Halloween weekend resulted in my favorite way to celebrate, watching scary movies. Two were recommendations from a podcast I listed to a couple weeks ago, The House October Built and Southbound, and the other movie showed up on my google newsfeed, Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight. Compared to other scary movies I had watched recently; these were comparatively exceptionally good. The top end of these three movies even contended with some of the better films this year that have been released recently by Netflix. These movies had some good scares that will cause a jump, or parts that will give chills, and that is all a person can ask for from a scary movie. None of them were extremely terrifying or unsettling like a Hereditary or Midsommar, but these stuck closer to the roots of horror.
The House October Built had a Blair Witch style of filming. All the footage was “found.” The movie was largely recorded by handheld cameras, by the friends on the trip. The group of friends were traveling around Texas the week of Halloween, and they were trying to find the scariest haunted houses, and there was one specifically called the Blue Skull that they wanted to find. The main guy felt that haunted houses just were not scary enough because as an adult people have the understanding that none of it is real and that the people in the houses cannot hurt their customers. The group wanted something that felt more real and terrifying, and slowly they found it. Strange occurrences slowly started to happen on their RV. One night someone crept on and filmed them all sleeping, then uploaded it to Youtube. To me, this is one of the scariest occurrences in scary movies, when people come in while everyone is asleep and mess around with the house of the people sleeping, and then leave some evidence behind to show that someone had been there. I feel like if that ever happened to me, I would never have a good night of sleep again.
The movie raised one big question, which was: was the Blue Skull experience an extreme underground haunted house, or did they kill everyone in the group of friends? The movie ends with the group of friends being buried alive in coffins, which was a call back to an earlier part in the film, where they put the girl in the coffin. I feel like sense the footage was found and not released by the group that they ended up being murdered, which seems a bit ironic. They were looking for a real scare, but sometimes when a wish comes true, it comes true in the worst way, kind of like the Monkey’s Paw. They all left a question in the air as to if this was the underground haunt they were looking for, or did they just enrage enough of the workers at other haunted houses that the people wanted revenge.
The movie did show news footage of interviews of owners of haunted houses and the owners talking about how some of their employees had been convicted criminals and that others seem very intense and strange. It does make the idea of going to a haunted house a little scarier knowing that there might be some terrifying individuals underneath the costume. One of the biggest problems with this movie was the lack of care the story created for the people trying to find the haunt. Once they were in peril, my emotions toward them did not change, so they needed more character development, or slightly more likable characters. At times it felt more like watching a travel channel show about haunted houses than a horror film.
The second movie was Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight, a Polish Horror film that reached the Netflix top 10 the week of Halloween. I had no idea what to expect, except for that the article I saw said that it felt like a traditional slasher film, which I found pretty exciting sense I love Halloween and Friday the 13th. Between the two of those films, it felt closer to a Friday the 13th movie. The story takes place at a camp for kids who are addicted to electronics, it may be their phone, computer, or video game system, and the camp gives them a chance to be in the woods for at least a few days to be totally technology free, allegedly. At the camp there were many campers initially there, but they split up into groups, and the movie focuses in on a group of six, five campers and one counselor. Once in the woods at night, of course this was when things started to go badly for the group. What initially seems like a giant monster comes and kills the first camper. Later the movie shows that this monster, is just a giant human being with large boils all over his body, he looked like if the Thing from Fantastic Four was turned into a horror villain.
Overall I would say that it does hold up to many of the standards that slasher films have. It has the camp aspect of it all taking place at a camp like Friday the 13th. It has the overly gory aspect to it as well, there were numerous deaths by varying creative means that were gross, and the deaths were people being picked off one by one in classic fashion, typically after the group had split up. It also had the most quintessential part of a slasher film, that the serial killers never really dies, they could be stabbed by a knife multiple times or run over by a car, but they never really die. One aspect of this movie that they did better than other slasher films, was that they gave a background as to how these two boys became deformed giants, a meteor from space landed close to their home, they found it, brought it home, and at night black sludge infiltrated their bodies, thus turning them into beasts that had been locked in a basement for years by their mom. Other slasher films just seemed to give a brief explanation as to what happened. In Halloween, Michael Myers killed his sister, but there was no real premeditation or explanation, and next thing we knew he had escaped from a mental hospital. In Friday the 13th, there was a brief explanation that he was bullied at camp and thrown into the lake, but it would have been more compelling if it was shown, like they did in this movie.
Sense this movie was a Polish film, this means that they were not speaking English, which was fine, I was going to watch it either way, but instead of subtitles they used voice dubbing. Personally, I was not a big fan of this at all. It felt like they chose very stereotypical American voices for the characters, and it just did not feel right. The voices did not feel matched up correctly with these characters, plus it is always disorienting when voices are speaking and the words coming out of their mouths and what the audience is hearing do not match up. It was the same way in the Netflix film, The Platform. I did not take the time to see if there was a way to just have subtitles instead of dubbing, but next time I watch a movie like this I will. As a final note on this movie, the music they used in it was excellent as well. It added to the film and was unique.
The last film was Southbound, which was a 90-minute horror anthology film that was fast paced and compelling. It had four different stories that all take place on this deserted cursed highway that does not exist on any map, and those that have been sucked into it have terrifying experiences. The only other horror anthology movies I have watched were the VHS movies on Netflix. There was a trilogy of them, and each one of them got progressively worst as they went one, but the first one was excellent. The difference between Southbound and VHS was that all the stories in Southbound were slightly interconnected and created a time loop of sorts, whereas the anthology stories in VHS were all separate entities. In the first story of this film, there were these creatures that reminded me of dementors from Harry Potter chasing after these two criminals to make them pay for their sins. The second story was about a band of girls breaking down on the highway and getting picked up, and two of them joined a cult, and the other one ran away. The girl that ran way was hit by a car, and the guy driving took her to an abandoned town and performed surgery on her in a vacant hospital while getting directions from a mysterious 911 operator. The last story was about a home invasion that went too far. The best of the stories was about the guy who hit the girl with his car and the home invasion. They might have been the best because they were the most realistic.
It would be incredibly terrifying to hit someone in the middle of nowhere and have 911 not be able to locate where you are. Then they told the driver to move the girl and bring her to a hospital, which was abandoned. They gave him directions on how to give her surgery, but he ends up failing. Then he finds replicas of all his clothes and a new car so that he can leave and pretend nothing ever happened. It was a wild story that kept my eyes pealed to the screen the entire time. The last story of the home invasion was equally terrifying. Being in a remote location and not having a working phone then looking outside and the house is surrounded by strangers in masks must be the one of the worst real-life occurrences. It makes it hard to want to travel somewhere out in the woods because one never knows what could be lurking in the darkness waiting for an unsuspecting victim.
All three of these movies were some of the better horror movies I have watched recently, which is not saying much, but it made for a good Halloween weekend. The stories were diverse from each other which also helped to their pairing, parts of the movies had aspects that could actually happen in real life and truly be terrifying experiences, and the other parts of the movies that were less realistic were well done. I would recommend watching all three of these movies. If you like slashers, Nobody Sleeps in the Woods is well worth it. It received an 85. If you enjoy haunted houses and shaky filming of handheld cameras then The House October Built, would be good, and it received a 71. Finally, if you would enjoy a good anthology with a blend of real-life horror and some more fantasy horror, then Southbound would be good, and it received an 83.
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