The Tournament (2009), Squid Game, and Other Deadly Competition Movies

Squid Game was released two months ago and became one of the biggest streaming series ever. People were obsessed. They wouldn’t stop talking about it. The bingers got there early, watching it all as soon as it got released. The hype train started rolling. Then the people who started watching immediately, but couldn’t do it all in one sitting… They finished pushed the hype to new levels. People like me put it off for a few weeks, then eventually got around to it to see what all the hype was about.

It was a show about four-hundred-something people who were taken to an undisclosed location to participate in children’s games. The twist was that they died if they lost the games. It began with a game of red light, green light where people who moved during the red light would be shot by snipers. Things got progressively more violent from that point on. Or, maybe not. A couple games got more violent.

Squid Game wasn’t the first time a story like this was told. It had a similar structure to a bunch of movies, books, and television shows that preceded it. That similarity was part of the discussion when it was released. The idea of a competition where a bunch of people would die, one-by-one, until only one person remained wasn’t anything new. It wasn’t something that people didn’t already know about. But the set design, the performances, the costuming, and the use of children’s games helped set Squid Game apart from the others. They helped make it the success it was.

Again, the story of Squid Game was built on the foundation of other stories that came before. I want to take some time to go through a few of the others, including this week’s movie, and bring up different tropes and structures within them. I want to show what elements within them led to Squid Game. Or, how they paved the way for the other movies and television shows that used similar formats.

The Long Road

You probably thought I was going to start somewhere else because there are other, more popular, stories out there. However, I thought I should at least bring up this Stephen King novel that depicted a strange future. An annual competition was held where one hundred teenage boys walked as far as they could at a steady pace of at least four miles an hour. If they dropped below that pace, they received three warnings before being shot by military personnel from a vehicle accompanying the boys. The last boy standing would win a large sum of money and a prize.

This is the oldest story I’m going with, having been published in 1979 under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. What I want to focus on is the character work. One important part to any deadly competition story is that there should be characters to care about. Not just the main character, but the side characters, as well. Some of them are fodder. Sure. The happens when you have a competition like this. There should also be characters with backstories that you, as an audience, care about. There should be characters that the main character cares about, even though they know that the characters will die. That way, the audience will feel emotion as these other characters begin to die, wondering if the main character will actually survive.

Stephen King gave a few of the characters in The Long Road backstories that made them more sympathetic. The main character was the main character. He wasn’t the best character, but he was the one whose well-worn shoes the audience walked in. One of the boys was married, leading the others to make a pact to financially protect his wife with the prize money. Another boy had a scar from an ex-girlfriend. He revealed that story during the walk. Yet another boy was trying to get into his father’s good graces by doing the walk. They each had stories that built the characters so the audience, and the main character, cared when they died.

This structure exists in most of the deadly competition stories. There are supporting characters who get proper backstories and emotional arcs. It fills out the story and gives more people to care about than just the main character. Squid Game had that in the form of the North Korean girl trying to bring her family to South Korea, the childhood best friend who got into business trouble, the Pakistani guy trying to support his family, the gangster in debt, and the old man suffering from a brain tumor. There was depth to the supporting characters as much as there was with the main character. It made it much easier to feel the consequences of the deadly game when the characters were fleshed out in this way.

Battle Royale

You probably expected me to start here. It is one of the two deadly competition stories that people frequently reference when they talk about this subgenre. The other one will be coming up soon enough, don’t worry.

Battle Royale was about a class of students brought to an undisclosed location and tasked with killing each other. Only one kid could survive. All others had to die. They were given a bag of supplies, sent out in intervals of time to not all get bunched up in one spot, and given a map. As time went on, different areas were out of bounds. If any students broke any rules of the game, an explosive collar would trigger to kill them. That was if they hadn’t already been killed by another student.

I’ve both read the book and seen the movie. They differ from one another in ways, but not enough in the structure to warrant a big discussion. What I can say, though, is that Battle Royale had one major difference in the competition from The Long Road. Well, two, I guess. One, and not the one I want to discuss, is that the characters had to do the killing themselves. For the most part. But the major one was that the characters didn’t sign up for the competition. They were thrown into the death and mayhem without knowing what was coming. They were unwilling participants.

