Dahlia DeWinters - Author

Quirky Heroines, Happy Endings

Blogtoberfest – Horror Movie Review – Friend Request

Title:  Friend Request

Synopsis:  A popular college student graciously accepts a social outcast’s online friend request, but soon finds herself fighting a demonic presence that wants to make her lonely by killing her closest friends.

Genre:  Horror

Opinion:

Let’s face it, most of us live online these days, especially those under 30.  Between online dating and online classes, people find themselves either at the computer or on their cell phones.  People are judged by the number of friends they have on social media or the number of likes they have on a post.  Some people pay good money to acquire followers and/or garner even more interest in their online musings.

Okay, you might be saying, it’s a movie review, Dahlia, get to the damn point.  All right then.  I say all that to say is when we see a post with no likes or a person with a low number of “friends” or “followers”, we assume that means low popularity.  And of course, someone with low popularity online is to be pitied and “felt sorry for”

And now we come to the crux of this movie.  A popular college student receives a friend request from a girl who doesn’t have any friends.  Feeling sorry for her, she “friends” her.  The relationship then degenerated into a sort of stalker/stalkee symbiosis, with the popular college student trying to get away from the cloying, smothering of her new “friend”.

::::::::SPOILER ALERT:::::::::::::::SPOILER ALERT::::::::::::::::SPOILER ALERT:::::::::::::::

After cutting off the friendship, the girl commits suicide and posts the video on the popular girl’s social media page.  This leads to her losing online friends and then DUN DUN DUN, she begins losing friends in real life….TO MURDER MOST FOUL.

Anyhoo, the rest of the movie invovles her tracking down and trying to eliminate the girl’s ghost, who is apparently causing all the trouble.  Will she succeed?  You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

All in all, it wasn’t the best horror movie I’ve seen, but I thought the premise was interesting.  It is well-acted and well-shot with some disturbing imagery, but I must say the movie does contain an almost paint by the numbers list of horror cliches, including jump scares with stinger chords.  Despite these flaws, it’s moderately intriguing and is a good movie to have on in the background.

Grade:  B-

 

BlogtoberFest 2017 – The Days of Halloween

Let’s face it, the holidays start earlier and earlier every year.  I saw a six foot light up snowman in Costco at the end of August.  Therefore, I see no reason not to begin the celebration of all things spooky, macabre, and scary in the month of October.

You faithful readers of my blog:  I thank you.  AND you already know what’s going to be happening.  Recipes, Top 3 lists, Top 5 lists, spooky songs, movies, books….everything relating to the theme of Halloween and horror.  Click over every day to see something new!

So pour yourself a Bloody Mary with bacon garnish and come on along for the ride.  We’ve been expecting you.

 

Horror Movie Review – Grave Encounters 2

 

Title:  Grave Encounters 2
Genre: Horror, Found Footage
Director: John Poliquin
Writers: The Vicious Brothers
IMDB Link:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2231554/

NO SPOILERS

PLOT SYNOPSIS: (imdb.com) A film student who is obsessed with the movie Grave Encounters sets out with his friends to visit the psychiatric hospital depicted in the original film.

We’re back!

After seeing Grave Encounters, I just had to see if there were a Grave Encounters 2.  And, lo and behold, it was!  I quickly queued it up and sat back, prepared to be as scared as I was with the first one.

Alas, this was not the case.  Now, this is not to say the movie wasn’t pretty good. It just took a bit of a time to get to the point.

Don’t go into this expect a retread of Grave Encounters.  The screenwriter and director  went in a bit of a different direction, which saved the movie from being a boring retread of the first movie.

A film student who is obsessed with the movie Grave Encounters sets out with his friends to visit the psychiatric hospital depicted in the original film.

I will say the characters are a little less likable in this movie than they were in the first one.  They skewed younger and were less the “seasoned professionals” of the first movie and more snot-nosed college students.  Being a woman of a certain age, their antics grated on me a bit, but I was eager to see what the asylum would do with them.

And the haunted asylum didn’t disappoint.  

Things are not what they seem at the old homestead and the place starts acting up right away.  We, the audience, know what they’re in for, having seen the first movie, we’re just waiting to see how the asylum plays with the new crew.

There’s shouting, there’s yelling, there’s running. There’s spooky stuff afoot and a surprise.

Watch it, if just to have the story continue. Grave Encounters 2 is not as good or as chill worthy as Grave Encounters, but it’s still a pretty good ride. 

