I Watched 31 “Spooky” Movies for October: Here’s What I Learned
- Glendon Frank
- Nov 19, 2021
- 15 min read
I had never been super invested in the horror genre.
You can call it a lot of things and cite it to all sorts of reasons. At the end of the day, however, I think a not-insignificant amount of it came down to being pretentious. Simply put, for a long while I figured I was better than horror movies. Cheap thrills and scares? Pointless gore? No thank you! So, I avoided the genre for a long time. But over the course of a few years, I had a few moments that made me start to reconsider those opinions – opinions I had notably constructed without really playing in the genre at all. First was an interview with Scott Derrickson, director of Marvel’s Doctor Strange as well as well-received horror films like Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. When asked what “a nice Christian guy like you” was doing in horror, he replied that the genre is not “about putting something evil in the world. It’s about reckoning with evil.”[1] It’s an idea I chewed on for a long time; that maybe these movies weren’t just senseless blood and gore, but that maybe there was deeper fruit to be found. Maybe there was something to all this, after all. The second breakthrough was watching Get Out, Jordan Peele’s instant-hit thriller, that uses all the conventions of horror to talk about racism in America. It’s a movie where the mystery unfolds brilliantly, and where the violence at the end feels more cathartic than gratuitous. More than all of that, it’s a movie with clear purpose, with deep ideas to chew on long after the movie finishes. Okay, so this genre isn’t a total wash.
Over the next couple of years, the trajectory picked up. It turns out that arthouse horror is entirely my thing – I watched Ari Aster’s Midsommar for Halloween last year and it shook me to my core and was positively fascinating. A gorgeous horror movie about relationship anxiety? Brilliant. Annihilation is more “spooky thriller” than it is “horror,” but I’m still mulling over its approach to talking about self-destruction and rebirth a solid few years after seeing it. There’s something positively arresting about a movie that uses horror tropes well. The way that Parasite begins picking up borderline slasher tropes in the second half to throw the audience off-ease? Brilliant. So, anyways, this year as October started rolling around, I realized it might be fun to go and catch a few “spookier” movies I’d always meant to watch, but had never really felt in the attitude to do so. Pretty quickly, it became an excuse to go back through a set of old horror classics. The Shining, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Hitchcock’s Psycho, the works. And, yet, they’re all really good, actually. These things became classic for a reason. From October 8th through to November 7th, in the span of 31 days, I worked my way through 31 “spooky” movies. Old, new, thrillers, slashers, and a lot in-between. I’d be tempted to spend this article reviewing each one individually, but even briefly tackling every single movie would be a long article. There may be a better format for that (and you can check out first responses on my Letterboxd!). So, instead, I’ve decided to compile a list of various things I learned in this process. So, without further ado, here’s a very uncoordinated list of thoughts I had through the 31 movies I watched last month!
1. Horror Can Be Very Fun, actually!
I’ve long had a mantra about great movies, where any movie that can genuinely get me to laugh and to cry is probably a good movie. There’s something deeply gratifying about a movie that can cover the whole emotional spectrum. Horror movies can fit on that same plane. The first movie I watched for this thing was Jennifer’s Body, because it had just got added to the Criterion Channel and Twitter was blowing up for it and, hey, it’s got to be alright, doesn’t it? And, yeah, Jennifer’s Body is a blast. Just a really fun flick about women friendships seen through the eyes of a supernatural slasher. Somehow, it works! Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox really run away with the thing and give it a lot more weight that it could have had otherwise. Jennifer's Body is held together by their friendship, giving greater catharsis to it's conclusion. For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of catharsis, and good horror comedies really have this locked down. Genuine thrills mixed in with genuine laughs is an extremely good combo, consistently ratcheting up the tension only to create satisfying relief, and then jumping back to the tension. It’s a great way to keep the audience invested in the drama while not overwhelming them.
Shaun of the Dead and Ghostbusters are obvious classics, but one that stood out was Jaws. I finally watched Jaws! And much like Jurassic Park after it, Spielberg expertly balances tone to keep the audience’s attention. Jaws isn’t a full-on comedy in the way these other examples are, instead, it bounces back and forth between monster movie and a classic adventure flick. The ending had me on the edge of my seat in a way I can only compare to A New Hope’s trench run. The way that absolutely everything is falling apart and that death is such a tangible factor. There’s no return without defeating the monster that looms impossibly large over the whole film. That’s a part of catharsis, too, having room to put the stakes and tension on such a high level that the resolution comes as a wave of release. Horror can do that like no other genre.
2. Horror Can Be Reflective, actually!
In which I gush about the movie Scream.
