine is the movie which you can watch on both days. There will always be something common between romance and love – this closeness is the sign of that common thing being even more common this year. This should be a bloody valentine’s day indeed 😀 Even if you don’t need any of these people of the gore, there is always Hannibal 😉 ***The images used in this blog post are from the official Facebook pages of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Happy Friday the 13th and Happy Valentine’s Day. May the combination work very well 😀 😀

TeNy

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Movies Saving the Day

There are so many occasions when movies did save my day, and so you know there is another reason for falling in love with them. Movies are also a source of knowledge, and you don’t know when you can use them, especially when studying something like Literature or History for graduation and post-graduation. Movies are like superheroes – when they are not saving somebody else by moving away from your memories, you can always trust them to save you from different types of villainy; may the movies keep having their superpowers forever and ever 😀 Here are the list of those movies which saved my day:

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994): I would consider this movie as something that changed my movie watching world, but other than that, this also served as the primary text for my thesis during my post graduation in English Language and Literature; the study called “Vampire as a Cultural Construct”. People have so many doubts about what to take for their MA thesis, and I knew I had to choose this – even as I had taken the book, the influence on the movie was more in my ideas and how I went on with the project. It is expected when a movie has cast like Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater and Kirsten Dunst.

Claudia the child vampire: the most haunting image of Interview with the Vampire

Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead (2008): The first ever quiz competition’s first round can keep one nervous, and even as I have continued to be nervous throughout, this horror slasher movie helped me to get past the preliminary stage. We all know the story of three bears, but I had not known the name of the girl in the fairy tale. In the movie, the serial killer phones and calls the potential victim who came into his abandoned house as Goldilocks because she is blonde. But to make her feel that he is not watching her, he tells her that the name was given as a comparison to the story Goldilocks and the three bears as she and her friends came into his house like that and rests there. Yes, slasher horror saves and Nicki Aycox is a beauty.

Ghost Rider (2007): Johny Blaze a.k.a. Ghost Rider is my Doctor Faustus, and yes, those things which I had felt while watching this movie could be used with my study of The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. That’s right, my ideas about Faustus has derived from my earlier watching of this movie, which has helped me a lot in working something for those seminars and assignments, rightly combining this with that world and making the necessary changes. Well, a movie with the same Mephistopheles, and a gorgeous Eva Mendes as extra with soul being sold in a contract – you can’t stop yourself from drawing a parallel here, no matter it is of Renaissance Era or the Modern Age.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002): This is my favourite Harry Potter movie, and that is not where my appreciation for this movie ends. There was a question in one of those exams about who Mrs Norris is, in Harry Potter. Yes, she is the lovely pet cat of Argus Filch, the caretaker of Hogwarts, and I seemed to be the only person knowing it. Every question paper has the last few questions, which are not directly from the text books. But this was completely unrelated to anything that we had studied, and I could gladly answer this and pray for more out of syllabus questions – a prayer which is sure to make me enemies among the usual students. This was Harry Potter saving the day in Kerala.

The English Patient: One of the best movie adaptations ever, and proven by the Oscars

The English Patient (1996): Well, this is a secret, as I had told everyone that I was going to read this one, but I never really tried until I was an MA graduate. Yes, I read books which are in the syllabus after I complete the course – then it will not feel like a text book. Then how did I answer those questions for exams? The credit for the same goes to this movie with Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche and Kristin Scott Thomas. This was one awesome movie, and my addiction to it made me watch it again and again, getting me prepared for the exams rather than the book or the guide. I had those things I had found out about the movie and used them effectively for the exams, which I am sure, should have worked very nicely.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): This is the first Dracula movie that I have ever watched and the second vampire movie after John Carpenter’s Vampires. Yes, it is a fact that is recorded in golden letters in my vampire admiration history, approved by my fellow vampire lovers. Even as I have known Dracula and his minions since childhood, this one surely made the difference, and every time some Gothic stuff needs clarification, this is the memory that flashes into my mind. Yes, this one has saved my world on multiple occasions, even as I have now watched too many Dracula and vampire movies and so many of such books to need this one for reference.

*Keep calm and let movies save the day 😀 All the images used in this blog post are from the Official Facebook Pages of these movies.

TeNy