Halloween Goodness

It’s interesting to me how Halloween has slowly morphed from being one day at the end of October when you run from house to house to get candy into a month-long bonanza of elaborately decorated houses, costume parties, and an endless string of costumes that all begin with the word “sexy” – sexy witch, sexy firefighter, etc. Halloween has grown from a fun, little holiday into a full-fledged pumpkin-spice flavored cultural phenomenon.

Certainly, the movie industry strives to take advantage of this trend. Scary movies start coming out in late September and peak around Halloween before giving way to other holiday films in November. What I notice about Hollywood’s efforts to be part of the Halloween fun is that its product breaks down into just two categories. Spooky October films end up either being either strictly for kids (Hotel Transylvania 2, for example) or specifically for intense-fright loving adults (such as the latest Paranormal Activity installment.) Generally, adults are bored by the kids’ movies and there’s no way I’m taking my six year old or even my 14 year old to see Crimson Peak. There seems to be less and less of a middle ground these days, movies that are legitimately scary but not excessively gory, sexualized, or intense.

I have three older, more obscure films I’d like to recommend as spooky, but not gory, good ghost stories rather than horror films.

The first is 1980’s The Watcher in the Woods. It was produced by Disney during a period when the company was targeting young adults and trying to shed its just-for-kids image. A young family moves into a stately country manor owned by a menacing, mysterious old woman named Mrs. Aylwood. The family finds out that their daughter looks almost exactly like Mrs. Aylwood’s daughter who disappeared during a séance-like ritual in the nearby chapel years before. The woods surrounding the house are haunted and clues about the missing daughter keep turning up in unexpected and unsettling ways. The film is somewhat notorious because it was released briefly in 1980 and then taken out of circulation so Disney could tinker with the ending for a year to make something a little less dark. It was rereleased in 1981. Of course, parts of the film are a little cheesy, but it also has the inimitable Ms. Bette Davis as Mrs. Aylwood on its side, and her angry, piercing stare is by far the movie’s best and most frightening special effect.

Next is 1983’s Something Wicked This Way Comes based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. Set in the Norman Rockwell-esqe village of Greentown, Illinois, the film tells the story of Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade, two boys fretting over the end of summer and their own potential shift into young adulthood. As if on cue, the carnival comes to town, signaling not only the end of summer, but the end of innocence. The carnival is run by Mr. Dark who may or may not be the Devil come to claim the souls of Greentown. The film is a combination of lyrical meditation on innocence and straight-up freak-out. The scene with the spiders always get to me. 

Last is 1988’s The Lady in White, a small but evocative ghost story starring a very young Lucas Hass. Hass plays Frankie Scarlotti, a kid who sees a ghostly reenactment of a murder that took place in his school years before. He feels it’s his responsibility to solve the crime and give the ghost of the murdered little girl some peace. Like Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Lady in White is set in an idyllic small town, this time upstate New York in the early 1960s. It’s nostalgic and sweet at times, but there are a few scenes of genuine menace and fright throughout.

These three films are precisely the kind of movie you can watch with your kids at this time of year, confident that you’ve scared them but not traumatized them.