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As an October baby, I’m also a Halloween baby, which means that I was reared on horror movies, those motion pictures of the past century that inspire heart-stopping & blood-chilling moments of terror. But horror isn’t entirely about jump scares & high-pitched screams, at all times. Horror doesn’t have to keep you wide awake at night. In fact, some horror is a bit more akin with sleepy time tea, the perfect ingredient to help you relax on a cool autumn night.
Because horror can sometimes be cozy, which is enjoyed best during the spooky season.
It’s a chilly Sunday afternoon. You can hear the dead autumn leaves skritch-scratching across the concrete patio & the wind gently blows. You purr into a hot cup of apple cider or hot chocolate while you rest comfortably under a thick, warm blanket, watching a quiet, ghostly cinematic story unfold.
That’s cozy.
And yet ultimately still chilling.
And these are the movies that you could be watching this Halloween season as you daydream, as you drink, and as you dread.
D A R K F A N T A S Y
Something Wicked This Way Comes
1983 | PG | 95 minutes | d. Jack Clayton | dp. Stephen H. Burum | s. Ray Bradbury
* * * *
It’s autumn in the small town of Green Town, Illinois – but what’s unique this season is that the community will be forever changed by a visit from the mysterious traveling carnival host by the even more mysterious Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce). More specifically, two young boys – the slightly rebellious Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) & his more reserved best friend Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) – will see their life-long friendship tested by the ominous carnival visit. Meanwhile, Will’s father (Jason Robards) will confront his role as a father, as a husband, and as a man simply growing old. If all three cannot contend with the ways in which their lives could be changed by Mr. Dark forever, they stand to lose more lives than their own before Mr. Dark’s attraction leaves Green Town for good.
When I first started watching horror movies, I never really imagined what a valuable, educational tool they could be. Initially, horror was simply a matter of black & white – literally, populated by the Universal creatures. Later, there wasn’t much to decode about the slasher films starring Freddy, Jason, and Michael either – no deeper meaning to ponder, no intellect more required than to count the number of creative kills in a single film.
There was simply no subtext to horror, by & large, and that was enough for me, for a good, long while. And there were a few exceptions to this rule: Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) confronts notions of personal faith against the backdrop of a young girl’s demonic possession; The Silence of the Lambs (1991) gruesomely explores the nature of evil while baking into its dish the negotiation of gender in what has traditionally been a man’s world; and It Follows (2014) possesses its own thesis on inescapable doom while wearing the trappings of teen sex.
And other horror films have seized the opportunity to say something about the human condition through genre filmmaking, with varying degrees of success.
But with the widescreen adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novella of the same name, the filmmakers address the challenge of accepting — or refusing to accept — one’s mortality through the attractive Big Top of Dark’s traveling carnival.
Here, horror is able to speak to the subject through two different characters: Charles Halloway & Jim Nightshade. The first protagonist, an aging father with an uncharacteristically much younger son, Charles has the opportunity to reverse the aging process through Dark’s magick. It’s an attractive offer to be certain, but only when Charles refuses his offer does Dark begin dramatically zapping year after year from what remains of Charles’ life, thereby bringing the husband & father closer & closer to death.
Jim Nightshade is a more complicated case study, requiring a different approach for Dark’s entrancement of him. While best friends all their lives, Jim was born only minutes after Will on Halloween & has grown up without the benefit of a positive father figure in his life. (It’s suggested that Jim’s father either passed away or abandoned the family.) Perhaps as a result, Jim has always been quicker than Will to defy adult authority figures & dreams of little more from his future than growing out of childhood, even being older than level-headed Will. These qualities make him an easy target for Dark’s life-altering, and here Charles Halloway & Jim Nightshade will potentially collide sitting atop two of its horses –
– Charles, as he is promised he will be made to grow older, recognizing the harsh reality of his morality –
– and Jim, as he potentially earns a newfound adulthood, never recognizing that in growing older, he too will come to understand mortality, sooner than he should as a young boy.
The “something wicked” that this way comes – a lyrical reference to William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” – is not merely Mr. Dark & his soul-sucking promise of salvation to the townspeople of Green Town. The “something wicked” is less tragic than it is natural: the growing older that each of us will experience. It’s the passage of time that some of us fear, like Charles, who is terrified of it with all of his being. But it’s also to some of us like the passage of time to Jim, running toward it as if it were the only solution to his momentary, pubescent problems.
* * * *
Something Wicked This Way Comes is streaming on Amazon Prime.
