NOV 1st

A-GHOUL

HALLOWEEN TUNES '23

The yearly Halloween tradition. Click through below to access the full 2023 playlist along with all those from years past.

HALLOWEEN PARTY (1989)

I love everything about this—just everything—from the borrowed soundtrack selections of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Halloween (...and Halloween 2...and Halloween 4) to the laughter of the high-school-aged actors after they knowingly botch a line or fumble with the set decoration while fleeing in terror. This is charming as fuck. As FUCK. And I absolutely plan on loading this one up every October until this miserable world kills me to death. Welcome to your newest Halloween tradition, boneheads.

As for the plot, some kind of flanneled ghoul inexplicably rises from the grave and begins picking off local teens at a Halloween party down the road. I think said ghoul is given a backstory about being a murderous farmer who'd killed his family, but to be honest, it was kinda hard to make out. But it doesn't matter. It's the tops. It can't be said enough: I love everything about this. 

Evidently, Halloween Party aired on Connecticut cable access in 1989, which I think is genuinely terrific because I'm sure writer/director David Skowronski and his creative team felt like gods that night. And they deserved to. This right here is better than most of the Halloween franchise.

Samples of this brilliance are below, but if you're not sparing yourself the lousy 38 minutes to watch the whole vid, you don't deserve joy. Plus, the very end has a blooper reel and the cast performing a dance routine to The Monster Mash!

THE MONSTER MASH! 

C'MON!

SCREAM (2022)

There have been a half-dozen different terms that all mean the same thing: remake. While they've been part of the Hollywood system since the 1930s, it didn't become a machine until the early 2000s after the success of The Ring and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre opened the floodgates and inundated audiences with the maltreatment of their most beloved titles. That led to re-imagining, ushered in by Rob Zombie’s woeful Halloween and Zack Snyder’s much better Dawn of the Dead — movies that contained mainstay characters, settings, or concepts of their originals but otherwise explored different directions utilizing different tones. Then the makers behind 2011’s The Thing tried a new tactic of flat-out lying by hiding behind the false flag of prequel, but beyond giving most of its supporting cast Swedish accents (“They’re Norwegian, Mac”) and putting an ax through a door, it otherwise followed very closely in the snowy tracks of Carpenter’s movie right down to its moniker. Following that, 2018’s Halloween came along to rebrand the term once more, calling it a recalibration or, ugh, a rebootquel – something that resurrected an old franchise, retconned it just a tiny bit, and created a world where old met new. So what do you do when returning to a franchise like Scream when it’s been in on the joke this whole time? When your horror franchise is the equivalent of the kid in the back of the classroom throwing insults at all the other horror franchises for all the ways in which they’re cliches, how does a filmmaker find a fresh spin? Well, you do what you’ve always done: embrace the warts of this wacky genre while giving it a fresh coat of paint. And given the Scream franchise’s meta approach that saw it sending up slashers, sequels, trilogy cappers, and remakes, 2022’s familiarly monikered Scream necessitated a new term for a franchise rebirth that still acknowledged every single one of its previous entries. Anchored by a new primary cast with supporting duties from the old guard (including minor characters from previous sequels you’ve forgotten about), and with all of them being terrorized via phone by the gnarly voice of Ghostface once again, Scream ‘22 called itself a requel. 

But you could easily call it a redial.

Whatever you want to call it, Scream '22 is a true return to form for the franchise and the best entry since 1997’s rushed-but-satisfying Scream 2. Free from the meddling hands of former rights-holders Dimension Films (aka the Brothers Weinstein) and under severe pressure to follow in the footsteps of Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Ready or Not) and writers James Vanderbilt (Zodiac) and Guy Busick (Castle Rock) have proven themselves eerie chameleons, recapturing Williamson’s snappy dialogue and mind-bending knowledge of the genre’s rules and Craven’s fastidious eye for creating misdirection and off kilter unease, right down to his dramatic Dutch angles. (Williamson serves as executive producer and creative consultant.) With a new cast that spiritually embodies that groundbreaking first film’s crop of savvy teen characters (brought to life by Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Mikey Madison, Mason Gooding, and Jack Quaid, among many others), but with a new and more psychologically complex (and sympathetic) layer, the Scream name is back, updated, and most thankfully, in capable hands. 

Though I grew up on a diet of ‘80s slashers mostly consisting of Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, even all of their newest entries were nearly ten years old by the time I’d discovered them. Before their own ‘90s-set sequels and retcons, those franchises were, for all intents and purposes, dead and buried – grandfathered into my world in the same way everything else in existence had been. Scream was entirely different. With that first film hitting in the ass-end of 1996, and with two sequels coming along at a steady clip (Scream 2 opened a mere seven months after the first film left theaters), Scream became the slasher franchise of my generation – one with several entries released during my teen years that gave me the opportunity to see them unfold in an auditorium of like-minded people in the same way other lucky folks had the thrill of experiencing Friday the 13th sequels on a yearly basis. For me, the Scream series was happening in real time – it was in-the-moment as opposed to once-was – which imbued a different experience but also a different set of expectations. Having watched Scream in 1996 and seeing characters who were modeled to be just slightly older than I had been landed differently than watching Scream '22 and seeing new characters who are twenty years younger. Seen from a young age, Scream '96 exaggerated the pains of the coming transition from adolescence to adulthood – think The Breakfast Club but everyone gets stabbed to death. To an adult, Scream '22 doesn’t have the same effect; as your adult mind is analyzing the motives of the newest killer(s), part of you can’t help but think, “Oh, brother,” finding difficulty in accepting the outcome. While the motive(s) of the newest Ghostface(s) is admittedly clever, it doesn’t carry the same emotional weight as the original…because this time it’s not personal. In Scream ‘96, Billy and Stu used horror movies as a scapegoat to achieve other ends; in Scream ‘22, the sanctity of horror movies themselves is the driving motivation. And that right there is the number one issue brought forth by sequels, remakes, or any other label that resurrects your favorite franchises: the impossible task of experiencing the natural extensions of the originals you love, but having to process them with a mind that now thinks and feels differently thanks to twenty years of horror’s evolution and one’s own accumulated awareness. You can fall in love with a movie after a first matinee showing, but it takes time, sometimes years, to understand why – to deconstruct the way that movie feels, isolate its DNA, and identify its essence. Scream ‘22 recaptures the largest and most important parts of that unique Scream essence, and though it doesn’t recapture everything, it seems superficial to pick apart its shortcomings.

Scream ‘22 also lessens the bloat the franchise accumulated over the years, which got a little too big for its britches with 2000’s uneven and unmemorable Scream 3, a production plagued by constant rewrites, leaked endings (the return of Matthew Lillard as Stu would’ve been WILD), and Craven and co’s over-willingness to have “fun.” (The Jay and Silent Bob cameo still makes me barf.) With this Scream story set back in Woodsboro, organically allowing for the presence of the next generation of characters with familial ties back to those from the first film (though it occasionally relies on soap opera hysterics to enable this), murder and mayhem is once again occurring in plain sight, beneath the bright sun, in broad daylight. The illusion of safety at which the Scream franchise always excelled has returned, whether it be in high school hallways, quiet suburbia, or your best friend’s rural farmhouse. But of course, no one is safe. 

From the opening scene, Scream '22 plays with audience expectations. Whether the series is old hat or a brand new experience, you never quite know what’s coming; similarly, surprises are in store for the old guard characters and the new, though for the old guard those surprises are going to register in more emotional ways. The kind of character who would most certainly die may just survive the night, whereas the kind of character who has always survived may not be so lucky this time. In spite of some minor plot contrivances, for the most part, once the characters know of the danger they’re in, they’re no longer running up the stairs but directly out the front door; however, once they discover their safe haven was never out that front door to begin with, that’s when the Scream series is most at home – and Scream '22 is the fresh and fun reminder that audiences and the franchise needed. Even the film’s score by composer Brian Tyler, taking the reins from former franchise keeper Marco Beltrami, acknowledges audiences are in new but familiar territory: the track that opens the flick is called “New Horizons,” which is not an eerie, ethereal theme we’ve heard before, but a soft and pensive ballad, and the score itself revisits some of Beltrami’s older themes while injecting some new ones into the mix. (Amusingly, it even adapts a theme famously used in Scream 2 that wasn’t an original composition, but had been lifted from Hans Zimmer’s score for Broken Arrow.)

