Saturday Grab Bag ... To Go!

I'm still not sure how much (if any) sense I was making in my post on Tuesday about the fine lines separating "stories with scary bits" from "horror stories", but as promised I am still thinking about it. After hitting Publish, I remembered one of my buddies and his steadfast aversion to horror, including big thick blanket statements like "I don't do horror movies." This actually came up recently as he was part of the crowd with which I saw Man of Steel, and more to the point part of the crowd standing around outside the theater afterwards talking about the movie and all sorts of related topics, from the inevitable Superman sequels to the also inevitable Justice League follow-up, which led to discussing The Avengers movie franchise, and from there to Joss Whedon, and thence on to Cabin in the Woods, a movie which I like (a lot, in fact, quite a lot). Yet which my anti-horror buddy has not seen and basically refuses to see, because it is technically a horror movie. However, my buddy is a huge fan of Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv series; he is in fact the very person who loaned me and my wife the box sets of every season on DVD, back when we were "me and my girlfriend" and I was belatedly watching the show for the very first time. And I pointed out to my buddy how Buffy and Cabin have similar sensibilities, they both involve humans fighting monsters, and there's really not much of anything in Cabin that's inherently more nightmare-inducing than anything from Buffy. I'm not sure if I won him over or not, but that's another example of my point, in a nutshell, that the labels we attach to things often obscure the particular merits of those things. Weird.

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Today is the 400th anniversary of the original Globe Theater burning to the ground, from whence we get our modern aphorism "People who put on plays in thatched-roof wooden buildings shouldn't fire real cannons on stage for special effects." Forsooth!

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Honestly I'm pretty light on grab bag items this week, but I did really want to get the scary-v.-horror one above out there. Perhaps more next weekend! Or not, seeing as how that's kind of a holiday weekend (although both my wife and I are scheduled to work on Friday the 5th). Maybe the weekend after that!