Grinch Night

Submitted for your approval, a little known film called Grinch Night or Halloween is Grinch Night. I've heard it referred to as both.   I discovered this little piece of nightmare fuel via the Nostalgia Critic's "Top 11 Mindscrews" video.  We all remember the classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  I watched it several times growing up.  It was a lighthearted classic that is still enjoyable today.  This film is a spin off that takes a slightly darker turn.  By slightly darker, I of course mean much much darker.

I'm 25 years old.  I've read my fair share of horror fiction as well as seeing more than a handful of horror movies.  Most of them don't manage to phase me.  Don't get me wrong, a vast majority of it is very enjoyable; but unlike Joey on Friends, I didn't have to put my copy of The Shining, great book that it is, in the freezer to feel safe.  This, this little animated piece of child's fare manages to creep me out and make me cower away from the screen.  It's the chanting that opens the Wagon sequence more than it is anything else, for me anyway.  The build up when the Grinch is luring Eukaria up to the wagon is also fairly suspenseful with that unnerving music playing while the Grinch, in a very soft spoken manner, repeats "Come on".

People wonder why our generation is so screwed up, this is why.  We watched movies with scenes like this and our brains were never able to recover.  OK, I don't know that as a fact but it's a plausible theory.

If Stephen King ever decided to make an animated film, I have a feeling it would look something like this.  With today's resources the animation might be a bit cleaner and it would be written much better, but I think that this gives us a good idea of what to expect.  The only difference would be that while Grinch Night puts all of the creepy imagery here at the end, (the rest of the movie is quite tame)  King would have us engrossed and on the edge of our seats from the beginning, slowly building up to the insane climax with increasingly creepy images and plot developments.