Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Tuesday, January 3rd. Huge Happy New Year to all of you! I hope you had a great one, happy and healthy, and you were surrounded by people that you love. Over here, we had a good one. A great one, really. We went over to our neighbor's house for a small New Year's Eve party and at about 9:30 I took Quinny home and my mother-in-law was going to watch him once I got him to sleep so I could go back to the party. And every night when I'm putting him to bed, we tell stories. And usually the story—we tell three different kinds. But the first kind, usually, he made this whole configuration up, but he likes to talk about Rapunzel because he loves the movie Tangled. Nut she's in her tower and Mother Gothel, who's the villain of that movie, has her locked up. So she calls on help from a friend, who's usually Batman (sometimes it's Godzilla but usually Batman) and then Mother Gothel calls on her evil friend to help. And usually that's either the Hulk, for some reason the Hulk is bad in his mind, or one of the Batman villains, which he knows and loves, or King Ghidorah, or a host Disney villains.
So anyway, I was prepared for that. And then he was like, “dad, will you talk about the beach tonight?” And I was like, “the beach?” And he was like, “yeah, the beach!” So I was like, “yeah, sure… there's the sand and the waves,” and he's like, “talk more about the waves!” So I'm like, “well, the waves roll over gently…” And I fell fast asleep. And I woke up at 12:05 and was like, oh, shit… and I ran back over to the party and everybody made fun of me.
So that was my new year's in a nutshell, but it was actually kind of wonderful. And I'm really excited to be starting a whole new year of Our Best Jackett! We decided that our next class will be this month on January 18th at 9:30pm EST. We have the pieces we're going to use, we'll post them soon. I'm really excited. So many great submissions came in. And the other thing that's been really fun has been using the Black Jackett tier for you guys to submit work and go over it with me. So if you're interested, we actually built a little bit more infrastructure because so many people seem to want to sign up. So we might have a little bit more room, I'm not sure. But try and sign up and see if it lets you in if you want.
[Quinn comes over with a gift for me.]
He gave me the stick from his lollipop. He gets a treat because he was very good. Anyway, that's been a real joy. I do office hours every week and people sign up. And if you miss out, you can always email me and I try and do them anyway. And you can submit scripts and all kinds of stuff, and actually get my hands dirty looking over them. So it's something that I missed, but I'm having a lot of fun with. I hope you'll you'll sign up.
So usually Tuesdays I do two questions. Honestly, the question I've been getting the most, honestly from people is:
What were some of my favorite moments from the past year?
And I'm just gonna pick a couple, but honestly, I feel like going to conventions last year was just incredibly special after them having been predominantly gone the year before. San Diego was just a huge surprise where it was always a convention everybody groans about because it's so crowded and difficult and all that, and this year it just felt so special. It felt like everybody was so happy to see each other.
There was an incredibly warm feeling. On a personal note, I went there with a mandate that I wanted to just do a couple cons without drinking anything at all, without partying at all because when I was younger, a lot younger, I think I used to overdo it. And I thought this time, going back, I wanted to be super clear-eyed about everything and I think it was just a very special experience. But my two favorite were probably Thought Bubble, which I have a post about that Tyler can link to here.
It was just such a creator-based feeling, and I had my kid with me. L.A Con was also really special because I got to bring my other kid, Emmett.
But Memphis was a super special one because I got to go to Graceland with Greg Capullo. It’s something we've been talking about forever. And we went to the Rock and Soul Museum and we went around town and had a barbecue and it was just one of those things where it was a perfect convention. A perfect catch up with one of my best friends.
So I have another question here:
AshcanJohnny asks, “what were some of your favorite horror movies of 2022?”
That's a great question. I actually had a few and I realized I was thinking about them a lot over the last couple days as to why I liked him so much. But my favorites were a few unconventional movies, I think. I really liked Barbarian…
…I liked Nope…
…and I think, honestly, I didn't expect to like it as much because it's so simple, but I really liked Smile.
And I think what I was most impressed with was the way that they broke convention, all of them, to create a very pervasive sense of anxiety throughout the entire film that re-energized the feeling of horror throughout the whole movie experience. For me, especially in a movie like Smile, it has a very conventional structure and follows all the three-act structure stuff that I taught you in class. But the way that it uses its jumpscares, the way that it uses it to music, it's tracking shots, its structure, it shocks you at odd moments and it creates tension where there usually isn't tension. And so it creates this kind of permeable, creeping sense of dread throughout the entire film because you never know when a jumpscare is coming. And it's very different feeling than a more conventional horror movie. Probably my favorite more conventional movie, even though it wasn't super conventional and it was stylized, was Pearl.
These movies, like Nope, broke from convention for all kinds of storytelling reasons and reasons of race and everything too. But so did Barbarian, which broke from story structure for its own reasons. But I thought that Smile was the best example for me. It’s a movie that's leaning into this kind of hyper-anxious feeling, this feeling of nervousness that invades the entire film because things will scare you and you don't expect them to. And tension will be played out in scenes that would normally be emotionally calmer through strange shots, through odd lighting, through very unsettling kinds of craft choices. It fits the moment in an interesting way that way. It creates this feeling that that you're not watching a movie for fun. It doesn't just scare you in the ways that you expect. It has that structure, but it always makes you feel scared. You never relax throughout the whole movie, and that feels pretty common today.
So those are the answers to those questions. I’m really excited about the class. I wish I could tell you more about everything coming in 2023. We're going to have some big announcements soon about some really good stuff all across the map. I can't wait to tell you! And Friday I'll do a bigger post. Thanks, guys!
S
Newsletter #112: My 2022 Favorites