THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I started this, the drawing for the second stanza of the same sonnet.

While drawing, I continued on down the rabbit hole of horror movies about being abducted by the grays and re-watched Fire in the Sky (1993). Like Communion, this movie adapts a purported real-life abduction case. Though it definitely breaks my rule of never directly showing the grays, it does at least delay their reveal until literally the last 15 minutes. I remember watching this movie in the theater with my dad when I was a kid and being quite terrified by the ending. And it does hold up. Even among horror films that don't reveal the full monstrosity until the climax, Fire in the Sky is unusual in that for first hour and ten minutes it doesn't even try to be a frightful-- it's all just unspooky character melodrama. So, it has the structure of a movie-length jumpscare. The abduction sequence is also intrinsically horrific because it's so disorienting. Nothing in the grays' ship makes sense, and most of it is disgusting. It's quite inventive and well-executed. Nevertheless, I would still say it doesn't make good use of the grays per se because it turns out that these aliens actually look like unshelled turtles. They just wear space suits that resemble the Communion grays. More importantly, they don't have the mind-control and memory-altering powers that make *True Grays* distinctly scary.