Fast forward twenty years and you have the first game of Squid Game. The adult participants knew they were in for a nice children’s game where they might be able to earn some extra cash. That’s what they signed up for. What they didn’t know was that they would be killed if they lost. That was a discovery they made on the field, while playing red light, green light. The shock of that mayhem initiated a vote to end the games. People didn’t want to die. They just wanted to make money by playing games from their childhood. Of course, that would change. Most of them went back to the games, thus becoming the willing participants who put their own lives on the line for money. What a way to have it both ways.

The Hunger Games

The other obvious one that frequently comes up is The Hunger Games. I haven’t read the books, so anything I say is solely based on having seen the movies. Much like Battle Royale, which came before it, The Hunger Games and its sequels pitted a bunch of kids against each other in a game of kill-or-be-killed. Yet, there were some major differences that set the movies apart from the story that people say clearly influenced it.

The Hunger Games wasn’t solely about the competition. That was the big thing, it was what got people hooked in, but it wasn’t the substance of the story. The young adult story actually wove in a bunch of societal elements that played out during the deadly competition. There were different districts, based on wealth and status, that broke up the nation in which the story took place. District 1 was the richest, while District 12 was the poorest. Each year, one boy and one girl were chosen from each district to participate in the games. Of course, the richest districts could train for the games. This meant they were more prepared and more likely to win. It was also easier for the richer districts’ participants to find sponsors to help them in the game because sponsors were more confident in their chances to win. Wealth leads to better opportunities. The way of life.

Many of the deadly competition stories weave in some kind of societal commentary. Much of the time, it has to do with the wealthy having better protection because of their wealth. They get more opportunities. They have safety that the poorer people don’t. Of course, these types of stories aren’t the only times that you’ll see commentary on the wealth gap in movies, television, or writing. They’re just a place where that commentary becomes more obvious.

Squid Game also involved that sort of commentary. Each of the participants in the children’s games were going through financial trouble. They were all in serious debt. A man lured them into the competition by playing a children’s game in a train station and offering them money if they won. They could win more money if they competed in other children’s games. When they got to the unknown location, they were kept in the competition by the amount of money they could win. Their need for money made them ignore the bloodshed.

Why did the people end up in serious debt? There were many reasons for it, but the most apparent was inflation in prices while wages weren’t increased. That’s something we’re going through in our everyday lives. The inflation of groceries, gasoline, and housing is far outstretching the inflation in minimum wage, or wages in general. People are going further into debt because they can’t afford anything with the pay of their jobs. Some people work two or three jobs just to stay afloat. Sometimes, even that isn’t enough. Squid Game commented on that sort of unevenness through the competitors’ debt and need for money.

The Tournament

Another element of the wealth gap that comes into play can be seen in the 2009 action flick, The Tournament. The movie followed Father MacAvoy (Robert Carlyle), a church minister who got caught up in a deadly competition between thirty killers and assassins trying to kill each other. He teamed up with Lai Lai Zhen (Kelly Hu), an assassin trying to make up for killing an innocent woman prior to the tournament’s start. Also involved in the tournament was Joshua Harlow (Ving Rhames), a notorious hitman who was married to the innocent woman Lai Lai killed. He was out for revenge.

For the most part, The Tournament was your standard deadly competition story. There were thirty people going head-to-head to see who could come out as the only survivor. Sure, there was an innocent bystander thrown into the mix, by way of Father MacAvoy, but it was a movie about people killing each other until only one stood alive at the end. That was the majority of the story. However, there was some behind-the-scenes stuff that played into a similar area as the wealth gap stuff in The Hunger Games.

The tournament in The Tournament had to be held by someone. There had to be some sort of infrastructure for the tournament to happen. Someone had to recruit. Someone had to scout locations. Someone had to oversee it to make sure there was a winner. Powers (Liam Cunningham) was that overseer. He was the host of the tournament. He was the person who put it together. And he also brought in a bunch of rich people to watch the tournament play out and place bets on who might win. It was a gambling ring by way of assassins assassinating one another. They were watching people die for their own amusement.