Most interesting, while Scream ‘96 was a riff on Halloween ‘78, Scream ‘22 acknowledges Halloween ‘18 while adhering somewhat to a new set of rules brought forth by this newest craze of resurrecting old horror properties – the “requel.” Being that Scream ‘96 satirized the first wave of creators, appropriately, Scream ‘22 satirizes all the different ways in which those initiators of the genre come back from the grave, along with whoever's along for the ride. Seeing Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and especially David Arquette, who has always been the heart and secret weapon of the series, return time and again, even for the lesser entries, and even in the face of towering odds, feels right, and even necessary. A more traditional series would have eventually been forced to say goodbye to them, either by killing them off or writing them out, but Scream's own DNA doesn’t have that problem – that trio is an integral part of the mythos, and every new killer that comes along KNOWS this. If Ghostface is the Joker, then Sidney, Gale, and Dewey are Batman, and he is always going to make sure they’re involved, thematically, in his newest scheme. It’s just not Scream without them, just like it’s not Halloween without Jamie Lee Curtis. And upon Campbell’s first appearance in the movie, in which she says, “I’m Sidney fucking Prescott, of course I carry a gun,” one can’t help but picture a gray-haired Laurie Strode doing target practice in the back of her Haddonfield compound. There’s a symbiosis in the horror world, and one that’s potent enough to exist without the need for official but forced “shared universes.” That Halloween inspired Scream, Scream reverse-inspired Halloween: H20, and that Halloween ‘18 is considered not just horror canon but provides a means for dissection in Scream ‘22 is the ultimate proof of that. However, unlike the Halloween series, which had the luxury of wiping away forty years of nonsense and directly sequelling the first film, Scream, luckily, already has its own Halloween-like, in-universe franchise to mirror that: the "Stab" series, through which Scream is able to not only critique the genre in general, but also critique itself in fun but honest ways. (One of the flick’s best bits has some of its characters watching footage from "Stab 8" on Youtube, which shows a muscular Ghostface laying waste with a flamethrower, as they remark that the series has really gone off the rails.) Though seeming like a funny, throwaway moment, it actually embodies what this new Scream is about: the harrowing goal of making a fan-driven movie for fans while knowing they’re going to hate you no matter what you try. But it’s also about saving a fledgling franchise after the piss-poor Scream 3 and underwhelming Scream 4 and returning it to its former glory…by any means necessary. 

It’s been said that this newest crop of horror franchise rebirths – Halloween, Candyman, Ghostbusters, and now Scream – lean too heavily on fan service and nostalgia as a means of forcing an emotional connection with the audience that it might not have necessarily earned. (Halloween Kills is the guiltiest of this.) Regarding Scream ‘22, as with anything else, your mileage may vary. You may love the callbacks, cameos, and re-quotes, or you may think they’re lazy and heavy-handed. You may think the familial ties the new characters share with the old ones are bordering on eye-rollingly convenient storytelling, or you may remember that this is Scream, and if there’s ANY franchise that’s allowed to break those rules, you’re looking at it. Though I don’t think fan service and nostalgia is the scourge of modern cinema that others have been quick to proclaim, I will say it doesn’t sit well when it feels manipulative or uninspired. Scream ‘22 does the best at towing this line, and not just because its own genetic makeup allows for it. Regardless of how you may feel about each rebirth of your favorite horror property, I have no doubt each new generation of filmmaker genuinely loves the franchise they’ve resurrected, and were raised in video stores in the same way we all were, or even literally grew up on the sets of its previous movies like Ghostbusters: Afterlife director Jason Reitman. And when the filmmakers of this new Scream go to the trouble of bringing in a dozen cast and crew members from the previous films to lend their voices to a scene in which a fallen and aptly named friend is toasted at a high school house party, resulting in an emotional salute of “To Wes!,” the admiration for departed filmmakers, beloved characters, and long-running franchises can’t be justly denied. If you’re a fan, then you’ll know a small piece of trivia like that. Because you went looking for it. Because you read about it, or listened to a podcast, or watched an interview with the directors. It wasn’t on the screen and staring you in the face, waving to you from a place of plain sight. It was knowledge you had to earn, to validate your fandom, to know that little extra tidbit most others will never know – all to enrich this experience of revisiting a thing you’ve loved for so long.

Wes Craven may be gone, but he’s left behind an awfully large shadow. Against every odd, the makers of this new Scream were able to fill it. He would’ve been proud.

IT’S TIME

HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS (1988)

Halloween (1978) is a classic. That statement will be true from now until the end of time. Halloween 2…not so much. Though it tries to recapture its predecessor’s magic, right down to aping Carpenter’s style and half of Halloween’s cast and crew, its sole identity is forged from the unnecessary and hammily executed twist that Laurie Strode and Michael Myers were siblings. After that seemingly definitive swan song for The Shape came Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, which blew the minds of audiences everywhere, but for all the wrong reasons. “Where is Michael Myers? Who is this Irish guy? Fucking Stonehenge?” Though this black sheep sequel has since enjoyed a long-overdue reevaluation, most audiences refused to accept its Shapeless design at the time, leaving the series as an inconsistently formed trilogy with rapidly diminishing returns.

By the time 1988 rolled around, Trancas Films/franchise godfather Moustapha Akkad (RIP) and John Carpenter/Debra Hill (RIP) had already fought in court over the Halloween rights, which the latter lost, so the rights reverted solely to Akkad, who wasted no time in moving forward on a new entry. At this point, Carpenter had peaced out of the franchise and was putting the finishing touches on the second movie of his Apocalypse Trilogy, Prince of Darkness, and Hill, who would informally remain with the franchise over the next two sequels to groom potential writers and helmers, was busy producing Adventures in Babysitting. And finally, following her consecutive appearances in The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, Road Games, and Halloween 2, Jamie Lee Curtis had waved bye-bye to the horror genre. By then, and as Scream will tell you, Trading Places had put her on the map and major Hollywood offers were rolling in.

With no Laurie Strode, what’s a screenwriter to do?

Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) is seven years old and Halloween is just around the corner. She wants to be happy about it like other kids her age, but that’s impossible. She’s still reeling from the car accident that claimed the life of her mother (Laurie Strode) and father (assumed to be Jimmy, the surviving paramedic from Halloween 2) and has since been adopted by the Carruthers family. But there’s even more going on that she’s not privy to: in a move wisely avoiding being derivative of Halloween 2’s third-act twist, the audience is fully aware of who Jamie Lloyd is and her blood connection to Michael Myers. Though she has inexplicable dreams about him, referring to him as “the Nightmare Man,” she’s mercifully unaware of their family ties…unlike everyone else in Haddonfield, who know of or remember the sixteen people he killed a decade ago (an inaccurately high figure used in both marketing materials and the film itself), including the kids at school who bully her relentlessly, Tommy-Doyle-style. 

Bringing all of that trauma to her performance is an uncannily good Danielle Harris, who was only nine years old at the time of filming. Even though she’d worked scantly in television before her feature debut with Halloween 4, Harris proved she had the chops to be a sympathetic and likeable lead. With an almost unreasonable amount of dramatic responsibility, Harris is tasked with carrying the conflict of the movie on her shoulders, and when she ends her first scene with hugging a shoebox containing the photos of her dead parents on the floor of her closet and sobbing from her nightmares of the boogeyman, there’s no way you don’t feel for her.

Halloween 4 also marks the return of a familiar, reassuring, and haunted face: Donald Pleasence, who dons the trench coat of Dr. Loomis for a third time, and in a way that tests the durability of the phrase “suspension of disbelief.” Despite his valiant attempt to blow up Michael and himself at the conclusion of Halloween 2, which Halloween 4’s opening exposition dump reduces to Loomis “setting him on fire,” both have survived, though badly scarred. (A proposed but unfilmed opening for Halloween 4 picked up at the end of Halloween 2, which had Loomis begging firefighters dousing the flames on Michael Myers to “let him burn”—which Halloween Kills was happy to borrow.) When word hits that the ambulance transporting Michael to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium is found crashed and overturned below a bridge with all personnel dead and Michael missing, Dr. Loomis unpacks his steel-plated pistol and heads to Haddonfield, hoping to warn everyone in time that the boogeyman has returned.

Though Loomis essentially plays the same version of the character as before, this time he’s doing so with ten more years on his face and in his voice, and with ten more years of regret in his heart. In Halloween and Halloween 2, Loomis was curt, bossy, and domineering, but always with Haddonfield’s safety at heart. That bossiness remains, but this time it comes from a place of pure desperation. Though he’s not offered any standout monologue moments like his famous “devil’s eyes” scene from the original, he’s still given plenty of opportunities to chew the scenery, either by letting loose in explosive confrontational moments with cynical characters or by ably selling some pretty heavy-handed dialogue. (No one else could have pulled off, “They survived this ordeal; they’ll survive its memory.”) Along with the original, Halloween 4 presents the most archetypal iteration of Sam Loomis—the one that strays closest to fans’ perceptions of who the character is, what he looks like, and how haunted and broken he’s become over his self-professed failures.  

