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.
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withdrawn girl (which also takes place on and around Halloween) – became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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.)
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.")
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.)
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.
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
