So many film lists around this time of year toss all manner of horrors into one frightful bundle. But the emphasis in Cinema Paradiso's Films That Go Bump in the Night is on those features set on 31 October itself. So, if you need something to take your mind off any other dread-inducing events happening on this particular date, why not check out our second selection of tricks and treats?
The emphasis in this overview is for adults only, as we celebrate the franchise at the heart of Hollywood's fright night fixation and explore some of the more gruesome movies that have been set on the Day of the Dead.
Shape Up and Scream
In the closing credits of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), we learn that Michael Myers was played as a six year-old by Will Sandin and in his unmasked form by Tony Moran. But the knife-wielding boogeyman who escapes from Smith's Grove sanitarium and returns to Haddonfield, Illinois some 15 years after stabbing his sister Judith to death is listed only as The Shape. He is played by Nick Castle and his sinister visage has fuelled many a nightmare since Jamie Lee Curtis established herself as one of Hollywood's most tenacious Scream Queen in playing teenage babysitter Laurie Strode.
Despite being shot by Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and falling off a balcony, Michael Myers remains larger than life in Rick Rosenthal's Halloween II (1981), as he stalks Laurie through the hospital where she has been taken for treatment after her ordeal. The ensuing game of hide and seek doesn't turn out well for the staff of Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, but the franchise principals got a well-earned rest from Tommy Lee Wallace's Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), which centres instead on the efforts of Dr Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) and Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin) to find Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy), a novelty maker in the small town of Santa Mira, California, who is bent on causing the deaths of any children who watch the Silver Shamrock commercial wearing one of his mysterious Stonehenge masks.
The mediocre receipts suggested that the series was running out of juice. But, six years later, Joe Chappelle's Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) appeared to explain the meaning of the 'Curse of Thorn', as Michael (Wilbur again) seeks the baby born to Jamie (JC Brandy) before he can be cornered by Loomis and Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), who had been under Laurie's watchful care in the original story. If this is all getting a tad confusing, you may want to pause and listen to PJ Soles narrating Stefan Hutchinson's documentary, Halloween: 25 Years of Terror (2006), in order to get things straight in your mind.
Of course, by this time, two more instalments had been released. Ignoring anything that had happened since the end of Halloween II, Steve Miner's Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) shows us what Laurie has been up to in the two decades since her first encounters with Michael. She is now the principal of Hillcrest Academy in Summer Glen and is dating school guidance counsellor, Will Brennan (Adam Arkin), With the rest of the staff and students on a trip to Yosemite National Park, Laurie allows son John (Josh Hartnett) to have a small Halloween party in the basement with girlfriend, Molly (Michelle Williams). But Michael (Chris Durand) has discovered Laurie's whereabouts and only security guard Ronny Jones (LL Cool J) stands in his way.
The very fact that Rick Rosenthal's Halloween: Resurrection hit cinemas in 2002 should clue you as to the homicidal anti-hero's fate. But you can't blame Michael (Brad Loree) for taking exception to the fact that Dangertainment duo Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston (Tyra Banks) have appropriated his Haddonfield home so that six student wannabes can star in an online reality TV show.
Almost three decades after John Carpenter's landmark slasher, Rob Zombie reimagined the origin story in Halloween (2007), which starred Tyler Mane as Michael Myers, Malcolm McDowell as Dr Loomis and Scout Taylor-Compton as Laurie. Decent reviews prompted a sequel, Halloween II (2009), which reunited the leads in a plotline that attempted to examine the psychological traits shared by Michael and his imperilled sibling. But the trail went cold and another nine years were to pass before David Gordon Green reunited Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle (who required a little help from stuntman James Jude Courtney) in Halloween (2018), as the now alcoholic Laurie tries to protect daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) after Michael escapes (yet again) following a crash in transit.
While we're in franchise country, let's take a quick look at the movies spawned by Kevin S. Tenney's Night of the Demons (1988). The original premise saw high school loner Angela Franklin (Amelia Kincade) and best friend Suzanne (Linnea Quigley) host a Halloween party in Hull House, a funeral parlour that has been abandoned since its owner had killed himself after slaughtering his family. All is going swimmingly until the radio packs up and Angela suggests a séance to pass the time. Six years after the ensuing carnage took place, the locals have accepted the myth that Angela descended into Hell. But she's gone nowhere, as we eventually discover in Brian Trenchard-Smith's Night of the Demons 2 (1994) after he has filled us in on the ructions between her sister, Melissa (Merle Kennedy), and mean girl Shirley (Zoe Trilling) at St Rita's Academy, a Catholic boarding school for troubled girls.