One of the first movies I watched for this thing was Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods, famously written and produced in collaboration with Joss Whedon. This movie came out about the peak of Whedon fever, before a lot of the grimy details of Whedon’s personal life came out into the public. It was praised as a witty, meta-horror movie, a deconstruction of horror tropes. I was intrigued for all of those reasons, but Cabin in the Woods just simply did not do it for me. Maybe I had finally moved on from Whedon’s shtick, but mostly, the movie felt thematically muddled and unresolved. It felt deeply cynical, showing disdain for its audience and implying that it's the viewers’ fault that horror movies are often cookie-cutter in format. As someone wanting to get into this genre, Cabin in the Woods was bizarre, seeming borderline embarrassed to be associated with horror.
Confused by the popularity of this movie, I fled to the Letterboxd reviews – and found a collection of people saying that Cabin in the Woods was just a weak attempt to do what Wes Craven’s Scream had done years prior. I think I knew about Scream but in a very second-hand sort of way. I’d seen the Ghostface killer before, I remember people imitating the phone call gag. But I really didn’t know very much about it. Coincidence would have it that a trailer for the newest Scream installment dropped that week, and the hubbub intrigued me even more. I sadly figured I had put together the twist of the movie but was invested enough that I went to check it out anyways.
Oh man, Scream is such a blast.
Like, I need to make clear that a huge part of the reason this project expanded from “I should watch a couple of horror movies this month” to “I need to hit up all the classics and spend 31 days doing this” was because I watched Scream. Unlike Cabin in the Woods, Scream holds its tradition with reverence, but with a reverence that still allows you to gleefully share in the genre’s flaws, just like how the obviously fake ROUSes in The Princess Bride just makes me love the movie all the more. First of all, Scream is exceptionally funny. It’s easily the best time I had in these movies. Where Cabin in the Woods’ meta humour often existed to spite the genre, Scream manages to be a meta movie that genuinely loves its source material. Randy Meeks works at a movie store, and when people start to die in their small town, he anxiously lectures the group in horror movie tropes. Our hero, Sidney Prescott, tells the killer that she doesn’t like horror movies because they always end the same, and always have idiot protagonists. There’s a loving awareness at work that also suggests that this movie is going to be something different. And it surely is. Scream did the thing that every good movie should do, which is that even though I thought I knew what the reveal would be, it pulled the rug on me with something even bigger than I could have considered. It constantly feels fresh and surprising, and always delightfully, gleefully fun. It’s a movie that tells non-horror fans that this genre is fun, and it’s a movie for horror fans to celebrate in the tropes and ideas that they’ve all grown up with told in an exciting new light.
More than that, Scream is easily the best “self-aware” movie I’ve ever seen. There is this growing trend in franchise films, especially in more ‘fantastic’ genres like superhero flicks, to be degradingly self-aware. I’m writing this just after the new Spider-Man trailer dropped, wherein Tom Holland’s Peter Parker laughs at Doc Ock for being named “Otto Octavius.” There’s no punchline, which would have been appropriate for Spider-Man, the joke is purely that “hey, this is kind of silly.” It’s a self-awareness that attempts to ground goofy concepts by mocking them, and it’s a trend that is getting increasingly tiring. Meanwhile, Dune is out here going “yeah, this is very silly, but we’re going to treat it as seriously as possible and it’s going to be awesome.” Scream’s self-awareness isn’t just a surface-level nod to try to clean its image, however. As mentioned above, the awareness is baked into its characters and is also baked into the plot. Because the movie is aware it’s a horror movie, there’s a brand new level to the twists and turns it takes throughout. The meta-ness adds to everything around it. Scream is a delight, is what I’m saying. If you take nothing else out of this entry, it's that you should watch Scream sometime.
3. Found Footage Can be Cool, actually!
Okay, this is a one-off, but I watched Blair Witch Project and it affected me way more than I was expecting.
I, broadly, haven’t loved the found footage genre. I watched Chronicle a while back and thought it was very lame. Cloverfield has been the only movie in the genre I’ve kind of enjoyed. I felt like Blair Witch, as one of the most famous found footage movies, was an obligatory piece in this puzzle and figured I would knock it out of the way and use it as proof that found footage sucked. But, to my surprise, I really dug The Blair Witch Project. It was way more effective than most other found footage movies, mostly for the reason that it’s aware that it’s a found footage movie. This is kind of an extension of the point above, but it’s one I found interesting. What usually takes me out of found footage is the fact that the artifice of it all is so apparent. You want a movie to draw you in, but with found footage you find yourself asking “why are the characters filming this? How are they filming, and to what end? How did people find this hypothetical footage? Why did the people in-universe edit this footage into a feature-length movie?” The final question is almost never answered (I think Cloverfield comes close, and it’s part of why I appreciated it so much), but if the movie can’t grapple any of the other questions either, the whole house of cards collapses.
