Manifest Destiny™

Gladiator versus the Wyoming wilds © Jake Naughton 2010

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In the coming days prepare thine eyes and stomachs for an onslaught of hitherto unseen images from the PACIFICNORTHWEST™ archives.

Five Great Halloween Movies for People Who Don’t Like Horror

As many of you know, over the course of the last couple of years I have spent a great deal of time working to further my knowledge of the horror genre, particularly in regards to its film presence here in America and across the globe. There are an incredible number of these films, particularly when you broaden the spectrum to include the majority of tense, monster-based Science Fiction films of the 1950 and 60s... And yet a large number of filmgoers can't stand this genre, and do their best to avoid scary movies, but then Halloween comes by and I get the familiar question, "What kinda horror movie won't scare the crap out of me?" And here I am today to oblige an answer.

If you are one of the multitude of people who don’t care at all for blood, gore, screaming, and monsters from another world, and yet you'd like to keep your movie-watching experiences to be season-appropriate, I suggest you take a look at the five films I've listed below. They each certainly count as members of the Horror genre, and yet they lack that visceral terror that renders some trembling with fear long after the final credits have rolled. That doesn't mean these are bad horror films, some of them are simply old, and others hold more of a comedic or adventurous tone. But to this day, these remain among the best the genre has to offer, and I couldn't recommend them enough.

1. The Curse of Frankenstein

With any film adaptation of the original Frankenstein story, the subtleties of the original novel tend to get nixed in favor of clear-cut good and evil. However, the lovely people at Hammer Films decided to take a much different path than their predecessors at Universal by making Baron Frankenstein himself the true villain of the film. Creepy with a touch of camp, with a great performance by Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin) as Baron Frankenstein and a young Christopher Lee decked out as Frankenstein’s monster himself!

This was quite the scandalous film at the time, but it’s doubtful this film out of the 1950s will send you shaking with fright. And yet the image of perfect villainy in Baron Frankenstein, and the creepy overtones in the film still leave a spooky Halloween movie you can enjoy this October.