Spooktober 2024

‘Twas the season. Breaking down some recent spooky media.

These are not all things that I recommend, just things I tried out or rewatched in the spirit of the season. Numbers next to the film are my likeliness to recommend it to fellow fans of spooky stuff.

Films

Links here are all to the films’ respective IMDb pages.

• The Autopsy of Jane Doe

  A solid film and likely a huge inspiration for a great game, The Mortuary Assistant. 8 / 10

• Poltergeist

  Spielberg’s (technically Hooper’s) attempt at children’s horror, which didn’t resonate with me. 5 / 10

• Se7en

  Gritty and grimy, I’ve seen this one before and enjoyed it even more on a second watch. 8 / 10

• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

  A classic for a reason. As a first-timer, this was a lot of fun. 7 / 10

• Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

  A fun and extremely appropriate palette cleanser from TCM. 6 / 10

• Midsommar

  Scandinavian folk horror, though not as effective as The Wicker Man. 6 / 10

• Pan’s Labyrinth

  Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I’ve seen this many times and I still love Del Toro’s dark fantasy. 9 / 10

• Coraline

  Gorgeously directed and animated, it still feels to carry the magic from when I saw it years ago. 8 / 10

• Beetlejuice

  Very fun, with Keaton at his chaotic best and some iconic imagery. 7 / 10

• The Fly

  Grooooooooooss. Great practical effects which are sooooo grooooooss. 7 / 10

• Signs

  A bland alien invasion film without any effective scares. 4 / 10

• Misery

  An oddly funny adaptation of a Stephen King classic. 6 / 10

• Gremlins

  To quote a co-worker, Gremlins is a lot of things. 6 / 10

• Corpse Bride

  Excluding the skeleton song and dance, Corpse Bride literally pales in comparison to Coraline. 6 / 10

• The Omen

  Another classic, though this film struggles to compete with the supernatural horror films that preceeded it. 6 / 10

• Nosferatu (1922)

  My first silent film in over 6 years, Nosferatu remains very effective at stirring my imagination. Public domain! 8 / 10

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

  Similarly to Nosferatu, Caligari builds a wonderful world in my imagination but also layers dense German expressionism on top. Public domain in the US! 7 / 10

• The Silence of the Lambs

  A modern classic which I fell asleep to some 10 years ago. This time, I better appreciated the thriller aspects though the horror hasn’t gotten to me yet. 8 / 10

Games

Links here are all to the games’ respective Steam store profiles.

• Grunenberg

  A brief horror experience which was neither hard nor scary after a half hour. 5 / 10

• Amanda the Adventurer

  An obtuse, playable creepypasta with half the intrigue. I didn’t realize it was YouTuber bait. 3 / 10

• Visage

  Three distinct acts which vacilate wildly in quality and tone for an overall experience that can still be recommended. 7 / 10

• Dread X 3

  DreadX has slowly been raising the bar, even if the best entries in this pack aren’t as memorable as those of the past. 7 / 10

Overall, my Spooktober was a good one with some gems in there (and I was able to knock out a lot of my watch/play-lists). There are a number of films, games, and books that I didn’t get around to, but will certainly be crossed off in the next year or so.