Here it is, the official thread for this years challenge! Come one, come all and celebrate the 10th horrid year of this terrible challenge! If you've never attempted the challenge, now is the time to dip your toes into the (acid) pool of celluloid atrocity known as the Scary Movie Challenge!
Here's the guideline that we've used past years, with a bonus 6th "rule" present for the birthday boy!
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1. Watch 13 Scary/Horror/Halloween-Themed films before midnight on October 31, 2008 (use your own timezone to set the ending time).
2. Two of the above must be new discoveries, movies you've never seen before. The point of this is to see those few movies you've always meant to see, but never got around to. I recommend more than 2, but 2 is the minimum to pat yourself on the head and say you completed the challenge. Please specify new discoveries in your film list by making them bold, adding asterisks, different colors, etc.
3. Come here and talk about 'em.
4. There is an uber-category, the Ultimate Splatter Challenge for those who wish to put all of the rest of us to shame. This is the heavyweight division. These people, if they choose to accept the challenge, must view 31 horror/scary/Halloween themed movies before dawn on Nov. 1st. Ten new discoveries are recommended for this one. The rest of us will bow down in awed reverence to these truly "Splatterific" HTF members. The bragging rights will be awesome and long lived.
5. There has been discussion over the past two years as to what movies qualify. Is Silence of the Lambs a horror movie? Does The Nightmare Before Christmas count? From now on, if you wanna include it, go for it. There will be no hairsplitting. If The Wizard of Oz send you to the dresser for a fresh pair of boxer shorts, all the power. Running times are irrelevant. Short films count.
6. 6. TV Shows officially count, to a point. They should be kept on a separate list to be tallied up at the end. The tallying is based on the following:
Anthology shows count as single entities. Each episode of "The Twilight Zone" is a self contained story, so each episode counts as one. Same with "Masters Of Horror" and other anthologies. These all basically replicate short films, if TV never came around, it would not be hard to imagine a "Twilight Zone" being a short subject before a film, and we've always counted those.
Episodic shows like "X-Files" and "Dark Shadows" now count, but not as single entities. Typically on shows like this, a season is a storyline, which would not be fair to count as one. So the compromise is this. The average modern horror film is 90 minutes, so episodic shows are counted based on this mark. So two episodes of a hour long TV show count as "One" title on the list, three 30 minute episodes of some other 30 minute horror based show ("The Munsters") would also count as "One" title on the list.
At the end of the challenge, the TV content will be added up, and then added to the final total.*
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2008 Ultimate Splatter-Heads
Michael Elliott 121 (63)
Radioman970 115 (32) 3 others
Russell G 113 (92)
Jim_K 105 (53)
John Stell 104 (21)
Pete Battista 100 (41) 45 TV shows and 2 others
Mario Gauci 82 (77)
PatW 68 (51)
TravisR 62 (5)
Christopher B 53 (20)
Jason Roer 44 (19)
Bob Turnbull 43 (43)
Peter M Fitzgerald 43 (25)
Ockeghem 35 (10) 13 others
Brook K 33 (29)
Joe Karlosi 33 (14) 68 episodes of The Munsters
Sandro 33 (22)
Bob McLaughlin 32 (17)
Lucia Duran 32 (11)
SteveGon 32 (25)
Brian Kissinger 31 (13)
Chucky P 31 (10)
So there it is! Official start time is October 1st in your time zone! So dig your grave place below to save your list and let the frightmares begin!
* This was added to end the debate that always seems to happen about whether TV should count or not. I hope people still concentrate on theatrical films, so we'll see what happens.