Riding Home for Samhain: Halloween Challenge Night 11

So far, with some exceptional evenings attended by Mrs Simian (plus movie night at the Black Lagoon!) Halloween has been a somewhat solitary project, undertaken in the spare room while the rest of study and tamer televisual flair continues around me. But this night was different because I had Jet Jr in tow and a yen to return to the Disney Well.

We’d been here before, this month, with Something Wicked This Way Comes, but spurred on with the animated success of Trick or Treat I elected to go further back this time, both in studio time and in literary sources. Uncle Walt did the honours, guiding us through a bespoke animated and… worthy version of the author’s life – for it was quite a life, and the feature wasn’t quite to length. The author was Washington Irving, and the story?  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. A delayed production, and initially paired oddly with a Wind in the Willows adaptation, this 33-minute short (plus 14-minute biography!) is worth checking out on its own for the season.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949, adapted from the short story by Washington Irving)

So. Much. Disney. DNA in this one! There’s music and songs, an avuncular voiceover (by the Bingmeister Crosby hisself), caricature of the characters, and a loose version of events - but faithful enough to the source material that it doesn’t go the way of Tim Burton’s version or, indeed, the TV series. The first twenty minutes or so go by well enough, being an introduction to our long-shanked, beak-nosed, chinless and twitchy ‘hero’ (the designers very much drawing on the waterbird for Crane’s profile) and his interest in lining his pockets the fair Katrina Van Tassel – plus his rivalry with town braggart and prankster Brom Bones.

It's the final ten minutes which really shine – rejected at a community dance, Crane sets off home on his horse Gunpowder, only to encounter the local bogeyman, the Headless Horseman during his travels home and to the safety of a covered bridge, the barrier which keeps the Horseman in. It’s a masterclass of classic cel animation, the design elements are there in spades, and the whole sequence itself meticulously choreographed with plenty of tension occasionally undercut by slapstick through the hapless hero. Junior and I laughed out loud several times and in all, good clean Disney spooky fun was there. The set-up may be a little long in the tale, but the resolution makes it worth it.

Halloweenometer. A classic, very much worthy of its reputation. Catch a nice clean print if you can, and buckle up for a good, safe, but chilling ride. Recommended – and would do well with Trick or Treat!

Pumpkinwatch: It's part of the story, so...

Bad Duck! Halloween Challenge Night 10

 When I was a youngster the Simian house was not awash with the comic form. We had, it would be fair to describe, an ‘assortment’ of juvenile reading material beyond an admittedly not bad selection of classic literature courtesy of the Children’s Library collection. But beyond the Robinson Cruesoes and Robin Hoods, your graphic narrative examples were lean pickings: some Disney Time magazines, the odd pickup from a church fair, the obligatory Phantom one-off, and a random assortment of Gold Key Comics, offering such variety as Tarzan, Star Trek, and Disney Characters. It was the latter that held most of my interest – particularly the Donald Ducks and Goofies, two of what I still regard as the heavy lifters of Uncle Walt’s menagerie.

One particular favourite of the Double D's was Trick or Treat, in which The Don met his comeuppance via the agent of Chaotic Good, Witch Hazel after he behaves like an absolute rotter to his becostumed, door-knocking nephews. It’s a great story, told with economy and illustrated by the reliable Carl Barks, and I treasured that issue. We lost it in a reliable and probably necessary Mum Purge in time, of course, but the memory lingered long after.

Recent gob-smacking discovery was mine then when I found the ORIGINAL ANIMATION on Disney+ – complete with jaunty song (which sounded quite unlike the simple mute rhyme in the comic version). It was a thrilling find, matching my memory of the strip so very closely it was as though it had come to life. The reality of course is the reverse – the comic was the adaptation, and even expanded the story – so, maybe a mission then to find a copy…

Donald Duck 'Trick or Treat' (1952)

Trick or Treat in either form is marvelous. The Big D in all his adult mischief and self-righteous rage is the perfect foil and victim because of his unscrupulous trickery to poor Huey, Louie and Dewey, and his apoplectic frustration at being bewitched, bothered and bamboozled by Hazel and her broomstick Beelzebub still had me cackling when I revisited it this evening. A masterpiece, with all of the Halloween trimmings, including some great and memorable detail: the Duck abode having (presumably for one night only) an empty wheatfield within reach to convey the harvest season, the reliable silent abetting of Beelzebub, and the weird but on point rendering of a Junior Duck’s eyes as black spots when dressed as a ghost (he never takes it off – is it makeup?)

So yes, here is possibly THE Disney Halloween joint – ten minutes of your time definitely not wasted, and a vintage Halloween in a catchy wee morsel. Sure, Lonesome Ghosts has the big Three animated characters predicting Ghostbusters years before, and the even older Mickey and the Haunted House is creepy in its own way, but Trick or Treat has the right balance. I’ll be revisiting it again next Halloween, I’m sure.

Halloweenometer: A perfect score!  

… but is there anything from the House of Mouse that could match it…?

