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I always like a good scary movie, and seeing as how it’s Halloween, it seems like a pretty good time to see one. Here are five frighteningly good movies that you haven’t seen to get you sufficiently freaked out for Halloween.

5. The Haunting

No, not the craptacular 1999 movie in which Catherine Zeta Jones and Liam Neeson are attacked by various pieces of CGI furniture before eventually fighting a possessed tornado (or something). No, that stinking pile of ectoplasmic poo was a Hollywood remake of 1963’s The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise (of, oddly enough, Sound of Music fame).

Essentially, it’s just a haunted house movie: a parapsycologist, a clairevoyant, a (slightly unhinged) survivor of poltergeist activity, and a jaded cynic agree to stay for several nights in the famously haunted Hill House. During the day, they explore the gothic corners of the house and learn the colored history of its infamously cruel owner; at night they experience ever more disturbing supernatural events, culminating in the eventual disappearance of one of the boarders and the utter mental annihilation of another.

But what The Haunting may lack in plotline novelty it more than makes up for in projecting a relentless atmosphere of supernatural fright. The nighttime poltergeist attacks are frightening in both their intensity and their ambiguity, and the white-knuckle terror of Julie Harris’ Nell is so utterly believable that I had no trouble suspending any disbelief. What’s all the more impressive is that The Haunting has almost no physical or visual special effects in it (save one near the end, which is both effectively subtle and spooky), and instead relies almost exclusively on disorientating sounds, the play of light on shadow, and the ever-unraveleing inner monologue of the perpetually tormented Nell to concoct personal horrors in the imaginations of its viewers.

As the parapsycologist says, “I know the supernatural isn’t something that’s supposed to happen, but it does happen.” And how.

4. Monster House

Of course, if you want a CGI-intense haunted house experience, you can’t go wrong with Monster House, a 2006 CG-animated movie executive produced by Robert Zemekis.

Yeah, you heard me, an animated movie. But hear me out. It’s about three kids who are convinced that the decrepit Nebbercracker house across the street is haunted. When Old Man Nebbercracker dies on his lawn after attempting to throttle on of the kids, the house goes from being merely haunted to being homicidally possessed, and it begins luring the citizens of the suburbs inside its doors, never to be seen again.

Monster House employs the same kind of performance-capture technology that Robert Zemekis used to turn The Polar Express from a lovable children’s story to a frighteningly macabre cadaver puppet show of a movie, but that’s not really the scary part about the movie. In fact, it is paradoxical that, freed from the structural constraints of making the digital protagonists appear realistically hominid in stature, the characters of Monster House are in fact much more endearing and believably human (especially Jenny’s perpetual looks of girlish disgust at the boyish antics of her compratriots — I’ve seen each one of those looks from my sisters over the course of my life).

Part of the creepy charm of Monster House results from another animation innovation: the lack of motion blur. Usually computer animation employs a digitially rendered “blurring” effect that accurately mimics the way film captures actual motion, the end effect of which is the illusion of fluid motion. Monster House does not do this: each frame is cyrstal clear in its static perfection, and the end result of it is a sense of motion that is disconcerting and unnatural in a way that’s very difficult to put your finger on, like watching claymation on computer. The effect, though seemingly unnatural, made the entire movie feel like it was filmed in miniature in the real-world, a freakish blurring of virtual and physical realities.

But beyond the technogeek aspects, Monster House does deliver some good scares as the house becomes more and more proficient at dispatching the neighbors. The very organic nature of the house (once the children find a way inside) is freakish and surprisingly ghastly. And yes, when the house finally uproots itself from its foundation and becomes very frighteningly ambulatory, it’s a frickin’ spooky thing to behold. The concept of a haunted house is spooky enough, but you know you’re safe when you’re not in it. The concept of a haunted house that can actually hunt you down and follow you is an altogether more horrifying experience. Trust me, Monster House is not a children’s movie…

…Unless you’re talking about the Children of the Corn.

3. The Host [Gwoemul]

Then again, maybe you’re in the mood for a more “traditional” monster movie experience. In that case, give this Korean blockbuster a try.

