Beware of all the spooky, scary skeletons this Halloween is you are heading out and about. If, on the other hand you are like myself (pretty sure nobody is), chances are you’ll be spending the evening in curled up with your best friend. It just so happens that my best friend is a small set-top box with all the streaming services at hand.
So, what on earth is there to watch for those horror fanatics among us? Well, the good news is that there is quite a number of excellent films available to us. So put down that Blockbuster card (I just dated myself with that reference), put on your most devilish attire, and lets take a look at some movies that will give you the hebbie jibbes!
Eraserhead (1977) – Hulu Plus
A serious WTF film by David Lynch, a director who has made a career of making people question their own reality, and sanity. Eraserhead is probably the strongest and most widely recognized film from Lynch, and for good reason.
Shot in black and white, the film is considered a body horror film in the most surreal of fashions. While the film is creepy in its own right, the heavy reliance on sound helps to elevate the film to an entirely new level. Lynch would spend an entire year of post-production work solely on creating and editing the audio on the film.
Event Horizon (1997) – Amazon Prime
1997 was an interesting time in my life. I was being my awkward self in middle school splitting my time between playing in the school band, watching copious amount of Star Trek (both on air and in re-runs), and getting my hands on any science fiction film I could from my local, non-Blockbuster, video rental store.
The along came Event Horizon to shatter any interest I ever had of captaining a starship. The story revolves around a search and rescue spacecraft captained by Morpheus on a mission to rescue the lost, but now mysteriously returned, Event Horizon interstellar spaceship.
Turns out the Event Horizon uses a mini black-hole to jump through space and things went terribly, terribly wrong on its maiden voyage. Seems like while trying to jump across the galaxy, the Event Horizon made an unscheduled pit stop in Hell. The film might not hold up so well today, but it’s still a fun and jump scare filled film.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) – Amazon Prime
Every generation has their own seminal works of horror that they can point to many years later. For a kid growing up in the ’90s we didn’t have many blockbuster horror films released. Sure, we had the occasional scary movie, but nothing that captured the entire country by storm.
Then came The Blair Witch Project. We are talking pre-internet days (or at least pre-mainstream access to it), so all we had to rely on for information was word of mouth and television. I found out about the Blair Witch Project completely by accident sometime before the film released to theaters on television.
What I saw was a documentary style film/tv show (I vaguely remember the details) explaining the legend of the Blair Witch. At this point in my life I had no idea that the entire program was a genius form of marketing, instead I thought that I was catching a cool documentary. Then the movie came out and we all shit our collective pants and the found footage genre exploded.
The Cabin In The Woods (2012) – Netflix
A thrown back to the days of teen slasher flicks, but with a modern twist, The Cabin In The Woods delivers on the scares and the fun. Produced by Joss Weadon and starring Chris Hemsworth, you could almost picture this movie as one of those Marvel “What If” tales.
Cabin In The Woods is like a monster free-for-all with the teens just thrown in to move the plot forward. If you don’t take your horror film too seriously and love having a good time while being scared, then you are going to want to watch this one as soon as possible.
V/H/S 2 (2013) – Netflix
I have to start out by saying that I saw V/H/S 2 without seeing the first film, so this film has the bigger impact in my memory. Instead of a single movie based around a single story, we instead get a series of vignettes tied together by a couple that finds a number of VHS tapes in a home.
What makes the film unique is that each of the vignettes is undertaken by a different director. Sure, this means some work better than others, but it lends to a really cool compilation of different ideas. The entire film has a gritty filmmaking styling and a number of the stories will stick with you long after the film ends
About Author
