the final spooky not scary round
and the results because actually it's Halloween
The last round of the original 64 comes ON HALLOWEEN DAY!1
(3) Hotel Transylvania vs. (62) Halloweentown
I’m too old to care about Halloweentown but somehow not too old to love Hotel Transylvania, a movie series that began a decade and a half later.
(30) “Thriller” music video vs. (35) Pushing Daisies
Thriller is a perfectly contained horror film with an all-time great song, a dance that is still immediately recognizable 40 years later, and narration by Vincent Price. It steamrolled the competition in a play-in round to enter the tournament and will crush Pushing Daisies so let me say a word for the dead.
Pushing Daisies stars Lee Pace as a small town piemaker who can bring the dead back to life with a touch; a second touch will send them back permanently. When his childhood sweetheart is murdered, he brings her back but can never again touch her even as they fall in love.
LEE PACE as a star-crossed romantic lead! Everything around this central love story is quirky and colorful even though it’s technically a procedural (the piemaker goes to work for a local detective reviving murder victims to find their killers). This sounds heavy but actually it’s not. It’s emotional but not depressing, and the vibe is lighthearted from all its strange small town characters. It’s a bit Practical Magic, a bit Gilmore Girls, romantic, bright, 22 episodes in its entirety, and streaming now on HBO.
(14) Ghostbusters vs. (51) Frankenweenie
Frankenweenie won its way into the main tournament by beating Paranorman and Monster House in a play-in round but that kind of luck can’t hold out against Ghostbusters. My conception of the ghostbusters for many years was from the cartoon, where Slimer was a friendly ghost and not the annoyingly evil guy from the movies, but I can hardly be blamed for confusing which concept came first when there was the original film, the sequel, the reboot, the legacy sequel, the hit theme song, the hit children’s drink, the cartoon, the other cartoon, and all the toys and costumes. I have seen kids dressed as ghostbusters; I have seen adults dressed as ghostbusters; I have seen dogs dressed as ghostbusters; and this holds true for basically every year of my life, no matter how far from the original release. I don’t think I’ve appreciated until I listed it all out just now how rich Dan Aykroyd and the late Harold Ramis must have gotten.
(19) The Storyteller vs. (46) Rocky Horror Picture Show
I regret that I’ve never seen Rocky Horror in a theater but you all know about it anyway. Let’s talk about The Storyteller!!! A short-lived show from the ‘80s in which John Hurt tells old folk tales to his muppet dog (yes, this is once again a Jim Henson Creature Shop production and yes, I am once again voting for it for the next round). Each story is beautiful and yet somehow ominous, as befits a show dedicated to fairy tales. The story names alone! “The Luck Child,” “Sapsorrow,” “The Heartless Giant,” “The Solider and Death.” The entire show was written by Anthony Minghella pre-English Patient or anything else you would recognize. Give yourself five minutes to just watch the intro and you will see. It’s magical.
(6) The Craft vs. (59) Goosebumps
The Craft was so influential to my youth, but I haven’t seen it in many years and I never saw the reboot. Goosebumps has had so many iterations that I’m not sure which version I’m even talking about here. The ‘90s show? The Jack Black movie, which seemed very far from the original series? The new streaming show that came out THIS MONTH which I didn’t even know existed until I was doing this bracket and which I have not seen reviewed? Book Goosebumps probably would have won out over The Craft but given that we’re talking strictly about TV and movie adaptations, The Craft wins easily.
(27) Beautiful Creatures vs. (38) Young Frankenstein
Oh, this is so hard because I love Young Frankenstein but Beautiful Creatures is criminally underrated in that no one knows it even exists to rate it. And how DOES it exist? If I just read you the cast list (Emma Thompson, Viola Davis, Jeremy Irons, Margo Martindale, a pre-Star Wars jail Alden Ehrenreich, a pre-Maisel Rachel Brosnahan) and asked you to guess what the movie was about, you would probably think a Shakespeare adaptation and not a Southern Gothic teen romance about witches. Yes, I said Southern! Everyone gagging on the accents is part of the appeal.
It’s the movie I think Twilight wanted to be and perfect for the person who misses turning on the TV on a Saturday afternoon and becoming engrossed in some mid-budget movie from ten years ago you’d never heard of, a treasured experience that is mostly lost now that cable has given way to streamers. Young Frankenstein probably gets my vote but Beautiful Creatures gets my rewatch.
(11) It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! vs. (54) The Monster Squad
Apples and oranges! Monster Squad is campy fun, a Goonies- meets-the-Universal-monsterverse kind of thing, and I think the only movie in this list of 64 to feature a swamp thing character. Charlie Brown is Charlie Brown though. You’re either in the mood for one of these or the other; you will never be confused on the subject.
(22) Donald Duck’s Trick or Treat vs. (43) Hocus Pocus2
I don’t really remember the plot of this Donald Duck cartoon but the little devil costume Hewey, Dewey, or Louie is wearing is firmly ingrained in my memory.
When I seeded this bracket, I was originally unsure if I should be doing it according to how I personally thought these movies ranked or how I thought everyone else would rank them. I knew the biggest discrepancy would be with Hocus Pocus, a top 4 seed if I were just predicting how others would vote but a movie I personally find mediocre forgettable. Every year I marvel at how passionately people love it; I have held this stance so firmly for so long that it’s almost inevitable that if i were ever to rewatch it, I would discover I loved it too. The solution? Never rewatch it. 3
Happy Halloween!
This is obviously late so I can tell you that The Addams Family beat out Nightmare Before Christmas for the win, which is the correct outcome in the correct final matchup as far as I’m concerned.
The #1 thing I have learned this month is that everyone’s kids are terrified of Hocus Pocus.
This contest took so many hours of painstaking preparation and posting and the payoff was the sinking feeling that I was annoying my friends with an utterly unnecessary and unwanted stream of posts. The most I can say is it’s been good to turn over newsletters in a couple of days instead of doing what I usually do, which is write them and then sit on them for months until they’re no longer relevant.
Forcing myself to do lots of work that no one is asking for and that offers no payoff is what underlies everything I do on the internet, and is why this newsletter exists, so I guess I can’t hate TOO much but I have been Perceived this October and I’m ready to not speak for at least a month.
Goodbye!