You’re going to have to bear with me, here, because I have never seen any of Barbara Crampton’s work. In fact, the thing from her biography that sparks the most familiarity to me is that she went to Castleton State College. (In 1976, long before Time Chasers was made.) I have, in fact, passed “place I first think of them from” duties over to my good friend Cara, who’s a lot more into horror than I am. I try to do the horror celebration in October, but it’s a bit difficult when you’re simply not all that into horror yourself. In fact I even asked for help blocking out the month.
To be sure, there are options beyond Re-Animator, Chopping Mall, and Tales of Halloween. On the other hand, I am also not a fan of The Guiding Light, The Bold and the Beautiful, or The Young and the Restless. The simple fact is, there are quite a lot of people out there whose careers I am not best suited to provide retrospectives on, because their entire career is stuff that doesn’t interest me. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth bringing up now and again.
She does have good things to say about the modern state of horror films, inasmuch as she likes that it’s now possible to just go ahead and make one. Remember, for example, that you no longer have to pay to have film developed. Everyone carries cameras around all the time. She does acknowledge that, yes, you still have to have the talent to make a good movie, and that you don’t have the same kind of distribution model for fan-made films as you would for the ones she made back in the ’80s, but still.
Though of course she also observes that horror is a male-dominated medium. It’s made by men for men, most of the time. So it’s made to appeal to men. Now, I have female friends who like horror movies, but she’s not completely wrong. And goodness knows the horror film fan friends I have can also talk for quite some time about the role of women in horror movies. Again, it’s somewhere I’m simply not qualified, and I’m not inclined to do the research to become qualified to talk about it.
Soap operas fascinate me, albeit not enough for me to have ever gotten into watching them. More as a sociological phenomenon. Wikipedia has a list for me of actresses who have played Mindy Lewis on The Guiding Light, which has five women on it. One of them comes both before and after Crampton on the list. I could probably read up about the character and find out more about what the deal is there, but honestly, it’s not really something I plan to do.
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