In terms of plot, The Host is a standard Hollywood monster movie: poorly disposed of toxic chemicals create a giant monster that terrorizes Seoul, and a dysfunctional rag-tag team seeks it out to destroy it. Beyond that, however, it’s a whole ‘nother thing. The movie opens with the barest minimum of backstory — American prick contaminates Korea’s Han River and a nasty mutated thing grows in it — before the monster launches into a midday feeding frenzy through Seoul in what has to be one of the best action/horror set pieces I can remember.

The opening ends with the monster snatching away young Hyun-seo, and the rest of the movie focuses on the attempts of her family to hunt the beast down and her attempts to escape from its den. In many ways, The Host is more the story of Hyun-seo’s estranged family coming together under exceptional duress. And even though the language and culture of Korea may be alien to a Western observer, the dynamics of family are so universal that this aspect of the movie has a strong emotional resonance that elevate The Host above your typical slimy-moster-flick.

The Host isn’t all just family melodrama, of course. Now, while the pacing in the middle lags a bit (it tries to alternate between dark comedy and political statement, both of which are lost on someone without a Korean worldview), the movie is peppered with white-knuckle encounters with the monster thing that reminded me a great deal of Jaws: this isn’t some supernatural thing lurking in the shadows with an axe to grind, but a big hungry animal out on the hunt, and the little tiny people trying to bring it down are seriously outclassed. Hence, The Host is not so much scary as alternately action-packed and cringingly suspenceful, with a surprisingly degree of heart beating underneath the thrills and chills.

It’s certainly not perfect creature feature, but it definitely ranks up there with best.

2. A Tale of Two Sisters [Janghwa, Hongryeon]

Of course, Halloween is more about haunted houses and ghosts and general creepiness, and if that’s what you’re looking for, you can’t get much better than 2003’s A Tale of Two Sisters, another Korean entry.

Based on a Korean folk story, A Tale of Two Sisters centers on two young sisters who return home to their father and stepmother after some ill-defined hospital stay. Upon their return, the two struggle to come to grips with their tragic yet obscurely forgotten past, and in doing so supernatural events build up while their stepmother’s sanity breaks down.

A Tale of Two Sisters is partly a ghost story, but it is mostly an exercise in unsettling creepiness. Everything about the family is off-kilter and discomforting, from the strange aloofness of the father to the deranged obsessiveness of the stepmother. Whenever any of the bizarrely uncomfortable family events disbands, the girls are then tormented by fragments of memory and ghosts in the wardrobe. There are sudden scares and creeping horror scares and a general feeling of squeamishness throughout the entire affair.

And by the conclusion of the movie, when sufficient history is revealed, you’ll need to watch it a second time in order to understand the reason for the creepiness from the first time around. And oddly enough, watching the movie a second time is creepy and unsettling in an entirely different way, and while it answers many questions, it raises new ones that can only be answered (if they can be answered at all) by a third viewing. Fortunately, the movie stands up to repeated viewings, for it is lovely to look at, being expertly framed and beautifully shot, and deliberately vague, leaving aspects of the story to the viewer’s own terrible imagination.

A Tale of Two Sisters is frightening and unsettling and just a wee-bit confusing, but it’s creepy as hell and highly recommended.

Speaking of a movie that’s frightening and unsettling and creepy and beautiful and enigmatic, I give you my number one Halloween pick:

1. Pulse [Kairo]

No, not the craptacular 2006 movie in which Veronica Mars and that dude from Lost are attacked by pasty white people who jump out of driers and laptops and crappy FM radios (or something). No, that stinking pile of techo-turd was a Hollywood remake of a 2001 Japanese movie called Kairo, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

On the face of it, it’s a movie about two groups of friends who discover that a creepy website inviting the living to meet the dead may in fact do just that, but only at the expense of the living. If building an entire movie around that idea sounds stupid and dumb, well, go see the American Pulse and congratulate yourself on how right you are.

