| OPINION
| OCTOBER 26, 2005
I Want My Mummy
Villians were better back in the
old days
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| The Shorthorn: Brandon Leirer |
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Aside from candy and costumes, Halloween
has one more awesome aspect going for it: scary movies! Now horror
movies can be seen year round, but the holiday serves as the bastion
of scary movie viewing.
The only other date that can rival Halloween for this honor is Friday
the 13th. I personally prefer Halloween for my scary movie viewing
since, by the time I’ve finished eluding the authorities with
my loot of candy, it has gotten pretty dark out. I guess it’s
sheer irony that Friday the 13th movies are infinitely better than
“Halloween” movies. I enjoy scary movies since they
don’t follow traditional rules of Hollywood productions. They
are unpredictable, and that’s what’s scary.
Vampires always seem to be the popular scary movie villains, but
they’ve changed in recent years. They used to be creepy, yet
charming characters that lived in old European castles. Now they
just seem to permeate the goth scene, inspiring all goth kids who
try really hard not to care about anything. They’ve also lost
their supernatural roots, reducing vampirism to a disease. While
it’s certainly the most attractive disease out there, when
you explain it that way, it just sucks all the fun out of it —
pun unintended. Still, when it comes to being a vampire, it’s
not so much the drinking of blood for sustenance or hiding from
the sunlight that would bother me most. I’d say the worst
part would be becoming a pansy goth in the process.
Zombies have seen a lot of press lately. They are always my favorite.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like my zombies slow and undead as
in the original version of Night, Dawn, Day and Land of the Dead,
opposed to those newfangled running and diseased variants you see
in movies like Resident Evil and 28 Days Later.
Zombies are supposed to be dead, slow and numerous. I don’t
like all these new zombies learning how to shoot guns and hunting
particular people. When was the last time you saw them lumbering
for plain old brains? Enough of this reinventing the zombie, just
give me the George Romero classic version.
The mummy is a character that has taken a beating. The recent mummy
movies seem to be “family-friendly,” where no one you
care about will get hurt in any way. That’s more like fantasy
than horror. The mummy is a great premise for a horror movie; it
has all that mummy gold to go after. It makes more sense than the
Friday the 13th movies, where you’d think after the fifth
time Jason Voorhees or his mother slaughtered all the teens at Camp
Crystal Lake, people would stop sending their kids there. While
in reality the mummy is only a threat to Egyptologists and 1950s
comedy duos, it does play on some of our most basic fears: death
and old people. In fact, art imitates life pretty accurately through
mummies. You’ve got to put up with some old person, usually
a relative, for a while and jump through all their hoops until you
finally get their money/gold after they’re gone. Instead of
being cursed, you just feel guilty. Why do you think they named
this monster mummy — pun intended? Coincidence? I think not.
Also hoarding some gold is the leprechaun. This is a good example
of fantasy moving into horror. Instead of dealing with the elderly
like the mummy, here you have to fend off a little Irish person
who speaks only in whimsical rhymes. Also, he stabs people. I think
I’d rather put up with the leprechaun over the mummy. The
problem I have with the leprechaun is that out of his six movies,
two of them have the subtitle “In the Hood” and another
has the subtitle “In Space.” I always thought movies
like The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
exploited our little people, but the leprechaun movies just take
the cake.
For a good night of horror movies this year, just go for pretty
much any B-movie flick or lower. Those have more graphic stuff you
want to see in scary films. Anything that you can measure with buckets
of blood is definitely worth your time.
— Josh Morris is a marketing sophomore and The Shorthorn
staff columnist
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