Halloween Horror Movies/TV Shows 2025

​

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

I've been aware of this one for some time and have never seen it. Apparently, it has a bit of a cult following.

Jessica, her husband Duncan, and their friend Woody drive out from NYC to a remote farmhouse Duncan has bought. There they discover Emily, an enigmatic young woman, who's been squatting there.

They invite Emily to stay, and, for a time, everyone gets on well. But all the old men hanging around in the nearby town are...weird, and vaguely menacing, and all seem to have peculiar scars. Emily becomes a little too enchanting to both Duncan and Woody. And Jessica keeps hearing voices and seeing a strange girl, which is especially troubling, since we know Jessica recently had a stay in a mental hospital.

The strange girl leads Jessica to the dead--apparently murdered--body of an antique dealer Jessica and Duncan met earlier, but, of course, when Jessica brings Duncan, the body is no longer there.

Duncan's beginning to think Jessica may need some more time in the hospital. Jessica, on the verge of unraveling, accepts Emily's offer to go down by the water...

Although there are definitely horror elements, this one is more psychologically unsettling than straight-up scary. Jessica's descent is well-portrayed and there are some moments of suspense. We're wondering how much of what we're seeing is real, and how much may be a product of Jessica's mind.

I'll add that the title--which implies some kind of psycho mischief--is misleading. No one in the film is actually plotting to scare Jessica, although scared she does indeed become!

Historically interesting, decently acted, and in much the same vein as The Innocents or The Haunting (with a dash of Night of the Living Dead), Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a serviceable if not terribly frightening psychological horror film.

6.5/10

And of course I will end my Halloween binge with the master of suspense Alfred Hitchock. The ORIGINAL masterpiece and not that plagiarized crap remake that Gus Van Zandt did. What else can be said about Psycho that hasn't already been said? It's a classic and still holds up to this day. Probably my forever favorite.

Have you seen this? It's a well-made documentary.




As for me, I don't go in much for horror movies but I think I will roll Todd Browning's Freaks tonight because it's been a while since I've watched it.

A great film that indeed continues to hold up. I watched it (for the zillionth time) a few months back, so won't get it in this Halloween cycle.

"One of us! One of us!"

I got Criterion's Browning set a year or so back and haven't watched any of it yet, though I've seen Freaks several times before.

Robert England got his star on the walk of fame today.

thsi one still has a couple of scenes that scare the bejeebers outta me...

In defense of GVS, everyone shit all over him having Bates peeping on Crane in the shower, but... that's in the book. Which I didn't find out until I actually read it last month.

I'm watching Pet Semetary, the original and the remake. The original, with creepy Gage kind of ruins the whole thing with "No fair" and seems a bit hokey. The remake with Ellie being the resurrected dead kid is better from a story point and the actress does a great job of playing an evil dead kid. John Lithgow does a great job as Jud Crandall. Overall, both are equal. The one with "Tasha Yar" has that 90's cheese factor while the remake likes to rely on the creepy kid vibe. The original had a better Zelda crippled angry scare to it. Victor Pascow was better in the original.

And Pet Semetary by the Ramones is so much better than the cover version.

Does "Phantasms" STNG or "Catspaw" TOS count as a Halloween show?

Or "Empok Nor" DS9, "Haunting of Deck Twelve" VOY, or "Impulse" ENT?

The TNG episode "Night Terrors" has some genuinely creepy moments, like when the corpses around Dr. Crusher sit up...

H&I ran that one tonight, changing its usual spot in the episode running order. Its original air date was 27 October, 1967.

​

Wolf Man (2025)

This one came and went quickly earlier this year. The buzz I got was that its reception was lukewarm. That turned out to be the case for me.

The film begins with a title card that talks about a missing hiker and fears of people going mad in the forest ("hill fever") which Indian folklore describes as having "the Face of the Wolf."

An excellent sequence follows where young Blake is out hunting in the Pacific Northwest woods with his father when they encounter--and are stalked by--something, but they make it home.

30 years later, Blake receives a notice that his missing father has been declared dead, so he along with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner, who I just saw in the fantastic Weapons) and their young daughter Ginger, venture back to the father's remote cabin to take stock of his belongings.

