It’s October and as I lie nestled snug in my bed, visions of spooky things dance in my head! Fine, that’s all year round, but in the month of Spook-o-ween it’s legit, y’all. I’m more about the creepiness than the gore, but I’m willing to deal with some ick for a movie that takes me somewhere I wasn’t expecting to go or just plain entertains me. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a movie that somehow manages to make me laugh about something as disgusting and cliché as putting someone through a woodchipper. September has turned my brain to mush this year, so here from my semi-zombified state for your accursed viewing entertainment is a selection of films to celebrate this most hallowed season of ghosts and monsters.

Slash/Back (Canada, 2022) directed by Nyla Innuksuk

Slash/Back is a sci-fi horror film about a group of teenage girls in the remote community of Pangnirtung, Nunavut who end up battling an alien invasion on a night when all the adults are down at the community centre dancing. It’s the first feature film by Canadian Inuit director Nyla Innuksuk, and stars a number of new young actors whose real-life friendships bring a very genuine feeling to the story. The remoteness and isolation of the setting are perfect, both for a horror movie and for beautiful shots of wild open spaces where the sun never sets. Innuksuk clearly takes inspiration from John Carpenter’s The ThIng (1982) to the point where the girls actually make the comparison themselves in the script, but she brings a very different lens to it with her focus on the characters and their conflicting desires about staying with their community and culture or getting away to somewhere new and exciting. Plus it involves possessed polar bears and shapeshifting tentacled aliens played by a horrifyingly talented contortionist who makes them move in ways that nothing ever should, and a bunch of Indigenous girls kicking their asses using traditional hunting tools and horror movie knowledge.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (USA, 2014) directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

Going from a film where the sun never sets to one that takes place entirely in darkness and shadows, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a slow, beautiful black and white film about a vampire girl (Sheila Vand) who skateboards around a town called Bad City, stalking (mostly) predatory men who arguably deserve to become prey. She falls in love with a boy with James Dean style and a fabulous 1950s car whose world revolves around his cat. It’s an American film in Farsi that was shot in California with the spidery frames of oil derricks in the background and spaghetti western notes in the soundtrack. With all the shadows, retro styles, and the mysterious Vampire Girl With No Name in her cape-like chador, Bad City seems like a place outside of time and space that could be anywhere or nowhere. As Gutter Editor Carol Borden said in A Girl Thinks Too Much Alone at Night, “it feels an awful lot like a Jim Jarmusch vampire movie” and I noticed that the soundtrack includes an Iranian band called Kiosk, who bring a definite Tom Waits sound to back that up.

Mr. Vampire (Hong Kong, 1985) directed by Ricky Lau

Jumping from a very melancholy vampire genre to a much sillier one, Mr. Vampire is a classic kung-fu comedy horror film featuring jiangshi, the hopping vampires of Qing Dynasty folklore. It’s directed by Ricky Lau and produced by the legendary Sammo Hung, who kick-started the martial arts hopping vampire genre with Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980). Burying someone wrong or digging them up and burying them again is never a good idea, and when it happens to a town elder, his reanimated corpse begins hopping around town, terrorizing everyone involved with his unacceptable grave. Hijinks ensue as a Taoist priest and his two bumbling disciples freeze the jiangshi in place by sticking paper talismans to his forehead, and throw sticky rice at him to draw out the evil as their master attempts to return the undead elder to the grave.

One Cut of the Dead (Japan, 2017) directed by Shin’ichirô Ueda

Speaking of the undead, Shin’ichirô Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead is a zombie movie with a wonderful twist. It was made on a $25K budget with unknown actors and opened in a single theatre in Japan, but went on to make over $31 million worldwide as audiences realized how great it is. I wrote about it in more detail in my article, Triple-decker Metafictional Zombie Sandwich, but here’s the short version. A director whose motto is “fast, cheap and average” is hired to make a zombie movie at an abandoned water filtration plant that has its own urban zombie legend. They get attacked by actual zombies and so goes the first half of the film, but the second half turns everything on its head. It’s one of those glorious experiences where you get to rewatch everything you’ve just seen in a completely new and incredibly entertaining context. You may wonder why you’re watching this strangely acted and filmed movie at first, but I promise the payoff is worth it.

