This will be short, since I'm about to head out on a day drip to Port Townsend - possibly the most haunted town in the state of Washington :) - and I've been pretty busy all week long. I do have one or two things to talk about, though.

First, I just got a phone call from my brother in Russia, where he lives. He's taking a trip to Italy with his girlfriend and wants to know if I want anything from the Dario Argento store. DO I!?!?!?!?! That's the exciting news.

The movie news goes as follows: This week I haven't been watching as many horror movies as I will be watching soon. I've had my boyfriend visiting me from Oregon, and he doesn't like horror movies. Fortunately for me, we do this thing where we pick a couple of movies each and then watch them all. I picked "The Vanishing," which I wrote a review about, and "Nattevagten," which I would write a review about if I had a chance to see it twice... but I don't. In fact, we almost didn't get to see it at all. We just got a TV at my house, and we don't have a VCR. The movie was on VHS. I almost rented a VCR for $10 and a $25 deposit, but at the last minute my friend let me borrow her VCR. So "Nattevagten" (1994), remade as "Nightwatch" with Ewan McGregor, was really good, although I think a more appropriate English title would be "Night Guard" or "Night Watchman." Oh well. I first heard about it in a little teeny book my cousin's wife got me at City Lights for my birthday called "100 European Horror Films" (link below).

Basically, it's about a law student who gets a job as a night watchman at a mortuary. He needs a job to get him through school and thinks it will be easy money. Unfortunately for him, there's a lot in store for him. Nothing out of the ordinary happens the first night he's there, but it's quite obvious how extremely terrified he is. Somehow, the film makes you feel like you're in there too. You have to walk past all those dead bodies down there. You have to sit and wait for the dead-body-is-actually-alive alarm to ring as well as he does. It's already terrifying. But then it becomes even more terrifying when things actually begin to happen. Things begin to happen when the murdered bodies of prostitutes begin coming into the morgue. I won't give any more away, and I wish I could actually write a review of this but I always like to see a movie more than once (The Vanishing I had seen a long time ago - or at least most of it. I felt like I knew it well enough to write it with only one viewing fresh in my mind) before writing about it.

Another movie we saw was neither of our choices - it was my dad's, and it wasn't really a horror movie. It was more of a thriller. It was called "Tell No One" and we went to see it at the Egyptian Theatre in Seattle. It was probably the scariest thriller I've seen, though. It was very edge-of-your-seat, and though I didn't absolutely love it (or that damn shaky camera), I thought it delivered the suspense quite well. It's about a guy whose wife is murdered but eight years later he receives an email from her. When he begins to investigate, people start dying and he is suspected. This wasn't bad, not horror but involves serial killers and such, and I liked it.

Off to Port Townsend. I checked out a few movies from the library and hope to watch them soon. "Wolf Creek," the Geoffrey Rush "House on Haunted Hill," and Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere."

100 European Horror Films:

http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk/acatalog/info_2538.html