This behind-the-scenes element was also present in Squid Game. In the later episodes, VIPs were brought to the undisclosed location to watch some of the later games. They placed bets on the people they thought would live, and those they thought would die. It was all fun and games to the rich people, who thought they could do whatever they wanted with no consequences. They were rich, the competitors weren’t. Their lives mattered, the competitors’ didn’t. That’s all there was to it. It was more commentary on the wealth gap through the means of gambling.

The Belko Experiment

The final story I want to bring into this discussion is The Belko Experiment. This one felt very derivative of other deadly competition stories, except it was set within an office building. The American people working in the Bogota field office were locked inside with someone on the speakers telling them they couldn’t get out until there was only one person alive. The only reason I want to bring this one up is that there’s one element present within the movie that hasn’t yet been discussed.

There was an extra rule in the deadly competition that would lead to more death. The voice on the speakers said that if a certain number of people hadn’t been killed within a certain timeframe, a device would be set off within the competitors which would explode and kill them. That device was a tracking implant placed inside each employee under the guise of protecting them if anything happened in Bogota. Really, it was just a way to control the participants through threatening their lives over the lives of others. Pushing their will-to-live buttons. That sort of thing.

Squid Game took a different approach to the threat of death in a game in which death was likely already. To force people to do things, there was a military-like presence. There were people in costumes who would lead participants to and from games, guard the large bedroom when people were supposed to be asleep, and kill people when they lost certain games. Games like marbles and the honey cookie game, or whatever that was, involved these people killing the participants who lost.

If the competition involves people killing each other, there typically needs to be a reason why they would want to. Someone pushes people to kill each other. There can either be military-like people, such as in The Long Walk or Squid Game, to threaten participants to keep participating. There can be fail-safe killing devices, such as those in Battle Royale, The Belko Experiment, and The Tournament. Either way, the threat must be imminent, or else people would just choose not to participate.

Squid Game was an amalgamation of elements from many stories that featured deadly competitions. There were the obvious comparisons that everyone made to other popular deadly competition stories. But there were also elements that it shared with lesser-known works, such as this week’s movie, The Tournament. If it weren’t for the foundations that these other stories built, and the influences they provided to the creative team behind the show, Squid Game would never have been what it was. It never would have been the sensation it became.

Squid Game took the world by storm when it hit Netflix. It was the talk of the town. Masses of people felt the need to check it out. It quickly became the most watched show on the streaming giant. But its influences were clear. It didn’t try to hide that there were similar elements to other stories. It also didn’t bring attention to them. Squid Game found its own place within the world of deadly competition stories, and perhaps opened the door for people to check out some of the other examples out there.

I just want to end this by saying that this post seems to be about Squid Game, and it kind of is, but it was inspired by a watch of The Tournament. I wanted to discuss other stories that shared the very basic idea behind The Tournament, and I just ended up hanging the post on a recent example that people watched. So that’s how a post that was inspired by The Tournament ended up only somewhat featuring the movie.

Now for some notes:

• The Tournament wasn’t Ving Rhames’s first rodeo in Sunday “Bad” Movies. He was in Death Race 2 (week 9), Death Race: Inferno (week 9), and 7 Below (week 137).
• Kelly Hu also made a fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in The Tournament. She was previously in Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (week 294) and The Scorpion King (week 380), as well as in archive footage used in The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (week 380).
• The Tournament featured Bashar Rahal, who was also in The Legend of Hercules (week 77) and In the Name of the King: The Last Mission (week 220).
• Three actors from The Legend of Hercules (week 77) were in The Tournament. They were Scott Adkins, Borislav Iliev, and Kitodar Todorov.
• Kaloian Vodenicharov was in The Tournament and Getaway (week 135).
• J.J. Perry returned from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (week 140) to appear in The Tournament.
• Die Another Day (week 153) featured Rachel Grant, who was also in The Tournament.
• Finally, Tom Wu was in The Tournament. He could also be seen in The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (week 380).
• Have you seen The Tournament? Have you seen or read anything else I mentioned in this post? What do you think of the deadly competition stories? Share your thoughts with me on Twitter or in the comments.
• Let me know what movies I should watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. Drop your suggestions in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. I’m open to all suggestions.
• There’s currently a tournament going on through Twitter to determine which movie I’ll be watching for the ninth anniversary of Sunday “Bad” Movies. Go vote for your favourites.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• What’s up next for Sunday “Bad” Movies? I’m heading back to the 1930s for another one of those cautionary-tale, exploitation movies. Yeah, another movie like Reefer Madness (week 339) or The Cocaine Fiends (week 424). I’ll be watching Gambling with Souls. I’m sure I’ll have something to say about it. Come back next week to find out what. See you then!

Material Girls (2006)

Disney has been a company producing child stars for decades. From The Mickey Mouse Club all the way up to the current Disney Channel originals, child stars have been their bread and butter. People like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling, and Justin Timberlake came from The Mickey Mouse Club. There were Disney Channel original movies that brough the Jonas Brothers, Zac Efron, and Vanessa Hudgens to popularity. There were sitcoms like Hannah Montana with Miley Cyrus, or Lizzie McGuire with Hilary Duff that also created child stars.

When Lizzie McGuire ended in 2004, one of the biggest questions was where Hilary Duff’s career would go next. Obviously, she was a huge star who would get into movies. That was the career path at the time. People went from television to movies. People tried not to go the other way around, unless it was for a guest role on a television show that was super popular. It wasn’t a time where there would be a big star like Kate Winslet taking a starring role in a television show. Times have changed since then. Anyway, people wanted to see what would come of Hilary Duff following the conclusion of her popular Disney show.

Lizzie McGuire was still airing when her movie career began. The Lizzie McGuire Movie was released as the finale of the show before the final episode even aired. Cadet Kelly was a Disney Channel original movie that aired while the show was on. Agent Cody Banks and Cheaper By the Dozen released to theaters while Hilary Duff was still gracing television screens. It wouldn’t be until 2004’s A Cinderella Story that she had a film career beyond her television days.

Looking over Hilary Duff’s career, one thing is apparent. She has a love for her sister, which bleeds over into much of her work. Haylie Duff appeared in a non-starring role in Lizzie McGuire. They did voicework together in In Search of Santa and Foodfight!. They made music together, including a cover of Our Lips Are Sealed done for the soundtrack of A Cinderella Story. Their biggest collaboration was on this week’s movie, Material Girls.

Tanzie (Hilary Duff) and Ava Marchetta (Haylie Duff) were two heiresses to a major cosmetics company. Their father passed away, leaving the company to them. They couldn’t access the financials until they were of age. Until then, Tommy (Brent Spiner), the CEO, was in charge. When it was almost time for them to receive control of the company, Tommy came to them with a buyout proposition from rival cosmetics giant, Fabiella Du Mont (Anjelica Huston). They didn’t sell and rumours came out about how their products could cause serious health issues. The Marchetta sisters’ stock value plummeted. They lost all their money and fought to get it back.

Material Girls was a comedy starring the two Duff sisters. Much of the comedy stemmed from a strange fish-out-of-water premise. It involved two girls who were raised in wealth having to come to terms with not having wealth, while also not acclimatizing to their new financial situation. Instead of trying to live with a lack of wealth, they continued to act like the spoiled rich girls that they were. Well, Ava did, at least. She wouldn’t face the reality that the sisters were in, insisting that they must continue to be glamorous socialites. Tanzie just wanted to become a chemist like her father. It didn’t matter to her what their financial situation was. She just wanted to do chemistry.