S U P E R N A T U R A L
The Gate
1987 | PG-13 | 85 minutes | Tibor Takács | dp. Thomas Vámos | s. Michael Nankin
* * * *
By nature, “cozy” horror films aren’t meant to necessarily make you scream. But that doesn’t mean that some “cozy” horror movies can’t scream with a certain pastiche: of a particular decade, of a particular tone, of a particular subgenre of motion pictures. And directed by Tibor Takács, The Gate blew wide open the doors on all three.
In the film, Stephen Dorff (Judgment Night, 1993; Backbeat, 1994; Blade, 1998) plays in his first major starring role 12-year-old Glen, who – assisted by his older friend Terry (Louis Tripp) – accidentally summons a horde of small demons from an ominous hole in Glen’s backyard.
It’s strange to think that movies like The Omen (1976), The Exorcist (1976), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) were so influential as to spawn such a powerful subgenre of horror, but during & since these films that focused solely on demonic possession or demonic worship, offshoots of the Satanic Panic foundation maintain a cult popularity today.
Movies like Race With the Devil (1975) took demonic worship on the road by telling its story of two couples vacationing in an RV – only to witness a human sacrifice & spend the rest of the film running from a rural cult. Evilspeak (1981), meanwhile, tapped into the popular suburban fear that heavy metal music contained secret, hellish messengers to its audiences listening closely enough, and the made-for-TV dramatic thriller Mazes and Monsters (1982) joined the conversation by cautioning its viewers of the demonic influences that reside within tabletop role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.
The Satanic Panic cultural craze was so pervasive that it’s been referenced, parodied, and emulated as late as the 21st Century. Writer-director Ti West’s homage to these films — entitled, The House of the Devil (2009) — is a love letter to 1980s filmmaking, while the 2010 found footage film The Last Exorcism speaks to demonic possession films in an age of hand-held recording technology.
And The Gate exploits many of those ingredients as well, the most prominent being the suburban setting. Crime & violence & death are reserved for urban streets – certainly, the peaceful suburbs would never become a target for subhuman evil. But examine a number of horror films – Poltergeist (1982), Scream (1996), Sinister (2012), and more – and it’s clear that horror has frequently throughout time tried to make the suburbs its new home.
The procedural incantation of a demonic summoning is also apparent in The Gate, even if it’s more accidental than purposeful. Glen inadvertently leaves his blood at the scene of the mysterious hole in his backyard, the family dog is buried in said hole, and so on. Heavy metal music as a conduit for supernatural activity is also an obvious reference in this movie, as is the unsettling situational twist that someone close to you – a friend, a sibling, a parent, etc. – would become possessed over the course of the narrative. Suddenly, gone is the welcoming face & warm voice of someone you love, replaced instead by something that ultimately wants to hurt you.
As a piece of cozy horror, there’s nothing in the film’s demonic referentialism that suggests the movie is a thing inspiring abject terror. On the contrary, The Gate never takes itself that seriously, and that’s what makes it even a perfect piece of moviemaking – like Gremlins (1984) or The Monster Squad (1987) – to introduce those new to the horror genre. Call those movies – and The Gate – fantastic pieces of gateway horror, if you must.
You see, no one should take all of it too seriously.
We’ll leave that to the soccer moms listening for ritualistic incantations in the background of a Black Sabbath song, seemingly incomprehensible demands that the listener bid eternal allegiance to The Dark One.
* * * *
The Gate is streaming on Pluto TV.
H A U N T I N G S
Lady in White
1988 | PG-13 | 118 minutes | d. Frank LaLoggia | dp. Russell Carpenter | s. Frank LaLoggia
* * * *
The perfect Halloween night is dependent upon a few key factors.
The temperature in the air has shifted suddenly, unexpectedly, without little warning – the chill is as pointed as if a cold snap had never been felt before in the community.
The perfect Halloween is for the burnt-orange, dead leaves that no longer cling to the life-giving branches of trees but now carpet the lawns like a home renovation that few would ask for, a remodel that few would embrace, because it meant that the harsh bitterness of winter was soon to come.
But until then, the perfect Halloween also meant a door-to-door collection agency of masked adolescents, amassing candy like it was currency: the sweet stuff.
And Lady in White makes good on all of that sweet stuff.
In the film, it’s Halloween night in 1962, when nine-year-old Frankie Scarlatti (Lukas Haas) is locked in his school’s coatroom by some mischievous peers. Trapped there well after dark, Frankie witnesses the apparition of a young girl murdered in that coatroom by an invisible assailant. From there, Frankie is reluctantly tasked to solve the mystery of the young girl’s murder, a crime that seems to span decades, a horror that comes much too close to the sanctity of Frankie’s contemporary home.