There comes a time when a topic can become exhaustively over-explored, which is why I’ve spent years writing about the Halloween series without ever specifically writing about the original, and which is why I’m also having trouble adequately celebrating the talents and legacy of Donald Pleasence. There’s absolutely nothing new to be said about him. Somehow, even the word “legend” feels lacking when addressing his power as an actor, his immortal staying power as Dr. Loomis (it’s the defining role of his career, yet he wasn’t Carpenter’s first choice), and whose sad eyes and obsessive madness will be sorely missed in every Halloween sequel to come. In Halloween 4, he turns Loomis up to eleven. The guilt and determination that’s driven him thus far has metastasized into maddening fixation; he’s gone from a psychiatrist disillusioned by his failure to counsel a child to a bounty hunter on the prowl in hopes of destroying the murderous man that child has become. His transformation into Ahab is complete and only death will stop him from hunting his white whale.

In response to savvier audiences, Halloween 4 smartly tweaks the concept of the “final girl,” made iconic by Jamie Lee Curtis, in an effort to keep the formula fresh while also remaining loyal to it. The screenplay by Alan McElroy deconstructs and redistributes the “final girl” title among our two female leads, maintaining all the expected characteristics but presenting them in a different dynamic. It’s the character of Rachel (Ellie Cornell) that falls in line with the classic heroic sense of the final girl, proving herself to be Ripley-tough—and not just against The Shape, but in everyday life when fending off her aggressive boyfriend, Brady (Sasha Jenson), or marking her territory against drugstore sexpot Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont), her competition for his affections. “Wise up to what men want,” Kelly tells her, all but confirming Rachel’s virginity—again in keeping with the final girl’s characteristic purity. Like Laurie Strode, Rachel is smart, capable, and aware of what’s going on around her, even when dealing with her own teenaged angst. Little Jamie, however, because of her age and the emotional baggage she carries, takes on the umbrage of the final girl’s victimization as the killer’s ultimate target, forced to endure most of The Shape’s wrath and unending rage. In response, Rachel has to be the strong one; she becomes the Kyle Reese to Jamie’s Sarah Connor, and with her parents out of town and Haddonfield’s remaining finest chasing down drunken, friendly-firing vigilantes, she’s the only one who can save her stepsister. 

Really, all of the screenplay is well constructed, with evident thought behind every creative decision. The movie’s best scripted scene is the one shared between Loomis and the eccentric Reverend Jackson P. Sayer (adorable character actor Carmen Filpi), who is kind enough to give Loomis a ride after his explosive confrontation with The Shape leaves him stranded on the road. Once Sayer’s antiquated truck appears to materialize within a cloud of dust, as if divine intervention—as if he’s an angel putting Loomis back on the path to his fate—the two share a drink…and a conversation about the apocalypse. "It always has a face and a name," Sayer claims, and Loomis can only agree. Both men acknowledge they are seeking the same thing, but both are seeking it in different places. Had this scene been excised from the final draft or first edit, no one beyond the writer would’ve noticed, but it's small touches like this that make Halloween 4 special. The mere mention of this end-times theme elevates this entry while enhancing Carpenter’s initial concept of “evil” as a force as opposed to a philosophy, and in what form we’re all expecting it to manifest…because if we’re all looking for something different, we’re doomed to let it pass right by.

Taking over the command for Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers in the previous films) is Ben Meeker, played exceedingly well by character actor Beau Starr (Goodfellas). His portrayal of Meeker as a no-nonsense lawman turns a potentially forgettable supporting role into strong and memorable work, and his first scene with Dr. Loomis establishes the makeup of his character. Upon Loomis entering the Haddonfield Police Department and telling them of Michael’s return, Meeker resists believing it from sheer audacity, but once Loomis convinces him, he doesn’t waste time. “What the hell can we do to prevent a repeat of ten years ago?” he growls, proving to be far more proactive and powerful than Sheriff Brackett ever was…but that’s because Brackett had been the overseer of a small, quiet, pre-tragedy town where nothing ever happened except for kids playing pranks, parking, and getting high. It’s Meeker who lords over post-tragedy Haddonfield, cursed with the knowledge that bad things can happen even in the sleepiest of towns and remaining on mental reserve just in case the Myers shit ever again hits the Haddonfield fan. Following Loomis’s revelation, he immediately scoops up The Shape’s likeliest targets and barricades them inside his fortified home outfitted with steel doors, a battery-powered CB radio, and of course, a robust arsenal. Ironically, in spite of how prepared he may have been, like his predecessor, Meeker suffers the loss of his daughter to The Shape; as has been a constant theme in the series, it would seem no amount of preparedness is enough when fate comes calling. The characters in Halloween and Halloween 2 made foolish choices and engaged in reckless behavior because they didn’t share the omniscient view of the audience and didn’t know of the danger creeping up on them in the dark. In Halloween 4, every character is given clear indication of the danger they’re in and every character makes the smartest possible decision in the moment, and yet most characters don’t survive the night. “Fate never changes,” indeed.

George Wilbur provides a perfectly satisfying performance as The Shape (with some assistance from Friday the 13th series alumnus Tom Morga), which is sometimes undone by the less interesting costume catalog mask and the hilariously thick shoulder pads that make him look like he's got on a few mom sweaters beneath his jumpsuit. Thankfully, Wilbur is able to counteract much of his character’s clumsy presentation with his subtle mannerisms and rock-solid stature. His stillness aids in the film’s ostensibly purposeful choice to present The Shape as slowly reforming after his ten-year coma: his first appearance has him wrapped in mummy-like bandages and strapped, unmoving, to a hospital gurney, his flaccid hand hanging loosely at his side…but then on his feet with his hospital gown hanging off him like shedding skin…and then free of his hospital garb and inside a freshly obtained mechanic’s jumpsuit…and then, finally, within a brand-new mask. The newfound knowledge of his niece’s existence has given him “purpose” again, and that purpose shows him regenerating until he’s back to being the masked maniac that’s lived only within the nightmares of Haddonfield for the last decade.

Though his screen time is limited, even Michael Pataki (Rocky 4) as Hoffman, medical administrator at Ridgemont Federal Sanitarium, offers a new dynamic as the “other” doctor—not the one chasing down evil in the night, but the one faced with the uncomfortable logistics and potential liability of keeping a comatose and evidently indestructible murderer in his hospital. Hoffman doesn’t want Michael destroyed, vanquished, or exorcised of the “evil” inside him—he just wants him gone and out of his medical jurisdiction. “Michael Myers is now in your hands,” he says to the Smith’s Grove personnel who come to transport him away from Ridgemont—and he says it for a reason: it’s his disclaimer, his end-of-watch sign-off, his mandate that whatever happens with Michael in the future won’t fall on his head. And yet his last scene sees him watching from the shore as Dr. Loomis, undaunted, walks into a shallow creek to examine the bloodied and mangled transport ambulance that’s been driven off the road. It’s then Hoffman understands Loomis has been right all along, that realization reflecting in his sorrowful eyes. 

Director Dwight Little (of Marked for Death fame, also starring Danielle Harris) deserved a more prolific career directing features, but he eventually made the successful jump to television, having helmed episodes of The X-Files, Prison Break, and 24. Similar to Hollywood’s modern practices, an independent film called Bloodstone caught the attention of Moustapha Akkad, who offered the unknown director the gig. Little proved he was the right man to follow in Carpenter’s footsteps, insisting on rich storytelling, fleshed out characters, mood, and terror. Little knows when to dial it back and rest on suspense, and he knows when to kick things into gear and get the pulse racing. Just look to the opening credit sequence—it doesn't feature the usual single glowing jack-o-lantern hugged by blackness or a montage of newspaper clippings to get us all caught up. Instead, Little presents static, abstract shots of small-town Haddonfield—Americana, really—on the cusp of October 31st. Familiar icons like pumpkins, skeletons, and scarecrows wielding rusty hatchets are on display in midwestern farmland settings and set to ominous, non-melodic music by returning composer Alan Howarth. That opening sequence exists for no other reason than to show you that behind Haddonfield's Halloween is an underbelly of fear and blood—that for other places in the world, Halloween is just another holiday, but in this small Illinois town, it’s a reminder of wounds long scarred over yet nowhere near healed. 

Though Michael’s carnage fills the streets and quite a few bodies drop, Halloween 4 is only occasionally violent, obscuring or suggesting much of its bloodletting and mostly falling back on a restrained approach. When compared to the entries in the Friday the 13th, Phantasm, and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises released that same year, and all which perpetrated an eye-popping level of violence against their audiences, Halloween 4 was downright tame by comparison—and that’s because Little looked to Carpenter’s original for inspiration. Dark and shadows, camera tricks suggesting violence without showing it, fleeting glimpses of The Shape, an emphasis on developed and likeable characters—these are things that made the first film great, and they are also the things that make Halloween 4 more than just another sequel. But in a move echoing Halloween 2's troubled production, several days of additional shooting occurred to beef up the movie's violence in favor of audience expectations, as early cuts had been stingy with the gore. This minor meddling isn’t a detriment, however; sudden violence in a movie otherwise trying to avoid it still contains the power to shock, whether or not it runs congruently with the director’s intention.