Pumpkinwatch: A real beauty - animated and everything!

I Don't Think I'm Ready For This Giallo: Halloween Challenge Night 9

 I watched a giallo tonight. I didn't like it at all.

Much better!

Familial Haunts No 2 : Halloween Challenge Night 8

 Tonight’s scar is actually one of Mrs Simian’s. Who knew that Little House on the Prairie had such a resource of spooky stories to draw from? Well, it did. The Waltons had a Ouija board story, sure, but Little House had allegedly haunted houses ('Haunted House')  a werewolf ('The Werewolf of Walnut Grove'), and it had this – 'The Monster of Walnut Grove', which was not a monster, but the allegedly murderous Mr Oleson the village shopkeeper and patriarch of the snobbish Oleson family and their seriously weird children (I told you snobbish shopkeepers were required in these stories!)

Little House on the Prairie 'The Monster of Walnut Grove' (1/11/1976)

The tale itself isn’t exactly what’s promised in the title. Here be spoilers: Little halfpint Laura is out soaping windows on Halloween Eve (yay!) when she thinks she spots Mr Oleson decapitating his wife in her chair with a ceremonial sword. Ho ho! And as Mrs Oleson leaves town before sunrise the next day she’s nowhere to be found and soon every child is buying into the murder story. Things escalate, there’s some great graveyard action by day, a rolling mannequin head down cellar stairs, nightmares with Grimsdike-like ghouls and the same sound library wolf howl track playing every time the script calls for EXT. NIGHT. THE LITTLE HOUSE. It’s a hoot! Actually, there are probably some hoots in there, too.

Halloweenometer: Oh, highly recommended – even if Mrs Simian didn’t feel up to revisiting her scar. Compared to The Waltons, this is the real thing, and a great surprise and delight for me. Incredibly, 'The Monster of Walnut Grove' was my first genuine highlight of the spooky season. And it’s bookended with a Headless Horseman, no less. Brilliant!

No musical companion-piece this time, but check this out for Walnut Grove’s most Spooky Moments and tell me you’re not racing off to fire up the Wayback Machine:




Bonus Pumpkinwatch: near the opening of the episode we get this marvel setting the scene:

So we have a few constants developing for an ideal Halloween viewing: kids are good, Halloween night obviously, and scares more than horror. Let’s see where that gets us from here.

Familial Haunts No. 1 : Halloween Challenge Night 7

I have scars. We all do. Yeah, I have physical scars - gnarly, story-carrying ones about literally crawling over needles and broken glass (I was an unattended little Simian in my formative years), coming a cropper off bikes, even chipping a tooth on a loser's fist in high school... but no, I'm talking REAL scars, psychological ones. 

A departure tonight, then, as my early scar – well, perhaps more of an intrigue, comes courtesy of that eerie, haunting tale of the weird and uncanny, The Waltons. Yes, the most sepia-toned TV series of the 1970s, set in the 1930s, but anchored in the Flared Decade’s fascination with all things country and colonial. We’ll come back to that, but tonight’s episode from Season 7 is one of only two Halloween themed stories, 'The Changeling', and it features a poltergeist. Yes!

The Waltons, s7 ep5 'The Changeling' (26/10/78)

Poltergeists were all the rage in the Seventies for a time, it seemed. 'The Changeling' aired only months after the Enfield Poltergeist (though before Tobe Hooper’s movie, of course), and carries with it the essential contemporaneous theory that this activity was usually centred around a… highly-strung (adolescent) individual – often female. With Enfield you can see the connection (one theory even calls this the “mischievous adolescent” phenomenon), and of course it fits neatly into the story of Elizabeth Walton - twelve years old, just days away from the big one-three. No longer a little girl, not yet one of the grown-ups of the household, she struggles with her place in the homestead. Her brother Jason has a subplot which offers a variation on the innocence/experience struggle, but there’s no paranormal element to his, and it’s as dull as ditchwater.

Elizabeth’s is slightly better fare as the Youngest Walton is beset by flying crockery, a sentient piano and a creepy doll™ which is a raggedy Ann variety – which, trivia fans may know, was the actual doll that the Annabelle doll from the Conjuring movies was based very very loosely on. But back to 'The Changeling'. It’s a curious story, balancing the radio efforts of gauche Jason as a would be on-air agony cousin, and local storekeepers Ike and Cora Godsey (there’s always a snobbish storekeeper in 1970s colonial programmes – we’ll come back to them) and of course the supernatural troubles of our heroine. Hair gets blown back, faces get stuck on ‘bewildered’ for most of the episode, and it’s really only the intervention of Olivia, the Waltling matriarch that provides an explanation (probably a ghost) and a resolution (after things peaked things… stop?) and we’re on our way back to a very Appalachian normaldom.

Halloweenometer? The last ten minutes are probably the best, but the doll is reliably unnerving. On the whole, though, not quite as spooky as intended. It tries, but like our Elizabeth, is maybe stuck between worlds a bit.

