Spooky Season is HERE 👻🎃
Halloween is the best holiday and I will not be accepting any arguments. It is the only holiday where you can truly do whatever you want.
Want to stay home and watch scary movies - do it
Want to go trick or treating, I don’t care how old you are - do it
Want to go to a party and spend time with people - do it (not this year though…
Since we’ll all be inside this Halloween, here are some worth considering.
Mary Shelley (2017)
If you don’t know who Mary Shelley is, she is the teenage girl who created science fiction. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist writer of the late 1700’s. The film tells Mary Shelley’s life the few years before writing her most famous novel, “Frankenstein, a Modern Prometheus”, portraying the abandonment and relationships in her life, paired with her love of science and ghost stories, helped her to create one of Halloween’s most iconic monsters. While today, Frankenstein’s monster is portrayed grunting, green, with bolts in its neck, in the original story, the monster was made and abandoned by Dr Frankenstein, and the novel explores the monster’s feeling of abandonment and desire for revenge. And if you are into the dark academia vibes of films like Dead Poets Society (1989), Maurice (1987), or Tolkien (2019), then this film makes the list.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988)
Elvira is one of my absolute favourite people. A badass, spooky, feminist witch who is also very, very, hot. The character was created by the actress, Cassandra Peterson who portrayed her, after auditioning as a Horror Hostess, for a show similar to ‘The Vampira Show’ from the 1950’s. During the film Elvira travels to a small town in suburban America, where the women judge her for her appearance (which is kind of a shock to everybody), men harass her in the bar, and teenage boys take pictures of her in secret. Ultimately she needs to use her newfound magical powers to defeat the real evil that lurks in the town.
Coraline (2009)
Obviously I have to put an animated movie on the list. There is something about animation that is so immediately expressive and artistic, that is so much harder to capture in live action cinema. Coraline is about a young girl who is dissatisfied with her life, and finds a doorway to another world in her bedroom. Look at how colour is used to portray the two different worlds Coraline lives in. In the real world (left) the world looks dull and grey, but the people are in colour, because it’s the people that make the world worth living in. It would be much harder to make this distinction in live action cinema without making it glaringly obvious like in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939). In the second world that Coraline escapes to, the world is exciting, but the people are trapped, they only exist to entertain her and aren’t real people of their own. Coraline needs to learn to value the people she loves over the world she lives in.
Child’s Play (2019)
While Chucky is a classic villain from the 1980s, a creepy doll with a knife will make you afraid of any toy store, and while Chucky’s a classic, the 2019 film takes a strong modern twist. In the original, Chucky was a doll possessed by a serial killer, this Chucky is an electronic entertainment system for your child, your new best buddy. 😇However, this buddy has been programmed differently, showing a factory worker makes one bad “Buddi” to be shipped out with the rest before committing suicide. The toy adopts the name Chucky and is determined to be Andy’s best friend, recording everything he says that using it against him, so when he gets angry and wishes people would go away, they go away for good.
Midsommar (2019)
Full warning: this film has got intense and graphic death scenes, mentions of suicide, use of hallucinogen, and is that very specific kind of scary where you learn a little bit too much about humanity and don’t really know what side to be on (would you kill the misogynists? I might). Dani is the protagonist of the film, and is struggling with the loss of her sister and parents. On university break she goes to the Midsommar festival with her boyfriend and his friends to take drugs (now legally) and experience another culture, but the culture is much more than one would expect. Things slowly become more intense as the festival progresses, but they are repeatedly convinced to stay. - - also to note is that while the Midsommar festival is real, no one is murdered.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)
If Mary Shelley and Jane Austen ever met, this would be their baby. Taking the classic Pride and Prejudice and somehow flawlessly setting the story in the middle of a zombie apocalypse just works. It also reinforces how strongly women are made to value marriage. Even in a world of zombies, where people are trained to fight and defend themselves, women are still expected to have their main priority be to find a husband, and give up their training and become defenceless. If nothing else, women packing weapons into their evening wear before a ball is just the ultimate aesthetic and something I aspire to.
