Halloween on Netflix: 6 Spooky Things To Give A Chance (+ Review of The VVitch)

IT’S NEARLY HERE. GUYS. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I LOVE HALLOWEEN. I HATE ALL CAPS SENTENCES BUT I LOVE HALLOWEEN SO MUCH I OVERCAME THAT HATRED.

Every year I try to marinate myself in as much Halloween goodness as possible, and while most of my favourite Halloween films are not on Netflix, I appreciate the chance it gives me to try new titles. So here are some of the films I’ve been binging that I think might put you in the mood.

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One You Can Watch Instead of Reading the Book

Extraordinary Tales (2015)

Dir. Various

3.4/ 5 Bones

Every Halloween requires Edgar Allen Poe as an ingredient. Extraordinary Tales is a series of animated shorts in various styles, covering various poems or novellas by the droopiest moustache in all of Victorian fiction. I really enjoyed this one, though I did watch it in chunks. They attempt to tie all the shorts together with a ghastly original poem in which Poe’s spirit takes the form of a crow and speaks with the personification of death. Poe is even more emo as a crow than he is in The Raven, a feat of some magnitude. If you can squirm through those awful but mercifully short celluloid stitches, you’ll get to a collection of truly interesting adaptations. The directing is often far too fast-paced - Poe needs time to build dread and despair - but the aesthetics are all unique enough to keep you curious for each tale.

If I haven’t yet convinced you, I should mention that this contains the posthumous recordings of some horror greats. Bela Lugosi’s reading of The Telltale Heart has a great black-and-white segment, and my beloved Christopher Lee narrates The Fall of the House of Usher in that gothic baritone all of Poe should be read with. Vincent Price even makes an appearance, though in image only, as the hypnotist in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. A not-posthumous (thank god) Guillermo del Toro also lends his vocal chords to The Pit and the Pendulum.

My favourite segment visually is Masque of the Red Death, which is a silent one. I love that particular story and this was full of gorgeous imagery, even though it sorely needed another 5 minutes and more build-up to the reveal of the Scarlet Reaper. I also enjoyed the comic-book stylings of Valdemar and Telltale, and the Burtonesque Usher brings out some real pathos in its abridged run.

Ultimately it’s a little disappointing, more of a curiosity when the potential for greatness is there. I recall a similar project done all in stop-motion, and I’m sure something similar will be undertaken again. This is still a worthy and interesting effort, but I hope future attempts will linger a little longer in Poe’s melancholy.

Classic that’ll make you feel More Cultured than all Your Heathen Friends

Rear Window

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

A wheelchair-bound man spends his time watching the windows of the building opposite his. After observing a few odd events he becomes convinced that a murder has occurred. No one believes him, however, so he continues to watch, fascinated - and eventually obsessed.

It’s as good as everyone always said it was. I was constantly tense and at attention. The ending is a little disappointingly straightforward - you start thinking at some points that the conspiracy may become fantastical, or that your attention has been misdirected. Still, there’s no denying that this film proves you don’t need much to engage the audience. Even a single room can prove a terrifying and engaging place to spend 90 minutes, as long as the actor and direction are carefully managed. It’s also interesting as a commentary on cinema. The rooms we observe from the rear window appear like a wall of television channels, and we watch without interacting with their occupants. The protagonist treats them as his entertainment, and though he is very likable, his inability to engage with others and his literally one-sided perspective of them is an interesting commentary that seems more relevant to today than the year of its making. One could even argue it’s a better allegory for the internet than film, especially when those watched suddenly start looking back - and stepping outside their frames to move towards our own.

  Modern Classic You Can Show to Your Children To Scare Them into Loving You

Coraline
Dir. Henry Selik

  Whoa, this is actually a really good trailer. Conveys the story with just music, no narration and minimal dialogue.

There’s a little door in Coraline’s new house. On the other side, everything’s a little bit better. The food is delicious, there’s a circus of jumping mice and a garden full of living plants. There’s even versions of her parents that love her so much better than her real parents. Coraline wishes she could stay in the Other World forever - until her Other Mother tries to sew buttons into her eyes. If only she'd listened to the cat...