Little isn’t content to just crib from Carpenter’s playbook, though, infusing new concepts into the series and new ways to execute them. The movie’s last act, in which some truck-driving good-ol-boys transport Rachel and Jamie out of Haddonfield, is the highlight of Halloween 4, filled with propulsive action and bonafide fear, as Michael dispatches one character after the other, tearing faces, stabbing spines, and tossing them off a speeding truck. The entire sequence is sublime, embracing one of the core philosophies of the sequel: go bigger. Like the first Halloween, the action of Halloween 4 builds and builds before “ending” inside a dark suburban home, but unlike the first film, The Shape doesn’t disappear into the night because he’s not yet done with our characters. The carnage continues, spilling out of that dark suburban home and onto its own high-peaked roof before ending up on the nearest highway out of town, not only opening up the “world” of Haddonfield but eerily reminding the audience that Michael Myers can go anywhere—that he’s not constrained by a town boundary line—that all he needs is a ride. And as for that shock ending, holy fuck. That last-act moment of Jamie holding those bloody scissors and Loomis seeing his vilest nightmare starting over from the beginning and shouting himself hoarse before beginning to sob—all playing out over the Halloween theme—has never once failed to give me chills.

Speaking of, Halloween 4 sees longtime series composer Alan Howarth going solo without Carpenter for the first time, and though he’s eager to jump right into the Halloween theme, he’s sly with his approach. While the film utilizes the infamous theme several times, it never sounds the same from one sequence to the next: when The Shape is being loaded onto the Smith’s Grove ambulance, it’s propulsive and ominous; when the convoy of beer bellies are patrolling the town with their rifles and shotguns, it’s focused and militaristic; and when The Shape is on the roof of the truck during the highway finale, the theme truly comes to life—it’s quick-paced, frantic, and relentless, matching the most action-oriented sequence seen in the series up to that point. Outside of the main theme, Howarth doesn’t rest on his laurels and barely revisits some of the previous movies’ themes, intent on injecting his own original music into the franchise. Like the very movie he’s scoring, Howarth’s music is the peak of his solo work across all the sequels.

Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers was a new beginning for the re-born series, but also the beginning of the end, as the next two lackluster sequels would get mired in new directions so strange and mythology so confounding that audience interest couldn’t sustain, leading the series to be retconned twice—first by 1998’s Halloween: H20, which rendered parts 4-6 irrelevant, and again by 2018’s sequel, which rendered everything irrelevant except Carpenter’s original. Until this era of reboots and retcons, Halloween 4 had been the only worthwhile entry that preserved the core story begun in 1978 and had proven to be the last entry that focused more on thrills, suspense, and well-developed characters as opposed to one-dimensional bloodbags destined for garish and graphic kill scenes. Poor Halloween 4 had done the impossible: resurrected the boogeyman, created new characters to carry the mantle, and revived the series after Halloween 2 had concluded it and Halloween 3 had reinvented it. Time has proven the series’ intermittent fresh-start approach to be the right call each time, as they consistently returned reasonable respectability to the Halloween name, even if they left behind a wacky trajectory of three different continuities for fans to navigate. Proving that is the fresh release of the polarizing and disappointing Halloween Kills, which sees interest in the series at an all-time high while once again boasting the return of Jamie Lee Curtis in her sixth appearance as Laurie Strode, the quintessential final girl. (Her seventh and “final” go-round will be in next year’s Halloween Ends.) Though Halloween: H20 was the first sequel to reboot the Michael Myers story and resurrect its towering reputation after the dismal Halloween 6 (which had done so much damage to the series that the initial version of Halloween 7 sans Curtis was destined for a direct-to-video debut), it was also a little sad: seeing Laurie Strode battle the boogeyman once again was the stuff of fan dreams, but her return to the series had erased her daughter completely out of existence—and while Halloween: H20 was a worthy sequel, it was no Halloween 4.

HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS — FULL NBC BROADCAST, 1989

Following my previous fan edit "broadcast" of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, I decided to do something similar in honor of the spooky season. Much like Dawn of the Dead, some of the Halloween sequels never enjoyed network broadcasts in their heyday. To date, the most high profile broadcast of a Halloween movie was the 1978 original, which premiered on NBC in 1981 the same weekend that Halloween II opened in theaters. (This was the edit that's become known as the "television version," which includes three new sequences shot by Carpenter using Halloween II's crew to help pad the running time to fit within a two-hour time slot.) While Halloween II and Halloween III: Season of the Witch did air on television in the mid-1980s, both aired on affiliate channels with pre-existing licensing agreements with Universal Studios, who owned both sequels (and who also own the current Halloween timeline, comprising 2018's reboot and this year's disappointing Halloween Kills). Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers were made independently and never aired on network television or even on local syndicates outside of premium cable channels. Because of this, and being someone who owns a copy of every known broadcast of a Halloween movie, the lack of Halloween 4 always felt...wrong. 

Decades spent watching the Halloween series has allowed me to embrace a possibly controversial truth: after Carpenter's original, Halloween 4 is my favorite of the series by a lot (not counting the Shapeless Halloween III, which is nearly tied). There's a variety of reasoning behind this: one, it's well made and appears genuinely respectful of the source material; two, because if you've stuck with the series through thick and thin, then you know how off-the-rails the series went with each timeline, making Halloween 4 look better and better by comparison; and three, and this is the biggest one—nostalgia. While the series' original run that began with the very first and ended with 1998's Halloween: H20 all lovingly exists under that warm and comforting nostalgia blanket, there's something about Halloween 4 that really hits me in the feels. All of that is what led me not just to fan-editing a network broadcast that never actually happened, but it had direct influence on how I designed the edit. 

With my Dawn of the Dead edit, I kept all commercials confined to a late-70s and very-early-80s aesthetic, with most of the commercials being in-jokes based on Dawn of the Dead's content. (There's a bonafide commercial for Monroeville Mall—that kinda thing.) With Halloween 4, I kept the era appropriate to 1989 or close to it, but I also I made it a full-on nostalgia boner for everything Halloween season—commercials for costumes and makeup, all kinds of weird and spooky 900 numbers geared towards children (including Freddy Krueger's infamous hotline), and of course, TV spots for notable or infamous horror flicks released that year. It was designed for background play during your Halloween party, or to sit down and watch in its entirety—the hope is to stoke your own fires of nostalgia as you get lost in this more and more celebrated decade. 

Like Dawn of the Dead, this edit of Halloween 4 has been censored for content to adhere to network standards, but luckily, unlike Dawn of the Dead, Halloween 4 didn't have that much content to remove because it was a pretty tame and chaste sequel compared to what would come in the franchise's future, so this edit isn't very jarring. It also felt right using NBC as the hosting network, as it had aired the premiere of the original almost a decade previous to this one—it felt like the series had gone home. I hope you enjoy this newest addition of TEOS Theater and can embrace the shitty-on-purpose look and feel of a broadcast recording designed to look like a 37th generation copy—all blips, static, and tracking issues included.

JOHN CARPENTER'S HALLOWEEN SAFETY PSA

Something I made for a laugh to celebrate the spooky season: a remix of the 1985 Centron Halloween Safety PSA, this time with footage from Halloween, along with cameos from Halloween 2 and Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.

Every apology in the world to John Carpenter.

LEGEND OF THE SCARECROW

A complete and total tip of the hat to ShellHawk's Nest for turning me onto this beautiful short film entitled "The Legend of the Scarecrow," about a lonely scarecrow who only wants to befriend the crows that visit his field. It has elements of Frankenstein and Poe and TEARS. Be sure to check it out.

PLAYLIST: HALLOWEEN – SEASON OF THE HITS

Another round of Halloween listenin' for the year of our gourd 2021.

This one really fought me this year. Hopefully it doesn't suck.

Allow me to soundtrack your spooky season: 

TRICK (2019)

At one point, before David Gordon Green and Danny McBride helped to restore some class to the Halloween franchise with 2018’s successful rebootquel, Dimension Films had been trying to get a sequel off the ground for years—at first trying to continue Rob Zombie’s completely awful saga before going back to the original series and trying their hand at what was going to be called Halloween Returns, a direct sequel to 1981’s Halloween 2. Obviously, this didn’t happen, but a whole lot of folks were taking meetings with Dimension Films to pitch their approach. Among these filmmakers was frequent collaborators Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer, who had directed and written, respectively, 2009’s My Bloody Valentine and 2011’s Drive Angry. Their version, pitched as Halloween 3D, would’ve followed the exploits of Zombie’s version of Laurie Strode, played by Scout Taylor Compton, as she was confined to a psychiatric hospital following the events of whatever the hell was happening in 2009’s Halloween 2. The duo seemed like such a sure thing that they had confidently told another frequent collaborator, Tom Atkins, that he would have the role of Laurie’s doctor. As we all know, this didn’t come to pass, and I have to wonder how much of their original concept for Halloween 3D was rewritten to become this year’s Halloween-set slasher, Trick. It does, after all, feature a maniac (Thom Niemann) in a Halloween costume going crazy one Halloween night and slaughtering several teenagers, only to be sent away to a hospital for the criminally insane before escaping again on—you guessed it, Halloween—to pick up where he left off. 