Fortunately for the viewer, Kairo is as much a movie about killer ghosts jumping out of your computer, say, Casablanca was a movie about WWII nightclub management. Instead, Kairo is a soulful rumination on loneliness and isolation. In it, cell phones and the internet and all the technologies meant to connect people actually do nothing but compartmentalize and separate them, rendering human-to-human connection almsot unattainable; in it, the ghosts and spirits are not monsters bent on destruction, but themselves empty shells devoid of contact, desparately seeking to connect with anyone or anything.  Kairo is utter heartache and despair rendered on celluloid.

But don’t get me wrong: Kairo is absolutely frightening too. Like The Haunting, it relies not on shocking special effects and “Gotcha!” scares, but instead on a relentlessly increasing sense of isolation and preter-natural terror. Each of the ghostly encounters is sublimely horrifying, each using various techniques to complete disorient and disturb the viewer.  In particular, Kairo’s use of sound as a scare tactic is the best I’ve ever witnessed: rather than scaring the audience with a sudden screech of strings and screams, Kairo instead employs moments of silence that are absolutely deafening, if you imagine such a thing. Perhaps the best (or worst) aspect of Kairo is that there is never any moment of release — no monster to go “Boo!,” no enemy to destroy — so your sense of unease and discomfort merely increases continuously throughout the movie.

But beyond that, Kairo is also one of the most starkly beautiful and thought-provoking movies I’ve ever seen, too. Each of the supernatural encounters is uniquely, horrifyingly beautiful, and it was that effect that stayed with me for days after viewing, long after the initial shock wore off, and they still haunt me: Yabe’s encounter with the woman in the Forbidden Room; Kawashima’s encounter with the shades in the school library; the destruction of the plane; Junco’s eventual surrender to her desolation (this last being one of the most utterly beautiful and profoundly sad scenes I’ve ever seen).  

Kairo is a masterpiece, and you should see it.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

A joke someone sent me for my Math Joke Archive:

Newton, Gauss, Einstein and Pascal were playing Hide-and-Seek, and it was Einstein’s turn to count.  As Einstein counted to twenty, the other three went to hide. Gauss hid himself behind the couch, while Pascal hid himself behind the door. Newton couldn’t find a good place do hide, so he drew a 1-meter-by-1-meter square at the floor and stood in the middle of it until Einstein finished counting. Immediately Einstein noticed Newton standing in the center of the room, so he shouts out “I found Newton!”

Newton looks at Einstein and says “I’m not Newton! I’m Pascal!”

It’s funny, see, because 1 Pascal = 1 N/m².

You know… unit conversions?

… a pun? Get it?

Ah, the hell with it.  Go here instead; it’s frickin’ awesome.

A recent sampling from my University inbox:

Good evening Mr. Komplexify.

My son booked a plane ticket home for Christmas. But just today I have been informed by him that your Math Dept. has decided across the board, there will be no early Finals given.

Since class meets everyday, I assumed my son would have the opportunity to take his Final test at any time during the last week of the semester. With that in mind he bought his ticket to leave Thursday December 20, although the Final is not offered until Friday. How is a student to know this in advance?

This is completely unfair for my son. Living out of state, I would like to see in the future that your faculty provide this information to incoming parents, that Finals can and will be given on the last day of the semester. How else is a mother to plan ahead?

–Concerned Parent X

First draft at a response:

Dear Concerned Parent,

I am sorry for the bind your son finds himself in, and am even more sorry for the astounding lack of foresight that got him into trouble in the first place. Let me address the points brought up in your email.

(1) Assuming final times are optional.

First off, the department policy against early finals is a longstanding tradition and not, as your son indicated, a sudden decision mandated by our department chair, who is also not, despite all protestation by your son to the contrary, the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

But regardless of that fact, the times for midterm examinations and final examinations are established in advanced and not subject to negotiations or haggling. There is no Precalculus course with an optional homework-and-exam package thrown in. This is a science and engineering university, not a used car dealership.

(2) How is a student to know about Finals in advance?

