Fall is my favorite season, and not for pumpkin spice reasons. All summer, I can’t wait for the cool weather so I can wear all the flannel, boots and cardigans, and curl up in a blanket watching horror movies. My personal spooky season started in late August this year; the first time there was a hint of chilliness in the air and maybe one leaf turned sort of orange — it was horror time for me. Here are a few of my horror film favorites.
This is one of the first films that got me interested in horror when I was in my tweens and I watch it almost every year around Halloween. Whether you’ve seen this movie or not, you probably know “REDRUM” and Jack Nicholson demolishing a door with an axe screaming “Here’s Johnny!” In this horror classic, Jack Torrance becomes the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel located in the Colorado Rockies. His son Danny begins having psychic premonitions, and as Jack learns more about the hotel’s dark past, he begins to terrorize his family. Director Stanley Kubrick does a great job at creating a general feeling of unease throughout the film.
This Korean horror/thriller feels more like an action movie, so it might have broad appeal to those who don’t usually like horror movies. Divorced father Seok-woo and his young daughter Su-an board a train to the city of Busan, where Su-an’s mother lives. As the train leaves the station, the passengers are notified of widespread violence suddenly erupting all throughout the country, which turns out to be a zombie apocalypse. An infected person was on board the train, and quickly turns hundreds of passengers into zombies, leaving the others — including a young baseball player and his girlfriend, a pregnant woman and her husband, and a homeless stowaway — struggling to survive. The plot is more intense than scary, keeping you on the edge of your seat rooting for these characters in what seems like an impossible situation. A sequel called Peninsula was released in South Korea this summer, so stay tuned for a future US release.
Like his directorial debut “Get Out”, Jordan Peele’s second film is a skillful mix of horror and social commentary. In the film, the protagonist Adelaide goes on vacation with her family, returning to a boardwalk where she experienced a strange incident as a child — she thought she ran into her doppelgänger in a funhouse. In the present, doppelgängers of each of her family members (called the Tethered) show up at their vacation home, threatening to attack Adelaide’s family. While answering the questions “who are the Tethered, where do they come from, and what do they want?” the film generates more questions about identity and privilege in society today.
Avid movie watchers can spot the common tropes and archetypes that plague American horror movies. So many of them feature a group of attractive young people going on a road trip and ending up in a spooky town, haunted house, or of course a cabin in the woods. They are attacked and tortured by evil humans or monsters and make dumb decisions that have the viewer screaming at the screen. “Let’s split up to cover more ground” rarely ends well in horror movies! But what if all their decisions are being manipulated, their environment controlled by someone else? By critiquing these overused and predictable tropes, “The Cabin in the Woods” successfully turns the horror genre on its head, while also being quite funny.
The classic slasher film is a spooky season staple. Watch the teens of Haddonfield, Illinois try to escape the grip of killer Michael Myers in the original John Carpenter film.
Find more horror at your library in the catalog, and through our digital services on Hoopla, and on Kanopy.