Companion piece. It’s hard to find one that’s not exploitative Maybe an Arthur C Clarke bit on Poltergeists, or just sample this snippet from the story. Yeah, that'll do.


Goodnight, John Boy. Sweet Dreaammmssss

Invaders From Mercury: Halloween Challenge Night 6

 

Halloween is a time of spooks and creatures - but it has for a long while also been a time of alien visitors. 

I'm not sure which version of The War of the Worlds I first encountered. I was probably aware of the book first, and it can't have been long afterward that I became aware of the audio version. Or versions, really, because this was the Seventies and boy, did that decade have a treat for the Marsophile in me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I first encountered Orson Welles' Mercury Theater adaptation of the H G Wells classic in an A4ish, orange-covered, likely Scholastic Book Club book on monsters and monster movies. Man, I loved that book. It had quizzes, pictures, more facts than my childhood mind could absorb, and it was just the perfect primer for a lifelong interest. Over subsequent years I'd return to the soundtrack of Jeff Wayne's Musical Adaptation (tm)  - and I'd retain an interest in the Welles radio play. Would I ever get to hear it?

Of course I would. On the cover of my first copy of Empire magazine (issue 71, 7 may 1995) a cassette version was sellotaped. And our university library had a scholarly (but possibly since improved and debunked) analysis of the alleged 'panic' that ensued with Welles and his pals' little prank. Two years previously TVNZ had screened The Night That Panicked America, a TV movie event and, well, suffice it to say that any time there's a look back at that night - legend or fact, I'm interested.

By chance or design, this month one of our cable channels played a mor recent documentary - part dramatisation (hmm), enough fact-filling. Despite obsession, Mrs Simian wasn't up on the story behind the infamous evening, so we were in for a nice hour's diversion, with an Oliver Platt narration and some ropey overacting of 'people of the time' (actually actors of our time). 

American Experience: War of the Worlds (PBS Documentary, 2013)

The doco skewed just the right side of an entertaining yarn with a bit of the legend to spice things up. The earlier TV movie had played a little loose with the dramatised anecdotes also, but this newer version had enough to put things in perspective. No Martians to be seen, but plenty of grainy back and white footage, replayed radio broadcast, and some decent talking heads filling in the gaps. It was fine, really. And a reminder that October 30 1938 was also the night that made Halloween a little bit more unearthly for a bemused/panicked audience. You takes your picks. 

For a more in-depth take, here's Slate's debunking of the night, but as I say, the Halloweenometer begs for something a little more creative, so excuse me if I indulge the myth a little more. 

https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html

Companion Piece

I didn't get to that, did I? Of course the Jeff Wayne version made an impression on me - as tied in as it was to late night radio playings of the first single - and (although it may be my own mind creating a myth) a late year radio airing around the time of the Kaikoura Lights...

Dark Carnival: Halloween Challenge Night 5

 Time for a ramp-up at last: a movie set at Halloween!

Well, a week before Halloween, to be precise and faithful to its novel origin, but near enough. 

I was absolutely fizzing to read that Disney's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes was finally coming to ratty old Disney+. A decent version of it online has been very hard to find legitimately, and it was that way for many years until sanity prevailed, and this movie joined its twisted early 80s brethren. So I watched it!

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Jack Clayton, 1983)

Disney is a fascinating company, and we'll surely return to them, but for now I'm thinking of that point in the studio's past before the big IP acquisitions, before the superheroes, the star warses, the pixars and even before the new animated classics like The Lion King. I'm talking about Disney's Dark Period(tm). I'm talking The Black Hole, Watcher in the Woods, Return to Oz, The Black Cauldron, and this spooky little moonflower. I'm talking Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, PAM GRIER, and a curious decision to make a story previously set in a sometimes 50s a more period piece set presumably pre-Great War . It doesn't ruin anything, and maybe helps sell the film's old world visual aesthetic - although I've always found Bradbury to be a highly visual storyteller, so maybe it's just a point of difference.

So what to say?  It's not the book. The book is sacrosanct. As full of life and mystery as it was when I first read it back in my teens. The cast is great. The cinematography is good, the score is... very James Horner. The production was troubled. It's a blessing we have this at all, so given the odd imperfection, I give it a fair bit of slack. The book is still there, as are my memories of losing myself in that first reading. 

On the Halloweenometer we're getting very close to a great pick. It has the time, the location, and enough retro charm to locate it in a familiar-unfamiliar location. It is utterly American, dark, threatening, but not too dark for family viewing. 

Recommended!

Companion Piece 

We're going local with The Chills (perhaps appropriately named for the spooky season). The late, lamented Martin Phillipps had a few supernatural themed songs in his repertoire, being a fan of the paranormal. 'Ghosts' and the aptly-named 'Dark Carnival' from debut album Brave Words could both be contenders, but for me it's a little more recent, and a deeper cut - a B-Side to 'Male Monster From the Id', complete with Peter Holsapple's REM-ish guitar, and a knowing Bradbury reference in the second line. Marty was a fan of his, too.