Almost a decade had passed since Shirley's party at Hull House. But Angela clearly still had some unfinished business, as she's there to welcome the teens fleeing from an unsavoury Halloween incident at a convenience store in Jim Kaufman's Demon House: Night of the Demons 3 (1997). When she next surfaced, it was in the guise of Shannon Elizabeth. But Adam Gierasch's retooled Night of the Demons (2009) opens in 1925, as Evangeline Broussard (Tatyana Kanavka) loses her head in the very New Orleans mansion in which Angela Feld is playing Halloween hostess to Maddie Curtis (Monica Keena) and her friends Lily (Diora Bird) and Suzanne (Bobbi Sue Luther). However, ex-boyfriend Colin (Edward Furlong) has also shown up to deal some drugs and some weird things start happening after the police launch a raid.
May They Rest in Pieces
On 31 October 1938, Orson Welles caused untold panic across the United States with his devastatingly innovative radio adaptation of HG Wells's The War of the Worlds, an incident recalled in Chuck Workman's Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014). The unlikely combination of Michael Parkinson, Mike Smith and Sarah Greene did much the same on the BBC with Lesley Manning's Ghostwatch (1992), as a live broadcast from a supposedly haunted house in North London got out of control.
Just because a horror film has become a Halloween favourite, it doesn't necessarily follow that the action takes place on 31 October. It's always presumed, for example, that Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror (1979) and Andrew Douglas's 2005 remake are set around Halloween. But the date that sparks the supernatural activity is actually 13 November 1974 and, somewhat vaguely, we are only told that the ensuing action takes place a year later. Similarly, the proximity of the holiday is exploited to ramp up the unsettling atmosphere in Peter Medak's The Changeling (1980), while we only know that student film-makers Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard go to Burkittsville, Maryland in October 1994 in Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's pioneering found-footage chiller, The Blair Witch Project (1999).
Dozens of horror movies are set on Halloween, however, even if it only provides the linking plotline to the stories gathered in George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982) and Creepshow 2 (1987), which Romero co-scripted for director Michael Gornick. But the anthology is an effective way of spooking audiences, as the vignettes deliver short, sharp shocks, while the shifts in tone keep viewers uncertain as to what is going to come next. In Michael Dougherty's much-vaunted Trick 'r Treat (2007), for example, a young boy with a burlap sack named Sam (Quinn Lord) provides the impetus for the quartet of interweaving tales that feature Dylan Baker as an ultra-strict school principal, Brian Cox as a Halloween killjoy and Anna Paquin as a virgin with a secret.
The directorial trio known as Radio Silence handled the '10/31/98' episode in the 2012 portmanteau, V/H/S, which follows four friends as they are spooked by paranormal phenomena after arriving at the wrong venue for a Halloween bash. Internet sex service boss Harley Moreinstein pays a heavy price when he refuses to let his female staff celebrate 31 October in the Kevin Smith-directed 'Halloween' segment of the horror anthology, Holidays (2016), while DJ Adrienne Barbeau provides the link between the grim instalments in Tales of Halloween (2015), whose directorial roster includes Neil Marshall, Lucky McKee and Darren Lynn Bousman.
Thanks to Pennywise, horror makers have recently been tapping into coulrophobia with ever greater frequency. Damien Leone is certainly not averse to a little ghoulish slapstick, as babysitter Sarah (Katie Maguire) discovers when she finds a VHS among the trick or treat goodies amassed by her young charges in All Hallows' Eve (2013). She's hardly sitting comfortably, however, as she watches three nerve-jangling stories introduced by the sinister Art the Clown (Mike Giannelli). More of the same is served up in All Hallows' Eve: The Reaping and All Hallows' Eve: Voices From the Grave (both 2015), which were portmanteau collaborations by numerous directors. However, Leone returned with a new Art (David Howard Thornton) in Terrifier (2016), which centres on the miserable Halloween experienced by partying friends Catherine Corcoran and Jenna Kanell and the latter's sister. Samantha Scaffidi.
Parties are a convenient way to get characters in a single, preferably atmospheric location and dress them in costumes that disguise the identity of the malfeasant. Linda Blair is among the four pledges to the Alpha Sigma Rho fraternity who leave a Halloween party to endure a night of hazing and slaying in Garth Manor in the company of a crazed killer (or are they?) in Tom DeSimone's Hell Night (1981). Ayre Gross's undead great great grandfather, Royal Dano, puts in an appearance at the Halloween jamboree being thrown by Jonathan Stark in Ethan Wiley's House II: The Second Story (1987), only for the crystal Aztec skull with sapphire eyes that helped re-animate Dano to be stolen by a mysterious gatecrasher.
What teen Halloween party would be complete without some gastropod molluscs on the guest list, especially when they've come into contact with some toxic waste, as in Juan Piquer Simón's slithery gorefest, Slugs (1988) ? Halloween pranks have a habit of going wrong in the movies, as Amy Weber discovers in Robert Mann's The Pumpkin Karver (2006), when brother Michael Zara mistakes a bit of costumed horseplay with her boyfriend for a real assault. No prizes for guessing what happens, therefore, when the siblings move to a new town and accept an invitation to a creepy party on a deserted farm.
