Oct 09 2009
Scary Movies for Halloween—Part 2
Happy Halloween Month at Mystery Tour.
Here are five more scary movies for you to watch on Halloween. All of these flicks gave me serious chills and some of them gave me nightmares and sleepless nights.
1. Halloween
This John Carpenter classic Halloween chiller, circa 1978, introduced actress Jaime Lee Curtis AND Michael Myers to horror movie fans. But Halloween is not just a slasher film. Unlike other films in the slasher genre, Halloween is not really about how many teenagers it can cut up in just under 2 hours. No, Halloween is a classic because it delivers real suspense and pathos to the audience. There is a lot of audience identification with Laurie, the character played by Curtis. As a result, we don’t WANT Michael Myers to get her!!!
2. The Blair Witch Project
Okay, some people scoffed at this 1999 film’s “pathetic” attempt at terrorizing sophisticated horror movie buffs, and some people were scared to death—I was one of the latter. Presented in documentary format and filmed with a hand held camera on black-and-white film, The Blair Witch Project tells the tale of three college kids who go into the Maryland woods to film a documentary about reported witchcraft and voodoo phenomena—and become part of the story themselves as very scary things happen to them. The seemingly unstructured filming, with hand held cameras, made it look real—very real—to me. Plus, I think that being in the woods is one of the scariest places to be. All those trees make perfect hiding places for human, and not-so-human, monsters. Yikes!
3. Poltergeist
“Go into the light, Carol Ann!!!” Who can forget those chilling instructions to a little girl who had been sucked into a closet and deposited in another dimension? Released in 1982, Poltergeist was Stephen Spielberg’s first, great success as a film producer. It is a story about the paranormal consuming a little girl and her family’s desperate struggle to save her. You might want to sleep with the lights on after watching this movie.
4. The Mothman Prophecies
This 2002 film was very creepy. The Mothman Prophecies tells the story of an investigative reporter (Richard Gere) who arrives in Point Pleasant, West Virginia to research reported sightings of a huge, “moth-like” man. Sightings of this Mothman, so legend has it, always precede some type of large-scale tragedy. In this case, the tragedy involves the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant—a real event. This film adaptation of the book purports to be based on “true events,” but, true or not, this movie gave me goose bumps!
5. Final Destination
The first and, in my opinion, the best Final Destination film was truly scary. In a way, this 2002 release is sort of a supernatural “slasher film,” in that one teenager after another dies a horrible death—but the stalker is “death” itself. The film opens inside a plane, where a high-school French Club is waiting to be whisked away for a field trip in Paris. While waiting, classmate Alex Browning has a vivid premonition of their plane crashing and killing all of them. He goes berserk and demands to be let off of the plane. His terror is so real that several of his classmates follow his exit. They watch from the safety of the airport terminal as the plane takes off—and then explodes. They had escaped their fate—death—that day, but death had not forgotten about them. Their numbers were still “up,” and “death” would not be cheated. Truly creepy!!!
