Lots of kids, Asian kids especially, grow up forced into piano lessons. There were lots of scales. Right hand first, then left hand, “Beethoven for Beginners” and so forth — really dry stuff. So I’ll always remember being floored when I watched John Carpenter’s “Halloween” for the first time (a poorly taped VHS copy of a copy, probably, which only made it scarier).



I couldn’t get over the soundtrack. It was simple but terrifying all by itself. When I later learned that it was in an odd time signature, featured lots of black keys, and was composed by Carpenter himself, I appreciated it even more.

In those years, if you were ever at a family gathering in a house that had a piano, there’d be a show-off who was, like, a prodigy or a Juilliard student or whatever. Yet eventually they’d break out the Halloween theme song. Dah-duh-duh Dah-duh-duh Dah-duh DAH, Dah-duh-duh Dah-duh-duh Dah-duh DAH! It was like “Stairway.” Everybody played it.

— John Woo is a senior editor for video at The Times and an occasional moonlighting musician.

I love how often horror-movie monsters can become allegorical stand-ins for what scares us. Back in high school, I came across the 1943 movie “I Walked With a Zombie,” and was floored by how this suspense movie dealt with repression, fear and racism. It caught my attention because my family is from a Caribbean island, and I grew up with stories about Santería.



Loosely based on “Jane Eyre,” the movie follows a nurse who is hired to care for the catatonic wife of a wealthy sugar plantation owner in the Caribbean. “I Walked With a Zombie” is upfront about the island’s tragic history of slavery and the slave trade, even as some of its white characters would rather minimize their unsavory past to focus on the romantic melodrama. The white characters dismiss the blacks’ voodoo practices, and their ignorance leads to fear of their nonwhite neighbors. I remember feeling relieved when it turned out that the movie’s exoticized “other” wasn’t the villain. As for people in power who don’t know their history? Now that’s scary.

— Monica Castillo is a film writer for Watching at The Times.

Even though interest in Asian horror movies skyrocketed in the early 2000s — with Japan’s original Ring and Grudge franchises leading the pack — American remakes have tended to erase the original films’ Eastern roots or tuck them into the background. While the Hollywood imperative (white stars mean more money) is often misguided (diversity actually means more money), those Asian-Americans who long to see Asian faces on the screen have had to turn to the countries of their ancestors’ origins for satisfaction.