13 Cakes of Halloween #13

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When I started this series 13 days ago I mentioned that there was a specific film that inspired me to devote thirteen days worth of posts to a thing as ridiculous as Horror Cakes -- well here we are the final day and I can now reveal... nothing. 

Okay not quite nothing -- I can tell you what movie it was. It was Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (reviewed here), which is out in movie theaters right now doing very very well for a foreign film in the United States. Which is a thing that translates to: not enough people have seen it yet for me to properly talk about this sequence, which involves a central mystery of the film and which, when unspooled at just past its midway point, drops about ten megatons of deep meaning onto the premises.

I also can't, much to my chagrin and consternation, gif the moment's pay-off, because it's a huge pay-off in the film and one of its most bedeviled and striking images, and I'd hate to ruin it for anybody. What I will say is that this movie, which isn't a Horror Film, has one of the decade's best Horror Images in it all the same.

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It's somewhat reminiscent of the "God" conversation in Bergman's film Fanny & Alexander -- "Who's behind the door?" -- which I've noted before I find to be one of the scariest moments in any not-horror flick and so if I'm bringing this shit up know it's for good reason. Anyway let's just say that the rich family in Parasite has a son who has birthday and cake-adjacent trauma and by the end of the movie... that trauma will have been quadrupled.

"Let them eat cake" has never been as pointed. Anyway parallels between the rich family's kids and the poor family's kids in Parasite are themselves rich, and I think this also pays off when it comes to cake -- the gift that poor family's son is given, which has been heavily featured in the film's advertising (see this recent poster), is a scientific rock specimen which set upon a little base, and which...

... is often lugged around just like a cake. 

That the rich family gets fluffy delicious cake while 

the poor family gets a big cake-shaped rock, well...

... I don't think anybody's arguing that Parasite is subtle.

But effective. It's effective, and it's goddamned true.

That brings this year's Halloween celebration to a close! Click here to see all of the "13 Cakes of Halloween" and if you have any favorite cake scenes in horror movies I didn't talk about tell me about them in the comments. After all, we can be Cake Boys every day!
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13 Cakes of Halloween #12

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In one room Mom is baking a cake 

for Dad's birthday. In the other room...
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... Son is cleaning Dad's guns as a birthday present.

Whatever could possibly go wrong???
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Oh right. That. That could go wrong.
An excellent reminder that guns are shit, folks. 

Thanks to everyone's favorite Final Girl Stacie Ponder for recommending today's Cake when I was trying to drum up more ideas -- I've never actually seen 1984's The Mutilator, which this is the opening scene for, but I'll sure as hell be watching it now. Stacie wrote up her thoughts on this slasher earlier this month at Final Girl right here. I'd of course seen the ridiculous poster and knew the film's hysterical tagline before, which is what it's probably best remembered for now, although I don't know about you but...

... I can no longer read the words "Bye Bye" without hearing them in Dennis Nedry's voice. "You didn't say the magic word, bye bye, bye bye, bye bye..." Perhaps that's just my own kink, who knows. Speaking of kinks...

... for all the poster's "girls in bikinis" show-offery a quick glance through the movie just now (it's streaming on Amazon and in much better quality than these gifs attest) shows that there's actually an extended sequence in the film where this very handsome blond jock type here is seen scampering around half-naked while being stalked after a skinny-dip in the local Pool of Doom. Okay, I don't know that it's actually a "Pool of Doom" since this character doesn't actually die in it... I admit it, I just wanted to say "Pool of Doom." Pools of Doom everywhere! Maybe I'll do a "13 Pools of Halloween" list next year. It'll reward us with more beefcake than cakes, at least.

13 Cakes of Halloween #11

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A good chunk of the first act of Brian De Palma's 1973 flick Sisters revolves around a cake. Philip (Lisle Wilson) hooks up with a girl he meets through outlandish circumstances (it involves a prank television show) and overhears it's her birthday...