The fish-out-of-water stuff never really worked. It never really fazed the sisters. Most fish-out-of-water comedy comes from the confusion of one character as they are put into a situation they are not used to. They try to treat their new situation like their old one, it doesn’t work, and they either learn to try new things, or they find a way to compromise their ways with the new ones. When the characters are oblivious to their new surroundings, the writers must balance things carefully. That’s especially true of characters moving between social/financial classes. Rich people being oblivious to people who aren’t as financially secure even while being financially insecure themselves doesn’t stick the comedic landing if the rich people don’t learn anything.

Ava and Tanzie never really learned anything from losing their money. Well, they kind of learned one thing a piece, but those things didn’t make the characters any humbler or more relatable. Ava’s big arc was that she was in a relationship with a reality television star who ghosted her when she lost her wealth. She then realized she preferred the lawyer that she and her sister hired because he was real with her. Tanzie ended up in jail at one point, learning that the other women in there would buy the Marchetta cosmetics if they had a lower price point. When the sisters got their company back, Tanzie made sure to market some cheaper cosmetics to people with less money.

What made these two lessons fall flat was their execution. Ava’s relationship lesson seemed like she was simply attaching herself to the first person that showed even the slightest interest in her after she was ghosted by her famous boyfriend. Sure, she found some connection beyond beautiful people being beautiful. There was more of a personal connection. But it’s not like she paid any attention to anyone else that didn’t have money. She only paid attention to Henry (Lukas Haas), the lawyer who talked to her as a person, because they had brought him on as a lawyer.

The Tanzie stuff maybe worked a little better. She realized that some people didn’t have the money to indulge in things that rich people were able to do. She spent time in jail with people who weren’t as well off and made quick friends. But when the ending of that arc was revealed, it was through a billboard about affordable cosmetics. It was a marketing strategy for more people to buy Marchetta cosmetics. As good as the intentions were, it turned into a corporation being a corporation. It was a way for the Marchetta sisters to make more money, played as a charitable cause.

The one good thing to come out of the fish-out-of-water situation in Material Girls was the Marchetta sisters’ relationship with Inez (Maria Conchita Alonso), their maid. They moved in with her after a house fire. They tried to stay at a hotel, but their credit cards were cut off due to the plummeting stock of their company. She was the closest thing they had to a mother since their mother had passed away, many years earlier. They learned that she had been trying to bring her children into the country for years. When Ava and Tanzie got their wealth back, they used it to bring Inez’s children into the country. It was a nice little thing they did for someone they cared about.

What made the comedy of Material Girls fail seemed to boil down to something people frequently bring up about stand-up comedians. It is always better to punch up than punch down. A slight perspective shift of the storytelling could turn Material Girls into a punching-up comedy satirizing the socialite lifestyle. Instead, it put the audience in the shoes of the socialites and punched down by making the comedy about the less fortunate people of the world. The comedy wasn’t so much about adjusting to a life they weren’t accustomed to. It was simply about two rich girls being in a world without wealth. The unwealthy shouldn’t be the punchline.

Material Girls didn’t do well at the box office. It didn’t do well critically, either. It essentially signalled that Hilary Duff’s major motion picture career wasn’t going to be as successful as Lizzie McGuire. She wasn’t going to be the huge superstar that people thought she might be. She would continue to make movies, but there was never going to be a big event movie starring Hilary Duff. She wasn’t going to be that person. Her career wasn’t on that trajectory.

Not all child stars find success later in their careers. Many of them leave the business for different reasons. Some of them have behind-the-scenes issues. It could be substance abuse. It could be abuse from the people in charge or from their families. Some people, like Jake Lloyd, become so associated with a role from their childhood that people harass them for it. They can’t handle it (they shouldn’t have to) and stop acting altogether.

Other child stars go on to have illustrious careers. They make names for themselves and bring that stardom into adulthood. The child performances were only the beginning of what they would bring to Hollywood and beyond. Whether they came from a famous family or not, they found fame in their childhood years. They may have experienced some of the roughness that other child stars experienced, but they came through the other side and kept going.

