5 Essential Spooky Season Movies
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Sabina Music Rich/Unsplash.
By Nick M. W.
The mausoleum doors will soon close on Spooky Season, unless you carry it with you in your black heart and celebrate throughout the year. I’m more of a seasonal fan of Halloween. I get down with the holiday traditions, like decorations, pumpkins, costumes, and passing out candy. I like the festivities during October, but when the month is over, I move on. Same shit with Christmas. Once we turn the page on the new year, put your holiday decorations away.
I love a good freak out, so one of my favorite Halloween traditions is watching scary movies. When it comes to horror movies, there is a deep pit of death and despair filled with thousands of them. All of the choices and not enough time to watch them all, so I keep a short list of scary movies for the Season and try to watch a couple of them before Halloween.
So, which movies are on your list?
I’m glad you asked. These are five horror flicks that are essential to my Halloween celebrations.
30 Days of Night
Vampires are the ultimate classic monster. They’re smarter, stronger, and faster than humans, and they do all the shit we can do better than we can do it, except for catch a suntan.
Now, imagine being stuck in a godforsaken town, on the frozen edge of the Arctic Circle, in the dead of winter. This isolated town is about to experience a month of darkness, and would you look at that, it’s just as a gang of vampires settles in the community for the long Polar Night.
The movie has a bit of a Western feel to it, as the lone sheriff is tasked with protecting his town against rough and rowdy outlaws. It’s quick to jump into the action with little backstory for its characters, and it works. There are buckets of blood and plenty of gore in 30 Days of Night, a fresh take on vampire movies.
An American Werewolf in London
John Landis’ lycanthrope classic about American tourists who have the good fortune of being attacked by a werewolf. One is killed and the other cursed to transform into a werewolf on the next full moon, which is only days away.
This movie is bizarre, and it’s extremely gory (check the 1:40 mark of this nightmare scene). It is also funny and has a few lighthearted in moments, which completely contrast with the gore but don’t feel out of place in the movie.
Rick Baker, the practical SFX legend, won a “Best Make-up” Oscar for his work on this movie. There were zero computers used to generate special effects in this movie, but take a look at how they created and shot David Kessler’s transformation into the werewolf.
Amazing work to make the best werewolf movie to date, and it’s 40 years old!
Event Horizon
A signal from a spaceship that had been missing for seven years ago turns into a rescue and recovery operation that, of course, goes badly. It turns out that this ship, the “Event Horizon”, was sucked into a black hole and spent the last seven years in a little place folks call “Hell,” and it brought the Devil back with it.
I read that Paul W. S. Anderson had to recut this movie at the request of the studio, who felt that it was too graphic and violent. Whoa. I wonder what the murder orgy scene in the middle of this movie looked like in the original version. It was plenty disturbing in the “toned down” version.
This is an ultra-violent sci-fi/horror flick that spooked the shit out of me when I first saw it. Event Horizon is darker than the center of a black hole, a perfect Halloween movie.
28 Days Later
This is the scariest zombie movie I’ve ever seen. Alex Garland (writer) and Danny Boyle (director) turned the formerly plodding flesh-eaters into motherfucking maniacs, running through London streets and remote woods like blood-thirsty Olympic sprinters smacked on meth. It raised the threat level of zombies from “Shhh. Don’t be caught slipping” to “There’s no hope once you’re seen”. You can’t outrun these savage bastards, but you also can’t trust other survivors to lend you a hand when it’s all gone to shit.
Brian Eno’s soundtrack adds to the tension and madness as Jim just tries to survive after waking up from a coma 28 after the virus outbreak that turned England into an island of rage fueled zombies.
The Thing
I guess I like horror movies set in cold, lonely places, and Antarctica is as cold and as lonely as it gets for terrestrial terror. Like An American Werewolf in London, this movie is pushing 40, but it holds up. The characters are researchers, out in a remote Antarctic station, who cross paths with an alien “thing” that infects living creatures, like a virus, and can transform into that which it inhabits. It appears to be bent on killing and replicating, which creates white-knuckle tension throughout the movie as everyone is paranoid about who in their group has been infected.
This movie is another showcase of some of the finest in practical SFX in cinema. Tons of fantastic gross-out gore, where a head separates from the body and grows spider legs and a stomach becomes a gaping, hungry mouth (happens to the same person!) The human touch to these effects makes them far more disturbing than whatever CGI can produce.
If you only watch one scary movie this Spooky Season, it might as well be John Carpenter’s masterpiece, The Thing.
That’s my top five for Spooky Season. There are some other great scary movies that didn’t make the cut. The Babadook, Scream, and Slither are my next three go-to for the Season. I could stretch this list out to twenty movies, but where’s the fun in that?
If you haven’t seen any of these movies, you still have a few days to get your Halloween freak out in before we move on to more wholesome holidays. If you have seen them, do it again.
Enjoy!
