CadreCinematique
The Complete Guide to Halloween Horror Films Updated for 2019
Filmmaker David Sporn provides THE total 2019 guide to Halloween‘s best horror films, with no stone unturned in this authoritative selection.
George Herriman Halloween is upon us. The eve of All Hallows’ Day. The sky is overcast. The leaves, adorned with burnt autumnal hues, fall from the trees. Neighborhoods are strewn with pumpkins, skeletons, and plastic graves. Soon the children will scour the streets. In our mass-market post-modern world kids only issue idle threats. Trick or Treat once literal – No more.
It is no longer Samhain, Halloween’s Celtic precursor that marked the end of the harvest. Pre-Tenth Century, the Celts believed that Samhain was a liminal time – a time when our world and the Otherworld merged. The spirits of the dead were amongst us. To survive the winter, we would have to please them. Fear was the key to survival.
Today, fear is escape. Horror is a sensation genre. It is not purely intellectual. The viewer has a visceral reaction. The hairs stand on the back of his neck as his date gropes for his hand. Horror toys with our most primitive coping mechanisms – our survival instinct – our id.
Pintrest As a mirror to our world, the horror genre is superior to all other forms of narrative cinema. Horror, viewed as a base genre – a genre that only titillates and excites – has the ability to dissect society through stories that at first glance seem far separated from every day life. The horror genre possesses a sense of freedom in its approach to political or sociological concerns.
1950’s horror films focused on fears of the Cold War and atomic annihilation; fears embodied by gigantic irradiated monsters and soul snatching pods. In the 1960’s, horror films focused on alienated youth.
A decade later, the televised carnage of the Vietnam War led to desensitization and the sadism of such films as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Last House on the Left (1972). The slasher craze that began in the 1980’s was considered by many social critics to be archconservative in nature, while others, including genre luminary John Carpenter, viewed the cinematic killers as the personification of a constrictive society bearing down upon and repressing suburban teenagers. Nevertheless, the slasher films were dismissed as bloody, exploitive, and even possibly dangerous.
In Scream 4, actress Chloe says, “There’s something really scary about a guy with a knife who just… snaps.” This is exactly the point. There’s something out there in the dark. Something you don’t understand. And there is no escape.
