Halloweentober Day 5

Nosferatu The Vampire. Warner Herzog's reimagining of Nosferatu and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

This movie is incredibly unsettling. This very well may be the most intriguing, yet scary, vampire film I've ever watched. I added this movie to my collection thanks to Scream Factory. This is certainly a movie to revisit on dark and dreary weather. The entire film, the setting to the characters, makes me feel icky for lack of a better word.

The movie opens with enchanting, haunting music over horrifying corpses and dramatic slow-motion cinematography that is so unsettling. The character of Renfield may be one of the most, again to use this word for lack of a better one, unsettling of the character I have ever seen in a film. In all the hundreds of movies I have watched over 40 years, this one character makes my skin crawl and my soul want to leap from my body and hide in the shadows. He's a horrific laughing little man and I'd prefer never to see him ever again to be honest with you.

There is one scene in this film, thankfully, that breaks the thick as blood tension momentarily where Count Orlock, sorry Count Dracula, is traipsing around town hiding his dirt-filled coffins all over the place. The hilarity is in just imaging his state of mind as he places these things sporadically, methodically, in various spots to best suit his needs to hide from the sun in his nightly quest to feed. There is something so simple yet entirely pathetic about his desperation here that it lends the character some pity; he's like a rat trying to escape a sinking ship...

But fairly quickly the film finds its horror again... This movie is brilliant in making me feel yucky as I've said but this is what makes this film so good. It's truly horror in that it's a frightening film from the ghost town to the vampire, which transcends physical bodies if he's forced to. Being a German-Franco collaboration lends the movie more alienation for the modern viewer.

The movie is like a fever-dream Dracula adaptation. I personally think Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Copola (1992) is the better version of the book, but it's (Herzog's) Kinski's Dracula which gets under my skin and stays there for a while, like a tick's burrowed head in my skin, gnawing at me even after it's over. Watching Klaus Kinski stare down Jonathan Harker after sucking the blood from his finger is fascinating and truly breathtaking! He stands, ready to attack Harker, but holds firm in his resolve, understanding that Harker may be more useful to him once he arrives in Wismar (which stands in for London). Incredibly more useful, you will see.

Diagnosis Vampire!

Diagnosis Murder is one of my favorite snuggle beside the fire nostalgia trips to enjoy once in a while, like Murder, She Wrote or Matlock . It has that cozy mystery vibe and it's set at the perfect era - i.e., late 1980s through the 1990s. Actually I think DM ended in the early 2000s... But, anyway. The episode (S2 E13) The Bela Lugosi Blues (1995) was one of the first episodes I watched that turned me on to the show, and that's purely for the vampire story. Plus, Julie Carmen plays the vampire antagonist! Yes, Jerry Dandridge's sister, Regina! Julie plays the undead Moriah Thomas, who is killing most of LA's eligible bachelor's, and Jack could be next! Usually Diagnosis Murder plays things fair and straight, dispelling any notions of fantasy before the shows climax, but with this episode the show leans into the supernatural and doesn't fix it with a bend towards reality. Is Mark hallucinating, high with fever, or dreaming?? None of the above! Th...

White Out!

Right now, it's a white-out; snow has covered everything. And lightning is lighting the earth up in blinding white brilliance - I'm in awe. Thunder now, rattling windows and echoing into oblivion. Candles are lit and I'm reading a ghost story and I'm feeling euphoric now. Diet Pepsi and Op, what a feeling.

Halloweentober Day 22

Murder, She Wrote I could go over the more Halloween-adjacent episodes, such as The Witch's Curse (S8 E12), or Night of the Headless Horseman (S3 E11), or one of my favorites, the obligatory vampire episode The Legacy of the Borbey House (S10 E3), but I thought it more appropriate to discuss the overarching plot of the show in its entirety, and that is that Jessica Fletcher is in Hell!!! She has to be in her own private hell. How else do you explain that nearly every single person or acquaintance Jessica knows, every family member or movie star or who the hell ever she knows gets involved in a murder or is murdered? Every place Jess visits whether for vacation or to help a friend in need invariably turns into a whodunit. I get it, the show wouldn't be very entertaining without the murder in Murder, She Wrote. But, if one human must entertain all that death, then surely you would be in hell, either mental or literal. She is either A., killing people and ingeniously setting up ot...

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