Hilary Duff fell somewhere in between. Her career didn’t keep going at quite the same level of stardom as it had early on. She had one of the biggest children’s shows of the time in Lizzie McGuire. She transitioned into films. None of the films really found the same level of popularity. Her career didn’t end there. It’s still going. She still works now and then, making movies and television shows. She has even written a few books in recent years. That’s not bad for a Disney kid. Some do better. Many others do far worse.

Here are some notes to close out the post:

• Foodfight! (week 143) was mentioned in this post.
• Jake Lloyd was also mentioned. He was in Jingle All the Way (week 160).
• Material Girls featured Obba Babatundé. He was previously in April Fools (week 18) and Santa Paws 2: The Santa Pups (week 420).
• Anjelica Huston was also in Material Girls. She could be seen in The Ice Pirates (week 128) and Casino Royale (week 461).
• Marcus Coloma was in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 (week 70), Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva La Fiesta! (week 70), and Material Girls.
• The final three-timer was Colleen Camp, who was in Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (week 400), Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (week 400), and Material Girls.
• Hilary and Haylie Duff were the stars of Material Girls. They each also did voice work in Foodfight! (week 143).
• Timothy Davis-Reed was in Pottersville (week 316) and Material Girls.
• Material Girls wasn’t the first Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Lukas Haas. He was a child actor featured in Solarbabies (week 416).
• Finally, Brent Spiner appeared in Independence Day: Resurgence (week 449) and Material Girls.
• Have you seen Material Girls? What did you think of it? Do you think the comedy fell flat or did it work? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• If there’s a movie that you think I should be watching for Sunday “Bad” Movies, I’d love to hear about it. Find me on Twitter or drop the suggestion in the comments.
• There are a series of polls going on Twitter right now as I try to figure out what I’m going to watch for the ninth anniversary of Sunday “Bad” Movies. To be a little more accurate, you’re going to decide by voting. Go vote. Pick the movies that move forward until only one movie is left.
• Make sure to visit Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun all week long.
• Next week will bring another new movie to Sunday “Bad” Movies. What movie will it be? Well, it’s fitting that I’m running a tournament to find out what movie I will rewatch in a few weeks. Next week’s movie will be The Tournament, a movie from 2009. You’ll find out more about it in next week’s post. I’ll see you then.

Jack-O (1995) and Kids Horror from my Childhood

When I was growing up, I was introduced to horror at a young age. Aren’t we all? My dad was never a horror guy, but my mom was interested in horror. Add to that a childhood curiosity in things that parents don’t want kids watching and you have a formula for getting into things that might usually be a tad bit on the spooky side.

I remember sleeping over at my cousin’s house and regularly watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show when we woke up in the morning. I don’t know why. It was just a routine we had whenever I slept over as a child. Wake up before the parents of the house and watch this horror musical. Another thing I remember is sneaking over to the neighbour’s house to watch some horror stuff with the neighbour kids. We would see things like Bride of Chucky or The St. Francisville Experiment while the parents were off doing other things that didn’t involve us kids.

All of that said, I had already been introduced to horror in other ways. I wasn’t discovering horror by sneaking off to watch it when there were no parents around. There was a lot of horror aimed at children during the 90s. It was a little lighter in tone (because it was aimed at children), but it still managed to tell spooky stories that could get children interested in the genre. There were books. There were movies. And there were a whole bunch of television shows.

The biggest of those 90s horror stories geared toward children was Goosebumps. The franchise began as a series of books written by R.L. Stine. Everyone had them. By everyone, I mean everyone interested in spooky stories in any way whatsoever. I had a bunch of them. I still do. Stay Out of the Basement, Night of the Living Dummy, The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena, Night of the Living Dummy II… All the good ones. I read them a lot as a kid, slowly amassing a collection of most, if not all, of them.

The love of Goosebumps continued as the series was adapted for television. It was one of those shows where I can still remember bits and pieces of it. I clearly remember the theme song. It’s running through my head on repeat right now. I remember the green slime through the opening credits. I remember Ryan Gosling showing up in one episode. The Goosebumps books and show became staples in the lives of many people around my age who grew to appreciate horror. We grew up with the franchise.

