Coraline (2009)

 "Giraffes don't just fall from the sky, Miriam."

Let's quickly deal with the elephant in the room: there's the controversy about Neil Gaiman, it's all rather unpleasant and I'll not be going into it here. Libel laws exist, my watching this film in the way I did (perfectly legally, I must emphasise) directed no money to the writer concerned, and a film is the creation of more than a writer alone.

There can be no denying, though, that this film happens to be a wonderful little Halloween treat. Much of it is charming. The use of a parallel world evokes Lewis Carroll as well as a much older faerie tradition. The animation is glorious, clever and creative while still doing its job of narrating an entertaining story. And yet...

What really makes this brilliant is how, despite its inevitable happy ending, it really leans into the darkness of fairy tales. The very concept of a parallel world, with an Other Mother and Other Father, that is much more fun that drab reality with vaguely neglectful, busy parents... but, as ever with faerie, with a terrible price. The very thought of having one's eyes replaced by buttons is... brr!

There's more, of course. Standout performances by (who else?) French and Saunders. The matter-of-fact treatment of a talking cat. The cleverness with which it all unfolds. But this is, above all, a perfect dark little fairytale for Halloween. 

The Thing (1982)

 "I'm trying to get some sleep. I was shot today."

Yes, it's absurd that I'm seeing The Thing for the first time in 2022. I suppose I have half an excuse that I saw thiis asa kind of remake of The Thing from Another World, and had to see that first, but even so.

This film is superb, basically. Not because it reinvents the wheel; it doesn't. It's a very straightforward base under siege story, where the entire cast spends the film paranoid, ascanyone could be the unnamed alien creature. The creature looks amazing; Alien has had a definite influence. There's a character called Fuchs. Titter.

But, essentially, this film is as good as it is pretty much entirely because of John Carpenter's first class direction. That's pretty much it. The way he shoots the snow; the way he shoots the shadows. The sheer bloody tension that anybody could be this shape-shifting alien. This gloriously slimy, '80s alien aesthetic that never stops being awesome, and is splendidly pre-CGI.

The film is entirely set, barring a brief expedition to some dead Norwegians and a millennia-old flying saucer, in and around one compound in Antarctica, full of central heating, booze, weed and a computer version of chess that I swear I once played on the Acorn Electron. The ensemble cast makes the film almost as much as the direction, but obviously Kurt Russel deserves special praise. Yes, it's a sausage fest, with no oestrogen to be seen and the Bechdel Test failed spectacularly.

This film doesn't do anything radical. It just does jump scare sci-fi horror really, really, really well.