Halloween is nearly upon us, and if it still feels like a bit of a false festival in Britain – where the silly rigours of trick-or-treating and pumpkin carving seem a long way from becoming standard – a horror-movie marathon remains the best and easiest way to acknowledge its existence. The increased chill in the air, the sudden earlier onset of darkness: all ideal conditions for snuggling down with red wine and something a bit jumpy and blood-freezing to watch.
Most streaming services attempt to capitalise on this seasonal shift in some way or another, though some do it better than others. Unless you’re a diehard fan of Netflix’s Riverdale – a lightly spooked-out update of the Archie comics, the fourth series of which began this month – the streaming giant’s scary-season offerings aren’t the best. Their glossiest horror premiere for October is Wounds, a Sundance-acquired US debut for the British-Iranian director Babak Anvari, and a bit of a disappointment following his elegant, Tehran-set chiller Under the Shadow.
Its story of a New Orleans bartender (Armie Hammer) pulled into a grotesque occult dimension via a customer’s left-behind mobile lands a few neat jolts, and builds to a genuinely eye-scarring climax. Yet despite a faintly solemn depiction of alcoholism, it’s a shallow stunt, short on human feeling or meaning. It’ll start your marathon with a suitable shiver, but if you’ve never seen Under the Shadow – also streaming on Netflix, conveniently enough – that’s the better bet.
Over to Shudder, the dedicated all-horror streaming service, which you’d expect to have a little more to offer. Sure enough, landing on its menu this week is ideal Halloween-party fodder: Nightmare Cinema, a nifty new anthology film with a lot of fast style and a lot of easy scares, only a few of which will linger in your brain afterwards. It comprises five shorts, each about 20 minutes long, bound by a tenuous framing device with Mickey Rourke as a creepy cinema projectionist.
Gremlins veteran Joe Dante is the star attraction here for horror geeks, and his plastic-surgery themed short Mirare is a fun diversion. The pick of the bunch, however, comes from British director David Slade (Hard Candy), whose This Way to Egress, about a woman gradually losing her grip on reality in a doctor’s waiting room, has sharp, skin-crawling staying power. Slade has directed a few episodes of Black Mirror, and this plays like an exceptional one.
If your horror tastes veer more classic or arthouse, Mubi has you covered: their Celebration of Horror season currently includes Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and a Guillermo del Toro double bill of Pan’s Labyrinth and the gorgeous, visceral ghost story The Devil’s Backbone (still my preferred of the two), with The Bird set to descend on All Hallows’ Eve itself. Fresh from the London film festival, they also have Bertrand Bonello’s fascinating, politically inflamed, Haiti-set shapeshifter Zombi Child: its twisting of zombie-film tropes as a metaphor for postcolonial trauma may be a bit lateral for some Halloween marathons, but it’s a must-see on any day.
Finally, Ari Aster’s extraordinary Midsommar (Entertainment, 18) hits DVD and VOD just in time for the big day. Beginning with its title, it doesn’t quite match the seasonal conditions I described at the top of this column: it’s high-heat horror, played out almost entirely in glaring, punishing sunlight. Following a group of American students on a trip to observe an outwardly wholesome Scandi summer festival, its terrifying subversion of folk ritual, as the group splinters, prompted multiple Wicker Man comparisons, but there are dark adult echoes of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz in its bright, strange stew. If you caught it at the cinema, the three-hour director’s cut is also getting a release: prepare to be unsettled and surprised afresh.
Also new to streaming and DVD this week
The Before Trilogy
(Criterion, 15)
Richard Linklater’s decades-spanning trilogy of walking-and-talking romances gets richer and more resonant with age. This gorgeous Criterion box set will be on a many a cinephile’s Christmas wishlist.
Vita and Virginia
(Thunderbird, 12)
Director Chanya Button’s distinctive take on the romance between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West doesn’t pull off all its modernist flourishes, but Elizabeth Debicki is a brilliant, otherworldly Woolf.
A Good Woman Is Hard to Find
(Signature, 18)
A riveting performance by Sarah Bolger as a widowed Belfast mother accidentally entangled in grisly underworld dealings keeps Abner Pastoll’s blackly comic thriller on course, even as its tone lurches.
Photograph
(Curzon Artificial Eye, 15)
After a stint in starry English-language cinema, Indian director Ritesh Batra returns to the terrain of The Lunchbox with this slow-paced but sweet-natured cross-class romance, set vibrantly in Mumbai.
