Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Must be getting old


Is it me or is Halloween getting more television coverage this year? I only watched about two hours of television on Monday night and only an hour last night but every programme, every continuity announcer and every channel seems to be putting on something this year. Last night Sky 3 had an Alice Cooper concert on and tonight of course we will get the usual diet of chills, spills and slasher movies.

I think there must come a point when you say to yourself enough is enough with regards to the horror genre, by that I mean that there is very little new in terms of trying to visibly shock and it's the emotional side that becomes more important. The scariest film I have ever seen is Onibaba which is a Japanese film made in 1964. It's set in 14th Century Japan among swamps where a mother and daughter live and make their income from ambushing soldiers and selling their uniforms and weapons to a local merchant. It's only been shown on TV once as far as I know and I've only ever met two people (one in real life and one online) who have seen it, I've owned the DVD for years but have only watched it once.

Anyway back to tonight and given that the weather is so atrocious I doubt that there will be many taking part in the annual begging festival   trick or treating. I feel slightly contradictory about the whole knocking on strangers doors and asking for sweets ritual, part of me wants to celebrate it because I think that children should feel safe in their own community at night whether walking the dog, singing carols or asking for a sweet in return for not snapping off your car aerial (tough luck kids the VW aerial is wired into the windscreen, clever these Germans) the other part of me is shocked by how young some of these rugrats are.

2 comments:

Span Ows said...

Onibaba eh? I'll have to watch and give an Owsblog post!

yes, Halloween has gone the (sorry) way of St. Valentine's Day and any number of festivals/celebrations etc that are now tack fests (and no that isn't a sailors having fun)

Paul said...

Janis said that Tuesday was the busiest night of the year for Tesco's - she was actually shocked how much people were spending for Halloween.