HALLOWEEN HORROR MOVIE THREAD

[Mamisu]

It's the spooky month, which means it's time to watch movies that scare the pants off ya. This is a thread to talk about good/bad horror movies. I just watched Halloween (2018) and it was crap, but the original will forever be in my top 3

 

[GothMonk]

My Essential Halloween Night List:
1. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (#2 if you want dumb fun)
2. Scream
3. Halloween 1 & 2
4. Addams Family
5. Alien

Bonus MST3K Hobgoblins.

I'll agree to disagree.

 

[brentw]

I have such a hard time picking favorites.
Instead I think I'm going to use this thread to recommend stuff I think is lesser known or underrated.

I'll start with a potentially controversial choice.
An early 2000's Hollywood remake of a more respected Japanese horror film. (An often, deservedly, mocked category.)
I don't know of anyone else who talks about or recommends it, but I actually enjoy PULSE (2006).

View: https://youtu.be/CF6kedK4FQk?feature=shared


Obviously it's not as good as the original Japanese film, KAIRO (2001), which is absolutely fantastic.

View: https://youtu.be/MpsXvHMUQ3Q?feature=shared
That's a must watch for Japanese horror enthusiasts, but it's kinda slow and lower budget. The average viewer might get a tad bored.

Wes Craven worked on the screenplay of the American adaptation and I think it manages to stay rather interesting, while also delivering more conventional pacing, and a special effects budget that the original desperately needed.

One of the first, and best, examples of "internet horror" (generally an unbearably bad category)
Yeah, the writing can be cheesy at times, and the plot questionable. But this is horror, those are practically a given.
It has a good number of interesting death scenes and scares, a neat premise, and the special effects hold up pretty well (a lucky coincidence due to the low-fidelity/interference/distorted look of the entities).

And it's different than the usual horror fare. Which is refreshing.
After all, that's a huge part of what made Japanese horror so popular in the early 2000s. It was a nice change of pace from tired Hollywood tropes.

---

Just don't ever watch Pulse 2. It's one of the most infuriating examples of deceptive marketing, straight to DVD licensed cash grab I've ever seen.
Literally the entire movie is done on really bad green screen of stock photo backgrounds. Lower production quality than a student film.

 

[Vitnira]

Like my usual responses this is going to be a ramble.

I've had to front-load my spooky this season since we have guests coming over who aren't into horror. So far I've seen The Lost Boys (1987) which is somehow listed a horror, Near Dark (1987) also somehow a horror (???), and The Hallow (2015) which is actually what I'd properly consider a horror. Coincidentally, that is the order of enjoyment for me: The Lost Boys was an absolutely fun romp I'd recommend if you want some lighter Halloween fare, Near Dark was...okay, and The Hallow was frustrating with how it edges close to being a perfect horror in concept for me, and then ruining it.

I'm going to rant about The Hallow. As a new parent with a love of Irish myth and folklore, the plot being "foreign parents come to the irish woods and make the faeries mad" sounds like an AWESOME horror. Horror for me is about getting scared, and what more primal fear is there than losing your child? And the Good Folk (or in this movie, "The Hallow") are a great basis for doing spooky shit. So how the hell did they fuck this up?
The protagonists are idiots who make a series of dumb decisions that make it hard to sympathize, which is always a problem I have with horror movies. I don't expect big brain IQ protags but it's always obvious to me when the writers make the characters do something stupid to Make Spooky Happen. This movie may not be the poster child, but they're fairly irrational. Still, this wouldn't have killed the movie for me.
What made the movie awful for me is that they didn't commit to the faeries. The faeries are all cordyceps fungi zombies. Somehow the fungus can grow on car engines and ruin them. But they're hurt by iron somehow?? This is clearly written by a midwit that goes "no no there's no magic, there's a SCIENCE explanation for all this!" The cordyceps doing half the stuff it was doing is unrealistic and makes no sense. Not everything needs to have a bullshit scientific explanation. I would have much preferred the faeries be...faeries. Magic can be plenty realistic and scary y'know.

And now for my top horrors in no particular order:
- The Void
- YellowBrickRoad
- Reading the news every day lately
- In the Mouth of Madness
- Black Mountain Rise
- The Ritual
- A Dark Song
- Resolution (2013)
- The Endless (2017)
- The Thing
- Christine
- Videodrome

Horrors I plan on watching soon:
- Spring (2014)
- In the Tall Grass
- The Fog
- The Fly (1958)
- Color out of Space

Things that I wouldn't call horror that are categorized as horror (according to my media server) I enjoyed:
- They Live
- The Lost Boys
- The Stuff (this one's pretty funny)
- Tremors
- The Hunt
- Constantine City of Demons

 

[Deleted member 1982]

I can really recommend the V/H/S Films.

It's somewhat under the Radar and not many heard of them but its genuinely top tier in terms of Horror. Its in "found footage" style which is a turn off for some but everyone I showed these Films liked it. I always watch these movies with friends and girlfriends.

And there's some genuine spooky and freaky stuff in it but I wont spoil. Some parts of those movies have inspired others that came after.

