Scary Movies on a Plane
Everything I watched (and read) while traveling
Due to a combination of illnesses, medical procedures, and jet lag (yay, international travel?), I haven’t been consuming horror at my usual rate. I’ve even fallen off of my book-per-week reading schedule. (Curse Libby’s 14-day checkout period! A pox on the house of Overdrive!)
The nice thing about 12+ hour flights is the in-flight entertainment - and trust me, there’s not much to do besides watch movies. (I guess I could sleep, but, come on. I’ll do that when I’m dead!) So I got through quite a few.
As far as what’s coming up on H. is for Horror, I’ve got another Flanagan-centric piece in the works, this time about his adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher. Specifically, it’s about an aspect of the series’ ethos that I don’t personally agree with. *Gasp* me, not like a Flanagan work? Shocking, I know. (Spoilers: I still like it. There’s just one part that irks me.) Stay tuned for that!
Halloween (2018)
40 years after encountering Michael Myers as a teenager, Laurie Strode is now a paranoid recluse. But when Michael escapes once again she must fight back in order to protect her family.
This was the first movie I watched on the plane, and I must admit I was pretty distracted, so I didn’t absorb as much of it as I normally would. However it seems like a pretty solid follow-up to the original. There’s one scene that I found REALLY dread inducing.1
Interstellar
In seemingly the last days of humanity where climate change and resource mining have turned the Earth into an increasingly infertile dust bowl, former pilot Joseph Cooper learns he’s the only one who can pilot a mission to a black hole in search of other worlds that might save humanity–but he has to leave his children behind.
This is the best movie I watched while on the plane. I watched it about ten years ago when it was first in theaters, and there’s a reason that it’s a modern classic. I found myself tearing up at least five times. Hopefully my seatmates didn’t notice 😅
The scene where Murph gets in trouble with her teachers for insisting that the Apollo moon landings were real and not fabricated hit a little close to home.
I love that, although this movie leans pretty hard into Sci-fi, at its heart it’s about a father doing his best to find his way back to his daughter. The recursive, timey-wimey stuff is right up my alley, too.
Tuesday
When death comes to take 15-year-old Tuesday in the form of a bedraggled parrot, her mother Zora makes a decision that has ramifications that affect the entire world.
This is the newest movie I watched. It’s an A24 movie because of course it is. With this premise, how could it not be?? I love a unique movie, and the creators obviously had a vision. Unfortunately this one wasn’t cohesive enough for me. It felt like it didn’t really know what it wanted the focus of the story to be, Tuesday herself, or her mother? It went places I never could have predicted. It’s also great to see Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who apparently has made a Faustian deal with some entity or other because she hasn’t aged a single day.
Malignant
After a traumatic incident, a woman starts dreaming of murders being committed around the city where she lives.
WOW. I’ve never watched a Giallo film in my life and don’t get the homage, but this was still the standout movie I watched on my journey. I thought I had the “twist” figured out but I only knew the half of it. The creature design was so unexpected and so unique, especially in the way it moved. Can you tell I’m trying not to spoil things? If you haven’t seen this one yet, you should.
Twisters
Several years after three of her friends die while chasing a tornado, meteorologist Kate returns to storm chasing in Oklahoma.
This was a lot of fun. I recently rewatched the original Twister, and I like the way this one plays on your expectations of who the “bad guys” are in comparison with the original movie. I also like that the characters actually seem afraid of the tornadoes, unlike the storm chasers in the original, who seemed to understand that they had some sort of plot armor protecting them.
Watching this movie (and to some extent, the original) makes me wonder if it’s actually an accurate depiction of life in Oklahoma. I get that it’s been juiced up for the big screen, but, like, do Oklahoman’s spend every summer in fear of losing everything in an instant? I say that as someone who lives in Iowa, just on the edge of “Tornado Alley.”2
Also, I was not expecting stealth Kiernan Shipka, though it quickly became apparent why they didn’t publicize her inclusion in the cast 🌪☠
H. H. Duke is a writer, author, and podcaster. Most importantly, she loves horror! Currently she’s working on a book about a scary cave. OoooOOoo! For scary book recommendations, horror movie reviews, and other spooky things, subscribe to H. is for Horror now - If you dare!
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What I’m Reading
Currently hoping My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen will get me out of this reading rut 😅
Okay, it’s the part where he’s just wasted this family, and you hear a baby crying in another room and he STARTS WALKING TOWARDS THE CRYING. Then you see him approaching a baby in a crib… but then he walks right past the baby and out of the house. Ugh, I hate it.
I’ve never seen a tornado in person, but ONCE when I was delivering mail as a post-university summer job a FUNNEL CLOUD (AKA a tornado that hasn’t touched the ground yet) formed right over my vehicle. I called my dispatcher and she instructed me to keep delivering mail until it touched down. Stone cold, USPS, stone cold.