I’m planning something with a fuller review of Coraline in it later, but for now I will say that it’s an intensely personal film that changed my life and solidified my career. Having seen it again for its 10th Anniversary at an open air screening in Ottawa, I can ascertain that it’s still as amazing as it’s always been. It’s new fairytale as imaginative and powerful as Alice in Wonderland or The Little Prince, and this film proves that cinematic adaptations can be better than already outstanding source material. It’s moody, unsettling, adventurous and fantastical. If you don’t watch it, consider playing some of the score at your Halloween party. Bruno Coulais wove together odd instruments, unsettling sounds, and a children’s choir singing in a pidgin language to create subconsciously disturbing and ethereal songs that I often play when I’m writing my horror short stories.

Horror Anime That’s Got Cute Girls But Also Monsters and Violence and is Cool and Stuff

Puella Magi Madoka Magica (TV Series)

Dir. Akiyuki Shinbo

Speaking of amazing scores - just listen to this.

What if Sailor Moon was a horror story? And it had awesome fight sequences that used paper cut-out animation? What if the psychological strain of being a kid at war with monsters resulted in serious mental conditions and personality disorders, where childish desires and actions lead to horrific consequences?

I’ve never been a Magical Girl fan, but the way this show uses that genre’s conventions against it to create something genuinely disturbing and emotional is to be admired. While ultimately not as scary as other entries, there is tons of Halloweeny charm, mostly in the Witch Fighting sequences, which are unique visual experiences full of bizarre imagery and animated with more experimental techniques.

There are some movies on Netflix as well, but they are actually weirdly cut versions of the original TV show, which has a far better flow. There is also a sequel movie, which I don’t advise watching until you’ve seen the series. Seek out the original series if you're interested. It's only 12 episodes long and well worth it.

For Kids But Still Awesome

Soul Eater and Little Witch Academia

Japan’s really gotten into the spirit of Halloween, especially considering it isn’t a native Holiday. Both of these series skew younger - more for preteen kids -  and are more humorous in tone, but I still find them hugely enjoyable and drowning in Halloween iconography and excellent animation.  (Studio Bones and Trigger are both famous for their work)

Soul Eater follows Maka Albarn and Soul Evans, two students attending a school shaped (somewhat narcissistically) like their headmaster’s face. Which is to say their headmaster’s skull, because their headmaster is the Grim Reaper. Soul is actually a living weapon, eater of evil souls and able to become a scythe at will. Maka is his wielder, trying to make him into a Death Scythe fit for Lord Death himself. The show is mostly about their laboured bond, and the temptation to give into madness and violence in the face of fear. It’s a basic shounen show, but it’s pretty refreshing that the main character is female, and a bookish bossy one at that. It’s also cool that the show focuses on her maintaining a good friendship with a male partner who never becomes her love interest.

Whenever the two stop fighting each other, they manage some spectacular bouts against Jack the Ripper, Medusa, The Wolfman, Dr. Frankenstein, and their literal own inner demons. I love the cast on this show -  other characters include Death’s own son, whose love of symmetry is a debilitating mental illness, the creatively evil witch Medusa and her creepy experiment of a child, plus an insane bag of skin that has a bad habit of eating its closest friends.

The comedy’s hit and miss, it’s basically Dragon Ball Z in costume and the series doesn’t exactly end properly, but it just bleeds Halloween . Even the character designs give them noses that make them resemble skulls. I always watch a few episodes every year, even if just to hear that theme song again.  

(My advice is to skip Episode 2 and anything that centers on Black Star, who is a terrible character - more like a Black Hole that sucks in all that’s good and enjoyable about the show. He’s like that obnoxious kid who trick’r’treats as a ninja and keeps hitting other kids with his plastic katana until he tries to do something he saw Bruce Lee do - whereupon you find yourself spending Hallow’s Eve Night searching for your insurance card while he whines that he wanted a different coloured cast.)

Little Witch Academia is somewhere in between Kiki’s Delivery Service and Harry Potter. It’s absolutely adorable and incredibly well-made, but it’s pretty difficult to summarize. Basically, a girl goes to a school for witches, finds her Ron and Hermione and Malfoy and gets into hijinks with broomsticks and dungeons and dragons.

This trailer is in Japanese but both this and Soul Eater have English Dubs on Netflix 

Little Witch Academia has two specials on Netflix, one 26 minutes long, the other 55. Both have some incredibly fluid character animation far beyond what you usually see in anime.  They’re very sweet and laid back pieces of work and might be just what you need between your gory slasher flicks.

Honourable Mentions

I'm sliding in a review of The VVitch here. My thoughts on it aren't long enough for a review but it's been awhile since I did one.