Lady in White is a sublime piece of Halloween horror moviemaking: the holiday itself rests at the center of the film’s central conflict, the very night that Frankie is first locked in the cloakroom & catches a glimpse of Melissa Ann Montgomery’s ghost, setting him on a course to determine the identity of her killer. Moreover, the 1962 time period – clad in its costumes & its automobiles – remains the quintessential backdrop for a ghost story.
But what also rests in the timeless tomb of this film is the community that inhabits it, that gives this spirited scary story its heart. From big brother Geno (Jason Presson) to loving father Angelo (Alex Rocco), Lady in White at all times is preoccupied as much with the nourishing lives that populate young Frankie’s living life as much as it’s consumed with the haunting mystery of little Melissa Ann’s murder.
And perhaps that dichotomy is part of the deception that works so well for the motion picture – the film always seems to have a foot stamped firmly in both worlds, in the worlds of the living & the dead, so much so that the two worlds will inevitably overlap. As much as Frankie’s waking world provides him comfort from the spectral mystery of that dark cloakroom, his everyday life is haunted by the events that took Melissa Ann from this world.
In that way, Lady in White is as much a piece of spooky season cinema as it is a mystery play that transcends the Halloween holiday, and that – well – is where the sweet stuff truly hides.
* * * *
Lady in White is streaming on Amazon Prime.
V A M P I R E S
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
2023 | PG-13 | 92 minutes | d. Ariane Louis-Seize | dp. Shawn Pavlin | s. Ariane Louis-Seize & Christine Doyon
* * * *
Coming of age stories can be hard, whether portrayed on the printed page or on the big screen. Painful. Unrelenting.
Heart-stopping.
Sometimes, simply growing up can seem like the hardest thing about being alive, worse than death.
Co-writer & director Ariane Louis-Seize taps that particular vein with her horror dramedy about Sasha, a young vampire (Sara Montpetit), who remains reluctant to bleed humans because her fangs haven’t emerged & also – well – killing. But when Sasha meets awkward, would-be suicidal teenager Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), her existence of potentially taking lives collides with an existence of ending one’s life.
When it comes to horror films, nothing quite provides the opportunity for rebirth like a vampire movie. The Lost Boys (1987), Let the Right One In (2008), and A Girl Walks Home At Night (2014), among others, offer a glimpse of what life would look like if it were unending, and only occasionally is the life of a vampire on the big screen demonstrated as a death sentence.
But Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person turns the romanticism of vampires glamorized in motion pictures like Interview with the Vampire (1994) & Twilight (2008) into an uncomfortable yet necessary moment of growth – like puberty – that not only asks you to do what it takes to survive but also demands you to do what it takes to survive –
– And, sometimes, that thing has more to do with life-giving than taking a life.
* * * *
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is streaming on MUBI.
M O C K U M E N T A R Y
WNUF Halloween Special
2013 | NOT RATED | 83 minutes | d. Chris LaMartina, et al. | dp. Chris LaMartina | s. Chris LaMartina, et al.
* * * *
Few can imagine what the world would be like today were it entertained with broadcast television rather than streaming services. Children would likely be better young people if they were guided by scheduled Saturday morning cartoons. Stay-at-home housewives would be better entertained by more than a single soap opera every day.
And the WNUF Halloween Special tunes in to that on-air sensibility as it re-creates the 1987 Halloween televised broadcast of an investigation into the murders that took place at the local Webber House, the site of the brutal murder of a married couple. Over the course of the broadcast, the couple’s son confesses to murdering his parents — commanded to do so by demonic entities during a Ouija board seance — while a Catholic priest called to the scene admits that he has no true training in performing an exorcism.
There’s only so much that can be written about broadcasting these days that is meant to look authentically real when it is obviously “fake news.” Luckily, the fictitious WNUF’s Halloween Special absolutely flourishes in its approach to spooky storytelling.
It’s only too bad that the days of broadcast television are long gone, that audiences can’t be fooled by or at least entertained with phony narratives that the demonic exists today.
Perhaps that particular devil exists within the details …
* * * *
WNUF Halloween Special is streaming on AMC+.
Chris Kaine is the most amateur film essayist whom you may ever imagine. He earnestly contends that he was named after the actor Chris Sarandon, because he was either conceived while his parents watched Fright Night (1985) in his paternal grandparents’ basement, or because of their love for The Princess Bride (1987), which stars a character by the name of “Humperdinck,” which is pretty funny, if you think about it.
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