You’ve surely heard the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. You know the Headless Horseman, Brom Bones, and Ichabod Crane. This is a retake on this story in a very Y2K Tim Burton fashion featuring Burton favorites like Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, and Christopher Walken.

Here, Ichabod Crane has been made a sallow twink developing early forensic techniques. Katrina is a witch. Brom Bones is an extremely handsome Red Shirt who does less to get between Katrina and Ichabod and more to establish the strength of the villain. And the Headless Horseman himself is an agent of the devil, under the control of evil, terrorizing the town of Sleepy Hollow.

This flick is a fun genre mashup of mystery and dark fantasy that could pass for urban fantasy were its setting modern. A lot of its elements satisfy urban fantasy tropes: mystery focus, battling the supernatural, people wearing leather, a proper villain monologue, and a serviceable romance secondary to the external dilemma.

I can’t quite call it horror. Although there’s blood and some scares (mostly for younger viewers), it’s not really meant to scare you. It’s just kinda spooky to look at. The Headless Horseman is essentially just a murder weapon, and the question remains who wields him, to what end.

That said, it doesn’t have an especially twisty story, although it tries. That’s not really the point either. It’s just a pleasant feature.

Sleepy Hollow feels like Halloween recorded directly onto a film reel. It’s among Tim Burton’s finest executions of aesthetic. Danny Elfman also Danny Elfmans on the score to satisfying effect.

I’ve really got no complaints about Sleepy Hollow. I’m not as excited about it as I was in my youth; I kinda prefer actual horror movies these days. But this is a very fine Spooky Season entry that I watch every single year regardless. It’s like The Nightmare Before Christmas with a lot more blood. And Christopher Walken saying, “Gnyaahhh!” “Hrrggghhh!” “Agghhghgh!”

I recommend this to anyone with any tolerance for horror who also likes mysteries. It’s really fun. I can’t do Halloween without it.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

I like to think that horror movies occur in seasons. Some movies, like Chopping Mall, are best watched on Valentine’s Day, whereas the brightness and title of Midsommar make it prime for watching on a steamy summer afternoon. Of course, something like Scream or the homosexual masterpiece Saw is an actual Halloween horror movie.

Then you’ve got Krampus, which is a November Horror Movie. The kind of thing you watch between Halloween and Christmas. You know, like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

There is no better November Horror Movie than The VVitch (2015), directed by the same fellow who brought us The Northman. That’s because it’s not a *transitory* horror movie, indicating the switch toward Christmas. It just feels like a November movie. You can’t watch this in June to feel a June mood; it’s too late to watch it in December. You gotta put this on right around American Thanksgiving. (That’s the last Thursday in November for you foreigners.)

Growing up in America means all sorts of stories about Pilgrims and Puritans. We grow up with coloring pages of people very much like the outcast Protestants in this movie, distributed exclusively in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Most of my early holiday memories involve drawing hand turkeys and then some guy farming in a town surrounded by wooden barricades. There might have been goats. My memory might be getting a little creative with that one.

So the same Thanksgiving fuzziness I feel from Sleepy Hollow falls in a haze around The VVitch, which is a better movie if only for its paucity of Johnny Depp. Also the feminism.

In The VVitch, a family is sent away from their village and left to fend for themselves. They face a brutal winter amid a hostile, barren forest with naught but a couple of goats, a horse, a dog, and way too many children to feed.

You won’t be surprised to hear things go rapidly downhill from there.

The baby immediately dies to the hands of a forest witch. This happens at the beginning of the movie and must be spoiled, since I ordinarily can’t handle infant death and you gotta know about it going in. But it’s a very easy death. The baby simply goes missing. We get a low-stress shot of the baby before the witch murders it (no distress), and then that part of the movie is over. You can’t even get that upset about the mother’s grief for her baby because the mother is a major antagonist, quick to blame her eldest daughter for the baby’s death.

A newly adult Anya Taylor Joy leads this movie as the accused daughter. She’s very cute here — an adult teenager who could pass for fifteen. Her character absolutely doesn’t deserve the hate she gets from her parents. She doesn’t help herself very much, though. When her horrible twin siblings torment her, she tells them that she is, in fact, the witch in the forest.

