The last horror, thriller or suspense film you watched

^^^Keep going back and forth on whether or not to see Doctor Sleep… Glad to hear you liked it, Lebowskidoo 🎄😷🎄 .
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I’m sick and was holed up with a high fever yesterday, so I’ve gotten to see a bunch of movies.

I just finished Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which I wanted to see since the summer because I loved the book series as a kid but never got around to. To be honest, I’m kinda very disappointed by it. Maybe if It hadn’t come out, I would have liked Stories more, but as is it comes off as a cash-in. (Yes, those pronouns can be confusing…) What’s worse, the director and writer don’t seem to have grasped that the scariest things about the series weren’t the stories, which were hackneyed, albeit fun, old legends that weren’t always that scary, but rather the illustrations, which were flat-out terrifying. The actual text of a story like “The Haunted House” wouldn’t scare a little kid—but the picture of the revenant is enough to send his older brother running for the hills.

Perhaps that goes to show that the premise was flawed to begin with. The stories aren’t scary enough or mutually cohesive enough to base a whole movie on, so you’d have to rely on those scary images. But the staticity of the images is one of the elements that makes them scary, while a movie, by its very nature, has to move. It doesn’t help, of course, that what they’re replaced the original material with isn’t scary at all—and is completely predictable. As is, it feels like a PG-13 version of It, which is a disappointing adaptation for a series that is still scaring kids to this day.
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A kids’ horror flick that I surprisingly liked a lot, though, was The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018). I didn’t think I’d like it because the ads made it look like a CGI fest, the critics said it was a CGI fest, and I don’t like Jack Black—and it was a CGI fest and I’m still not a fan of Jack Black. (Though he did write and produce a surprisingly funny web video series called Ghost Ghirls, so I’ve got to give him credit for that.)

That said, House has a lot of heart and humor, reminding me of Henry Selick’s adaptation of Coraline, and it goes in directions I didn’t expect, for which I give the filmmakers a lot of credit, especially in a kids’ movie. (Not that kids’ movies shouldn’t go in unexpected directions—to the contrary, in fact. But storytellers seem to think they shouldn’t.) Is it some brilliant masterpiece? No, but it’s an inventive fantasy that has the courage of its fantasy convictions, instead of “lampshading” every plot development.

Even the CGI, though there is a lot of it, was gracefully used and doesn’t overshadow the actors. Also, despite being PG, it’s more grown-up than the PG-13 Scary Stories: what it lacks in cursing and gore, it makes up for in emotion and character. If that’s what a PG rating means nowadays, maybe more movies should be PG.

Where are you getting that there are two copies of her? I don't recall anything in the film that suggests that. But I haven't seen it in a while.

She switched with her copy as a child. The copy lived her life and then the original was the leader of the sort of 'uprising' or whatever you'd call it.

There were no other versions of her, from my understanding. Total of 2, like all of the other characters.

No, what you said is that there were 2 copies of her, which would be a total of 3.

I don't know what you mean that you don't remember there being 2 of everyone else. Everyone having a double is the entire premise of the film.

Right, you're saying there were a total of 3 of her, and I'm saying I think you're wrong and I have no idea where you're getting that idea from.

Again, I haven't seen it since it was initially released, but I haven't heard anyone come away with that perception, and I have no memory of anything in the movie that would give you that impression.