That popularity at the time, and the popularity that continued well after we became adults in the physical sense of the word (some of us, myself included, might not actually be adults in the mental sense), led to two Goosebumps movies being made in recent years. They paid homage to many of the classic tales while telling a story that was original to the movies. They continued a childhood horror tone that hasn’t really been around for some time. They brought my childhood of growing up in a horror-filled 1990s to the present day.

Another show from around that time, and one that had its own child actors who would become big stars, was Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Jay Baruchel showed up in a few episodes. Also featured, as regulars, were his Popular Mechanics for Kids co-stars Elisha Cuthbert and Vanessa Lengies. This one actually began the year I was born. Thanks to a revival in the late 1990s and repeats airing on YTV in Canada, I got to watch the show a whole bunch. I loved it. Goosebumps was the flashy horror show, where Are You Afraid of the Dark? was the spookier one.

Are You Afraid of the Dark? also got a recent reboot. I haven’t seen either season of the new revival series, so I can’t give any thoughts about it. I know it’s out there. I want to see it at some point. I also want to rewatch the old series because of my nostalgia. It’s a staple of my childhood life, and I can still remember seeing the finale to the 1990s revival when it aired as a television movie at the turn of the century. It was an event.

There were a few other shows I want to speed through before switching over to movies. Freaky Stories was a Canadian horror show for kids. It featured animated horror tales, usually based on urban legends and things of that sort. I don’t remember too much about the animated stories, themselves. I think one might have been about Area 51. What I remember most is the live-action bookends to the stories. There were two puppets that would introduce each of the stories. One was a maggot and one was a cockroach. They were in a diner. That’s what I remember. I watched that one a lot, too.

Then there was Tales from the Cryptkeeper, an animated version of Tales from the Crypt directed at children. The stories were the Tales from the Crypt style without the blood and gore. Because it was for children, you see. The voice actor for the Cryptkeeper returned to do the voice for the animated series, which made it easier to transition to the live-action show as you grew or matured. I don’t think I watched that one as much as the others, but I remember giving it a peep now and then.

Other kids shows on at the time that had some horror elements to them were Gargoyles, Eerie Indiana, animated adaptations of Beetlejuice and Ghostbusters, and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, none of which I watched. I did watch some of Courage the Cowardly Dog, which was a crazy horror animated show. There was A Pup Names Scooby-Doo among all the Scooby-Doo reruns on TV. I did watch all of that. There was an Addams Family show at the end of the decade, and The Zack Files at the beginning of the next. I watched both of those. It was a big decade for a young me to get into horror-based stories through television.

Now onto movies. I was watching horror movies as a kid. I already said that. I saw Bride of Chucky when I was nine. I saw Scream when I was eight. I remember seeing the Tatum in the garage stuff when I was a kid. I saw The Blair Witch Project when I was ten. It’s not like adult horror was entirely foreign to me or anything. But there were some kids horror things out there as well. Or kids adjacent, might be a better term. The movies could get a little more extreme, at times.

One movie I remember getting me right in the horror feelings as a child was The Pagemaster. It was a hybrid between live action and animated. There was a live action bookend about a kid dealing with a life full of fear before seeking refuge from a thunderstorm in a library, then an animated main story as he was sucked into the world of books. He had to travel through a few different genres. He went through adventure. He went through fantasy. The final genre he went through was horror.

I watched The Pagemaster a lot as a kid. I can remember the paint running off the cathedral-like library ceiling. It was the child’s transition into the animated world, the location where most of the story would occur. I remember feeling spooked by that bit. Imagine going to the library to get out of the rain and being forced into living out some sort of animated trek through book genres. Imagine having to overcome your fear through the horror genre. You would have to directly face your fears in a world you didn’t know. It was a spooky tale.

Other movies like Jumanji, Casper, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, and The Nightmare Before Christmas incorporated horror elements as well. Then there were movies like Phantom Town, which I covered in 2020, which felt like Goosebumps episodes extended into feature length. There were two-part Goosebumps episodes released on home video, basically as feature length stories. And then there was Jurassic Park, a movie that kids wanted to see because there were dinosaurs. What they got was a family movie mixed with horror as the dinosaurs set out to hunt people. I still remember seeing the opening scene on VHS when I was five, being afraid of the unseen dinosaur in the box, and wanting to turn it off.

