1922 — For whatever reason, 2017 has proven to be an exceptional year for horror movies. The year opened with the truly unsettling A Cure for Wellness, then immediately continued with the bitingly insightful Get Out. Then came Life, It and Mother!. Another promising Stephen King adaptation, Gerald’s Game, just came out on Netflix and the similarly inviting Cult of Chucky is about to do the same.
1922, a Netflix original based on a King novella, is set to release just in time for Halloween: plugging the desperately empty programming hole in the streaming service’s movie library. It seems to be a play on The Telltale Heart — where an unhappy marriage ends in the wife’s murder, only for the husband to suffer her curse from beyond the grave. If it’s even half as good as It, it’ll be worth checking out.
Cult of Chucky — What’s more impressive than the simple fact that this B-list horror franchise is still kicking around after so long is that, by and large, the sequels that they’ve been pumping out have typically been great. Say what you will about the perceived lethality of a living doll, but his body count speaks for itself.
The latest release in the Child’s Play franchise brings Chucky into a mental institution. A group of patients — all seemingly traumatized by him in the past — are easy prey for the pint-sized serial killer and something even more sinister seems to be lurking in the shadows.
Donnie Darko — With so many great horror movies leaving Netflix in the last few months, I’ll take anything I can to get my Halloween fix. Sometimes that means actual horror movies, such as those listed above. Other times, I’m forced to settle for merely “unsettling” movies from different genres.
While Donnie Darko would hardly be my first choice in this regard, it does fit the bill well enough, push come to shove. It tells the unnerving story of Donnie Darko, an outcast teenager who seemingly finds himself in an increasingly demented time loop, menaced by a man in a giant, black bunny costume. If you can’t seem to settle on a horror movie to watch this month, Donnie Darko is at least in the ballpark of one.
The Hateful Eight — There are amazing filmmakers, and then there is Quentin Tarantino. Whereas other auteurs make their movies despite what the public may think of them, Tarantino seems obsessed with making great movies that everybody — or at least everybody with a stomach for his elevated sense of violence — can enjoy. His latest film, The Hateful Eight, is no exception.
Set in a lonely way stop halfway to a captured felon’s hanging, the hovel — and its inhabitants — are trapped by a storm. The problem is that one of the titular eight characters penned into this one-room shack is a murderer trying to spring the prisoner. If Kurt Russel’s Hangman is to get paid for his bounty, he’ll have to survive the storm with his quarry in tow.
Stranger Things Season 2 — The second season of the acclaimed Netflix series thankfully hits all of the right notes for the Halloween Season. Not only is it a genuine work of cosmic horror — an all too-rarely explored genre — but it is both set and released around Halloween. You couldn’t have found a better October release for the streaming service if you tried.
Set almost a year after the first season, all is not well in Hawkins. Despite defeating the Demigorgon and rescuing their missing friend, this “loser’s club” is about to face an even greater evil, one of downright Lovecraftian proportions. And with Eleven still missing, Will somehow still connected with The Upsidedown and Sheriff Hopper working with the town’s clandestine government organization, the stakes have never been higher.
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