So things keep going downhill for our heroine and the family at large.

Ultimately, The VVitch isn’t a *scary* horror movie. You’re not going to get jumpscared. It’s mostly bleak, and even moreso a delicious horror aesthetic. It’s intimately similar to The Northman, which treats Viking mythology like it was completely, literally true; the Protestants here get a similar treatment of their mythology and puts forth a very classic kind of witch without subversion. A bewitched boy vomits a rotten apple. Witches are creepy crones. Satan talks out of a goat. That kind of thing.

It’s so Thanksgiving!

The VVitch ends with something very much like actual wholesome feminist vibes. “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” asks goat-Satan, offering butter and pretty dresses. Considering the alternative was starving to death in a forest with a family who abuses you, joining a coven of naked women dancing around a bonfire feels like a genuine victory (even if it demands a baby’s blood-oriented skincare routine).

I avoided this one for a long time because I thought it might be too much for me, but it’s really not. Sit in your least comfortable rocking chair and watch this one by candlelight. It’s such a mood.

(image credit: A24)

In Annihilation, a strange shimmer is growing around a Florida lighthouse. Anyone who goes inside doesn’t return. The only person who does comes back terribly sick — so his wife, who thought he was dead, decides to enter the shimmer and find out what happened to him.

The movie Annihilation is an adaptation of a book by Jeff VanderMeer which I haven’t read. I’m given to understand that it’s dramatically different from the movie, and Annihilation (the movie) has become so precious to me, I’m not really interested in another version of it. (I’m weird about this kind of thing.)

So when I’m talking about the movie, it’s with zero information from the book. I don’t think that the book and the movie are about the same thing anyway. Alex Garland’s adaptation is its own story. And one thing I love so fiercely about Annihilation is how the story is entirely metaphoric.

I like to assert my Sara’s Unified Theory of Annihilation to anyone who will listen. You ready for it?

All of the woman characters are Lena, the biologist.

DETAILED SPOILERS FROM HERE ONWARD.

Early in the movie, Lena shows her students video of cervical cancer cells dividing. She identifies them as belonging to a woman in her early thirties. I think these cancer cells came from Lena herself. This cancer is the vortex around which the entire plot revolves: Lena’s internal journey through grief and self-destruction, the trauma of the sickness, ruining her marriage, and — eventually — chemotherapy that saves her life.

The first woman to die is the softest, gentlest, sweetest of all the women. She lost her daughter to leukemia. In fact, I think Lena lost the *idea* of the daughter she wanted to have when she got cancer. Cervical cancer meant hysterectomy; she would never have children. At the same time, Lena lost the softer, gentler, sweeter version of herself. What remained were the likes of Anya (a heavy-drinking soldier quick to anger) and Josie (broken and self-harming).

Ventress, then, is representative of Lena’s overarching side as a biologist: the cold, scientific mind who can’t help but be fascinated by the cancer. Ventress is identified as having terminal cancer, in fact.

A lot of the dialogue in the movie feels sort of strange and prosey for this reason. They aren’t real people talking. They’re the sides of the same person engaged with one another in grief over the same problem.

One of the many ways Lena annihilated herself was by entering into an affair, and this is one of the things that drove Kane’s annihilation. His team, too, was likely just a collection of his own sides. Remember how tenderly Kane cuts open his other teammate, as if performing a c-section? And there is life inside of him? Kane had to grapple with the idea he’d never have kids with Lena as well. Kane had to deal with his wife’s sickness, pulling away from him, and cheating on him with a colleague. No wonder he vanished and took on this suicide mission.

The faceless being that Lena confronts at the end is herself. The cancer is Lena. It’s her own cells.

You will also note that the tunnel under the lighthouse is distinctively vaginal in shape. The cave is the womb. Instead of birthing a child, Lena births cancer — a hostile piece of herself.

When we wonder whether Lena and Kane are clones at the end of the movie, we’re kind of missing the point. Both of them are dramatically transformed versions of themselves. They are simply post-trauma Lena and Kane who annihilated, almost to completion, then came out the other side. It’s actually a really happy ending: forgiveness, healing, and moving on as their altered selves.