October tends to bring out the ghosts in me. I’ve had a life-long love of Halloween and all things dark and macabre.
I inherited this love from my father. When my sister and I were little, he’d pull out a fog machine, decorations, pumpkins for Jack-O-Lanterns, and a gas station Halloween CD to us to get into the holiday spirit every October. Along with that, we’d watch and discuss horror films.
Because of my father, I know more about horror films, even if I haven’t seen them personally. And his summarization of these films fueled my interest in watching them or learning trivia behind these films.
Based on the Stephen King novel (and the screenplay he wrote), Pet Sematary is about a family that moves to a home in a rural town with a literal pet cemetery in their backyard. Their family cat dies after being hit on the road. So the father buries the cat in an ancient burial ground that reanimates the corpse to save his daughter from grief.
It finally took till this year for me to watch this film, but my father has mentioned this time and time again.
The Car is about a “small desert town” being terrorized by a “seemingly possessed car” —- a ’71 Lincoln Continental Mark III — and the local police scrambling to shoot it down.
It may not have the same type of fear factor as Halloween or Friday the 13th, but there’s an element of entrapment. The town is in the desert, with roads carved into the rock. If this Car chased you you only have two ways to go: forward or off a cliff. It was a good film
Another film based on a Stephen King novel, Christine is about a young man, Arnie, who buys a red ’58 Plymouth Fury (’58 Plymouth Belvedere). The car begins to show a “possessive personality” and appears to be sentient.
Christine did pretty well in the box office before becoming a cult classic. My only memory of watching the film is when the ’58 Plymouth Fury locks the doors on Arnie’s girlfriend as she chokes on a hamburger at a drive-in theater.
Halloween is the film I probably knew the most about before it aired on our home TV in October. The premise of the film is that Laurie Strode is a young woman whose babysitting kids on Halloween night. What Laurie isn’t aware of is that a man is coming to murder her. This man is her brother, Michael, who’s been institutionalized for most of their lives after he murdered their older sister.
The movie follows Laurie running for her life while Michael murders promiscuous, drug-using teens at a steady walking pace.
Halloween became famous for Strode’s characterization as the “Final Girl,” which roughly means, “the last character alive to confront the killer,” according to TV Tropes. Like Strode, the character typically is a virgin, who didn’t engage in drugs, alcohol, or premarital sex and her friends and/or loved ones are killed throughout the film.
Probably one of the most famous slasher films, the Friday the 13th franchise began with a masked killer slaughtering camp counselors the night before the re-opening of a summer camp where a child drowned and two counselors were murdered years prior.
The mask, the jumpsuit, the blade, and the “Ch ch ch ch. Ha ha ha ha.” go on to become an iconic part of horror, popular culture, and Halloween in general.
So here’s a few horror and slasher films to get people in the holiday spirit. Are there any horror films you watch around this time of year? Feel free to comment.
Good night!
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