Friday, October 28, 2005

Halloween Countdown ...07

Top Ten Movies That Remind Me of Halloween continued...

* Due to continuing technical difficulties there are no pics. (boo hoo. me love visuals)
But I don't want to get too far behind. *

07. The Crow(1994)
This entry is not about costuming though you'll see the mime face w/ black leather pants (easy, iconic) just about everywhere this time of year. Neither is this about the Halloween ghoulishness of an extremely violent film about an undead man who happens to be played by a man who was killed on the set (Brandon Lee, rest in peace) during the making of. Nor is it about my teenage love of comic books. I only read this once after the movie was released. The Crow appears on this list because I hail from Detroit, Michigan and so does this gruesome story.

If you'd have told me as a child that I'd have to explain "Devil's Night" (the night in which all The Crow's narrative mayhem occurs) to other people when I grew up I would have laughed at you with the easy myopia of childhood. 'Who doesn't know what Devil's Night is?' I would have scoffed. Apparently lots of people. Or so I discovered when I moved west. So it came as a relief when The Crow opened and I suddenly had an easy-to-cite cultural reference to explain to people about the night of vandalism, arson, and general mischief that precedes Halloween. I thought everyone grew up tepeeing houses, egging cars, setting fires, and sneaking around their neighborhood on October 30th each and every year.