We are watching movies and eating spooky snacks

Coffee and breakfast

<2020-10-31 Sat 09:00>

Coffee and breakfast weren’t spokoy. A couple glasses of cold brew with milk, and something that was very nearly an omelette. Eggs, yoghurt, soy sauce, sugar, bacon, mushroom, and spinach.

Vampyr (1932)

<2020-10-31 Sat 11:30>

…AND LED HIM TO COURTEMPIERRE

notes:

• First up: Vampyr, a restoration from scraps of german and french prints, with a new(1998) german sound print.
• they’re really whipping out the imagery.
• a man with a scythe(death) has gone down by the river(death) and rung a bell(death)
• the first section of the movie is a lot of hanging around staring at things and being spooked. it’s good they hired an actor with big eyes.

there are no kind or hund here

• really good spooky face movements by Leone when she’s getting damned.

“Why does the doctor come so late at night?”

• Dr. Acula, I presume???
• it’s a good slow movie. Full of literary tropes, and Christian scolding. there’s a whole section about how “sure, eating people is bad but suicide will send you to hell”.
• There are a lot of slow scans of a printed german text about the vampyr, and if you lose your concentration for a moment the next scene is going to be very confusing. I spent a lot of the movie confused. “Are they going to dig einstein up and stake hiM??”
• there’s a great community of shadow people who live on the walls and sometimes are captured digging up pits in reverse. they seem friendly and i’d have like to get to know them better.

ashes to ashes

<2020-10-31 Sat 11:52>

if men came from ash and return to ash when they die, does that mean when women die they become ribs?

fog

<2020-10-31 Sat 12:20>

there are a few scenes where it is foggy, where it is too foggy, and i thought about how now we’d probably shoot it in clarity and add the fog as an after effect.

i prefer when things are a bit scrappy, and it captures what the artist wanted but as a compromise with life and luck and time.

walk

<2020-10-31 Sat 13:00>

okay, now it’s time to drink some water and go for a walk to get some bell peppers to make into a spooky lunch. cut little jack-o-lantern eyes in them and fill them with creole jambalaya. creole jambalaya because it has tomatoes and hopefully the tomato juice will leak out their little eyes.

cook

<2020-10-31 Sat 14:45>

the jambalaya is on the stove. the last time i ordered andouille from the only london butcher i could find who stocks it, i miscalculated the order and we ended up with 30 logs each of andouille and black pudding. the andouille they sell had too much thyme and rosemary in it for me (those both taste like mildew) so we ended up with a fridge shelf dedicated to almost inedible sausage.

since then i haven’t ordered any sausage online, and so in this jambalaya we are using chorizo and peperami. there is also chicken and bacon. and tomato and easy cook rice. i’ll be up every 15 minutes to stir it for a while, but we’re going to start watching Scream.

Scream (1996)

<2020-10-31 Sat 15:20>

Scream. I don’t really watch horror movies because i’m what they call a scaredy-cat. I’m not looking forward to this one, despite its meta narrative. I have avhard time telling the difference between reality and fiction and I think this weekend of scary movies followed by the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday and Wednesday will shake me up for anywhere between 4 weeks and 4 ever.

oh there’s the timer. stir the jambalaya and then settle in for a spook

<2020-10-31 Sat 17:33>

okay that wasn’t so bad. i’m interested in getting some of those stove-top popcorn things? like an inflating tinfoil? very nice. and someone should do a pair of r/relationships posts in character as Sid and Billy on the bed when billy is like “sorry, i was selfish for telling you to hurry up and get over your mother being raped and killed so i could havve sex with you sooner” and she’s like “no actually i’m the selfish one for having post traumatic stress about my mother being raped and killed one year ago tomorrow”

peppers

<2020-10-31 Sat 17:38>

We have carved our peppers and put them in the oven.

The Evil Dead (1981)

<2020-10-31 Sat 17:40>

i’m excited to see the evil dead because it has bruce campbell and bruce campbell’s face in it.

–

update: it was very good.

the cooked peppers

they were very good

emergency milkshake

<2020-10-31 Sat 19:56>

we take a break for abe to do some work and me to write this. maybe after we will watch Alien, and then The Shining. i’ve never seen Alien, but i’ve seen The Shining.

Jennifer Juniper Stratford

<2020-10-31 Sat 20:16>

We just watched this interview with this strange person. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etiMbvc9454

it’s about video synthesizers. they have very weird energy. intense

popcorn time?

<2020-10-31 Sat 20:20>

i think it’s time for me to make some kettle corn for the next movies. i will be following this instructable if you would like to follow along at home: How to Make Kettle Corn

the instructions in brief are:

ingredients

• 1 oil
• 1 corn
• ½ a sugar
• pinch of salt

method

1. heat corn in oil until it starts to pop
2. add sugar and lid
3. spin the pot around as the popping ramps up and back down
4. put popcorn in bowl
5. wait 5 mins
6. add salt and stir it around

alterations

i’m going to use a butter/oil blend this time and leave the salt out, getting all my salt from irish butter.

Alien (1979)

<2020-11-01 Sun 21:00>

Every time i type “alien” i type “alient”. every time.

the important thing about alien is that none of this would have happened if those boys on the lower deck had been able to unionize. contractually obliged to accept the call to adventure, at half the pay.

Going into it, I thought that Alien isn’t really the same kind of Halloweeny horror as the other movies we’ve watched today, that it fit mainly as a part of a set of films i was aware of the shape of from references only, like that quantum physics experiment with the glass tube. but it’s turned out to be the same kind of trapped in a bottle being picked off one by one spooker as the evil dead.

the subtitles broke at the end and it said Come on, cat. at the bottom of the screen the whole credit roll.

alien was good, the kettlecorn was really good

The Shining (1980)

<2020-11-01 Sun 22:50>

We took a break for a while and then started watching The Shining. The Shining understands better than any other movie we’ve watched today that the most terrifying thing imaginable is a normal man.

Come on, cat.