Movieacados! Last weeks prompt about horror movie recommendations really got me thinking, mostly due to that silver floaty Phantasm Murder Ball. I have been thinking about the iconography in horror movies and since they often do not have money to make big giant special effects they often try to make up for it in other areas like practical effects and costumes, make-up and design, movie props etc. Stuff that does not have to cost a lot of money but can still look great and iconic on screen. B-Movie workers can be a mix of MacGuyver, Nikolai Tesla and Edna Mode all rolled into one efficient and creative machine, and while a lot of the visibility and credit goes to actors and directors, movies would be nothing without the connective tissue of these jobs that makes them really great.

Horror in the 80s was in a groove, they could pump out the movies quickly and turn a tidy profit thanks to relatively cheap budgets and relatively steady viewers putting butts in seats. As such they needed some consistency between movies so fans would have things to look forward to, or in the case of new franchises they need hooks to grab attention and get those aforementioned butts into the seats and props were a good way of achieving this. With out his knife-glove Freddy Kruger is just some guy with a sweater and hat and bad kill puns, but give him stab/slash fingers and he becomes something much more threatening (the kill puns don’t improve but there are more he can make now). The floating knife ball from Phantasm would scare anyone as it comes around the corner getting all stabby. And the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies just looks like a really cool evil book, not to be confused with standard evil books that have evil information kept within, but didn’t give us a really cool cover to judge it by. The 90s continued this tradition with slasher movies often giving their antagonist slashers specific clothing/accessories like a Ghostface mask or a parka with the hood always up for some reason (I mean the real reason was so we did not know who the killer was until the ‘big reveal’).

So given all this, prompting this week is easy: What is your favourite horror movie prop? Remembering that I am pretty inclusive and loose with these prompts and anything horror related counts (thrillers, cross genre, etc), as long as it has some form of horror/thriller elements. For my part I will go with the evil book mentioned above, the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness movies. They went out of their way to make this look extra evil/cool to the point that there was a special edition DVD release that the case was this the cover of this book made out of rubber and I bought it based entirely on getting this book, and was almost single for a short period as a result (we are still together despite my reckless capitalism BTW).