Outsider Chris Sharp finds an invitation to a Halloween party in Brooklyn and makes a knight costume from cardboard. However, as he soon discovers in Jeremy Saulnier's Murder Party (2007), the hosts are a group of left-field artists who plan to produce a conceptual murder piece in order to impress a wealthy patron. When psychiatrist Nicole Kidman's son notices that a guest at a Halloween party has an unsightly patch of skin in Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion (2007), she asks doctor Daniel Craig to investigate, even though she has no idea that ex-husband Jeremy Northam is spreading an alien fungus that has been returned to Earth by the Space Shuttle.
Having scored a cult hit with Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Robert Quarry and director Bob Kelljan reunited for The Return of Count Yorga (1971), which sees the Santa Ana winds blowing the suave vampire into the San Francisco orphanage where teacher Mariette Hartley is organising a Halloween costume party for the residents. Kids, eh? Nine year-old Alexander Bickel detests his sister's boyfriend, Stephen Graham, in Jeff Lieberman's Satan's Little Helper (2005). So, when he's out trick or treating and bumps into a costumed figure he mistakes for the diabolical character in his favourite video game, Bickel suggests that they make a pact to send Graham to Hell.
There's a nod towards veteran exploitation peddler Roger Corman in Bruce McDonald's Hellions (2015), as he shares a name with the cop played by Robert Patrick, as he strives to protect vulnerable teenager Chloe Rose from the pesky trick or treaters besieging her remote home. Incarceration and abduction are recurring Halloween movie themes, as Rob Zombie demonstrates in 31 (2016), which harks back to 1976, when five carnival workers are abducted and forced to play a series of twisted Halloween-themed games by Sister Dragon (Judy Geeson), Sister Serpent (Jane Carr) and Father Napoleon-Horatio-Silas Murder (Malcolm McDowell).
Quaint customs are the last thing on Josh Stewart's mind, as he tries to spare Emma Fitzpatrick from a fate worse than death after she is kidnapped by a sadistic psychopath nicknamed The Collector in Marcus Dunstan's The Collection (2012), a follow-up to his 2009 offering, The Collector. You need to get a quick look at the décor to appreciate the timing of Adam Wingard's The Guest (2014), as once Dan Stevens arrives at the home of Leland Orser and Sheila Kelley and claims to be a friend of the soldier son they lost on duty in Afghanistan, you won't be able to take your eyes off him.
When will teenagers ever learn? If they have to steal a Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller from a top-secret centre for disease control, as a trio does in David L. King's C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D. (1989), why do they have to undertake the theft on Halloween? Do these kids not go to the movies? Moreover, what is medical student Julia Roberts thinking when she selects 31 October to witness what exists beyond life in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners (1990) ? Similarly, why would webcamming long-distance sweethearts Johnny Burton and Stephanie Dees choose this time of year to dabble with online mystic Vera Madeline in Michael Costanza's The Collingswood Story (2006) ?
Lakeridge High School outcast Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price) is crushed when rock idol Sammi Curr (Tony Fields) perishes in a fire at the start of Charles Martin Smith's Trick or Treat (1986). However, DJ Nuke (Gene Simmons, of Kiss fame) gives Eddie an acetate of Sammi's unreleased album, Songs in the Key of Death, which he plans to play on Halloween. Nothing bad could happen, right? And what could possibly go awry with the Mountain Man Festival being held in the West Virginia town of Fairlake on All Hallows' Eve? But the escape of the cannibalistic Hillicker Brothers, Three Finger, Saw Tooth and One Eye, from Glensville Sanatorium means that you won't be able to hear the tunes for the screams in Declan O'Brien's Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines (2012).
Situation Grave
A decade after he was disfigured as a 12 year-old by the men who raped and murdered his mother, mask-wearing Scot Nery opts for an All Hallows' Eve flit from the asylum where he has been living to wreak his revenge in Mark Atkins's Halloween Night (2006). A miscarriage of justice also drives the grisly action in Frank De Felitta's Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981) after small-town postmaster Charles Durning and his lynch mob punish the intellectually challenged Larry Drake for assaulting young Tonya Crowe.
While celebrating her 13th birthday on Halloween in the seaside town of Wells Harbor, Maine, English poet's daughter Jodie Foster receives the unwelcome attention of neighbour Alexis Smith and her son, Martin Sheen, in Nicolas Gessner's The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976). Life in the idyllic town of Willowpoint Falls changes on Halloween 1962 for nine year-old Lukas Haas in Frank Laloggia's Lady in White (1988), after he is locked in a school cupboard for a joke by a couple of bullying classmates and has an eerie encounter with a red-haired girl after witnessing her murder and surviving an attack on himself.
