Finding October

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This post is both about and not about a movie.  On a recent weekend I tried to watch The Houses October Built.  I found it on a free streaming service (with commercials) and settled in.  I’ve been looking for good movies to watch in October for many years, and this one seemed to have promise.  Then a couple of things happened.  But first, the idea: a group of friends want to find the most extreme haunted house attraction in the country.  Fine and good.  Their banter is appropriate, and engaging.  But thing one: the backdrop is again in part of the country where the leaves don’t change dramatically.  Like Halloween, it has the Southern California feel.  Not the truly spooky mid-Atlantic, upper Midwest, or New England autumn.  This is, for me, an integral part of the Halloween, or October experience.  It’s one of the reasons I could never move to the south.

Thing two: as a found footage movie, the camera motion made me physically sick.  Now, I don’t want to give up on “found footage” films.  I really liked The Blair Witch Project.  Perhaps because one of the missing campers was a film student, the camera motion wasn’t extreme.  I do remember newspaper reviews when it came out saying that some people left the theater ill because of it.  Since then, however, found footage has become a standard horror trope.  Some of it is quite good.  The Houses October Built joins VHS Viral, Amish Witches, and even Avatar 3D,  as films I could not finish watching because of too much camera motion.  Other movies have come close.  I’m sure the condition I have has a name.  Since it mostly affects me these days when watching movies, I see no reason to go under the knife to fix it.  But the fact is, the nausea after it sets in lasts for more than a day.  The insidious part is that I notice I’ve entered that realm suddenly, usually because a movie, like The Houses October Built, are engrossing.

If enough people read this blog I’d call this a plea to movie makers—the camera does not have to move constantly to make your film scary.  You are, in fact, limiting your viewership by at least one fan by making it utterly unwatchable.  No movie is worth being physically ill into the next day.  I have a friend whose favorite type of horror movie is found footage.  I often can’t discuss this with him because I’m often afraid to watch them.  And really, does anybody else appreciate that the trees are part of what makes the fall spooky?

Virtual Head Sickness

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I think quite a lot about the nature of reality.  Our brains—no, our minds—create reality for us.  I’m reminded of this when I get motion sickness from watching a movie.  I am not actually moving, and I even look away from the screen frequently, but if I don’t realize it soon enough, I become quite ill.  There really should be an advisory warning for people with my condition since I have occasionally lost an entire day recovering from such an experience.  Most recently it happened with V/H/S Viral.  I had not watched any of the V/H/S franchise; indeed, I didn’t realize it was a franchise.  I was watching it under the false impression that it was a Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead movie.  Well, it partially is.  They were responsible for one of the segments—it’s an anthology film.

I made it through an hour and ten minutes, with only eleven minutes to go, when I realized, “I’m going to throw up if I don’t shut this off.”  So I did.  Now, if you have the condition I do, there’s little that you can actually do when the process starts.  You can’t move your eyes much, and even moving your physical body has to be done slowly.  (My sister-in-law, who is a physician, once tried a “tough love” cure when I got motion-sick from a small plane ride.  It didn’t work.  I ended up laying in the dirt by the side of a camp road in Idaho for about half an hour before I could open my eyes and walk, very slowly, back to the cabin.  Once there I slept the rest of the day.)  You might understand why I resent when a movie does this to me.  After maybe an hour, I tried to read.  I was actually reading “Hans Phaal” by Edgar Allan Poe at the time, the part where Hans is hanging upside down outside the balloon.  I had to put the book down.

Although I’d almost gone too far, after a couple of hours I could stand to scroll a bit.  (That often makes me mildly ill, so I need to be careful.)  Then I realized that V/H/S is an anthology series and that various filmmakers are invited to contribute.  Thus the mention of Benson and Moorhead that drew me in in the first place.  I had been trying to complete my viewing of their films.  They aren’t a franchise, but I realized, post-nausea, that I had already seen all of their feature-length collaborations.  They’re philosophical movies, and leave me questioning reality.  The fact that my mind makes my body motion-sick when it’s not moving also does the same thing.