A Short Video Summation of an October of Horror

As a final wrap-up of my October horror viewing spree, here's a short compilation of scenes from each movie I watched (2 clips from each film not including the bonus snippets at the end):

A Month of Horror - Again

There I go again recycling content...Even though I made this montage last year, I thought I should start off my October Horror viewing with it again. I mean, it's not like those movies got any less scary.

As with the last few years, I hope to be posting short snippets about each and every horror film I watch during the month. Last year that was almost 50, so we'll see what lies ahead this time out. With the Toronto After Dark Film Festival shuffling back to October (the lineup is looking pretty fun, but I'm most excited about Ti West's "The Innkeepers"), I'll definitely be getting a good solid 17-18 screenings in there, but may not write about all of them in capsule form.

Looking forward to another entire month of frights, scares and shivers. Oh, and goo. I'm gonna assume there will be lots of goo again.

Random Dancing - Yet Another Movie Montage

Maybe it's that fresh smell in the air...Maybe it's that warm breeze that occasionally wafts by that signals the end of the long winter those of us in the colder climes have had...Hell, maybe it was just the Super Moon, but the arrival of Spring has given me the urge to DANCE!

Yes, dance. Set to the tune "Cineramascope" by the monster groove band Galactic (from New Orleans), the following video is a compilation of dancing clips from a diverse set of films. I avoided too many "professional" dancers in the clips in order to get things closer to how I might celebrate the arrival of Spring myself.




As with my first montage, the music came first - you can't really hear Galactic's "Cineramascope" without envisioning some booty shaking...And with a title like that, it was a no-brainer.

Movie titles will be added once we've finished the guessing contest over at the RowThree post for this video.

Any Colour You Like - Another Movie Montage

I love a good dose of colour in movies. Nothing against spectacular Black and White cinematography - Film Noir is one of my favourite styles of film after all - but I'm always happy to see bright and shiny colours put to good use on the screen. I went back and forth on how to try to capture that in a video - there are plenty of scenes I could have used that are filled with bright hues, but I wasn't sure how to pull it together. So I decided to focus on clips that use primarily one colour and then string them together to work through the spectrum of the rainbow. I'm not sure this came out quite how I expected it to, but I still like it...




When I put together my horror montage, the music came first as that particular Mogwai tune drove the idea. In this case, I worked the other way - I had the idea and the clips before thinking of the music. However, as soon as I thought of the song I used ("Jeans Jeans Jeans" by the terrific Montreal band Plants And Animals), I knew it could work. The band's second album La La Land also provided the music over the end credits (a track called "Tom Cruz").

Eternal Sunshine Of The Horror - A Montage for October

While I like horror films at any point in the year, I do enjoy focusing on them during the month of October - it just seems like the right thing to do, ya know? So to ring in another fright-filled month-long look at horror films, I decided to put together a little video - a montage if you will...



I love film montages. Those little short bursts of visual candy (usually paired with fitting music) can recall entire movies in a mere second or compel you to track down a movie due solely to an image that's been left behind in your brain like a virus on a hard drive. I've always wanted to make a montage...And now I have.

It's my first effort and I see all sorts of problems with it (no consistent theme, doesn't flow as well as I'd like, transitions are pretty basic, etc.), but overall I'm pretty happy with it - more importantly I had a lot of fun putting it together.

The music is by the Scottish band Mogwai from their excellent album The Hawk Is Howling (a tune entitled "Batcat"). Just buy the damn thing OK? It sounds far better in its full uncompressed glory. The opening and closing bits of music are actually from that very same song, but tweaked using the audio software application Audacity (via its effects options). I kinda stumbled across the results playing with the different features and they seemed to fit in nicely.

A few of the older B&W clips have been cropped. Yeah, I feel a bit crappy about that, but the iMovie software did it by default and when I changed it back to the original aspect ratio, it didn't seem to fit as well. Considering none of the clips that were cropped lost much in relation to their purpose in the video, I'm OK with it.

As much as I am happy with my first attempt, it really does pale in comparison to what others have done. Greg at Cinema Styles created the wonderful Frames Of Reference awhile ago and I can only aspire to put together something that rhythmic and imaginative (he apparently sees the clips he wants in his mind and then sources them, whereas I flip through DVDs until I see something and think "I wonder if I can use that?"). Here's his trailer for this year's October set of horror posts. Then there's Arbogast who, as far as I know, hasn't made any videos of late, but look at this amazing screencap post showing different uses of shadows - it flows so easily from one image to the other that movement is almost implied. And a final plug for one of my favourite montages (and simply one of my favourite YouTube videos EVER) The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir - a perfect usage of music to match the mood of the clips.

I also have to give my 10 year-old son a "shout out" (apparently that's a term the kids like to use these days). He found a screen grabbing tool for the iMac all by himself and was using it for his captures of video game walkthroughs. I ended up using it to capture my clips and it made the entire process so much easier. There's a drop in quality in the video resolution, but it serves its purpose and at web size it looks decent enough. So thanks Buddy-Boy...

Of course, the best possible result of putting this together would be for someone to seek out one of the movies included. That gets back to one of the reasons why I love montages in the first place - the visuals may be completely out of context, but they can still manage to grab your attention and develop curiosity for films you might not have considered.