It's been Halloween movie central here at Chez JusteMaiJour (hmmm, funny how I've never bothered to translate that until just this minute, but I like it- the Js, the M, the Jour).
We started off with It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown that we only have because The Grown Ups taped it off the television four years ago for me and, mercifully, ABC decided to cooperate. My parents have never bought into cable, and so even some local channels have awful reception, in spite of the fact that we live on the same side of town as every single station tower. There's a little bit of tracking in a couple places, and one of the commercials is in black and white, but the show itself is decent quality. Hoorah! I think if I were to have children, they would be visited by the Great Pumpkin.
Then we watched 13 Ghosts. Not the R-rated horror film you're thinking of. This is the original version from 1960. It's not quite campy enough to make it MST3K fodder, but there's nothing spooky about it. It was filmed in Illusion-O, so when you saw it in theatres, I guess they had special glasses you were supposed to wear with a filter that allowed you to see the ghosts if you had the glasses on. This is also an element in the movie, but it's a lot of trouble to go to for such a goofy gimmick. For the television version, they've put the ghosts in so you don't need the glasses, obviously. It's got the kid from The Fly and Margaret Hamilton in it, and was clearly written to have a sequel made, but it doesn't appear there ever was.
Next was the first of a series of viewings of The Nightmare Before Christmas, the only holiday movie that can be watched without funny looks from September to January. It was one of the ones that I watched something like once a week back in high school. I'm not one of the bandwagon goth kids, though, I just really like stop motion animation, and Danny Elfman. I also appreciate its relations to Brecht's Threepenny Opera, take a listen sometime, you'll see what I mean. It's very Kurt Weill.
Tonight was The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, because I am all about that movie. Every time I watch it I make a mental note to remind myself that I like Rex Harrison and that I should probably read the book for this movie. I rarely remember, but mostly because it's very VERY hard to find older classic movies at rental stores and I am unwilling to try Netflix and its ilk. (Seriously, every video store employee in town has given me funny looks when I ask if they have any of the Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracey movies. One of them went so far as to go "Katharine who?")
Next is probably going to be Oktober, a made-for-TV BBC movie from another novel I've never read. It's got Stephen Tomkinson in it and I've seen parts of it twice. It's not really Halloween-y, but it's your conspiracy theory spy film. I bought it on the off-chance I'd be able to see it all the way through sometime.
After that, we've still got Corpse Bride, Sixth Sense, and maybe The Day of the Triffids (though that's really sci-fi) before we've seen all the scary, Halloween-y movies we own.
Well, we do have Fiddler on the Roof, but that's a different kind of scary.