Alas, there's an incident involving a strange creature on the road to the cabin. The three are pursued through the woods but make it to the cabin.

Unfortunately, Blake has been infected by contact with the creature, and he starts changing. He gets steadily sicker and weaker but begins to take on the same appearance as the creature.

The gradual transition occupies much of the middle of the film and feels like a big drain on the momentum. There's a lot to be said for fast transformations like An American Werewolf in London.

While one creature lurks outside the cabin, and Blake transforms into another, Charlotte and Ginger are under increasing threat...

One neat innovation in this film: seeing how the wolf man perceives things. This is used very effectively in one scene.

I really liked director Leigh Whannell's terrific 2020 take on The Invisible Man, but this one just doesn't connect. There's plenty of action and gore, but none of it really engaged me. I think the psychological approach to the material might've undermined the sense of genuine peril.

5.0/10

The criticism was mainly over him just doing a shot for shot remake instead of his own interpretation. That's just pure laziness and borderline plagiarism. He should have taken a page from successful remakes like The Fly or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2002). Improve on what is there and make it your own. There are so many directions a filmmaker can go just based on the fact that the restrictions of 1960 no longer exists. Make Norman more like the book which was a drunk, fat man who peeped through holes. Show the girl being beheaded in the shower. Show the nightmare Norman has of his mother sinking into quicksand etc.

What reason do I have to watch a shot for shot remake when the original version of that movie already exists? Whereas with The Fly and Texas Chainsaw, I often reach for the remakes because they improved on their original versions and added something different and new to the story.

This was a series I'd been hearing a lot about so I gave it a shot. I got to the scene where Art The Clown is starting to saw the naked girl who was hanging upside down, legs spread open and shut it off. That's too hardcore even for me.

I saw the three films in the series last year.

Yeah. Very, very brutal.

They actually feel very throwback, to the transgressively gory stuff from the 1980s. I kinda enjoy them because they re-capture that.

But I can totally understand nope-ing out, especially at that scene.

Been a while since I saw this one. I'm a big George C. Scott fan.

A belated one, that I think was mentioned earlier in the thread...

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Building on a chapter from Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, this film reveals the mysterious happenings aboard the doomed ship that brings the vampire to England.

It's 1897, and the schooner Demeter with no living person on board crashes ashore in Whitby, England. The captain's logbook is recovered, and hints at some malevolence befalling the ship.

Flashing back to some weeks earlier, the Demeter is docked in Varna, on the Black Sea. The ship is taking on board several mysterious (and vaguely ominous) crates being shipped to London. After Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a black English ex-pat doctor, saves the grandson of Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) during the crate loading, he's allowed to join the crew to pay his passage back to England.

The ship gets under way, but bad things start to happen. One crew member disappears. An emaciated young woman is found in one of the crates. Another crew member sees...something...on the deck of the ship late at night.

Things escalate and the crew gets more unnerved. With a transfusion from Clemens, the young woman recovers and gives the crew some idea of what they're dealing with...

Yes, Dracula does show up, but not in human form. He's a bat-like humanoid and he often takes to flying around the ship. The sound of his flapping wings when the ship is ensconced in fog is nicely unsettling. The VFX are competent, if not dazzling. There is some gore, but the transfusion scene made me squirm the most.

Does is stay true to the novel? No. It adds the characters of Clemens, the young woman, and the grandson. One significant detail from the book (involving the ship's wheel) is set up, but then removed. The book has no survivors (if you don't count Dracula); there's a survivor from the crew in the film. The film has a denouement that suggests the survivor will continue to oppose Dracula, but that doesn't square with what happens in the novel.

None of that is a deal breaker, of course. And the film still mainly works as a horror film where the characters are trapped in isolation with a menace.

The film's a bit overlong, there's a bit of needless meandering about race, and there's the obligatory bit of people in denial there's a real problem. I didn't find it particularly scary, but it has some nicely unsettling bits. I do give the film props for not chickening out on one of Dracula's kills.

6.5/10

Id have to fo full 7.0 on that one. They found a way to make an entertaining movie out of one chapter from a novel. Plus their interpetation of Dracula was far better than what weve seen over the years .

The only negative for me was the sequal setup because no one should have survived that wreckage.

7 for me too.