Freaky (USA, 2020) directed by Christopher Landon

A movie with a twist that is already given away by the premise is Christopher Landon’s Freaky, which puts an interesting gender-swap horror spin on Freaky Friday. The film starts with a killing spree by the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughan) that in a very short time pays homage to Halloween, Friday the 13^th, and Scream, and ends with awkward 17-year-old Millie (Kathryn Newton) being chased across campus after the Homecoming football game in her beaver mascot costume and stabbed with a magic Aztec dagger. It takes an abrupt left turn when she wakes up the next morning in the Butcher’s body and vice versa. He seems as disturbed by the décor in her teenager bedroom as she is by his creepy taxidermy murder lair. From there it’s a very smart blend of humor, as Millie tries to convince her friends it’s her in there and get her body back, with a sensitively acted exploration of how sex and gender play into narratives about power, violence, and horror. Millie is always she/her to her friends, no matter which body she’s in, and somehow the romance that develops between her in Vince Vaughan’s body and her teenage crush walks a very thin age- related line to come across as sweet.

The Blackening (USA, 2022) directed by Tim Story

Another horror satire that stomps all over the tired, discriminatory tropes of slasher films in a most entertaining way is The Blackening (USA, 2022) directed by Tim Story. Its tagline is “we can’t all die first,” and the premise revolves around a Saw-like situation where a group of Black friends celebrating Juneteenth go into the creepy basement of a creepy cabin in the woods where a masked killer forces them to answer Black culture trivia questions and play a racist board game with a Sambo in the centre of it. The killer gives them a countdown to decide who will survive based on who they think is the Blackest, which ends in the sacrifice of the guy who admits he voted for Trump twice. It pokes fun at the flaws of the genre, and like all really successful disruptive art, it proves its own point: it’s a well done slasher movie that avoids all of the things it’s criticizing about slasher movies and makes a clear statement about racism and discrimination in a way that is also good, stupid fun.

The Stuff (USA, 1985) directed by Larry Cohen and Rubber (France, 2010) directed by Quentin Dupieux

If you’re looking for bad, stupid fun with more of a Mystery Science Theatre vibe, try Rubber or The Stuff. Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber is the story of Robert, a living tire with the telekinetic power to make things and people explode. Robert goes on a killing spree across the desert, complete with first person stalking and a Psycho-inspired bathroom scene. It’s ridiculous and begs to be watched with MST3K-style commentary. Larry Cohen’s The Stuff is about a mysterious subterranean substance that gets disguised as a trendy new dessert. It’s branded as “The Stuff” and it turns people into some kind of melty-faced zombies. It’s a gooey, white, spackle-like substance that comes in tubs like ice cream, but it also oozes towards people like The Creeping Terror, rises up out of their toilets, and generally causes cartoonishly panicked reactions to its very slow-moving threat. Both films are ridiculous and extremely 1980s.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (Canada, 2010) directed by Eli Craig

Coming full circle back around to films that can make me laugh about woodchippers, one of my all time favorite horror-comedies is Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale vs Evil. It’s a delightful, blood-soaked romp with the best buddy movie vibes and a sweet romance subplot. Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) have bought a creepy cabin in the woods and are trying to fix it up all nice for themselves, but a bunch of college kids on vacation are convinced they’re homicidal hillbillies. The kids panic and begin accidentally killing themselves in front of the duo in a series of absurdly horror-movie ways that leave Tucker and Dale confused and traumatized, and left me laughing hysterically. The juxtaposition of Tucker and Dale being creepy from the POV of the kids with the totally adorable and relatable things they are actually doing and thinking is a fantastic illustration of the perils of jumping to the wrong conclusions. Like many of my favorite horror movies, it dares to change the narrative of who the monsters actually are and who should survive.

I hope there’s at least something in this list that y’all haven’t seen, or forgot you loved and are now itching to see again. Happy haunting!

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Alex MacFadyen will be keeping the door to the basement shut this month, just in case.