Weekend stuff

1. Helped Elayna's troop with their cookie sales. Was much fun.

2. Made a pasta sauce of garlicky doom. Well, doctored it, actually. Started with a bottled garlic and herb sauce. Added a pound of browned ground beef and six cloves of garlic. The kitchen still smells lovely.

3. Started a new Pronzini novel, Undercurrent. Am liking it just as much as the last one.

4. Found out that my favorite local comic shop closed. It's the same one that used to employ mightywombat. They had a good offer, financially, to sell the property, but it's still disappointing.

5. Played a game on Elayna's Nintendo DS that involved peeing. Seriously. My mom gave her Warioware: Touched for her birthday (along with the DS itself). The game is incredibly addictive, with hundreds of minigames, each of which is about six seconds long. One of them involves a classic-style cherub statue swinging on a rope and peeing, and you have to guide it to put out a fire. I seriously think that the Japanese game industry has a major drug problem. It's the only explanation.

Off to a meeting.

A Nightmare on Elm Street countdown: Prologue

I know, I said I'd kick off my countdown series today, but time made it tough.

Besides, the Nightmare series deserves an intro.

You see, unlike the Halloween and Friday the 13th movies, the Nightmare movies aren't about a straightforward killer. Jason and Michael may be, in theory, invulnerable (until the final reel, at least), but you could imagine someone escaping them by simply outrunning them, or even finding a big enough gun to just blow them away. You could even envision someone finding a safe, secure haven.

Not so with Freddy. Freddy isn't just evil, he's all-powerful within his own realm. And his realm is the dream realm. Where we all go, whether we want to or not. And sleep, of course, is supposed to be a safe realm. Sleeping is how our bodies heal, and how our minds often process difficult information.

The thing with Freddy is, there's never any sense that anyone has a chance. In the end, he toys with his victims too much, and that occasionally gives them an out (and unlike Michael or Jason, he toys with his victims equally, so even though the Final Girl is usually pretty obvious, it's not because the killer treats her much differently). But there's never a sense of safety, even for the survivor. Unlike the movies featuring Jason and Michael, at the end of these, there's no body, no physical evidence that they've won. All they have is something they've witnessed in a dream, a state in which Freddy is fully in control, and they know it.

I'll talk more about the evolution of Freddy as the countdown continues, but I wanted to at least get a few words on virtual paper, as I'd promised a post.

Tomorrow, expect comments on the weakest movie in the series, followed by a countdown all the way to the best one.