So this year for Halloween I decided to watch the Halloween franchise back to back and live tweet what I was watching. You'll notice in the image above that you do not see the two Rob Zombie Halloween flicks, that's because they're remakes so they're technically a new franchise. Also technically they're called "ROB ZOMBIE'S HALLOWEEN" and "ROB ZOMBIE'S HALLOWEEN 2" so they'd more appropriately be called the Rob Zombie's Halloween franchise. I know I'm being picky, I didn't want to include 'em in this viewing because that would have been 10 movies in one day and that is 2 movies too damn many. Why did I decide to do this? I thought it would be fun. I've always wanted to do a horror movie marathon for Halloween and since Shout Factory released Halloween III this year and another company re-released 4 and 5 I figured why not go with a marathon viewing of the Halloween franchise.
This is what I learned while watching:
• Haddonfield Illinois gets dark pretty early in October.
• Haddonfield's Memorial Hospital closes up shop around 11 p.m.
• the HMH runs with very minimal staff, probably because the emergency department closes up around 11 p.m.
• Not whole lot of patients end up at the hospital.
• The most used security company is also the most incompetent.
• Irish druids have a really weird idea of what makes "a great prank." Especially if said prank is played on kids
• They should have stopped making Halloween movies once Donald Pleasence died.
• Rob Zombie's Halloweens aren't the worst Halloween movies (thanks H20 and Ressurection)
• The Mark of Thorne plotline (Halloween 4, 5, 6) while goofy and unnecessarily complicated was actually really fun and didn't deserve to be retconned out.
• H20 was the beginning of the end of Halloween.
• It's harder than you think it would be to replicate how scary the William Shatner mask was.
• It's harder than you think to be a really frightening Michael Myers.
• There is such a thing as eating way too much candy. This has nothing to do with the movies but everything to do with what I decided to eat while watching these movies.
• Franchises that are 6 movies long are probably the maximum single sitting marathons (I really enjoyed my Planet of the Apesathon in April last year and Star Wars is always a good marathon, if you cut out credits the three Evil Deads can be watched in about 4 hours, less if you can skip the recaps) the 8 Halloween flicks took almost until midnight, including bathroom breaks and preparing lunch and dinner. I started at 8:30 a.m.
And now that they're all fresh in my mind it got me wondering: why don't fans of the Halloween movies call Michael Myers "the Boogeyman?" I know he's listed in the credits as "the Shape" and his name is Michael Myers, but EVERYONE in the movies call him "The Boogeyman" if they aren't calling him Michael Myers. I'm pretty sure he's referred to as "The Boogeyman" more often than he's called "Michael Myers." "Fans" of the Alien movies refer to the aliens as Xenomorphs even though only ONE guy ever refers to the aliens as xenomorphs ONCE in ONE movie. He's not even referring to those specific aliens as xenomorphs, he's just warning his squad that they might be dealing with a xenomorph. He's using big words to impress his troops. The only person in the room that knows what the aliens are is Ripley. In the rest of the series the Aliens are called either "the aliens" or "AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH, NOOOOO, PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!" So why over the course of seven movies, a character who is called "The Boogeyman" by EVERYONE ALL the time is not generally known as "The Boogeyman?" I'm not saying I'm going start calling him "the Boogeyman," I just think its weird how Fandom works.
