Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

I need some good distractions. Something to take my mind off things. And October kicks off the holiday season with a nice lift. My plans this year are much different than years past. No themes or plans, just whatever feels right at time. Should be fun.

So what is unexpected and unpredictable--often not what we get from a slasher film or the genre, except from the twists at the end which didn't always leave a good taste--can be quite welcome when it comes to the slasher genre. In AHS: 1984, Murphy and Falchuk threw some wild curve balls at us. Grossman's Margaret Booth very casually and strategically (and rather surreally) sitting serial killer, Richard Ramirez, down on her cabin couch, talking to him about "God and trauma", even listening to him speak of a back story about a rotten father, having seizures, and getting hit in the head with a swing seat (not to mention, his uncle shooting his mom), while eventually convincing him (it would appear) to go out and stop Mr. Jingles was not at all what I was anticipating. But if that wasn't enough, you had Cody Fern's Xavier, the aerobics instructor, confronted by a male homosexual porn producer who threatened him on the phone, following him to the summer camp. Thr...

A ton of far more important sites and highly viewed critics will undoubtedly put together pieces together on "Mr. Jingles", the second episode of AHS: 1984, but my quick cuts are rather piecemeal because I haven't quite collected all my thoughts. And I already plan not only to follow this season as "appointment viewing" but also will be binging the entire season in November after the Halloween season concludes. The pacing for this Murphy/Falchuk joint is locomotive. I'm talking, no breaks, Pelham 1-2-3 full speed. I laughed aloud when a user on the AHS Reddit Live Discussion mentioned it felt like episode two was about three slasher films, covered in 45 minutes. It is just so breakneck, hitting all the slasher highlights, not even stopping to huff and puff. But "Mr. Jingles" cracked me up because, despite being named for the serial killer who escaped the asylum [natch] and immediately kills his doctor at the very beginning (she does get to warn...

Return to Murder House , with its “fan service” sort of hug to AHS faithful, is exceptional. Or at least to me. It is quite gruesome. It is quite unsettling. It polarizes and can be quite shocking. And it has the incredible Murder House gang emerging with the likes of the magnificent Lange, tragic marrieds, McDermott and Britton, evasive Violet (Farmiga), psychopathic son of Lange played by Evan Peters (Tate Langdon, also revealed to be Michael’s pops, having raped and impregnated Britton), and even the maid, Moira (Conroy). While this episode has its share of ghoulish moments—Satanists remove the heart from an unfortunate hitchhiking young woman, picked up by sadistic Mead as a sacrifice for a black mass to be performed for Michael Langdon, not to mention, Michael’s grisly hobby involving skinned varmints left for Lange as “gifts” for her to bury in a rose garden—there are some genuinely touching and poignant offerings to at least sustain the many blows. Such as Moira’s relief fro...

So clearly a lot happened prior to the select few arriving to the Outpost 3. It was once a completely different place. Langdon is assured by his mentor, Mead, that John Henry has been dealt with. Now AHS has won over some horror fans (and left others sort of mixed) with its turns to the darkside on many an occasion. Yes, the show can be off-putting (as horror as a genre often is) and visceral in its graphic violence. Such as when Mead gains the trust of John Henry with her evangelical speak, needing him to close, encouraging him to help her at the gas pump with the nozzle and hose, slitting his ankles and throat before torching him. It is quick but jarring. Ariel, the voice of the Hawthorne school, was in on it, tipping off Mead to take care of John Henry, seeing as Langdon is finally their chance to have a man as Supreme. This is very, very important to the Hawthorne faculty. Once Behold was pinned to the wall when trying to convince John Henry to remain at the school and not go t...

When I started writing about Apocalypse, I should have known better. I haven’t watched many of the series seasons beyond the excellent Asylum, Roanoke, and some of Coven and Cult. That’s not to say I have not liked what I have seen so far in Apocalypse. For instance the opening of the episode, Boy Wonder, has Cordelia finding her school for “student witches” in ruins and rubble, a sky and the air of radioactive fallout, and a cache of diseased human cannibals attacking her in a horde, ripping her flesh from her body. It is staggering and impactful…and brief. It is a vision. So this is back in the past when Cordelia is mulling over “testing” Langdon (we obviously know he is Satanic because of the “present” scenes that opened the season) to see if he deserves to be the new “Supreme”. Cordelia tells Myrtle she’ll allow Langdon to partake in the Seven Wonders test to determine just how powerful he is. Clearly after “rescuing” Madison and Queenie from their looping “purgatory”, Langdon ...

Watching the second season I often wonder how this or that works out because I have seen the final two seasons of iZombie. Like in “The Whopper”, where Liv eats the brain of a former underling for Mr. Boss (of course, since he’s one of three villains during the busy and loaded second season), found buried while Major and Ravi were looking for one of two missing drug dealers (we learn in this episode that Blaine’s “flunky”, Don E, was responsible for killing the con artist named Big Fish after a guy with the last name of Carp, who shot Drake, the current lover of Liv and muscle for both Boss and secretly for Blaine…sounds quite convoluted, aye?) with a prosthetic leg (he returned from the Middle East missing a leg) because he was the key to finding tainted Utopium. This tainted Utopium is key to a major development that spells doom for Blaine and Major, because they took Ravi’s temporary cure and the white rat, Hope, given the cure first, eventually dies. So Ravi somehow finding a ...

The previous episode was a bit depressing--the paraplegic firefighter was responsible for hemlock poisoning his wife due to her adult novel exploits, certain to take the shine of his heroism away in favor of her notoriety--considering Peyton had to learn the hard way that sleeping with Blaine, the con artist, has a way of returning with quite a bite. Who she truly belongs with--Ravi--is there right when she needs his presence, his humor and charm is necessary to wash away the filthy feelings with some hard liquor she can sustain with great resolve while every sound (including "gnats laying eggs") is quite loud to Ravi the next day. So without the heads, those three thugs Drake beat the shit out of in the previous episode aren’t available for Liv to take a brain feast from. Washing ashore from Lake Washington, the one with the machete was Mr. Boss’ nephew. Also Peyton and Liv surprise Blaine in Peyton’s office, once and for all detonating any chance of preconceived true ...