Halloween & Horror Movies

October 7, 2014October 9, 2014
by Brad

I’m a movie nerd. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a movie I didn’t like, at least that I’d admit to having seen in the first place. My wife, on the other hand, HATES movies. Can’t stand them. I think it’s because it requires her to stop moving for long periods of time. And THAT’S not going to happen.

Luckily she’s willing to compromise on my habit. I force her to watch as sparsely as possible for 10 months a year. The other two months I get a movie free-for-all. Those two months a year happen to be October and December, where I can’t help but binge on Halloween and Christmas movies, respectively.

Being October and all, I thought it appropriate to have a discussion about horror movies.

What Makes A Horror Movie

I have very little time to enjoy movies nowadays. Even when my wife agrees to watch with me, we have to wait until the baby’s in bed…and I’m not working on content for the blog or my fiction. So I’ve learned to be extremely picky when it comes to what movies I watch.

When it comes to Halloween season, especially, I generally stick to the same small batch of horror movies. Every once in a while a new one will become a “must watch,” but that’s a rarity. This year I’ve been giving a serious amount of thought to WHY certain movies are included my yearly horror binge.

1) It has to be scary

It should go without saying, but a horror movie has to be scary. That’s kind of the definition, and a prerequisite.

Just 10 years ago I was still in full on movie nerd mode. Back then there was a new Saw movie every Halloween. It was tough to be a cinephile (yes, I had to Google that) in those days without having seen a Saw movie. So I gave them a chance.

My verdict: not scary. Not at all. The Saw films aren’t even horrror. As far as I can tell they’re pure torture porn. Some guy sitting in a dark basement writing more and more gruesome torture scenes confusing an audiences’ repulsion with terror.

I gave the first 4 entries a try. I won’t be wasting my time with the rest.

One the other hand, a new film series came along a couple of years ago that NAILS the scary criteria:
Paranormal Activity.

Granted the vast majority of the scares in Paranormal Activity are cheap thrills designed to make the audience jump out of their seats, but it does them REALLY well. A lot of the effect comes from the fact that the audience is waiting for the thrill. There are long periods of absolutely nothing going where the audience doesn’t have anything to do but anticipate the coming scare.

When it comes to scary, Paranormal Activity does its job incredibly well.

2) It has to be re-watchable

I have a tendency to watch and re-watch movies, so one of my top criteria in judging a film is whether or not I’d bother watching it a second (third, hundredth in some cases) time.

What Paranormal Activity has going for it in scariness, it loses in longevity. It’s a bit like a bottle rocket; it’s big and flashy and all “ooh…ahh” but when it’s over there’s not much thrill left. Once those jump out scares have been done, they’re done. They’re no longer surprising and therefore no longer scary.

So, while I don’t hate them and actually really enjoyed the films, I probably won’t be rewatching any of the Paranormal Activity series.

3) It has to have that “feel”

This one is tough for me to describe. At first I was thinking that the horror movie “feel” was the same as being scary, but it’s not.

As an example, one of my all time favorite movies: Army of Darkness.

It’s BARELY a horror film, having ditched the scares of the first two Evil Dead movies in favor of humor and camp. So based on my criteria it gets docked for missing on point 1. But the thing is OOZING with horror movie feel.

Look past the cheesy jokes (THIS IS MY BOOMSTICK!) and give it a shot just for atmosphere.

The scene in the windmill is genuinely surreal, bringing with it a sense of really being alone in the wilderness in the face of pure evil.

Or the final battle with the deadite army. There is a true feeling of hopelessness against the horde, the same feeling that the best zombie movies go for.

Overall “feel” is a hard thing to nail down, a movie either has it or it doesn’t.

So What’s On My List?

This wouldn’t be much of a discussion about horror movies if I didn’t give my favorites, would it? So, without further ado, here’s the list of my go to horror movies. I don’t watch them all EVERY Halloween, but I put them on whenever I get the chance.

So, here they be, in no particular order:

The House On Haunted Hill