It seemed like he killed Bill’s brother quickly, and then afterward just kept focusing on scares rather than kills.

So he’s Sandra Bullock from “While You Were Sleeping”?

Nobody wants to watch the latter if it’s all adults. What are you, some kind of sicko?

I didn’t think Us was quite as extreme as IT in that regard. Like the dad really was going to get tossed off the boat. But you’re right that it was less scary than it could have been.

I also found it very overrated. Even in terms of simple scares, once it’s apparent that Pennywise is trying to scare rather than kill them, he ceases to be scary.

What archetypes and tropes are you referring to? And what context?

It’s stated in the sequel that nobody died.

I was actually thinking of the rich old lady the audience is supposed to hate and who gets launched out of her house via that stair-chair.

I haven’t seen Endgame, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. And the Friends serving as role models doesn’t inspire me with confidence either.

Maybe you have to see them as a kid. I watched the Gremlins movies more recently and wasn’t that into them. I recall that only one person seemed to have actually died, but then the sequel confirmed that nobody did, so people can stop categorizing it as in any way a horror film.

If we don’t declare that certain reviews don’t count, then the current Rotten Tomatoes score is 88%, the fourth highest of the festival so far, with 33 reviews. The Metacritic score is 75, with 18 reviews. Now that I have made the optimal comment on describing what the critical consensus is, we can all stop arguing…

Mr. Freeze was married.

I think it’s a logical fallacy to update based on fictional evidence and there’s no reason to assume the systematic biases of fiction are to our benefit. If people could just be entertained but not otherwise affected by a work of fiction, that would prevent any possible harm. I hope that’s what generally happens.…

Maybe McKenzie is a vampire and she’s recoiling from the rising sun at dawn? And by that I don’t mean the character she plays, but Thomasin McKenzie herself, regardless of all the “daylight” shots in Leave No Trace. Movies can’t fool me with their CGI trickery.

I was surprised to see del Toro’s list included a parenthetical reference to Mark Frost. I generally think of him as a very “American” writer, but then I’m relatively ignorant of his novels. Looking it up on wikipedia, List of Seven is a period piece set in England though, so not too far from Crimson Peak.

The idea that our values can be so affected by hacky sitcoms does not fill me with confidence for the future.

Seinfeld and Frasier were both better.

I was under the impression one of the two creators of Friends was also gay, which didn’t stop them from making plenty of gay jokes.

I never thought the show was good, and that’s not because it was “problematic”. It was just the hackiest sitcommiest sitcom I thought possible, prior to being exposed to the even further lows created by Chuck Lorre. Seinfeld had a point of view and a thematic interest in the unspoken rules of social interaction.…

I didn’t have cable in the 90s, but WB cartoons were basically my favorite thing to watch. They were syndicated to lots of stations.