Which is why Blair Witch Project stuck out, because it draws direct attention to the artifice. It’s initially framed as a trio of college kids trying to make a short documentary and slowly collapses into an account of their maddening isolation. As the movie is reaching its peak, one of the characters turns to the girl filming, the brains behind their documentary, and ask why she’s still filming despite all that’s going on around them. “I see why you like your video camera so much,” he eventually says, “It’s not quite reality.” He accuses her of trying to manufacture a narrative that she can control, a thought that goes straight through the screen and strikes the audience. The artifice of film is comforting, but something about Blair Witch Project, even after all these years, feels grippingly real. It helps that the actors were cast because of their natural improv skills, and how much of the movie uses their actual reactions. It’s a movie about the fragility of humanity more than it is about a spooky witch in the woods. It turns out the human experience, stripped bare, is scarier than any monster you can create.
4. Horror is an Incredible Avenue for Grief, actually!
That brings me quite solidly to one of the most interesting parts of this adventure. In these 31 movies I watched The Babadook and Hereditary, two movies that frame their stories around families dealing with loss. Both of these movies feel supernatural horrors that either represent or feed off of their grief. In both cases, however, the ‘monster’ is often the least uncomfortable thing on the screen. The Babadook, especially, depicts a single mother and her autistic-coded child as they try to cope through the confusion of the husband’s death. Their shared grief is uncomfortable and unrelenting and real. Seeing their lives and mental health slowly unravel easily feels more transgressive than anything the titular Babadook does – it’s telling that he isn’t even present for the first half of the film.
Hereditary takes this to a whole new level. Ari Aster is a genius at this sort of thing. While a lot of easy horror would rely on fast cuts and jump scares to spook the audience, Aster simply lets the camera play out in long, uncomfortable shots of humans having awkward, unsettlingly real arguments. Grief splits this family in several directions, leading them towards the worst parts of themselves. Toni Collette’s performance is especially gripping, trying desperately to hold herself together as a mother figure while she’s falling apart on the inside. In her grief, the world warps and distorts around her. While, as in Midsommar, the diverse plot points eventually converge into ancient superstitions and a finale that is as delightfully weird as it is tense and horrific, the scares that linger from Hereditary are ones of simple human failure and tragedy.
What’s telling to me about all of this is just how transgressive grief is in our modern society. Seeing people out in public grieving and struggling to go through life is an uncomfortable thing to put on screen. We want to hide it, to Other, it, and the sheer act of depicting it can feel like horror. Horror is deeply about the transgressive, the unknown, and the fact that it is such a prime genre for grief should tell us something about the way we treat grief in the present. But, it may offer us some avenue for catharsis through film, as well. The Babadook ends with mother and child teaming up to confront their grief head-on, and that’s a really cool concept for a monster flick.
5. Horror is All About What We Silence, actually!
On the same day I watched The Babadook I watched It Follows. Both are 2014 movies that, when they released, introduced me to the whole idea of “monsters as metaphor.” While I hadn’t watched either of them until now, I was tuned in to a film podcast at the time that reviewed them. The Babadook is transparently about grief, but It Follows is a little more complex. The elevator pitch is that Jay loses her virginity to her high school boyfriend, and suddenly a monster that had been following him now begins to follow her and is invisible to anyone else. The reading I’d initially heard was the monster represented STDs or something, but after watching the movie I’m convinced there’s more going on. For the first half of the movie, it really seemed like it was talking more about the aftermath of abuse; Jay’s boyfriend quickly abandons her to her fate, and the fact that she’s essentially the only one who can see the monster constantly leaves her feeling paranoid, misunderstood, and drives her to seek out isolation from her friends so that they don’t get caught in the crossfire. There’s some deeply emotional imagery with that lens. But the latter half of the movie seems to pivot more towards the monster representing death of innocence, the awkward and often anxious transition from adolescence to adulthood. In either case, it’s a movie where the monster represents a silent part of the human experience, one that is often brushed under the rug whilst it demands to be addressed and reconciled.
Just as grief is an experience that we find disturbing and seek to Other, horror is adept at tackling all sorts of subjects we dislike facing directly. Pan’s Labyrinth is ostensibly a dark fantasy, but the biggest threat to Ofelia’s childhood isn’t any fantastic monster, but the fascist regime she’s growing under. For as underwhelming as it is, this is something that New Mutants, the forgotten final X-Men film, got right. The movie is all about the characters looking into themselves and facing their deepest fears, that which they refuse to look in the eye. John Carpenter’s The Thing, apart from being an absolute dazzle of practical effects, is all about human paranoia. Horror forces us into a conversation with the uncomfortable things we try to silence, and that’s really cool!
