One by one...

Those of you who know me are aware that I have always had a bit of a weakness for the horror genre. In recent years I haven't indulged the weakness all that often, which I think may be a function of living in an apartment by myself. You never know when those miners with pickaxes are going to be hiding in your closet or under the bed.

(At this point, let me take the opportunity to apologize to my friend John for My Bloody Valentine 3D. But at the very least, when else have you gotten to see so many various severed body parts flying toward you in dazzling 3D? And those plastic glasses are stylin'.)

I have a couple thoughts about the horror genre in general. First, if I'm going to watch a slasher flick, there needs to be an element of "fun" to it. That sounds like a horrible contradiction in terms, but if you think about it, if there isn't a tongue-in-cheek sort of feel to the film, it feels too much like reality and just becomes grisly and unpleasant. Also, it seems that Hollywood has completely lost sight of what is actually scary, figuring that more buckets of blood thrown at the screen = scarier. If I want to freak myself out, I'll go for some of the Japanese horror that has come out in the last several years, i.e. The Ring or The Grudge.

(Another interruption here to relay tales of how my friend Chuck has tormented me over the years... after I had first watched The Ring, brilliantly while my roommate at the time was out of town for the weekend, I got on the computer to chat with friends and calm myself down before I went to sleep. I told Chuck this, at which point he told me to visit a hyperlink he sent me and that it would make me feel better. Upon clicking on it, I came face to face with that scary little girl from the movie, and had to stay up for another few hours. Then there was the time a group of us went to our friend Gabe's family's cabin in the woods of Maine and he threatened to put little piles of rocks by my bed or stand in the corner after I'd seen the Blair Witch project. I've just told him I'm sharing these stories and he still thinks it's funny.)

Anyway, my latest guilty pleasure was the 13-episode "mystery" series on CBS entitled Harper's Island, which just had its finale last weekend. I think the purpose was actually more about dispatching people during each episode in creative and nasty ways than it was about solving a mystery, but that's as may be. In any case, I got sucked in during the second episode when I happened upon it while flipping through the channels. I also personally got three other people addicted, which was kind of fun. The premise was that a wedding party was headed to Harper's Island, off the coast of Washington state. Some years back there had been a series of murders there committed by someone named John Wakefield. One of the victims was the mother of the main character. Once the group arrives on the island, the murders begin again, and at least one person dies each episode. Entertaining it was, but scary it wasn't (although there was a creepy little girl, who uttered the words in the title of the blog... creepy children seem to be a popular horror element). The ending was underdeveloped and didn't make that much sense, but what can one really expect from a summer horror show on network television? The website also kept it within my slasher flick-watching rules by having a "Pick the Victim" contest each week and periodically posting an "Interviews with the Dead" segment in which they ask the actors who were killed off in the previous episode how they would have liked their characters to die. For the curious, and other closet bad-horror fans out there, the website is here: http://www.cbs.com/primetime/harpers_island/

Incidentally, I took a How Long Would You Survive in a Horror Film quiz on Facebook, and was informed that I would be the first to die, as I was clearly too female to survive for long. The quiz result then tried to console me by saying it was kind of an honor to be killed first, as the good people of America pay good money to see hot chicks get cut up into pieces clad in revealing clothes. Well, okay, I suppose that's all right then...