The XF Book Club's first annual mini-rewatch

[wendelah1]

And now for something completely different...

Why? Why not. Tomorrow's the official start of summer. The The X-Files LJ community hasn't had a mini-rewatch since the one we did in February at scully_fest. My other active comm is on hiatus until July. I have a new writing assignment so obviously the thing to do is put that off and watch some episodes!

While spontaneity is the spice of life, it's also good to have a plan. Except--there's no time! We just have to make it happen. So I'm borrowing from this list, but subtracting the episodes we watched during xf_is_love month and scully_fest. So that leaves "Ice," "Little Green Men," "Pusher," "Quagmire," "Detour," and "Small Potatoes." I'm throwing in "Humbug" (and keeping "Little Green Men"). Just because.

We'll start tomorrow with "Ice." I'll try to put up a post every day at 10:00 am my time, which is the middle of the afternoon on the East Coast, early evening in Europe and the middle of the night in Australia. My time zone sucks, folks, but that's the one thing I can't change. Here's the rest of the schedule.

June 21: "Ice"
June 22: "Little Green Men"
June 23: "Humbug"
June 24: "Pusher"
June 25: "Quagmire"
June 26: "Detour" "Small Potatoes"
June 27: "Small Potatoes" "Detour"

There will be fanfic recs where applicable. Publicize this far and wide. You don't need an account here to participate. Anonymous comments are enabled. Regular programming will resume in July.

So, watch "Ice" and come back tomorrow for discussion. Are you with me?


xf_book_club
Mini-rewatch June 21-27
<center><img src="http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg200/her_new_day/e86106de-1903-42b5-a89f-14da7f0198c1_zpsf1a88a05.jpg"> <user site="livejournal.com" user="xf_book_club"> Mini-rewatch June 21-27 </center>

Comments

[discordantwords.livejournal.com]

The dog scene is and always will be nightmare fuel for me, but the scenes that absolutely make me lose it are the blood testing scene and the chest defibrillator scene.

A few years ago I was watching one of those 100 Scariest Movie Moments countdowns that periodically make the rounds close to Halloween, and a friend of mine walked in and looked at the television right at the moment they were playing the blood testing scene. He'd never seen the movie, and had no sense of the preceding tension, but he jumped a mile anyway.

Part of what works for the movie is that the creature design is so uncomfortable to look at. It's human (or canine!) but it's so wrong in a way, so you have heads sprouting legs and mouths where there shouldn't be mouths and the whole thing is just so creepy it makes your skin crawl. I'll take that feeling over giant CGI monsters any day.

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

Oh, the chest defibrillator one is definitely a jump-out-of-your-own-skin moment.

Eeh! Did you offer to show him the whole movie after that?

Carpenter says something to that effect in this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0FhSHqGg74). The creature could not be just one creature to be scary, it had to be a mix of everything it had ever imitated. I'm trying to think of another monster that was equally scary and coming up empty. The wrongness of its misplaced organs, some of them recognizable, some not, is what makes it so utterly disturbing.

CGI monsters. Meh.

[discordantwords.livejournal.com]

I believe his response was "I think I've seen enough." Haha.

Thanks for linking that interview, fascinating stuff!

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

I think the alien in Alien was pretty scary. Along with the slow, uninterrupted build-up of tension.

Nobody seems to agree with me on this, but my sis and I saw Cloverfield in an almost empty theater (an exaggerated imitation of the old movie palaces) on a Superbowl Sunday. And man, did it ever work! I still love the scene in NYC, as hapless partiers are trying to find out what's making the big noises by rubbernecking on the balconies, and the head of the Statue of Liberty slams into the street.