It also features Tom Atkins.

Naturally, we can only speculate on this. Perhaps Trick was built from the ground up to serve as a standalone movie without relying on the scraps of a previous script. Either way you look at it, Trick is a very okay movie, presenting a story that’s reasonably engaging although not altogether original. A killer’s on the loose on Halloween night and there’s a cop on his trail (“You’re the new Loomis”), played by Omar Epps, who also appeared in Lussier’s Dracula 2000  Despite Detective Mike Denver’s best efforts, the titular killer slices and dices his way through all kinds of people, from the teens who helped subdue him at the Halloween party where Patrick “Trick” Weaver went crazy all those years ago (I think because he almost had to kiss another dude) to even a member or two of Denver’s police team. And if you’re already thinking that only one plucky final-girl heroine (Kristina Reyes) can stop him, then hey—something tells me you’ve seen a slasher movie before. Maybe even Halloween!

As a slice of pure escapism, and as a throwback slasher flick that has some imaginative and gory kills to satiate your bloodlust, you can do worse than Trick. For someone like me who considers Halloween to be his favorite day of the year, I tend to be very forgiving when it comes to Halloween-set flicks that offer a palpable October/autumn environment and finds a way to tie its central conflict to Halloween in at least some minor way. I mention this because if this had been the same exact movie, but was called Kringle Kills and took place on Christmas , I’d be far less kind to it...but since the killer calls himself “Trick” and wears a jack-o-lantern mask and the last act takes place in a Halloween haunt walk-through...well, I'm a sucker and I fall for that kinda stuff. 

For most of its running time, Trick is competently made and hits all the beats you’d expect, but once the “twist” is revealed—followed by another “twist” at the very end that you can definitely see coming—your palms will end up pressed against your face not just at the pure silliness, but at the way the twist actually manages to ruin the killer’s mystique, rendering him less intimidating.  

Still, I won’t kick Trick off my yearly Halloween shelf, and it certainly has more of a chance of getting annual October play than Rob Zombie’s garbage or Halloween: Resurrection, but it’s definitely the weakest collaboration yet from Lussier and Farmer. The ending of Trick is a clear set-up for a sequel, and should that ever come to pass, here's hoping they have a firmer grasp on their concept now that the cat is out of the bag. Here’s hoping their next effort retains the uniqueness and their adherence to old school slasher formulas as essayed in their previous flicks. 

HALLOWEEN SAFETY TIP

Always check your candy.

PLAYLIST: HORRIBLE SOUNDS OF HALLOWEEN

Of the many rituals I take part in to celebrate October and Halloween, spending weeks and months agonizing over the yearly Halloween playlist is one of them because I'm a psychopath and I put more effort into this than what it's ultimately worth.

In any case, here is this year's offering to the Halloween gods.

I try to make the annual Halloween playlist as unique and non-generic as possible. You won't find Thriller on here, nor Time Warp, Flying Purple People Eater, nor all those other severely overused titles that appear on every single so-called "ultimate" Halloween playlist. The idea is to find new music yearly that, to me, drips that lovely Halloween sound. Traditional songs, along with instrumentals, film scores, and creepy/ambient/avant-garde tracks -- these are the guidelines I follow with the occasional deviation. Two of the tracks I wanted to include aren't on Spotify so they appear below the main embed. Call them an addendum if you wish, but don't skip them. It's all part of the experience.

Also, if you're a repeat visitor to this blog (hey, thanks!) and you hit this playlist more than once, chances are it's already different from the last time you were here because I am never satisfied with anything. This is my curse.

Enjoy the spooks.

 

And for the finale:

20 ALTERNATIVE FILMS FOR HALLOWEEN NIGHT

Every year, sites like this one like to run their own take on the ultimate and comprehensive list of seasonally-appropriate flicks to watch on Halloween. And as an absolute Halloween devotee, I read every single one of these lists hoping to catch at least one new title to add to my ever-growing Halloween movie collection.

It’s very rare when that happens.

If you’re someone like me who’s a little tired of the norm, and of reading through lists that have John Carpenter’s Halloween as the inevitable number one, here’s a list of obscure, unknown, or less obvious choices to watch on Halloween night after the sun has set and the trick-or-treaters have disappeared (hopefully the non-lame ones who knocked on doors instead of peering into car trunks).

Halloween means something a little different to everyone, and everyone has their own little traditions of what they like to do, eat/drink, read, listen to, and watch during those last couple October weeks. Having said that, some of my own personal recommendations might not make a whole lot of Halloween sense, so be forewarned about the list to follow, which represents a culmination of years spent writing, reviewing, and blogging Halloween. There’s old stuff, new stuff, and cult classic stuff, so grab your Halloween candy and dive in.

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The Woods

Director Lucky McKee made a big splash with his indie horror flick May back in 2002. The film – a Frankensteinian tale about a deeply lonely and withdrawn girl (which also takes place on and around Halloween) – became immediately beloved by horror fans everywhere looking for something new, and so they eagerly looked forward to McKee’s next title. Sadly, to some degree, The Woods doesn’t fully represent the film as McKee intended to make, though he does get full final credit. Whispers of studio meddling preceded the very delayed release, and after a couple years of sitting on the shelf, it was released quietly to video.

The film, set in the 1960s, focuses on a young and troubled teen named Heather (Agnes Bruckner) who is sent to live in an all-female boarding school in the middle of the woods to get her act together. While there, she butts heads with other students and members of the faculty, although one of them, Ms. Traverse (Patricia Clarkson), sees that Heather  is special…in the practical magic kind of way. Soon, Heather realizes that there’s much more going on at Falburn Academy than just reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic – something dangerously approaching witchcraft – and she learns she’s got two options: escape, or surrender her soul.

Even all the witchy stuff aside (although it’s a big boost, because witches = Halloween), The Woods drips in Halloween environment, and a large part of that is the very foliage-driven trees which surround their school (and in some cases, creep inside). The wardrobe choices even seem somewhat inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Crucible, about witchcraft and mass hysteria sweeping through Salem, Massachusetts.

Ultimately, The Woods isn’t a rock solid production and the ending feels rushed – not just how we arrive there but the actual execution of it – but it does offer a fairly appropriate Halloween experience, some cleverly constructed scenes, an excellent performance from Patricia Clarkson, and of course, some Bruce Campbell.

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The Houses October Built

Another quiet release comes in the form of this 2014 found-footage flick The Houses October Built, produced by Paranormal Activity’s Steven Schneider. The concept is simple enough: a group of friends who heart Halloween rent an RV and begin a cross-country tour to check out various haunts. Naturally, after going to one haunt in particular, an eerie, pint-sized haunt actor with a dreadfully creepy broken doll mask begins to follow them…as do her fellow haunt “actors.” The friends eventually find themselves forced to enter a very different kind of haunt — one that turns out to be real.

The Houses October Built isn’t a great film; in fact it probably hovers somewhere around satisfactory. As usual for found footage flicks, the characters aren’t particularly likable and the film spends just a bit too much time fucking off before getting to the fear parts. Having said that, The Houses October Built excels at the Halloween aesthetic, boasting several sequences where the camera follows our characters throughout many different haunts, offering a first-hand account of all the long-legged beasties that wait for them in the dark. It easily resurrects your own memories of having gone to such haunts in the past, and if you’re someone like me growing rapidly older and losing patience for standing in long lines just to pay $50 for a 20-minute scare, let The Houses October Built do all the work for you before removing it from your queue.

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Lady in White

It’s Halloween, 1962, in Willowpoint Falls. Two bullies trick Frankie (Lukas Haas) into the classroom cloakroom and lock him in for a Halloween prank. After beating against the door, Frankie falls asleep…and later awakens when he hears the soft voice of a young girl. She’s in the closet with him, singing and dancing — and Frankie can see right through her. Soon her singing comes to an end, and she begins fighting off an invisible attacker who has slowly begun strangling her. Frankie passes out and later awakes on the floor of the cloakroom, his father before him. Frankie is taken home…with that same ghost girl following close behind him. Lady in White then unfolds as one big mystery with lots of small subplots figuring in, with young Frankie solving a years-old murder, but which puts him directly in the path of the murderer.

To be fair, Halloween is a device that kicks off the strange and twisty-turny events that make up Lady in White (it’s Christmastime exactly halfway through the film), but the supernatural elements are consistent enough to safely label it horror, and thus, appropriate for some Halloween watching. Not to mention that the first third of the film does feature leaf-strewn rural roads, and Main Street shop windows filled with decorations, costume-clad kids, and buckets of candy corn. As someone who has loved Halloween since I was a kid, seeing Lady in White at a young age, on Halloween, has permanently locked itself into my heart. What keeps me coming back isn’t only the machinations of the plot, the legitimacy of the characters, or the performances of the ensemble, but the healthy injection of nostalgia for which I yearn more and more as the years go by.