The schedule of final exams for this entire academic year, and in fact for the next several years, is available online at the university’s website under the link helpfully labeled “Final Exam Schedule.” Failing that, the date and time of the Final exam is printed quite clearly on the class syllabus, which was handed out directly to students on the first day of class and is also available on the aforementioned university website. Assuming a lack of literacy, the date was itself announced on the very first day of class, along with a five-minute diatribe by yours truly indicating that holiday travel plans should not be made prior to said Final exam date to address just this type of problem.

And, of course, failing all else, he could simply ask a professor. Or a department secretary. Or anyone in the registrar. Or a peer. Pretty much anybody except a travel agent.

(3) Parents should be informed that actual class may occur on the last day for which that class is scheduled.

I am somewhat puzzled that this point would require further clarification, but in the interest of full disclosure, let me point out that (perhaps just as unbelievably) actual class may occur on any day for which that class is scheduled. This is, in fact, the entire purpose of “scheduling.”

Even more to the point, it is logically unsound to assume that the last day of scheduled class is somehow optional. For if the last day of the academic semester was in fact cleared of all mandatory obligations, then that day would not, in fact, be the last day of the semester, would it? The previous day would have been the last day. Of course, under the continuing assumption that the last day is optional, and realizing that this previous day has now been established as the last day of class, then this day would necessarily be devoid of mandatory requirements as well, implying that it was not the last day either. Continuing the argument inductively, the only logical conclusion to draw is that every day of the semester must be considered optional and devoid of mandatory requirements, a consequence to which I, as an educator, am somewhat opposed.

Consequently, I would suggest your son plan to late a later flight, or a later semester of Precalculus.

–Travis Komplexify

Second draft at a response, upon further reflection that as of yet I am not tenured:

Dear Concerned Parent,

I am sorry, but I cannot offer an early final. I can, however, offer a later final: your son may take an Incomplete grade in the class, and then take the final exam during start of Spring ‘08.

For further notice, all final examination dates are posted on the university’s webpage, and should be assumed unalterable unless otherwise explicitly noted.

–Travis Komplexify

P.S. Dear God, this is college, not junior high. Cut the umbilical.

At the suggestion of the department chair, the post script was removed from the third draft. But, eh, what can expect from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas?

Dear Ladybug,

Yesterday you turned nineteen months old.  Cue the angelic choir music:

Or rather, cue the Banana song!

Oh wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

Upon rereading your last newsletter, one might erroneously come to the conclusion that you had become a little hellspawn, a foolish misconception the untrained reader might have deduced based soley on the fact that I might have used those exact words. Yes, you are more feisty and contradictory now than, say, six months ago, and yes, it is a bit more of a burden keeping up with you.  But I would be lying if I said that you weren’t the coolest, smartest, funniest little girl I know, and I sure do like spending time with you.  So let’s focus on those things this time ’round.

The coolness

You sure are cool, little Ladybug.  I mentioned last month how you’ve taken to choosing your daily threads, but this month you’ve also discovered the joy of accessorizing.  No, I’m not talking about about choosing just the right sunglasses and sunhat and bracelets and necklaces to wear to complement your fall colors, although let’s be honest: you do do that.  No, I’m talking about stickers.  No outfit it complete without di-dahs.  You require at least one sticker per outfit, although placement is somewhat optional.  Some days we’ll hide a happy-face sticker on your shin, and I’ll catch you stealing a peek at it from time to time.  Other days, we’ll afix two ladybug stickers to the backs of both hands, so that you may gaze lovingly upon them all day long.  In extreme cases you will be so covered in stickers — stickers on both hands, on both knees, on both cheeks, inside your belly button, and so forth — that you resemble less a little girl and more a bipedal version of NASCAR.

