Halloween's high-profile chillers
Chances are only moderate that you'll be dressing up as a Squid Game player for this year's Halloween pub crawl but that doesn't mean the grand tradition of scary movie night is out of reach.
If your plans are to creep yourself out at home there are plenty of streaming choices through which to try any number of classics: The Innocents, The Exorcist, hidden gem The Changeling, and most likely John Carpenter's 1978 proto-slasher Halloween.
That film's spare, moody minimalism and scant deaths look quaint now, a far cry from its influence, including on its own 2018 reboot/sequel. David Gordon Green's Halloween Kills picks up original "final girl" Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter and granddaughter driving away from the flaming compound where they believe they had ended Michael Myers for good. But resurrection and confrontation is inevitable, this time involving a clutch of survivors from '78, including Laurie's now-grown charge, Tommy (Anthony Michael Hall).
Though it's the most high-profile chiller of the year, Halloween Kills is a mess of conflicting narrative, heavy-handed messaging and, because we know Halloween Ends is coming in 2022, only a modicum of tension. Green and co-writers Danny McBride and Scott Teems do their best to inject the proceedings with some kind of stakes and "deep meaning" about mob justice, but it's just spinning wheels until the next demonstration of Myers' heightened brutality, which may be a bonus, depending on your opinion of slasher films.
Marginally better and far more stylish is fanboy favorite Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho. Best known for the Cornetto trilogy, Wright makes a play for Repulsion-esque psychological horror, only getting halfway there. A mousy fashion design student with a family history of mental health struggles (Thomasin McKenzie) finds herself time traveling to 1960s London and wrapped up in the sordid life of an aspiring singer (Anya Taylor-Joy). The soundtrack of the relentless' 60s wall of Britpop is the film's highlight, with Marcus Rowland's production design (Rocketman) a very close second. But Wright can't pull the film's various loose threads and half-baked ideas together after a strong first half, and despite a few genuinely witty moments is, again, far too amused with himself to try.
No Halloween roll call would be complete without a haunted all-girls boarding school, and You're Next and The Guest writer Simon Barrett aims to fulfill those duties with his first feature, Seance. In it, a handful of mean girls and the new kid fall victim to the possible ghost of a dead classmate. To his credit Barrett doesn't get fancy, drawing heavily on the elements that made his best scripts work. But he also contorts the narrative into needless complexity, and the pervasive doom of his earlier work gets lost.
Perhaps the best bet this Halloween season is Scott Cooper's Antlers, the latest entry into the hideously dubbed "elevated horror" canon: think Hereditary and The Witch. A teacher (Keri Russell) carrying the weight of a traumatic childhood returns to her small home town, eventually making it her mission to save an abused student (eerily affecting Jeremy T. Thomas) with help from her brother, the sheriff (Jesse Plemons, always fantastic). Cooper — whose diverse filmography includes the underrated Out of the Furnace — douses the film so thoroughly in atmospheric dread, it's easy to lose track of the elegant observations of generational trauma, the oppressive burden of contemporary social issues, and the characters' emotional authenticity. Now that's scary.