Lady in White isn’t a perfect film, but the ambiance it creates, and the feeling of childhood nostalgia it sets out to establish, is. (Read my full write-up on Lady in White.)

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Pay the Ghost

Look, I know. Saying the name “Nicolas Cage” as it relates to films these days is like saying “McDonalds” when talking about cuisine. He makes an awful lot of garbage now, we know this. I know I do because I have to watch a lot of it. But quietly, in 2015, he made a little Halloween movie called Pay the Ghost, based on a short story of the same name by Tim Lebbon which appears in the gigantic Halloween anthology October Dreams. In the film, Mike Lawford’s (Cage) young son disappears in New York during a Halloween parade, leaving Mike to solve the mystery himself before his son’s case gets lost in the system. As he begins to sift through the clues, he stumbles upon a string of kids gone missing on previous Halloween nights, an ancient Celtic group very aware of the dangers of Halloween, and the powerful spirit of a witch bent on revenge.

Pay the Ghost is rare for a handful of reasons: one, it’s a small-scale/direct-to-video Nic Cage film that’s actually pretty good, and two, more importantly, it’s that rare Halloween-set film that takes place in a city environment. That may sound like a trivial detail to commend, but so many Halloween-inspired films are set in small towns, rural areas, and the suburbs; rarely do we get to see the big-city landscape dressed in Halloween lights, crepe paper, and decor. Plus the Halloween parade sequence is pretty satisfying.

It’s not just set dressing and the day of the year which make Pay the Ghost seasonally appropriate, but the film also includes modern day equivalents of age-old Halloween celebrations before it was ever called Halloween. The Celts, the sacrifice, the pre-Satanized version of the witch — these are deeply rooted in the origins of Halloween and they are fully on display here.

If you’ve bypassed Pay the Ghost a number of times because of Cage’s face on the poster, let this be the year you dive in and give it a shot. You may be in for a…treat? (Halloween!)

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The Barn

Despite being a 2016 production, The Barn takes place on Halloween night, 1989, and feels every bit like it. After its excellent opening, which lays down the legend of Hallowed Jack, Candycorn Scarecrow, and the Boogeyman (aka the Miner), we cut to “the present” and meet our usual group of kids who will get into kid hijinks and come face-to-face with an array of evil Halloween spirits.

The Barn, the newest in a long line of throwback slasher films, has its heart in the right place, which allows it to transcend the problems that most low-budget filmmaking inevitably displays. If The Barn gets anything right, it’s the loyal devotion to Halloween. The first five minutes alone exude more October ambiance than all of Trick ‘r Treat, and the party store design of its movie maniacs easily call forth Conal Cochran’s trio of now-iconic masks from Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. When the screen is filled with costumed kids, cornfields, pumpkin patches, and those midwestern small town surroundings ripped straight from images conjured by the abstract term “Americana,” Halloween permeates through every square inch of the screen. That the legend of these monsters are told and retold through “ghost” stories — one of Halloween’s many traditions — elevates the Octoberness.

The Barn may not stand toe-to-toe with its Halloween-inspired brethren, but it’s a worthy addition to the sub-genre and a more-than-welcome guest at the yearly Halloween party. (Read my full write-up on The Barn.)

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Extraordinary Tales

At some point, Edgar Allan Poe became synonymous with Halloween. And I’m totally cool with that. With Extraordinary Tales, five of Poe’s most famous stories are brought to life by very different animation techniques to help suit each story as well as stress the anthological nature of the project.

The Fall of the House of Usher kicks things off with its use of what looks to be wooden models, made both blocky and somewhat angular with heightened features. Christopher Lee provides the narration as well as the voices of the story’s sole two characters. The original text, much like the other stories to come, has been pared down, but also kept mostly intact. The Tell-Tale Heart switches to an all black-and-white aesthetic and is complemented by archival audio of Bela Lugosi. In terms of guest narrator impact, this one just might play the best, as the pops and hisses from the original recording (purposely left intact by the director) add an old-school charm and somehow helps to heighten the tension of this story. The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valedemar utilizes the most clever of animation techniques, implanting the story in an EC Comics-come-to-life design in which every panel is colored relying only on vivid comic book colors. The most surprising aspect of The Pit and the Pendulum is how much of a good job guest narrator Guillermo Del Toro does in bringing the story to life. His is not a voice one would typically think of in terms of narration, but he does a tremendous job in bringing a lot of emotion and tension to the story (and being that the story is about a man taken prisoner during the Spanish inquisition, he’s also an appropriate choice). The Masque of the Red Death caps off the anthology in beautiful watercolor and is largely narration-free. Roger Corman gets exactly one line in the entire thing, but the beauty of the images and how the camera moves about them more than aptly propels the story.

Extraordinary Tales has nothing Halloween about it, and except for The Fall of the House of Usher, none of the stories offer even a particularly October/autumnal experience. But, with this being in Poe territory, and with Extraordinary Tales being beautifully (and horrifically) realized, this is still an easy recommendation. (Read my full write-up on Extraordinary Tales.)

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Boys in the Trees

Every year I do the same thing: I go to IMDB or Blu-ray.com’s search page, put “Halloween” in the keyword field, and sift through all the well-known titles and DTV garbage that inevitably follows. But I do this hoping to find some secret little film that slipped below my radar.

One year, it was Australia’s quiet indie Boys in the Trees.

It’s Halloween night, 1997, and a group of bawdy, troublemaking kids take to the streets to engage in teen pain-in-the-assness, including a campfire at a nearby cemetery. One of these numbers, Corey (Tobey Wallace), crosses paths with Jonah (Gulliver McGrath), a close friend from his past from whom he has grown estranged and who has since become a frequent target for Corey’s friends’ torments. The boys organically end up spending that Halloween night together, traversing dangers metaphysical, emotional, and very physical, resurrecting a painful past and confronting a very sad truth.

Boys in the Trees isn’t fully a horror film, and some might argue it’s not at all. It belongs equally to drama, fantasy, and thriller, as much as it does to horror. Tonally very similar to Donnie Darko, it plays almost like a darker update of Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, as it sees two young men grappling with death within the confines of a Halloween environment. Together they embark down streets dotted with illuminated jack-o-lanterns and trees decked with toilet paper as Jonah tells “ghost” stories about the houses and people they pass.

Boys in the Trees is a touch too long, its genre-hopping might frustrate those looking for something more straightforward, and there’s a strangely introduced aspect of sexual identity that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, but beyond that it’s a beautifully told and very atypical story that uses Halloween (and even Day of the Dead) in a strong manner to convey its themes.

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The Monster Squad

There are two kinds of people: those who love The Monster Squad, and those who are total turds. Far, far superior to The Goonies, The Monster Squad is the quintessential kids-on-bikes film, the absolute precursor to Stranger Things, and the perfect kid-friendly horror title. Iconic classic monsters from the Universal monsters era (which were pared down to their generic versions to avoid a lawsuit) descend on a small names town in, led by Dracula (Duncan Regehr), in order to bring about the end of the world because of course he would. And since the adults are too busy caught up in their own adult bullshit, the kids have no choice but to take care of the threat themselves…these kids known as “The Monster Squad.”

I’ll be honest, The Monster Squad has nothing to do with Halloween, but damn it all if it’s not a perfect title to watch on Halloween, anyway. With a typically sardonic screenplay by Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), filled with all the gay slurs and body shaming that have since gone seriously out of style, The Monster Squad, though lacking Halloween iconography, at least embodies its spirit: facing down the terrors of the night with your childhood friends by your side while confronting your mortality. (Also, Frankenstein.)

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Psychoville: “Halloween”

Don’t ask me what Psychoville is because, beyond it being a sarcastic and odd British television show, I have no idea. But during my yearly scouring, this title popped up, and without many other new options I figured I’d give it a go.

I was, again, pleasantly surprised.

Told in the anthology format, Psychoville: Halloween tells four different stories (not including the wraparound) mostly set on Halloween night. Psychoville derives from the more well known The League of Gentlemen, so that’s a good indicator of the kind of humor (dark, odd, and a little icky) you’ll be getting. As for the Halloween of it all, among the tales, a clown gets harassed by some eerie trick-or-treaters and a mother and son get picked up by a motorist on their way to a Halloween party who may or may not be a serial killer. The tales play out with your usual brand of Tales from the Crypt irony, but this time married to a helping of odd and absurd British humor that both complement and somehow heighten the fear. (That clown story, especially, is kinda spooky.)

Psychoville: Halloween is about 85% standalone, so you don’t fully need an understanding of the series to enjoy the stories, but because it also happens to be the season finale, it ends with a WTF cliffhanger that won’t make a lick of sense to you. My advice? Turn it off after the conclusion of the insane asylum wraparound.

