TV: Turner Classic Movies & Halloween Horror
It was a simple enough decision to entirely cut cable television. A few months back, I took the opportunity to relinquish my DVRs and finally live without the timesuck of television's omnipresence, the inundation of advertisements, marketing messages and culture-shaping corporate memes. I realized there were too few times in my life where I'd lived free of television's influence and, in retrospect, nothing was lost in its absence - in fact, the contrary was true.
There were three points of hesitation: the first was PBS' programming, the last bastion of intelligent TV, the second was access to local news - more specifically weather reports given the often dire and dangerous situations Oklahoma's climate spawns. The third, of course, was Turner Classic Movies.
Always erudite, TCM has provided many an introduction to heretofore unseen classic films, frequently films I'd never thought to see or never even knew of; J. Lee Thompson's 1965 drama "Return from the Ashes" and Anthony Mann's "Reign of Terror/The Black Book," a 1949 noir about the French Revolution both spring to mind. TCM's Friday night "TCM Underground" programming specializes in bizarre genre fare and is a yearly prelude to the splendid October programming that surveys some of the best of classic horror.
So, whether you have cable television and the opportunity to see some of these on TCM or simply find TCM's taste to your liking and allow their choices to direct your rental or streaming decisions, here are the genre films Turner Classic Movies will be showing during the month of October in honor of Halloween.