My advice:  Push through the annoying college age antics at the beginning and stay for the scary parts.  There is some lore added and maybe a door opening for Grave Encounters 3.

Here’s to watching horror movies in the morning!

Dahlia

 

Blogtoberfest – Loving Among the Dead Playlist

loving-coverIt’s been a while since my first zombie novel, Loving Among the Dead was released through Loose Id. However, no matter how long ago I’ve written a book, the characters stay with me for quite a while. It takes a lot to get into a characters personality- how he or she walks, talks, behaves and reacts in certain situations, and this doesn’t go away very quickly.

With that in mind, I started looking through my Google playlists and found a list of songs I used to evoke moods with my two characters, Jude and Sky.

A little about the book: Jude is my female lead. When the zombie outbreak happened, she endured a scary journey from Philadelphia, where she was going to graduate school, back to Princeton (or thereabouts) where her parents’ lived. She’s a bit spoiled and a lot privileged, however, her parents were survivalists/hoarders, what have you, and they stocked their home with provisions and food, “just in case”. Though her parents are dead when she finally a makes it back home, she stays in her old boarded up home, the only person left alive in her neighborhood. It’s a lonely, scary existence, to be sure.

Then along comes Sky, traveling through solo on his way out of New Jersey to his home state of Tennessee. Before the apocalypse, he’d been a teacher in an urban district, having gone to college on a baseball scholarship.

The two meet in the stock room of a drugstore and Jude ends up allowing him to come stay with her. And as one would imagine, having been starved for human contact for many weeks, they cling together.

That’s the basic premise. The book continues with the push/pull of the relationship, where Sky wants to keep moving South, whereas Jude believes it’s safer to stay in one place.

All that being said, here’s a taste of their soundtrack. Some songs are hers, some are his, and some belong to them both. I’ve included a link to the playlist on YouTube, if you want a listen.

 

                     Jude Sky Both
Counting Cars – Snow Patrol Faster – Matt Nathanson Don’t You Forget about Me – Simple Minds
Time after Time – Cyndi Lauper Don’t Dream It’s Over  – Crowded House Follow you, Follow Me – Genesis
Invincible – Pat Benatar Wild Horses – The Rolling Stones Perhaps Love – John Denver
Like a Prayer – Madonna Melt with You – Modern English Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd
Nobody Does it Better – Carly Simon The Flame – Cheap Trick Never Surrender – Corey Hart
Head over Heels – Tears for Fears Sign Your Name – Terence Trent D’Arby Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen
 A Matter of Trust – Billy Joel Hey, Jude – The Beatles Anthem for the Already Defeated – Rock Plaza Central

Blogtoberfest – Stephen King's Pet Sematary

Horror is different for everyone.  I don’t think the “experts” can agree on what horror is and thus there are tons of movies and books that represent the horror

Cover of "Pet Sematary (Special Collector...
Cover via Amazon

genre, as it should be.

I also believe that horror is different depending on where you are in your life.  What’s represents horror for a twenty-year-old might be old-hat to a forty year old. Books that resounded for me in my twenties are just “eh” now that I’m a lovely seasoned woman of a certain age.

But Stephen King’s Pet Semetary broke that mold.  It’s just as frightening now as when I first read it many years ago.

Here’s the blurb

“Sometimes dead is better….”When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son — and now an idyllic home. As a family, they’ve got it all…right down to the friendly cat.

But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth — more terrifying than death itself…and hideously more powerful.

 

SPOILERS  SPOILERS   sort of SPOILERS sort of  SPOILERS  SPOILERS 

My goodness, what a story.  It runs the gamut from the “real-life” horror of the death of a child and the grief that follows, to the otherworldly horror that awaits when the family tries to alleviate the grief that follows the death of a family pet.

The first time I read the story the scene on the hill wasn’t so horrifying.  You know why?  Because I didn’t have children of my own.  I think I was more touched by the death of the pet than I was by the other.  However, when I read it now, that scene on the hill makes my gut twinge and jump.  After reading it, I had to go “check on the children”.  Having children of my own makes the following scenes more poignant and so much more touching.

Sympathy turning to empathy.

SPOILERS END (they were half-assed anyway)

My theory of horror if you’re “just watching” it makes it a lot less scary.  “This could never happen to me because blah blah”.  When an ordinary situation turns into a “horror” situation, something that could happen to anyone, something that is plausible (with a little “what if” thrown in)  that’s when the true terror begins.

Pet Sematary is about grief, loss and at its core, the horror of not letting go and where it can get you.

 

 

 

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