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The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014)

In Texarkana, a revival showing of the original The Town That Dreaded Sundown is in full swing. Pretty Jami (Addison Timlin) isn’t really enjoying the morbid film, and her boyfriend Corey (Spencer Treat Clark, Unbreakable) notices and suggests they both get out of there. Get out of there they do – and end up in the desolate, tree-lined Lover’s Lane. After a few gropes and gooses, Jami spies someone standing off in the trees watching them – someone wearing a burlap sack, much like the killer in the film they had earlier been watching. The sack-wearing figure kills Corey and leaves Jami to escape. To confront her survivor’s guilt, Jami begins diving into the past in an attempt to solve the sixty-year-old murders of Texarkana.

This incarnation of The Town That Dreaded Sundown is an impressive feature debut by director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. Dreamlike in its depiction and unrelenting in its bloodletting, it is a screaming example of how to make a good film based on preexisting material and still make it fresh, unique, and not just another cash grab (although the ending is an absolute copout).

If I wanted to be cheap, I’d say that The Town that Dreaded Sundown is a good Halloween night candidate because the killer wears a mask and it opens on Halloween night, but there’s more than that. Though the film really has nothing to do with Halloween, the very rural and cornfield-strewn Texarkana strikes the same tone as Haddonfield, Illinois throughout the Halloween series, and the strange, dreamy tone fits right in with Halloween’s strange, dreamy traditions. And okay, that the film opens on Halloween night and the killer wears a mask, well, that doesn’t hurt.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown is probably the least obvious title on this list, but also one of the worthiest.

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WNUF Halloween Special

Purported to be “taped off of WNUF TV-28 on Halloween Night, 1987, this strange broadcast follows local news personality Frank Stewart and a team of paranormal researchers as they set out to prove that the abandoned Webber House – the site of ghastly murders – is actually haunted.”

The WNUF Halloween Special is a painstaking recreation of the following: a news broadcast, broken up by commercial breaks, which then leads into the actual “live” special, which is also broken up by commercial breaks. The movie itself is designed to look as if someone hit “record” midway through a news broadcast and let the tape capture everything that followed, and it’s obscenely clever. The WNUF Halloween Special is also peppered with numerous horror and Halloween homages: the haunted house’s murderous past echo that of the “Amityville horror;” the characters of Louis and Claire Berger are clearly based on Ed and Lorraine Warren (of recent dramatized fame in James Wan’s The Conjuring) who investigated the Amityville house, with Louis Berger being a purposeful recreation of legendary writer and Halloween enthusiast Ray Bradbury. There’s even a shout out to The Monster Squad’s Shadowbrook Road!

Important to note is that, despite the film’s marketing campaign, the WNUF Halloween Special is actually pretty hilarious. And it’s supposed to be, as it takes a page from the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, etc.). More comedy than horror, the WNUF Halloween Special’s best aspect is its desire to resurrect a time in our not-so-historic history where things seemed purer — when people bought heavy metal compilation CDs or took in-store lessons on how to use “floppy discs” — and this forgotten time also includes Halloween, as our current society simply doesn’t seem to care as much about October 31st as it once did. WNUF Halloween Special has carved out a chunk of our lives, called it “Halloween,” and preserved it for all time. And for doing that, it’s beautiful. (Read my full write-up on WNUF Halloween Special.)

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Millennium: “The Curse of Frank Black”

You might remember Millennium, The X-Files creator Chris Carter’s second series, a Red Dragon-ish thriller starring Lance Henriksen as a serial killer profiler working for the mysterious Millennium Group. Following a critically well received but not highly viewed first season, which was fairly grounded and straightforward, season 2 began exploring more paranormal themes in an effort to nab that X-Files audience. While this became the catalyst for Millennium sadly losing its way, it also directly led to episode 2×6, “The Curse of Frank Black,” which aired on Halloween night back in the dark ages of 1997.

Frank Black sits at home carving a jack-o-lantern and waiting for the right time to go pick up his daughter, Jordan, to take her trick-or-treating. Somewhere between grabbing his keys and sensing something a little bit off about this Halloween night, Frank sees the devil outside his home. And his nightmarish, unending Halloween night of terror begins, during which he recollects a terrifying Halloween past and sees that he’s in danger of it becoming his future.

“The Curse of Frank Black” is the creepiest episode across all three seasons of Millennium, heightened by its dark, windy, and foggy Halloween night weather. The Halloween ambiance is immense, along with its use of “ghost” stories, mischief, and the juxtaposition of fun Halloween scares and real, absolute danger. All that aside, the atmosphere is immensely effective and encompassing. It’s the type of night we Halloween enthusiasts wish for every year. On top of that is the creep factor: the brief few sightings of the devil are legitimately unnerving, and happenstance has Frank on foot in his old neighborhood where he stumbles across some teens egging the house he and his family lived in during happier times. Inside the empty house, he stumbles across more kids in the basement, spooking each other with ghost stories relating to someone from Frank’s past that died there.

For non-fans of the series, the episode is still a very effective watch. No, you won’t understand all the references and ins-and-outs, but for its mood, tone, and imagery alone, it’s a more than worthy Halloween night watch. (Read my full write-up on "The Curse of Frank Black.")

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Hellions

Seventeen-year-old Dora Vogel (Chloe Rose) is having a bummer of a Halloween. Not only has she found out she’s pregnant, but a swath of demonic trick-or-treaters have descended upon her family’s isolated rural home intent on stealing her unborn baby. A one-location siege unfolds, with Dora fending off one attack after another from these costumed monster kids.

Hellions serves as a fun Halloween-infused action/horror hybrid, but also an allegory for Dora’s fears as a potential mother. That she finds herself battling evil children on the same day she finds out she’s pregnant is too on the nose to ignore, but soon the straightforwardness of the plot begins to dissipate and slowly transforms into a Lynchian nightmare, aided by the story’s surreal developments and the use of pink infrared film.

Hellions makes great use of the October aesthetic, littering the screen with pumpkin fields, Halloween decorations, and an army of deranged trick-or-treaters, and its very loose plot seems to be harvesting Halloween’s own history rooted in sacrifice and pagan worship. Every trick-or-treater’s design has the power to pulse with appropriate shiverage, and seeing them stand in crowds outside windows, in front of a flaming police cruiser, or idly on a swing set, is effortlessly eerie. Their manipulated childlike voices that whisper through their scarecrow burlap masks or oversized button-eyed doll faces cause the hair on the back of your neck to prick up.

Hellions isn’t quite a new minor Halloween classic, but it’s an interesting and worthy endeavor and deserves your fair chance. (Read my full write-up on Hellions.)

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The Guest

Soldier David Collins shows up on the doorstep of the Peterson family, who are still reeling over the death of their soldier son, Caleb, to pass onto them Caleb’s premortem expression of his love. The Petersons invite David to stay with them until he can find a more permanent place to live. The always-smiling and perfectly polite David Collins, who inserts himself into the family’s lives, seems to be the perfect guy, until it’s revealed that he has an uncanny knack for killing — all, it would seem, without any hesitation or regret. It’s soon revealed that David Collins isn’t David Collins at all, and by the time everyone finds that out, it’s far too late, because he’s very, very dangerous.

Take the “living with the killer” concept popular in the 1990s, add the You’re Next team of writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard and a healthy dose of 1992’s Universal Soldier, and you’ve got The Guest. That the film takes place at Halloween isn’t its only tie-in; The Guest is a hyper-violent and hyper-stylistic horror/thriller/action/comedy inspired by Carpenter’s late-’70s/early-’80s output, especially Halloween (and contains a fun nod to Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, the unfairly maligned, non-Michael Myers Halloween sequel). Collins embodies The Shape, including his soulless, expressionless demeanor, but this time, the mask he wears is that of humanity, and those around him can’t see him for what he really is.

The Guest offers a bit of counter-programming to your Halloween watching; it definitely satisfies in the horror department, but those wanting a little action will have an awesome time.

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Kenny & Company

Don Coscarelli’s sophomore effort, Kenny & Company, is not an obvious choice for a Halloween movie. It’s actually not even a horror film. Instead, it’s about childhood – one fully formed by the freedom felt on Halloween night as you and your friends walked your neighborhood streets in your secret identities. It’s about the misadventures you got into, and the trouble you avoided (or nearly did). Coscarelli, most famously known for the Phantasm series, Bubba Ho-Tep and his newest, John Dies At the End, writes, produces, and directs this slice-of-life nostalgia piece about a small, nameless community in the Southern California suburbs, told through the eyes of the titular Kenny, in the week leading up to Halloween.

Refreshingly, the kids act, talk, and think like kids. And it all works to the intended comedic effect because it feels very real, and this includes the sequence in which the kids put on their Halloween costumes and go trick-or-treating, ending up at a neighborhood house’s garage of horrors. (It is during this sequence where the kids are pursued by a costumed man in the dark that inspired Coscarelli to go on to write and direct Phantasm, citing his extreme lack of enjoyment in watching his audience squirm in fear from the events occurring in that haunted garage.)