The VVitch (2015)

Dir. Robert Eggers

2.5/5 Bones  

I was really looking forward to this one. It had really impressive acting and atmosphere, didn’t use any cheap modern horror filmmaking gimmicks and actually expected its audience to think. That said, I found its ending a let down with no real build up (its final shot would have had me laughing at its silliness if I hadn’t been fuming in frustration. My poor roommates probably heard me shouting questions at my computer in increasing incredulity. My howl of rage when the credits rolled was practically werewolfian). I also found it disturbing for all the wrong reasons - namely, in its desire to play the Witch mythology of Puritan times straight, it also plays the inherent sexism of it straight. Despite numerous opportunities, it never comments on this or attempts to make it part of the narrative. By framing the Puritans as ultimately right, it also, within its own universe, agrees with their view of power-seeking women and female sexuality being evil. I can’t help but be angry with that, especially considering that it led to the historical executions of so many innocent people and creatures. Now, I understand the director wanting to have a good family and frame the film from their point of mind so we can understand what led good people to act as they did. But it still feels gross. It’s like being on the side of the cats in MAUS, with the mice as the two-dimensional villains. There had to be a way to have your cake and eat it too - have a god-fearing puritan family up against a traditional witch and not somehow imply witch burning was self-defence.

Everything in the film could have happened as it did if there was just a little more motivation given to certain female characters. Then their actions wouldn’t be so bizarre or the ending so disconnected and it would help soothe my moral dilemma. Or perhaps just having any kind of twist, no matter how cheap, would be better.

It’s also really frustrating that it shows the ‘monster’ so early in the film, when I think the thing to do would be to frame her as potentially non-existent. Personally, I think later events in the film would be more frightening if one of the possibilities was just people living in isolation finally losing their grip and becoming consumed by the darkest part of their doctrine. Seeing a rather silly-looking Witch constantly diffuses a lot of the tension and takes away the character’s self-determination. There was an interesting angle on faith and how focusing on the authoritarian versus the forgiving parts of Christianity can lead to disconnection and despair.

The VVitch is still an interesting film that I don’t regret watching the first three quarters of, but ultimately I was bitterly disenchanted.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Dir. Henry Selik

Hey, Nightmare and I were born the same year! I didn’t know that. Considering what a good friend it’s been to me over the years, it’s nice to know that I didn’t have to bear existing in a world without it for more than 4 months.

But seriously, this ain’t a Halloween movie. The title literally has the word Christmas in it. I don’t think it gets any clearer than that. Halloween is literally covered in the first five minutes of celluloid and then the remaining 95% is all Noël. This will be on my Netflix Christmas list. But you can watch it immediately following Halloween if you like, or on the day. Or heck, watch it once for both holidays.

Dishonourable Mentions

Written by and for Stoned People but Tragically Made by Sober Thinking People

Hell and Back (2015)

Dir. Tom Gianas and Ross Shuman

What’s that, you say? Traditional Rankin-Bass animation paired with an irreverent trip to Hell? Well, sign me up! What’s that you say? The only seats in the handbasket are fourth class? And all the other seats are occupied by vomiting babies? And the vomit is lava? They found a way to ruin a perfectly good handbasket in increments? And it continues to find new ways to be completely unbearable even though the basket is of very, very good quality, the best wicker you could buy and can’t even find these days much? What’s that? The only thing for it is to hope Hell is better when we get there for real? I can’t imagine its idea of entertainment would be more disappointing than this film. I also can’t imagine that the torture would be worse than how tortured that metaphor got.

Each minute of this film tries to see how much irritation and degradation you can take before you start looking for the parachute under your seat. It’s so, so frustrating to have such an amazing production given over to a script written by two thirteen-year-olds high off their own unoriginal stoner humour. It physically hurts me that this exists. Those artists deserved better. The audience deserves better. I suggest passing around an envelope to buy those lazy, asinine “writers” seats on the handbasket to the actual H-E-Double-hockey-sticks. And then another envelope so we can hire those artists to do a proper irreverent Rankin-Bass Halloween special with writing by adults who know more than 5 funny words, many of which have nothing to do with male anatomy.

And of course there's classics like Hellboy and Buffy on there, plus a few others I missed. I tried to watch some new things and suggest stuff you might not have seen, even if most of these are pretty niche. I won't be offended if you didn't like them, they're odder ducks for the most part. These next couple weeks I'm tackling some recent horror films and will pick one to review properly. Your suggestions appreciated! After that I'm reviewing a Silver Age or Hammer Film.

Happy Halloween!

In the Queue:

You’re Next

Sinister

It Follows

Oculus

Sleepy Hollow