A Halloween weekend concludes with 'the final boss battle of Film Nerd 2.0'

Did I finally manage to scare my kids this month?

It’s Monday, November 1st, and here’s where we are…

I was determined to scare the shit out of my kids this weekend.

I have written an entire book about the way they first engaged with horror films, which you can buy at the Pulp & Popcorn Store if you’re curious, and obviously, my love for the genre overall runs deep. I just spent some time chatting about Masters of Horror with an old friend for his radio show, and obviously, there’s no way to avoid horror films during the month of October. It’s the month everyone goes crazy for the genre, and I certainly love showing horror films to the boys when they’re here during the month.

It guts me that I get such a limited amount of time with them, and I never notice it more than when we’re trying to pick horror films for October. One misfire and I feel like I lost a valuable evening, and the only way to describe their reaction to The Mist at the start of the month would be “disastrous.” They love both Shawshank and The Green Mile, and they were excited to see Darabont take on a darker King story.

image courtesy of Dimension Films

I’ve noticed that endings are brutally important to their overall experience, and for Toshi in particular. When I showed him his first Twilight Zone episode, I miscalculated horribly. I showed him “Time Enough At Last” with Burgess Meredith, and he seemed to be engrossed during the episode. We got to that ending, though, with Meredith breaking his glasses, and Toshi rejected the entire thing. Not just that episode, but the show itself. He was offended by the ending. He felt like he’d been cheated in some way for investing in it emotionally. The same thing happened when we watched Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. He told me that he hates the entire story because he feels betrayed when he gets to that ending. But there are movies that have devastating endings that he loves, like Se7en or Sorcerer, and he is fine with a twist or with ambiguity or even sorrow as long as he feels like they’re earned.