They are regularly On prime too

Also the british "Dog Soldiers". Super solid werewolf movie. Among the best werewolf movies there are.

Or "As above so below". Which is an occult movie loosely based on hermeticism/ magic.

 

[DeathToMicroWaves]

A good one i watched recently was as above so below

trailer is shit but, the movie is good
shoot in a sort of found footage like way
a must if you are claustrophobic

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq358xHbzN4

 

[brentw]

Like my usual responses this is going to be a ramble.

I've had to front-load my spooky this season since we have guests coming over who aren't into horror. So far I've seen The Lost Boys (1987) which is somehow listed a horror, Near Dark (1987) also somehow a horror (???), and The Hallow (2015) which is actually what I'd properly consider a horror. Coincidentally, that is the order of enjoyment for me: The Lost Boys was an absolutely fun romp I'd recommend if you want some lighter Halloween fare, Near Dark was...okay, and The Hallow was frustrating with how it edges close to being a perfect horror in concept for me, and then ruining it.

I'm going to rant about The Hallow. As a new parent with a love of Irish myth and folklore, the plot being "foreign parents come to the irish woods and make the faeries mad" sounds like an AWESOME horror. Horror for me is about getting scared, and what more primal fear is there than losing your child? And the Good Folk (or in this movie, "The Hallow") are a great basis for doing spooky shit. So how the hell did they fuck this up?
The protagonists are idiots who make a series of dumb decisions that make it hard to sympathize, which is always a problem I have with horror movies. I don't expect big brain IQ protags but it's always obvious to me when the writers make the characters do something stupid to Make Spooky Happen. This movie may not be the poster child, but they're fairly irrational. Still, this wouldn't have killed the movie for me.
What made the movie awful for me is that they didn't commit to the faeries. The faeries are all cordyceps fungi zombies. Somehow the fungus can grow on car engines and ruin them. But they're hurt by iron somehow?? This is clearly written by a midwit that goes "no no there's no magic, there's a SCIENCE explanation for all this!" The cordyceps doing half the stuff it was doing is unrealistic and makes no sense. Not everything needs to have a bullshit scientific explanation. I would have much preferred the faeries be...faeries. Magic can be plenty realistic and scary y'know.

And now for my top horrors in no particular order:
- The Void
- YellowBrickRoad
- Reading the news every day lately
- In the Mouth of Madness
- Black Mountain Rise
- The Ritual
- A Dark Song
- Resolution (2013)
- The Endless (2017)
- The Thing
- Christine
- Videodrome

Horrors I plan on watching soon:
- Spring (2014)
- In the Tall Grass
- The Fog
- The Fly (1958)
- Color out of Space

Things that I wouldn't call horror that are categorized as horror (according to my media server) I enjoyed:
- They Live
- The Lost Boys
- The Stuff (this one's pretty funny)
- Tremors
- The Hunt
- Constantine City of Demons

Nice list!

I can really recommend the V/H/S Films.

It's somewhat under the Radar and not many heard of them but its genuinely top tier in terms of Horror. Its in "found footage" style which is a turn off for some but everyone I showed these Films liked it. I always watch these movies with friends and girlfriends.

And there's some genuine spooky and freaky stuff in it but I wont spoil. Some parts of those movies have inspired others that came after.

They are regularly On prime too
View attachment 76916

Also the british "Dog Soldiers". Super solid werewolf movie. Among the best werewolf movies there are.

View attachment 76917

Or "As above so below". Which is an occult movie loosely based on hermeticism/ magic.
View attachment 76918

I've seen the whole VHS series and it's mostly good. But like all horror anthologies, it has its highs and lows.
But the best parts are well worth sitting through a few lame stories.
As Above So Below is also great.
Never seen Dog Soldiers, I'm usually not a fan of Werewolf movies but I'll check it out.

A good one i watched recently was as above so below

trailer is shit but, the movie is good
shoot in a sort of found footage like way
a must if you are claustrophobic

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq358xHbzN4

Definitely, the film itself is much better than the trailer would lead you to believe.

 

[AllNightNippon]

It's not Halloween without Hammer for me. The 1958 version of Dracula is one of my favorite movies of all time.

 

[Sebastian Melmoth]

Top spooky season picks:

Noroi: The Curse
Session 9
The Ring
The Blair Witch Project
Sinister
Hereditary

Great atmospheric films:

The Old Dark House (old, atmospheric, pretty funny in parts, charming)
Inferno (directed by Dario Argento)
The Woman in Black (the film is only OK in the spookiness department, but the atmosphere is pretty sumptuous. The novel by Susan Hill is great, if you're looking for a solid ghost story to read!)

 

[wearyinternettraveler]

Suspiria (1977) has an amazing aesthetic.

 

[l0nlym1lk]

Woman in black is in my opinion one of the greatest novel adaptations in cinema. It is drenched in classic 18th century gothic aesthetics.