Is Kenny & Company a Halloween film? Not really—at least not in the traditional sense. But Halloween is on the film’s horizon, and it certainly nails that nostalgic look back at childhood, of which Halloween was a very big part. It wouldn’t be the first film you'd think to watch as we approach that late October day, but Halloween wasn’t only ever just scary, either. (Read my full appreciation for Kenny & Company.)

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The Witch

After being excommunicated from their colony, a 1600s New England family journey to their new home in the middle of the woods to begin anew. But there’s something in the woods that doesn’t let them live in peace. And, at night, it comes for them — one by one.

The Witch isn’t interested in being a typical horror film. But that doesn’t mean it’s not interested in getting under your skin. It’s not a spoiler to say that this isn’t a case of “Is there a witch, or is it all in their heads?” The very real threat exists among this displaced, God-fearing family, looming over their new patchwork home in the woods like the night sky. Quick and hazy sightings of the force haunting them, rarely glimpsed but ever changing, heighten its malignancy. The thing going bump in the night is never made a primary on-screen force. It’s not hiding behind closet doors or hovering in the background of a mirror’s reflection. Its existence is felt in every frame, even if its visage is hardly sighted—a masterful accomplishment for any filmmaker, but especially writer/director Robert Eggers, making his directorial debut.

On its surface, The Witch has nothing to do with Halloween, but like The Woods, it still feels incredibly appropriate for some late-October watching. Something about colonial-era New England, the Salem Witch trials of Massachusetts — witchcraft in general — easily lends itself. As a bible thumper will be quick to remind you, Halloween has become “Satan’s holiday,” and boy oh boy does that make The Witch even more appropriate.

The Witch is very quiet and permeates with instant dread, and it’s classily and faithfully executed, but it’s not a Friday night party film like The Evil Dead. Not only does it make for an ideal Halloween film, but it makes for the final film of the night, when all is quiet, everyone’s gone to bed, and it’s just you, the silence, and the dark. (Read my full write-up on The Witch.)

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Halloween 3: Season of the Witch

Once Michael Myers returned to the Halloween series, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch officially became the black-sheep of the franchise, but while its black-sheep status remains a fair label, it’s certainly not the turkey that many series fans like to say it is.

Halloween 3, lacking Michael Myers, instead features: Tom Atkins (rocking the mustache!), rumination on old Celtic beliefs/traditions as they pertain to Halloween, an evil corporation, Stonehenge, booby-trapped bug-filled Halloween masks, and, fuck yeah, robots. Here’s the thing, though, and hold onto your butts: While Halloween 3 is nowhere near a better film than the groundbreaking original (ha ha; lord, no), it does a far better job of incorporating the actual day of Halloween – and all the myths and iconography and history that come with it – directly into its storyline. We’re not just talking about some guy walking around in a mask on the day/night of Halloween and getting away with it because Halloween = masks. We’re talking about a revisitation of old-school Halloween; how it was celebrated and observed in lands foreign from our own; how the very idea of Halloween itself – one whose enduring popularity is credited to legions of children – is both the inspiration behind and the vehicle through which Halloween 3’s antagonist will carry forth his dastardly plan. If you know the legends and lore of Halloween, you know that the Halloween of today is a sanitized and watered-down version of what it used to be. It's this embracing of genuine Halloween that makes Season of the Witch an entertaining watch.

You might be looking at this selection and thinking, “How is this ‘obscure’ or ‘less obvious?'” If so, GOOD FOR YOU. Most Halloween series fans tend to hate Halloween 3, and these people tend to be awful. (Read my full appreciation for Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.)

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Dark Night of the Scarecrow

It’s Halloween season in a nameless mid-western town where a young girl named Marylee and a simple-minded man named Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake) play together in the middle of a field. Bubba is harmless, but Otis (Charles Durning) and his cohorts believe he’s dangerous. After Marylee is viciously attacked by a dog, rumors spread that Bubba is to blame, so Otis gathers his hateful posse and heads out to the Ritter farm to exert some private justice. Bubba, attempting to hide within a scarecrow, is killed, and Otis and his posse are tried for Bubba’s murder. Without evidence, the men find themselves free, but then each of them begin seeing the Ritter farm scarecrow planted in the middle of their fields…before they’re picked off one by one at the hands of an unseen killer…perhaps by the ghost of Bubba himself.

Somehow, scarecrows have become infamous iconography of Halloween. Go to any Halloween party store and you’re likely to find a scarecrow mask or costume, or even a decapitated and blood-dripping scarecrow head (which makes no sense, but just go with it.) Despite this, the scarecrow has been used only moderately throughout horror cinema, which is a shame, because their visage is effortlessly creepy and could make for a good on-screen threat given the right approach. Dark Night of the Scarecrow is absolutely the best of this sub-genre, along with being one of the all-time greats in general.

In Dark Night of the Scarecrow, all the gruesomeness is left to your imagination. The men are killed, oh yes, and in imaginatively painful ways, but never on screen. It is old school in its execution because it is old school. And as the kids in town prepare for the Halloween dance, and as gusty, eerie winds pick up and blow dead leaves and trash cans down Main Street, the Halloween aesthetic will bring a smile to your face. (Read my full write-up on Dark Night of the Scarecrow.)

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Ghostwatch

Ghostwatch is presented as a live BBC on-air special that spotlights an alleged haunted house on Foxhill Drive in London. The host of this show is Michael Parkinson, a well-known (and quite real) British journalist. Next to him sits Dr. Lin Pascoe, a parapsychologist who fervently believes that the spooky events occurring at Foxhill Drive are genuine signs of a haunting. And in the cursed house live the Early family; mother Pam and daughters Suzanne and Kim. Much like modern ghost-hunting shows of today, a camera crew enters the house to investigate the events the Early family claim to have been dealing with for months. Leading this crew is Sarah Greene, another well-known British personality. Sure enough, the house is haunted for real, and as the investigation unfolds, the events within the house steadily increase into utter chaos.

Ghostwatch is tremendous for many reasons, but most of all because it was planned, written, and executed simply to have something fun to play on Halloween night. Added to that, the Early family within their house still try to celebrate the night; the decorations are hung above the chimney with scare (haw haw), and the kids bob for apples in the kitchen. Outside, curious bystanders watching the production crew trade ghost stories about the house, or the surrounding areas, and one also very real TV personality, Craig Charles, cracks awful but awesome jokes about how difficult it would be to interview the Headless Horsemen because, “Where do you point the microphone?”

Ghostwatch caused a huge stir following its one and only airing because many viewers thought it was 100% real, despite the BBC’s many attempts before, during, and after the show’s airing to make sure people knew it was entirely scripted. It even led to a young viewer, who suffered psychological problems, to take his own life after he believed his house to be haunted by the same ghost featured in Ghostwatch, leaving a suicide note to his mother which read: “if there are ghosts, I will be … with you always as a ghost.” It’s for this reason that Ghostwatch has never aired again in England (or anywhere), although the “real” story behind the film — known as the Enfield Poltergeist — has been dramatized several times since then, most notably and recently in The Conjuring 2.

Ghostwatch has never enjoyed an official U.S. release, but you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. (Read my full write-up on Ghostwatch.)

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The Halloween Tree

Author Ray Bradbury provided the teleplay adaptation of his novel (which earned him an Emmy award) and also provides the narration for his tale about a group of kids and the very mysterious Mr. Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud (Leonard Nimoy) pursuing the kids’ friend, Pip, across time and the world – from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to the cathedrals of Notre Dame – with each providing a bit of history on Halloween’s beginnings.

For obvious reasons, The Halloween Tree is essential Halloween watching, although it’s fallen into obscurity over the years since its award-winning release. Not just set on Halloween night, it’s a trip back to a real history that provides a perspective on how different cultures honor and celebrate death. (Both the novel and the film are an allegory for death.) This adaptation sees some minor changes from its novel, but the spirit of the story remains in place. Famed studio Hanna-Barbera provided the animation, and while it’s a reflection of the time it was made, it’s still beautiful to watch. Meanwhile, Nimoy does a good job with voicing Moundshroud, going for a strange, almost bird-like screeching voice instead of the deep baritone for which he was well known.

Regardless of when you discovered this movie – whether in your youth or your adulthood – it contains the power to enthrall and fill you with that certain kind of nostalgia that only usually happens by accident. But The Halloween Tree works in this regard. It will fill you with the kind of melancholy that only occurs when revisiting your childhood, but you’ll also laugh and maybe tear up as you watch these kids tumble through different lands and time periods, all in hopes of saving their friend. By the end, you’ll be wishing your friends were as loyal and devoted as Jenny the Witch, Ralph the Mummy, Wally the Monster, and Tom Skelton the you-know-what. (Read my full-write up on The Halloween Tree.)

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