Creepy Movie Time

The highlights of my Halloween movie marathon

For this year's Halloween I made a plan to shut myself in for the whole day, have a bunch of snacks and watch a metric shit ton of horror movies as it befits the city hermit that I am sometimes. I started off the night before the 31st with The Wailing by Na Hong-jin, a brilliant movie in its own way from South Korea. The plot visits a village where more and more people start to attack and slaugter their families after a mysterious Japanese man moved into the surrounding woods. This movie was already tense as hell at certain points and really well-made with outstanding actors but also quite weird especially in the beginning. It started of in a very comedic manor with a fairly clumsy and inept cop as the protagonist who constantly gets berated by his boss, is always late for work and seems to be frightened by his own shadow. I maybe want to do a review of this one on its own some time later and I definitely want to see it again for that alone, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

The next morning I started with some Spongebob Halloween episodes and the Summerween episode of Gravity Falls just to get a bit nostalgic for the time when I was a kid and watched the Halloween specials of Cartoons on TV. After that I put in The Void, a crowd-funded movie from 2016 about a group of strangers who get surrounded by hooded maniacs in a half-abandoned hospital at night. I only got to know this movie through a Top 13 of the best recent horror movies made by one of my favourite YouTube channels, Cinema Strikes Back. I will link the video below this paragraph, but be warned, it's entirely in German.
Back to the actual movie, I enjoyed it in general. The plot wasn't the most developed ever, neither were the characters and it left many things open to the viewer's imagination, but that didn't really matter that much because ... holy shit! The visuals! The effects in this movie are impeccable and stunning, especially because they were mostly practical. You get some really gross tentacle stuff, twisted limbs and morphed abominations, so no body horror fan will be disappointed. The only downside was that the camera work wasn't on point all the time, so it was a bit hard to follow in some scenes and because of the lack of fleshed out characters I wasn't that invested into what happened to them. I just leaned back and enjoyed the 90 minutes of carnage.

After this entertaining and well-made but not really that scary movie I switched the disc to the Australien horror movie The Babadook. Where The Void failed to create interesting characters you can identify with, The Babadook excelled. My god, what a stressful film. It shows the struggles of a single mother with her hyperactive and, to be honest, extremely annoying young son in combination with the grief about her deceased husband. The lives of these two get stirred up even more when a book shows up at their house, seeming like a children's book at first, but quickly revealing itself as threatening the arrival of the Babadook citing "If it's in a word, or if it's in a book, you can't get rid of the Babadook".The director Jennifer Kent created an atmosphere of pure exhaustion and despair. At least for me I could feel the extraordinary amount of stress the mother experiences, the lack of sleep, the grief, the worrying, the guilt. The movie is very effective in transporting the character's emotions directly to the viewer. And it creates a creepy horror film monster that hooks itself into the minds of the characters at every turn. That alone would make this movie one of the best in its genre, but it still goes a bit further. It creates a metaphora for overwhelming grief and exhausting stress and takes an unconvential way of showing these struggles through the monster in comparison to other dramas with a similar premise. I won't go in deeper for now, maybe I'll do an own post for that movie some time. Just let me tell you, I can absolutely recommend this movie for everyone who can conceive empathy. It might not be your kind of thing if you're just looking for a quick thrill, but still give this movie a chance, open your mind to what the characters are experiencing and why and how they ended up in their state of mind. This movie is a great work on the workings of the human mind and it would be a shame to discard it right away because it doesn't have any jump scares.

Now, let's get to my favourite movie of the bunch. A movie that finally managed to actually horrify me and instill a genuine sense of terror and constant uneasiness in me. That movie was Hereditary. Ari Aster's debut film had me in its grip right from the beginning. The plot opens up with a family of four, artist mother, psychiatrist father, teenage son and oddball daughter, at the funeral of the kid's grandma on their mother's side. In the eulogy held by the mother we learn that grandma was a secretive woman with her own live and circle of aquaintances. The youngest daughter was closest to her and in succession is most devestated by that loss. From that starting point the movie dwindles more and more into a literal nightmare, starting of as an emotional family drama, winding itself through shocking twists to a bone chilling, anxiety inducing finale that made me squeeze my cat nearly too hard out of pure fear and suspense. The other three films I had seen this holiday were ranging from good to absolutely brilliant themselves, but none of them terrified my like Hereditary. The last time I was similarily in fear was when I played through Outlast II and that only lasted very shortly before getting annoying and as a game it was more effective in the immersion from the get-go. The last time a movie really genuinely frightened me was The Conjuring. But other than the latter one, Hereditary was completely original, not the typical haunted house horror, no ghost or slasher movie, not anything I really had seen before. Somehow it managed to circumvent every clichè and at every turn surprise me with the outcome. When I thought I figured it out, it went another way. When I was sure something would happen, it just didn't. And when something happened, I didn't see it coming beforehand. Couple that with the excellent camera work of Pawel Pogorzelsky, minutely detailed production design, nightmare fuel imaging and actors that couldn't be in any way better and you've got yourself a movie you will never forget.  
Hereditary is not just an effective horror movie, it works as a family drama. You get to know the characters, they act in understandable ways, you feel their pain in moments of loss and you can sense the nearing uneasiness and terror oozing out of every scene, especially through the eerie, pulsing music by Colin Stetson that follows its own peculiar rhythm.
Also like I already mentioned the actors deserve their own special praise. The whole movie is basically running on the shoulders of five characters. Toni Collette plays the mother who designs and builds miniatures for an art gallery and she carries the brunt of the plot with absolute brilliance. Alex Wolff plays the teenage son Peter and he does that as a method actor, he really was Peter for the duration of filming and that pays off immensely in the final film. His chemistry with Molly Shapiro who plays his little sister in her very first movie role is astounding. They seem to understand each other on a completely subconscious level. The acting of both is very subtle most of the times, though you always pick up what is going on. That in turn then makes impulsive moments that much more meaningful. To complete the family Gabriel Byrne plays the more grounded father who is more in touch with his son and shows great understanding of his feelings but he also conveys fear and concern absolutely on point for the character. The whole cast is entirely amazing and I'm especially looking forward to seeing future projects of the two youngest actors, Wolff and Shapiro.
For a conclusion I just can say that I absolutely freaking loved this movie and it shot straight into my imaginary all-time favourites hall of fame. In fact I will probably watch it again in the next couple of days after writing this. It's one of these movies I will constantly annoy my friends with, reminding them that they should watch it every two and a half minutes.

I kind of want to also do some kind of analysis or spoiler review but I fear that that will just end up as a listing of trivia facts in text form. Let's see what my brain comes up with in the next days.