 

[Z0diacK]

If there's any movie I love so much on halloween, it is;
Hellraiser 1+2
&
Silence of the Lambs.
Why?
Hellraiser 1 and 2 give me such a disturbed and gritty feel, I love it so much. It's just so dark and it actually shows some of my true fears, it's also very psychological in a sense, very thrilling and I just love those movies. Especially 2 being my favourite, it actually just scared me because of the disturbing labyrinth, with the leviathan and all the cenobites. The scariest cenobite being "The Engineer", it is something I frequently see in my nightmares because it scares me so much, and that's why I love it so much. It just looks so demonic

Silence of the Lambs is just a nice psychological thriller and especially today because this was the OG movie in making trannies look like ridiculous sad killers! LOLOLOLOLOL

 

[Punp]

Horrors I plan on watching soon:
- In the Tall Grass

Do yourself a favour: watch the first five minutes of In The Tall Grass and then zone out. It draws out a 15 minute film into what feels like ten hours.

You've got some awesome films on your list. They Live and The Stuff are very similar films which critique capitalism in enjoyable ways. They Live is currently on my to-rewatch list to match my Bodysnatcher/imposter themed playlist.

Watched:
Under The Skin (2014)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
The Stepford Wives (2004)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1993)

To Watch:
The Worlds End (2013)
They Live (1988)

To Watch for the first time:
Mimic 1, 2 and 3
Assimilate (2019)
The Invasion (2007)
The People Under The Stairs (1991)
Screamers (1995)

 

[Punp]

Hellraiser 1 and 2 give me such a disturbed and gritty feel, I love it so much. It's just so dark and it actually shows some of my true fears, it's also very psychological in a sense, very thrilling and I just love those movies. Especially 2 being my favourite, it actually just scared me because of the disturbing labyrinth, with the leviathan and all the cenobites. The scariest cenobite being "The Engineer", it is something I frequently see in my nightmares because it scares me so much, and that's why I love it so much. It just looks so demonic

"
Where, two moments before, there had been an empty space, there was now a figure. It was the fourth Cenobite, the one that had never spoken, nor shown its face. Not it, he now saw: but she. The hood it had worn had been discarded, as had the robes. The woman beneath was gray yet gleaming, her lips bloody, her legs parted so that the elaborate scarification of her pubis was displayed. She sat on a pile of rotting human heads, and smiled in welcome.
The collision of sensuality and death appalled him. Could he have any doubt that she had personally dispatched these victims? Their rot was beneath her nails, and their tongues -- twenty or more -- lay out in ranks on her oiled thighs, as if awaiting entrance. Nor did he doubt that the brains now seeping from their ears and nostrils had been driven to insanity before a blow or a kiss had stopped their hearts.
Kircher had lied to him-- either that or he'd been horribly deceived. There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind understood it.
He had made a mistake of opening Lemarchand's box. A very terrible mistake.
"Oh, so you've finished dreaming," said the Cenobite, perusing him as he lay panting on the bare boards. "Good."
She stood up. The tongues fell to the floor, like a rain of slugs.
"Now we can begin," she said.
"
-The Hellbound Heart, Clive Barker, 1986

 

[Z0diacK]

"
Where, two moments before, there had been an empty space, there was now a figure. It was the fourth Cenobite, the one that had never spoken, nor shown its face. Not it, he now saw: but she. The hood it had worn had been discarded, as had the robes. The woman beneath was gray yet gleaming, her lips bloody, her legs parted so that the elaborate scarification of her pubis was displayed. She sat on a pile of rotting human heads, and smiled in welcome.
The collision of sensuality and death appalled him. Could he have any doubt that she had personally dispatched these victims? Their rot was beneath her nails, and their tongues -- twenty or more -- lay out in ranks on her oiled thighs, as if awaiting entrance. Nor did he doubt that the brains now seeping from their ears and nostrils had been driven to insanity before a blow or a kiss had stopped their hearts.
Kircher had lied to him-- either that or he'd been horribly deceived. There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind understood it.
He had made a mistake of opening Lemarchand's box. A very terrible mistake.
"Oh, so you've finished dreaming," said the Cenobite, perusing him as he lay panting on the bare boards. "Good."
She stood up. The tongues fell to the floor, like a rain of slugs.
"Now we can begin," she said.
"
-The Hellbound Heart, Clive Barker, 1986

Masterpiece.

 

[№56]

It's not a movie and it's not traditionally Halloween-themed, but today is the 85th anniversary of Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Definitely give it a listen if you haven't already, it's only an hour long:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q7tN7MhQ4I

I listened to it again today and loved it. The way parts of the story are deliberately left out still make it sound convincingly real in 2023. The horror doesn't come from the Martians themselves, it comes from hearing a broadcast network fall apart in real time. It's a great example of how the limitations of a story's medium can be used to its advantage, and it was done when the medium of radio itself was still relatively new.
The broadcast is famous for supposedly causing panic across the US due to people believing it was real, but according to this interesting article there's very little evidence to prove that actually happened. All the reports of hysteria that appeared immediately after the broadcast came from newspaper journalists who exaggerated the reaction to the broadcast (based on audience polls very few people were actually listening to Welles' show) and tried to spin the story into an example of the dangerous new medium of radio spreading "dangerous misinformation." Some things never change.