6. Horror is Meant for Kids, actually!
So while we’re talking about Pan’s Labyrinth and death of innocence and such, I wanted to touch on the most bizarre revelation of this whole thing – I think horror is a kid’s genre. Like, obviously it’s not just a kid’s genre, directors like Stanley Kubrick and Ari Aster and Yorgos Lanthimos prove there’s a lot of very adult themes and ideas to talk about. But I think there’s something special about the effect horror has at a young age. I got mulling this over after watching Coraline, which very sadly did not do it for me for a variety of reasons. No hate to Coraline, it was very impressively made, it just wasn’t my thing! But it got me thinking because I remember hearing the premise as a kid and being very spooked by it. Watching the movie, however, any “horror” is really just subtextual. There aren’t any big scares, just some mildly haunting imagery and the suggestion of more. It’s the suggestion that fascinates me – there’s a raw imaginative impact that horror has on the young. Something that isn’t that horrifying gets magnified by the creative subconscious into something way bigger than itself. The shape on the wall becomes a shadow of a monster.
I got talking about this with a couple of people after I watched Jaws. For the most part, Jaws, like Jurassic Park, is just a fun action adventure with a couple thrills. But those who watched it when they were young still had some trepidation about the open water. There were more than a few times that I reflected on a movie and thought, “alright, that was solid, but I feel like this would have done a lot more for me had I watched it ten years earlier.” When I went looking back for the above quote from Scott Derrickson, I found a different interview where he kind of talked about the same thing. He mentions showing horror movies to his kids, saying, “It makes so much sense to me, that with all the tempestuous feelings they have, all the fears and anxieties that they now wrestle with as their understanding and experience of the world expands, the outlet of reckoning with that through horror cinema is a truly beautiful thing.”[2] Once again, through horror we find ourselves reconciling with the confusion and chaos of the world, and hopefully, find catharsis. We need that as kids or teens just as often as we need that as adults.
7. Horror is Good, actually!
All that said, I’m really happy with this project. I’m happy I spent all this time dedicated to a genre because it’s really shown off all the different things horror has to offer. If anything, this made me realize just how vast horror as a concept is. I mean, I stayed pretty firmly in a couple sub-genres, I never dipped into George A. Romero, I just started looking at Stephen King, and there are plenty of different directions I could have explored. I still haven’t actually watched any of Derrickson’s horror movies, but maybe that’s a project for next October. I already feel pretty set on watching another 31 horror movies in a year, there’s just so much that’s still out there. Sure, a lot of horror can be dumb and silly, but so much more of it can be thoughtful and compelling. And even if it is dumb and silly sometimes, that just means it’s fun? I wound up watching Saw of all movies and really enjoying it – far from the edgy torture movies it inspired, the first Saw is just kind of a goofy early 2000’s detective thriller? It’s just ninety minutes of people expositing flashbacks to each other with all the direction of a grunge music video and then suddenly one of the raddest endings ever. Horror can be a good time!
Not to mention that this journey finally got me to watch some of the best movies out there. I finished this project with a double-feature of The Shining and The Silence of the Lambs, both just astonishingly good movies. Anthony Hopkins plays one of the most compelling characters, possibly ever? I finally saw Psycho, and Psycho is wild! Hitchcock played with story structure back in 1960 more than anyone is willing to do now. Aronofsky and Ari Aster are working some real artistry in horror tropes right now, putting out these insane thrillers that absolutely twist the mind. There’s a lot of cool stuff here! And so many other things I didn't have the space to talk about, like how Train to Busan is a blast that uses a zombie break-out as background for a story about a dad trying to reconcile with his daughter? Or how Black Swan is totally insane? Or how Beetlejuice winds up being the worst part of Beetlejuice, which is otherwise pretty delightful? Barry Keoghan absolutely dominates Killing of a Sacred Deer and I'm excited to see where his career goes, especially after being the standout of Eternals as well. There's too much to mention!
All that to say, you can’t write off horror. Not only is it a deeply cool and fun genre, it’s an important one, and a valuable part of the human experience. It, unlike any other genre, is uniquely equipped to help us face the parts of life we try to silence or ignore, and find genuine resolution and catharsis with them. There’s nothing wrong with confronting your fears every once and a while – after all, until you’ve done so, have you really lived?
https://boxd.it/dZ7RG - for all 31 of the movies I watched.
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