Sometimes a story that felt like it could be aimed at children had elements that were definitely not child-friendly. One such movie was 1995’s Jack-O. In 1915, a curse was placed on a family. They were hunted by a demonic pumpkin-headed demon. One of the family members stopped it. For eighty years, at least. In 1995, the demon rose and went after Sean Kelly (Ryan Latshaw), a descendent of the cursed family. It was up to Sean to defeat the demon before the demon got to his family.

Jack-O was very much a story that could have been told in an episode of Goosebumps or Tales from the Cryptkeeper. It had the classic elements of a kid-friendly story. There was the family curse. There was a demonic monster that wasn’t too spooky to look at. It was a scarecrow-looking guy with a jack-o-lantern head. There was a child in the lead role, protecting his family from the danger of the monster. With a few little tweaks, the story could have been a perfect fit for Goosebumps, with the flashy bits that would have set it apart from Are You Afraid of the Dark? episodes.

There were a couple things that weren’t quite kid-friendly, though. The first was the violence that was shown on screen. Most of the kids horror of the time didn’t feature a whole lot of blood. Jack-O featured an amount that wasn’t excessive, but was still more than kids horror would feature. The notable example was when one character was stabbed in the stomach, showing blood, and then began to cough up blood. His wife was soon electrocuted until she burned to a crisp. That was an amount of violence not typical for kids stuff.

The other thing was the humour of Jack-O. There was a satirical representation of a right-wing talk show host that showed up throughout the movie. He said things about how people should respect true Americans and true Americans only, people loyal to the flag. That sort of stuff, with slightly more nuance than I’m giving it here. There was also some sexual humour between Sean’s dad, David (Gary Doles), and his babysitter, Carolyn (Linnea Quigley). It probably wasn’t something that kids would pay too much attention to. It was in there, though, making the movie much more adult than you would think from the story.

Jack-O was a 1990s kids horror story trapped in the package of a 1990s adult-directed horror flick. It was a story that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a kid’s movie or television show that I watched when I was growing up. It was something that I could have watched when I was growing up, were it not for the violence and adult humour that was thrown on top of it. Though, I guess that wasn’t something that was out of bounds for me, so I probably could have watched it. Anyway, it was entertaining watching it now, when I’m 31 years old.

The 1990s were an interesting time to grow up. They helped to turn me into the horror fan I am today. Am I the biggest horror fan? No. Do I get thrills with the chills? Yeah I do. It was all thanks to watching things like The Pagemaster, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Freaky Stories, and Courage the Cowardly Dog. They gave me the upbringing I needed to fully appreciate things like Halloween, Hereditary, and The Sacrament. It all started as a child, with that childhood horror of the 1990s.

Now that that’s done with, I can get to the notes:

• I mentioned Phantom Town (week 404) briefly in the post.
• John Carradine had a bit part in Jack-O. He also had roles in Monster in the Closet (week 55), The Ice Pirates (week 128), and Shock Waves (week 299).
• Cameron Mitchell showed up in Jack-O, after appearing in Terror in Beverly Hills (week 78) and The Swarm (week 253).
• Brinke Stevens was in Jack-O and The Summer of Massacre (week 26).
• Finally, Linnea Quigley made a quick Sunday “Bad” Movies turnaround. She was in Graduation Day (week 462) and Jack-O.
• Have you seen Jack-O? What did you think of it? Was there any kids horror that you grew up with? You can talk about it with me on Twitter or in the comments.
• Let me know if there are any movies that I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks. Get a hold of me on Twitter or drop the suggestion in the comments.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• October is now over, which means we’re out of the horror month. I’ll be tackling a movie from another genre come next week. What movie is it? You’re probably asking that right now. Let me tell you. I’ll be checking out Material Girls, from 2006. If you want to see what I think of that, come back on Sunday for another post.