Halloween has come and gone.  I’m sure that you have been waiting on the edge of your virtual seat for the answer to last week’s conundrum: what movie to watch on Halloween?  Halloween (the 1978 version) or the original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)?

My sincerest apologies for making you wait for an entire week (I hope that you will forgive me as I was a little distracted).

So what movie did we end up watching on Halloween night, you ask? Drum roll please… and the winner is… Poltergeist!

“Poltergeist?!”  you say.  “That wasn’t even one of the options!”

Well, you have a good point there.  On Halloween night we were leaning towards watching the original Halloween, but unfortunately I could not find a copy the movie *anywhere*.  (Note to self:  next year, do not go to the video store looking for horror movies the day before Halloween).  I did manage to find a copy of Nightmare on Elm Street after calling *six* local video stores.  No kidding.  Ironically, we realized that Poltergeist was playing on TV and we ended up watching that on Halloween night because we hadn’t seen it before.

What a fantastic film!  Co-produced and co-written by Steven Spielberg, Poltergeist (1982) tells the story of strange phenomena that plague a family in a suburban California home.  When five-year-old Carol Anne (played by Heather O’Rourke) begins having conversations with static on the television, things start to get really bizarre.  Carol Anne is eventually sucked into another dimension by a malevolent poltergeist and her family turns to a group of parapsychologists to rescue her.  With the help of a medium (played with panache by Zelda Rubinstein), Carol Anne is eventually freed and the family flees for their lives.

I think I’ll have to watch the sequels, Poltergeist II and Poltergeist III.

Medium Tangina Barrons, Played by Zelda Rubinstein

It’s going to be a scary Halloween.  Scary weather that is.  The forecast predicts windy, rainy, stormy weather here in the Pacific Northwest… the perfect kind of weather for staying home and staying dry.

So this year RollerReggie and I have decided to embrace the middle-aged sticks-in-the-mud that we really are and stay home.  No parties, no costumes… just a tub full of candy for the occasional neighborhood kid who is desperate enough for candy to brave the weather.  And a scary movie.

The question is… which scary movie?  There are plenty of good ones from the 1970s and 1980s.  The Omen (1976), The Exorcist (1973), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and The Shining (1980) are just a few of my personal favorites.

For this Halloween, however, we have narrowed it down to either Halloween (the 1978 version) or the original Nighmare on Elm Street (1984).  I vaguely recall watching these movies years ago… but it has been a long time and I don’t really remember them.

So which do you recommend? Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street?

I’m a sucker for a good zombie movie. So when a friend loaned us a copy of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) we popped some popcorn, opened a bottle of wine, and settled in for an evening of guns, gore, and zombie goodness. The movie begins where George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead leaves off, the morning after an attack by zombies (albeit inexplicably ten years later).

Our story begins in the WGON studios, where television journalists are trying to make sense of the plague of flesh-eating zombies that seems to have taken over the entire country. Francis and Stephen, two studio employees, decide to flee the city in the station’s helicopter. They are joined in their escape by Roger and Peter, who have been battling the undead in the city’s urban areas.

En route to the wilderness, our heroes stop on the rooftop of a shopping mall to refuel and to take stock. They discover a cache of food in an emergency shelter near the top of the building, and ultimately decide to stay in the mall and live off of the limitless supplies in the stores below. Unfortunately, the mall is overrun with zombies.

Ah, the mall. The scenes in the mall are definitely the highlight of the movie. The parallel between the mindless greed of consumers (for material goods) and the mindless greed of zombies (for human flesh) is not a subtle one. And it is pretty funny to see the undead lurching about the mall, as if they were just going about business as usual, while fountains happily gurgle and cheerful elevator music continues to play in the background.

And so, our hapless heroes devise a plan to block the entrances to the building and embark on a zombie hunting spree. Once cleared of zombies, the mall becomes their personal sanctuary. So they eat, drink, and make merry (well, as merry as one can be in a world that has been overrun by flesh-eating ghouls).

Like any good horror movie, however, this respite is only a temporary one. But I am not going to ruin the ending for you. You’ll just have to watch the movie for yourself to discover what happens when zombies attack the shopping mall.