Halloween is on Sunday! This is my first Halloween away from home and I’m not exactly sure what to do with myself. Usually, I hand out candy and then have a pizza party with family and friends. This year, I’m at school, and Halloween is on a Sunday night so partying isn’t exactly the best thing to do. Maybe I’ll go trick or treating. No, I can’t, I’m 19 and much too tall to pass off as a 12-year-old. I’ll probably just stay in my room and eat candy. And you can do that, too, with these spook-tastic movies.
First off is Midsommar. The A24 Films movie Midsommar is horrifyingly brilliant. It tells the story of a group of friends who travel to Sweden for a midsummer festival that occurs every 90 years. What seems like a fun time with a bunch of blonde Swedes dressed in white pants and dresses turns into an unknowing nightmare at the hands of a Scandinavian pagan cult. While it’s shot mostly in the daytime under a blue sky on a humongous landscape of green hills, that does not hide the horrifying and disturbing events that occur throughout the movie. You certainly can watch this movie with the lights off, but you maybe want to think about postponing that trip to Sweden.
This next movie is the cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show. Two sweethearts named Brad and Janet, while stuck in a storm, seek shelter in a haunted mansion. They suddenly realize they are in a house full of wild and barbaric characters who dance and sing. Brad and Janet, after being introduced to the members of the mansion, meet the cross-dressing mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who tells the couple about the perfect blonde-haired man named “Rocky” he is growing in his lab. Lots of silly songs are sung and weird, strange acts occur throughout. Classified as a rock musical, Rocky Horror Picture Show is a movie experience like no other.
From the director who brought us the world of Get Out, Jordan Peele created the masterpiece of a horror movie that is Us in 2019. I am not the biggest horror movie fan, as they don’t excite me enough and I just find them boring and repetitive. Us is the first horror movie I watched and it had me talking about it with others for the rest of the summer. It is the perfect amount of scary and spooky. The movie centers around the people who live above the ground, the untethered, and the supposed doppelgängers of all of us who live underground, the tethered. A family of four named the Wilsons go to their beach home for the summer where they spend their days at the beach and their nights on the boardwalk. One evening four masked strangers walk up to the Wilsons at their house. After breaking in through the windows and doors, they reveal the faces under their masks. The Wilsons are horrified to see that each member is a doppelgänger of one of them. They have come from under the ground and are the tethered. I cannot express how much I love this movie. All of the twists and turns that lead to a perfect cliffhanger makes this the perfect spooky movie.
Well, here we are at the end of the spooky season theme for the year. Have a Happy Halloween, eat too much candy, watch lots of movies, get your homework done and November here we come!