Spanning from spring to the autumn of 1976, the action in Daniel Attlas's Silver Bullet (1985) is driven by the full moon, as the residents of Tarker's Mills, Maine become convinced that a mutilating maniac is on the rampage in this simmering take on Stephen King's novella, Cycle of the Werewolf. While dressed as the doll who was her sole companion in a troubled childhood. Angela Bettis comes to the Halloween conclusion that the best way to get a friend is to build one from spare body parts in Lucky McKee's splendidly malevolent, May (2002).
Hints that Halloween is in the air can be heard in the Richard Hawley songs that stud David Howard's Flick (2008), as a Memphis pirate radio station provides the oldies soundtrack for Hugh O'Connor's search for the girl of his dreams four decades after he went to a watery grave after a murder on the dance floor. The holiday provides the heart-stopping climax to John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps (2000), which centres on the macabre fascinations of Bailey Downs siblings Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle) that take on an even more sinister air after the latter is bitten by the ravenous creature that has been attacking the town's dogs. The pair are reunited (albeit through a spectral twist) in Grant Harvey's Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, but the action rewinds to 1815 in Brett Sullivan's Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (both 2004) to focus on two earlier Hudson Bay sisters named Brigitte and Ginger and their experiences in the woods around Fort Bailey.
The action in Mary Lambert's adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Sematary (1989) took place over Thanksgiving. But Halloween provides the setting for a key sequence in the sequel, Pet Sematary Two (1992), as a dog named Zowie, who has been interred in the Mi'kmaq burial ground in Ludlow, Maine comes back to life to attack Clancy Brown, the sheriff who had killed him. In the hope of hiding the lawman's corpse, stepson Jason McGuire and buddy Edward Furlong decide to bury it in the graveyard. Keep an eye on the jack-o-lanterns in Robert Voskanian's The Child (1977) after Laurel Barnett becomes the new babysitter for cemetery-obsessed Rosalie Cole and their neighbours in a backwater American town start perishing in grotesque ways.
When it comes to Halloween chillers, the setting is crucial and it's certainly a case of location, location, location in Steven R. Monroe's Grave Halloween (2013). There's a popular song containing the line, 'If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise'. Clearly Japanese-American Kaitlyn Leeb has never heard 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic', as she chooses Halloween for an expedition to the Aokigahara Forest to find the spirit of the birth mother who has recently committed suicide. When he discovers the presence of a malevolent spirit, actor-turned-cop Dig Wayne probably wishes it was still all make-believe after he ventures on to the third floor of the Santa Mira Hospital that was abandoned after a fire in Anthony C. Ferrante's Boo (2005).
While being trained to become a home carer, Chloé Coulloud hears a rumour that a comatose ballet teacher has a cache of treasure hidden in her remote mansion. On Halloween night, she breaks in with her boyfriend and his brother in a bid to find the loot in Livid (2011), Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's follow up to Inside (2007), one of the key films in the New French Extremity wave of millennial horrors.
An incident that took place on Halloween in 1925 on the site of the Toyland Warehouse impacts upon the case being investigated by cops Jeff Weston and Tracy Scoggins in Peter Manoogian's Demonic Toys (1992). Ignoring the fact there has been a double decapitation in the vicinity, four gay friends make for the West Hollywood Halloween Carnival and find themselves being stalked by someone (or something) in a Satan costume in Paul Etheredge's Hellbent (2004).
Amy Forsyth and her chums head to the eponymous Halloween theme park anticipating a bit of a giggle in Gregory Plotkin's Hell Fest (2018). But several are soon languishing in their death throes after crossing the path of a demented, but devious serial killer called The Other (Stephen Conroy). Katie Stevens and her pals make the mistake of surrendering their mobile phones on entering an old dark house attraction that supposedly feeds on human fears in Scott Beck and Ryan Woods's Haunt.
Borrowing the name of the character played by Groucho Marx in Victor Heerman's Animal Crackers (1930), Sid Haig is Captain Spaulding, the owner of the Museum of Monsters and Madmen in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003). As she is researching a book on roadside attractions with her friends, Erin Daniels has no qualms about going inside the museum on All Hallows' Eve in 1977. But she soon comes to regret accepting the hospitality of Sheri Moon Zombie. Director Bobby Roe is one of the quintet seeking to make a documentary about Halloween haunting attractions in the found-footage shocker, The Houses October Built (2014). However, he and his companions get more than they bargain for when they go in search of the legendary Blue Skeleton crew, who supposedly employ actual torture methods in their tableaux. Having been spared the ultimate thrill, the intrepid fivesome take another tilt at exposing the crimes of the 'extreme haunt' in Roe's sequel, Blue Skeleton: The Houses October Built 2 (2017).
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