... so while he runs out for an errand for her (that involves medication) he on the sly picks up a birthday cake and brings it back to her apartment to surprise her. Unfortunately for sweet Philip he's the one that gets the surprise. 

What's meant to be an act of kindness, of sweetness, is turned rotten by the ol' switcheroo -- the fact that Philip met this girl via a prank television show has already set up he's the oblivious type but this is the sort of prank that nobody sees coming and that nobody's laughing at. And now I have to break this sequence down into individual  shots because this is some prime stuff from De Palma:

The scene before this section was long and drawn out in order to lull us into that sweet sense of false security, and then boom Margot Kidder comes bursting out from under the blankets and all hell breaks loose. I love the shot of the not the knife itself but the knife's shadow passing over the birthday cake and blowing out the candles as it does -- and then the reverse as it's pulled back.

Like the "Shower Scene" in Psycho (sorry but all critics are contractually obliged to bring up Hitchcock while talking about De Palma) BDP wants us to follow the movement of that knife and the action through his edits...

Cause and effect though cuts. The gag here of course is the literalization of "cuts" -- what Hitch and De Palma have done is inextricably link the actual process of film-making with violence in the telling of their violent stories. It drags us into this and it implicates us as we watch. We made this happen too. We wanted our cake, and now we gotta eat it.

13 Cakes of Halloween #10

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I wanted to try to make this festive list of horror cakes skew towards non-birthdays whenever possible, but it turns out that Horror Movies really love birthdays -- specifically to shit on people's birthdays. But there was one Birthday Cake I knew from the get-go was a must-have, and that's the one in the trailer for the terrific and totally under-appreciated 1981 slasher gem Happy Birthday to Me starring Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Sue Anderson. Not the cake in the actual movie...

... but the cake in the trailer. Classic axe to the cake! I love this movie -- as you can see as it's been bestowed the honor of not just one Ways Not To Die post but also a second Ways Not To Die post -- but I love this movie's trailer especially. It's a sugary slice of frothy Slasher perfection! Watch: 

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13 Cakes of Halloween #9

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Correct me if I'm wrong but I do believe that the reanimated corpse of Nathan Grantham from the "Father's Day" section of the 1982 anthology horror film Creepshow might be the only action figure with a severed head cake as its sidekick? That's just an educated guess but if you want to show me some obscure Superman or G.I. Joe figure that's got one of those too feel free to do just that and I'll retract my assertion. Until then...

... we're gonna go with that being a yes. You can see a previous post on this section of Creepshow, which was written by Stephen King for the film, right here -- it's a classic! Creepshow I mean, not necessarily that post, although that post is fun enough. Also that post was written by me, not by Stephen King, which also might have been unclear? I don't know, I feel funny. Almost like somebody decapitated me and put my head on a platter and then frosted my head and stuck candles in that frosting and then lit those candles and then carried the whole business into the other room where my grubby relatives sat ready for the surprise of their lives. Funny.

Seriously I could just post Creepshow gifs all day though...

13 Cakes of Halloween #8

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I can hardly do a list of notable cakes in horror films and not highlight the fresh horror franchise so obsessed with that exact thing that its first poster was cake and nothing but. I don't know if we'll get a third film to make a proper trilogy of Tree (Jessica Rothe) being cursed to live and die and live and die and live and die and live and die looped around her fucked-up birthday shenanigans or not, but the series' two movies, 2017's Happy Death Day and this year's Happy Death Day 2U, are absolutely way more fun than they have any right to be.

And the cake is actually central to the plot! I can't really talk about why without being too spoilery (and these movies are recent enough that I'd like to avoid that), but this isn't just a drive-by caking -- Tree's birthday cupcakes are the reason for this particular season.

Not only do we get a reenactment of the famous final scene from Sixteen Candles with Tree's own cute boy -- although Israel Broussard, who turned out to be a racist pig, is never gonna be any generation's Jake Ryan -- but we also get Multiple Murders By Cupcake. Take that, Final Destination.