Halloween Viewing: Four Films for Spooky Season

Peak film-watching season has arrived.

The nights are drawing in, there’s a considerable nip in the air, and we’re ready to settle in under a blanket for some Halloween horror. Here’s what we’ll be watching this spooky season.

[REC] - Amy’s pick

[REC] is a ferocious zombie thriller that turns a Barcelona apartment block into a pressure cooker of infection, panic and people shouting over each other while completely disregarding sensible quarantine procedures. The shaky camerawork does its job a little too well: every frantic movement makes you dread what’s just slipped out of frame. By the final stretch, I’m usually watching through my fingers and wondering whether leaving every light on is a reasonable long-term financial commitment. Lean, vicious and gloriously horrible. Somebody give the cameraman a BAFTA. And possibly a tetanus shot.

The Night of the Hunter - Sam’s pick

Some years back, my colleague Ian recommended Robert Mitchum’s biography (which I now too reccommend!) It took me down a rabbit hole of his filmography - so many great films and performances, but it was The Night of the Hunter (1955) that totally blew me away. Beyond the sublime visuals, Mitchum’s casual, sinister, and predatory demeanour is just effortless - the way he sings the hymn Leaning on the Everlasting Arms throughout the film is so dark and creepy - it’s perfection. It remains baffling that such a haunting masterpiece crashed critically and commercially upon release, sadly ensuring Charles Laughton’s first feature film was also his last.

Hereditary - Paul’s pick

Hereditary is the only film that has induced an actual shiver down my spine. The raw, realistic expressions of a family grieving are horrifying in themselves, but among the genre’s requisite jump scares are some truly creative and disturbing moments: the family’s recently deceased grandma appearing, smiling, in a dark corner; Toni Collette’s possessed character bashing her head manically against the attic door; or the headless corpse floating with silent and eerie grace up to the treehouse.

The soundtrack drones, pulses and grinds its way throughout, until the end, when it releases us in a ghoulishly triumphant major key, Colin Stetson’s much-memeified ‘Reborn’. This choice alone tells us that this has been no ordinary horror film. Watching Hereditary at Halloween is a must. Never mind your socks, it’ll knock your block off.

The Bloodettes - Juwairiyyah’s pick 

Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s The Bloodettes (2005) is a genre-bending Afro-futurist political thriller set in the post-colonial dystopian landscape of 2025, following two sex workers in their quest to dispose of a corpse and resist institutional exploitation. While filled with quintessential spooky season imagery emphasising the abject, the grotesque and body horror, The Bloodettes definitely subverts our Halloween expectations. The film reminds us of horror’s capacity for building imaginative responses to contemporary cultural anxieties, encouraging us to both revel in and reach beyond the good time promised by the joy of cheap thrills and sensationalised storytelling.

Catch The Bloodettes tomorrow evening at Pan-Pan courtesy of Radical Exhibition Collective.