Yesterday I completed the 31 movies in 31 days of Final Girl‘s SHOCKtober event.
It was an interesting experiment, to watch that many movies in that short a time and write about each one. However, it is unlikely I will ever participate again.
There isn’t anything wrong with the concept itself, of doing a movie a day for the whole month, but there is a serious flaw in letting someone else pick the movies. There was a lot of terrible shit in this list, movies that I think I would have preferred never to have seen. Not all of them for the reasons I gave for the final film, Martyrs. Some were just because they were old and boring.
Plus, too many foreign films. There is nothing inherently wrong with foreign films, but reading subtitles means that you have to pay very close attention to the movie, even if it is boring. You can’t browse the Internets and return focus to the film when something exciting happens. Nope, you have to sit there staring at the screen and read the whole damn thing. I don’t mind foreign films, but I have to prepare myself for them, get other stuff done and clear the two hours of time where I can focus on just the movie. I feel like doing that roughly once a month. This selection had 13 films with subtitles. There were 15 foreign films, but the copy of Planet of the Vampires I watched was dubbed as was Tenebre (I had a subtitled copy but the subtitles wouldn’t work on my player).
If I ever attempt anything like this again, I’ll be picking the list myself.
On the other hand, being forced to write every day was good. And I plan to carry it into this month as I participate in NaNoWriMo. In fact, since I wrote this post in advance, there is a decent chance that I’m already writing. I hope so anyway.
Until next time…