My spooky season starts in August every year. Halloween is my favorite aesthetic, I’m low-key goth anyway, and I never run out of horror movies to watch.

I’ve already been watching so many movies.

I used to be easy to scare: basically, if it had ghosts, I was terrified. This still works on me a little bit — I struggle in particular with the suspense leading up to a ghost reveal — but for the most part, nothing scares me anymore.

Being afraid isn’t the only emotional experience you can have with horror, though. There’s sad horror, like The Sixth Sense and Martyrs, and there’s exciting gory horror like Saw. You can experience dread and nostalgia and anger and a genuine self-questioning depression.

Yet there’s one movie that nails fear in a way that nothing else does — a primal fright that makes me feel small and helpless like when I was a child, unsafe in your own home, and where nothing is the way it seems.

That movie, of course, is Coraline.

It’s a classic setup: a young girl and her family move to a house away from the life she used to know. It’s an old, scary sort of house, where she lives in close company with total strangers. Her stressed, busy parents don’t have time for her.

When she explores, she finds herself in — essentially — the most horrible portal fantasy you can imagine. She has to overcome fable-like trials in order to save herself, her family, and her friends.

This story is familiar. You’ve read it in a lot of fairy tales and coming-of-age stories about that weird, difficult time in a kid’s life where they shed the last trappings of young childhood and start hurtling toward adulthood.

That familiarity is why it’s so effective, in part: we all read stories like this as a kid, and it takes you right back to childhood to read them again. More than that, growing up is a universal experience, and the metaphors at hand are terribly effective.

I was already a proper adult when Coraline came out, but I’m still not immune. Being a child was a scary experience. Far worse than being an adult, where my problems are much bigger, more tangible, and higher stakes. Childhood is a time of being very small with very little control. When your parents aren’t friendly, there’s nowhere safe to go.

There’s so much more to Coraline than its flawless execution of ancient tropes, though. It’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. The stop-motion animation is incredible. The art direction is unmatched. The eerie, lovely score matches the beauty-terror of the rest of the movie.

Coraline also pulls no punches. It knows kids can handle the worst of the worst, and at times, it savagely attacks with imagery that still chills me.

It might be a movie made for young people, but it’s great at any age. If you let it take you on the journey, you might find it’s one of the genuinely scariest movies you’ve ever seen.

(image credit: Focus Features)

Paranormal Activity 2 is a really clever follow-up to its predecessor. In the first one, we met a couple being tormented by a demon; the second is actually a prequel that helps establish and contextualize the first one. These aren’t expensive movies, so I’d have expected the execution to feel cheap. It’s not! It’s really nice to see Katie again. Micah is there too. I wasn’t thrilled to see him again, but his presence did emphasize the extremely distinct characterization relative to the dude in the new family.

Yet again, we have one of the sisters (Kristi instead of Katie this time) with a demon hanging around, and the demon is only slightly eviller than her husband. It’s a solid formula! PA2 demonstrates that the makers of PA1 understood what made the first one work. They don’t mess around getting back to business.

While Micah’s obsession with his handheld camcorder was the entire excuse for having the first movie’s “found footage,” the second has home security cameras indoors and out as a reaction to a robbery. So we don’t need a dreadful personality like Micah’s again in order to make sure we have footage of every moment — although handheld cameras are also used, so it still gets to feel intimate and immediate.

The explanation for the demon’s origin is lightly handled. I expect the third movie will get more into the reason a demon goes after Kristi and Katie, but they provide sufficient explanation for the demon’s existence within the context of PA2 as well. Research from teen stepdaughter shows that demons can be summoned to give power and success to men in exchange for their firstborn son. Classy! Dad is a tasteless crapsack.

The crapsackiness of Dad is a throughline here. He doesn’t really believe Kristi at any point. When his daughter gets involved, he becomes more rageful. Gaslight, gatekeep, get attacked by demon! And he makes the biggest crapsack of all crapsack decisions to help set up PA1 as well. It’s extremely satisfying from a narrative standpoint.

The slow build is very similar to the first movie, and it gets very exciting in a similar way too. The most obvious demon influences feel a lot more high budget. I won’t spoil you — it’s fun to be surprised! They get a little carried away with the shaky camera and night vision, like they aspired to be as good as Rec, but I’ll forgive them. I’d badly emulate Rec too.

One jumpscare in this movie actually worked on me.

All in all, it’s extremely fun to watch and yell at it with your family. The Paranormal Activity movies just do such a good job establishing their goals and meeting the goalposts. It’s quite a flashback to the year 2006 in terms of fashion and home design, too.

If you’re like me, and worried about the safety of the baby and dog: Baby is menaced but never in much danger, and dog gets injured off-screen but does survive. I was not bothered by the baby and dog elements of the horror. Truly, this is a great horror flick to watch with the family. We’re looking forward to the next one.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

“Presented” by Wes Craven and directed by Patrick Lussier, the Craven-esque playful style of horror is a huge boon to this Y2K take on Dracula. It’s drenched in Millennium aesthetic and design choices: everyone is young and hot, Dracula wanders around shirtlessly, and there are plenty of gooshy bloody deaths. Imagine a then-modern Dracula done in the style of Scream or Final Destination, and you’ve got Dracula 2000.

It’s not a complicated plot. Dracula comes back, as always, and he’s out for all the babes. He acquires some vampire wives. He kills a lot of people. Van Helsing and company have to kill him. It’s not twisty at all, even with its especially Catholic backstory for Dracula.

Every actor you ever watched at the turn of the century is in this movie. As my personal favorite: Jonny Lee Miller is a darling 20-something protege of an immortal, Drac-blood-addicted Van Helsing (Christopher Plummer). I’m most familiar with Miller as Sherlock in the fabulous tv show Elementary, so seeing him as an earnest thick-necked Harker-alike is absolutely darling. He’s so clean compared to Trainspotting and so unrestrained compared to Elementary. He actually kind of passes as a twinky love interest.

But the most heart-throbby character is, of course, Dracula himself. Before becoming Phantom of the Opera, Gerard Butler chews scenery and floats on vapor. He has no idea he’s in a cheesy 2000 vampire movie; he actually acts the hell out of the screenplay with his whole Dracussy. I felt like I was watching a cinematic explanation for the reason that Millennial women all want villain- and monster-loving romances these days. Sure, he kills everybody, but he also bangs babes on the ceiling. His only direct competition for Y2K New Orleans Vampire is Stuart Townsend in Queen of the Damned, and I confess Butler is hotter than Townsend (although Queen of the Damned is still my favorite).

You ready for the rest of the cast list? Check it out: Vitamin C (seriously), Omar Epps, Sean Patrick Thomas, Danny Masterson, Jeri Ryan, Shane West, Nathan Fillion, and Jennifer Esposito. Every other scene made me sit up and say, “Hey! That guy!”

If there were an actual God, Jeri Ryan, Vitamin C, and Jennifer Esposito would be MY vampire wives.

If you like Y2K-era slashers, you’ll love Dracula 2000. The shallowness and easy-to-watch plot are features, not bugs. Lussier knows exactly what he’s doing. He dials it in just right to have a great time. It’s not remotely scary, the sex is brief and inexplicit, and the gore is mostly limited to a lot of red-hued chocolate syrup; I might argue this is actually one of the better vampire movies to watch with the family. Maybe you should watch it as a double feature with Jesus Christ Superstar. Just saying.

(image credit: Miramax Films)

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)