You’ve also become quite the hair fashionista.  Previously in the mornings, I’d pull your hair up into a single pony tail on the top of your head in what your mom uncharmingly refers to as “the Palm Tree.”  The design was chosen partly for its ease and partly for its utility in keeping your hair out of your eyes, but mostly because it’s the only style I know how to do given your tendancy to squirm and wiggle and scream bloody murder when someone comes at you with a brush.  Yet everyday when I pick you up from daycare, you are adorned in a new hair design: pigtails with a zigzag part, cornrows, French braids, loop-de-loops, you name it.  It turns out that one of your teachers, Miss Iris, is an artiste follicular, and through some strange combination of soothing talk, graceful hand movements, and powerful sedatives, she’s able to get you to sit still long enough to transform your brown mop of curls from its functional, if not entirely flattering, incarnation into a work of expressionist mammalian art.

The downside of this that, while you look cute as hell all the time now, you actually expect me to be able to said results every morning.  The upside, though, is that I’m now more than willing to try to fix your hair up, even if ends up with 2-and-a-half pigtails sticking out at oblique angles from your noggin — if it comes out bad, Miss Iris will wipe out all traces of it before the day is through.  If only Miss Iris could wip out all traces of the Banana song… which we’ll get to.

The smartness

One of the things I’ve noticed this month is that you’ve got the memory of an elephant.  You remember everything.  One of the most endearing displays of your memorific skills is watching Blue’s Clues, since you learned all the songs and even sing back to Steve and Blue in the TV:

Steve: To play Blue’s Clues we have to find a….

Ladybug: Paw paw!

Steve: A paw print? Right! And that’s our first…

Ladybug: Tchoo!

Steve: A clue?  Then we stick it in our notebook ’cause they’re….

Ladybug: Buh buhs, buh buhs! (Makes flashy hand signs)

Steve: Blue’s clues, Blues clues….  You know what to do! Sit down in our Thinking Chair and…

Ladybug: Tuh tuh tuh! (Places here hands on her cheeks and nods her head.)

Of course, your memeory isn’t reserved just for multimedia singalongs.  For example, I might mention off-handedly at 6 in the morning that we’ll go to the swings later in a foolhardy attempt to motivate you to get dressed.  Afterwards we’ll play with your toys and color with your markers and watch Blue’s Clues, and I’ll send you off to daycare.  Then when 5 in the afternoon rolls around and I come to fetch you, the first words out of your mouth are not Daddy! or Good to see you! but Swings? Swings? Swings?  which indicates not only the acuteness of your long-term memory, but also my lamentable place on your list of priorities.  You’ve also figured out that food, the marvelous treat that it is, is not magically produced by us, your parents, but is in fact stored in strategic places throughout the house, and your ability to memorize both the locations of said foodstuffs and the duration of time it takes for me to, say, run outside to throw away a trash bag, has lead to numerous events like this:

In an effort to help expand your creativity that doesn’t involve breaking-and-entering on your part, we’ve been trying to experiment with art and drawing.  We started you out with magic fingerpaints and magic paper (magic in that the paint only shows up on the paper), but that wasn’t wholly satisfying for either of us.  For your part, you tend to scoop up all of the available fingerpaints in a single glob and spread it out partly on the paper and mostly on your hands and face, an outcome that frustrates you immensely.  For my part, it requires that I set up a designated paint area and then set out the paint trough and the coloring books and the paper, only to have you put the bulk of the paint on yourself in the first thirty seconds, and then huff off to do something else.  A far more satisfying experience are your bathtub crayons, which allow you to draw all over the bath tub and your bath toys.  You will happily spend hours in the bath, coloring along the sides of the tube, the floor of the tub, the faucet, and even your tummy and legs, until finally your fingers are so pruny that they actually absorb the crayon into your skin.

We also bought you a small chalkboard on a plastic easel.  You draw and color with ambidexterous flair, scrawling zigzags of reds and oranges and yellows* across the slate.  When completely satisfied with your work, you take the eraser to it and start afresh.  I thought it’d be an easier out-of-bathtub artistic experience for us, but unfortunately for me, the chalkboard requires just as much supervision, for although you don’t really attempt to draw with the chalk on non-slate surfaces, you do attempt to stick the chalksticks in your mouth, ears and nose on a pretty regular basis, falsely assuming them to be candy, kleenex, or Q-tips, respectively.  Your creativity is through the roof; your common sense, not so much.

