henna day post

[gwynnega]

It is Henna Day, on a pleasant (but not autumnal enough for my liking) Sunday afternoon in LA. We had another heat wave, followed by a dip into autumnal-for-LA temperatures, and now we're somewhere in between, but at least the nights are cooler. Meanwhile I keep eating pumpkin products from Trader Joe's. My favorite new pumpkin item: their mini pumpkin-and-ginger ice cream sandwiches.

I'm working on my book of poems based on horror movies etc. and trying to figure out how to revise my novel Out of Uniform. Last night I watched Fright Night (1985) (after sovay posted about it). What an eighties fest that film is! I watched it mostly because Roddy McDowall's in it, and he's marvelous--but I hadn't made the connection that Chris Sarandon, who plays the vampire, is the guy who played Leon Shermer in Dog Day Afternoon (one of my favorite movies) ten years earlier. So that was an extra treat.

Comments

[usedtobeljs]

Good thoughts for your writing and your pumpkin finds. :)

[hugs]

[gwynnega]

Have a good remainder of the weekend, Lori! :-)

::hugs::

[seajules]

It's been decades since I saw Fright Night, but I loved that movie for Roddy McDowall, and for that iteration of the Master Vampire (the one in Lost Boys was quite interesting too).

[gwynnega]

I don't think I've ever seen Lost Boys, though I did see Vamp (featuring Grace Jones as a vampire!). There are some gaps in my eighties horror viewing...

[seajules]

Fright Night was, I felt, a Victorian Gothic horror film transplanted to the contemporary suburbs and featuring teenagers almost incidentally (almost, because the youth of the characters in those particular roles has always been part of the point). Lost Boys felt more like an attempt to make a vampire movie for teens (older teens, owing to the rating, but still teens), though there are in-jokes and references the average (non-horror-loving) teen would not have picked up. Fright Night is more clearly descended from the various cinematic iterations of Dracula and Nosferatu. Lost Boys riffs more on the same adolescent narratives of alienation, disaffection, and The Lies Adults Told You Via Childhood Fairy Tales (TM) that fueled many of the "aliens/monsters are taking over and adults just won't listen" drive-in B-movies of the '60s and '70s, and would give rise to the YA lit versions of classic monster stories and fairy tales with the grim bits re-injected. At least from what I remember, which is always subject to admittedly not-infallible memory.