Good morning 🐣

Surprise! I’m alive! You may have noticed I haven’t written anything since June. Let’s just call it a Summer break, shall we?

I truly appreciate those of you who reached out to check on me. I’ve sure missed all you goofballs and I’ve sure missed writing about great movies.

So what happened while I was away?

• This summer movie season was low-key kinda great, especially when it came to movies that not only SHOULD NOT have worked, but actually steamrolled what SHOULD have worked.

• Taylor Swift dominated arena concerts and is now coming for movie theaters this month.

• AMC abandoned their paid premium seating idea I “reported on” back in February.

• Writers in Hollywood gained much of what they were fighting for during their strike, though actors are still picketing.

• And Netflix finally ended their mail-order DVD program that put Blockbuster out of business over a decade ago. (You bet your ass I’ve still been getting DVDs in the mail all these years.)

Kind of a wild time, huh?

And now it’s Fall… and most importantly here at Cinescape HQ: October! It’s that spooky season when the realms of the living and the dead converge and spirits wander amongst us.

So the perfect time to crown this year’s Scream King and Queen, I say!

To get this party started, check out this funky music video for “Disco Closure” by MILKBLOOD, starring a sleep paralysis demon with some sweet dance moves. It’s the perfect soundtrack to Cinescape in October.

Now on with the show!

Scream Queen: Fay Wray 👑

Carl Denham (played by Robert Armstrong), is running some test shots of his new screen ingenue, Ann Darrow (played by Fay Wray). He’s a movie director whose hubris soon puts cast, crew, and eventually all of New York in danger of one of Hollywood’s greatest movie monsters of all time. As he cranks the camera, Carl tells her:

Look up slowly, Ann. That’s it. You don’t see anything. Now look higher. Still higher. Now you see it. You’re amazed. You can’t believe it. Your eyes open wider. It’s horrible, Ann, but you can’t look away. There’s no chance for you, Ann. No escape. You’re helpless, Ann. Helpless. There’s just one chance if you can scream, but your throat’s paralyzed. Try to scream, Ann. Try! Perhaps if you didn’t see it, you could scream. Throw your arms across your eyes and scream, Ann! Scream for your life!

Ann doesn’t scream. She lets loose a primal howl.

“King Kong” is celebrating its 90th anniversary and still dazzles, defined by two special effects:

1. Kong himself, a giant ape living in a lost world full of prehistoric dinosaurs, a complex and beautiful combination of stop-motion animation, matte painting, rear projection, and miniatures. You never doubt that he’s a living, breathing creature with curiosity and desires.

2. Fay Wray as Ann, who’s playful and flirtatious and has the most expressive face. Her thoughts and feelings leap out of the screen and hold you hostage, but it’s her screams that will haunt you. She brings the monsters to life just as well as the special effects team. Check out this edit of all of her screams in the movie if you don’t believe me.

We’ve actually touched on so-called scream queens before, those legendary women of horror. But Fay Wray is one of the earliest and most iconic queens, appearing in several horror films, including “Doctor X,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Vampire Bat,” and “Mystery of the Wax Museum.” It’s “Kong,” however, that wins her the crown. We bow in her presence.

Scream King: Bruce Campbell 👑

To me the quintessential cabin-in-the-woods horror is the “Evil Dead” series — initially a trilogy, later expanded upon by a couple modern sequels and a TV show — about a group of young’uns accidentally summoning demons after reading aloud from the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. The first film was billed as “the ultimate experience in grueling horror,” but each subsequent entry in the trilogy introduced more and more physical comedy, a combination of horror and Three Stooges-style slapstick dubbed splatstick. And much like “King Kong,” these films are defined by two aspects:

1. The utterly unique filmmaking style created by Sam Raimi and his collaborators; and

2. Bruce Campbell.

Campbell plays the main character, Ash, to the point that the opening credits and title card for the third film, “Army of Darkness,” don’t read the typical way, i.e., “Army of Darkness starring Bruce Campbell.” Oh, no; in this case it’s

Like Fay Wray, Campbell has complete mastery of his face. In fact he is a wholly unique animal: the chiseled jawline, the expressive eyes, and the complete unashamed joy in getting abused by his director again and again and again. In “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn,” Ash’s hand gets possessed by the evil entities, so Campbell has to beat himself up, throwing himself against walls, bashing plates over his own head.

In “Army of Darkness,” celebrating its 30th anniversary, the first screams of his that we hear are both when he’s falling: into a time portal that tosses him into medieval England and later into a pit inhabited by some Olympian-level gymnastic demon-witch. It’s all very silly and fun, like when mini Lilliputian copies of Ash step out of broken shards of mirror and ram a poker straight into his rear end. At one point he even gets stretched thin like a cartoon character. It’s horror light, without the scares, which I know some of you will appreciate.

Though their performances are separated by sixty years, both Bruce Campbell and Fay Wray forever reign as Scream King and Queen. They don’t just scream, they put their whole bodies into it. You can see, hear, and feel the terror and torture they’re put through.

As Campbell’s character, Ash, boasts: “Hail to the king, baby.”

Until next time! 🎃