* It’s worth noting that, despite watching the “Rainbow” episode of Signing Times almost every day last month, and despite knowing the words and the signs for the standard prismatic suite of colors, you persist in thinking that everything is red.  “What color is this banana?” “Red.” “No, it’s yellow.”  “Yeah-yo.” “Yeah, yellow!  So what color is it?” “Red.”  I like to chalk up your monochramatically rosy worldview up to a healthy dose of optimism, as this option is significantly more appealing than the alternative of staggering color-blindedness. 

The funniness

You are a happy and giggly little girl.  When I close my eyes and think of you, I see you with your eyes tightly closed, with your nose scrunched up and you smiling your big, silly grin with your mouth full of sharp little pirahna teeth, and it makes me smile.  You love to play hide-n-seek, although lately it has devolved into a curious variation in which you hide directly behind me so that, as I turn to the left or the right, you scrunch down and remain out of my field of version.  It would actually be a very successful ninja tactic if it wasn’t for the fact that you spend most of the time giggling spastically at how very clever you are.

This month you also discovered Yo Gabba Gabba, and life has not been the same since. Ostensibly a program aimed to teach kids wholesome life lessons through singing and dancing, the typical Yo Gabba Gabba episode looks like a Dee-Lite music video directed by Sid and Marty Krofft, or what Sesame Street would be if the Children’s Television Worshop was staffed not by professional educators, but by ravers and club kids. Each epidose has DJ Lance Rock, a really skinny dude in an improbably bright orange running suit and impossibly bright white teeth, spending time behind the world’s largest diarama and playing Almighty Creator God to four minature monsters (Muno and Foofa and Brobee and Toodee) and a robot (Plex) that live in the diarama and, occasionally, inside the DJ’s big-ass circa-80s boom box. Sounds weird? You have no idea.  Yo Gabba Gabba makes about as much sense as this picture:

…which, oddly enough, is exactly what it would look like if you were being swallowed alive by Foofa.

But what Yo Gabba Gabba lacks in, say, metaphysical coherency or, say, basic sobriety, it makes up for in frickin’ awesome music. Big, bass-thumping techno songs consisting almost entirely of a single chorus so virally catchy that merely being within the same building in which Yo Gabba Gabba is being broadcast — even if only on a twenty-year old black-and-white television encased in a block of concrete buried under the building’s foundations — will ensure that you’ll be singing “Party in my tummy” for the next two weeks.

For you though, it’s Banana, a regae song sung by the Aggrolites that uses the word “banana” probably three hundred times during its two-minute duration.  (Really! The song starts out: Banana! Banana! Banaaaaaana! Ripe and green banana! Everybody wants a banana! left to the right, banana! Children like a banana! Me? I like a banana! … and so on.)  Every song we sing eventually turns into Banana, since at some point during singing you will bust out your regae dance and start singing Ba-baa! Ba-baa! Baaaaa-baaa! and signing “banana” to the rhythm in your head.  Everytime I sit down at the computer, you plunker down in my lap and zip over to YouTube to download Banana video clips.  Anytime the TV turns on, you start to ragae dance and chant Ba-baa, as if to cast a spell on the TV and force it to show Aggrolite videos.  All conversation with you takes the form

Me: Hi, Ladybug, how are you!

You: Ba-baa! Ba-baa! Baaaaaa-bah!

Me: Siiiiiiiiigh.

In Europe, all paths may lead to Rome, but in the Komplexify house, they lead to Bananas.

But I love to sing Bananas with you, or any of the other silly songs and dances you’ve picked up from daycare or Gabbaland.  Because when it comes down to it, you are just the damndest bestest thing ever, and I’m so happy that you’re my little girl, as feisty and smart and goofy as you are.  High five, kiddo!

– Ba ba (not banana)

Photo album

See more pictures from your nineteenth month of existence over at Flickr.

“Hey Professor!  Why did the chicken learn to antidifferentiate?”

“I dunno.  Why?”

“Because it was integral to crossing the road.”

[ Pause. ]

“I may have to fail you on general principle.”