The proper dose of terror can be the most comforting of rituals.
Anyone with a remote control becomes intimate with that paradox. There’s a terribly satisfying rhythm to a Halloween night, when desiccated leaves skitter across the sidewalk and the moon shreds clouds into funeral shrouds:
1) Escort the kids through the neighborhood in search of treats.
2) Answer the door to hordes of starving chocolate-cannibals.
3) Put the sugar-addled family to bed, turn off the lights, settle onto the couch, and find a scary movie to accompany you like an old friend into the autumnal dark.
We’ve culled through a crypt of recommendations to offer some video favorites for your midnight viewing.
If it’s an undebatable classic you’re looking for, and you don’t need to sleep Halloween night, you can’t go wrong with “The Exorcist,” “The Shining,” “The Omen,” “The Ring,” “Alien” or “The Blair Witch Project.” “The Exorcist” alone has enough iconic spooky scenes to keep you awake for the next year: the long staircase in Georgetown, the slamming furniture, the 360-degree head turn even a snowboarder wouldn’t try.
But be careful before sharing these with even your teenage children – Linda Blair as possessed Regan in “The Exorcist” does things with a crucifix that nice, non-Satanically inhabited girls shouldn’t do. And in general, the movie remains as profoundly disturbing as ever.
Two other Halloween-night picks are actually old enough to deserve the moniker “classic,” though they aren’t played as frequently on late-night cable. The original 1963 version of “The Haunting” cemented many of the Halloween cliches in the American mind: Abandoned, haunted manor houses, ghosts moaning through walls, moon shadows of tree branches driving overnight guests to near-madness.
“Rosemary’s Baby” in 1968 tried for an entirely different form of creepiness, the paradoxical alienation of urban life in a crowded city. Can you be surrounded and lonely at the same time? Mia Farrow proves you can, especially when neighbor Ruth Gordon is your midwife to birthing the devil’s spawn. (Gordon brought a new level of respectability to the genre by winning the best supporting actress Oscar for the role.)
Some movies project our most common nightmares straight onto the screen, to chilling effect. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in 1956 did just that, illustrating our childhood worries that our parents might secretly be replaced by coldhearted strangers. Many read the black-and-white film as a political warning about the McCarthy era, but this kind of restrained horror needs no introduction. It’ll have you searching the garage for telltale pods.
Hard to believe Wes Craven’s modern classic “Scream” is already 10 years old, but it’s worth dusting off and watching with teenagers. Study up on your horror flicks first, and see if you could survive a ruthless killer who taunts his victims with trivia questions, offering them a chance to live. The opening “popcorn and babysitting” scene is a masterpiece of editing and camera angles.
A personal favorite that stands out from other horror movies for being a little bit cool, a little bit sexy, a little bit scary and quite a bit funny is “An American Werewolf in London.” This 1981 romp was directed by John Landis – he wrote the script more than a decade earlier at age 19 – and follows the misadventures of backpackers David Naughton and Griffin Dunne after they pet the wrong doggie on the British moors.
You can’t go wrong by dipping into a cable version of “Halloween” on the self-same night. John Carpenter perfected the “point of view” camera shot that is so disturbing to the audience: If our point of view is through the killer’s eyes, can’t the victim see the killer (who is us?) And if the victim can’t see the killer, then are any of us safe? From ourselves?
Post reader Greg Ostravich prefers another John Carpenter movie, “The Thing,” a 1982 remake of “The Thing From Another World.” Kurt Russell and other scientists are trapped in Antarctica by an alien life form that can enter their bodies. Ostravich said he appreciates the “open-ended” feel of the movie’s conclusion – in other words, the Halloween-night feeling that horror might not just be contained to your TV screen. It could always leak around the edges, just a little.
Boldface names blanch with these on the screen
Singing in front of 9,500 people at Red Rocks? No problem.
Trying to watch all of “The Ring” alone in a darkened basement? Horrifying.
Isaac Slade, lead singer of the hit Denver rock group The Fray, claims “The Ring” is “the scariest movie I ever managed to watch without shutting it off.” Even then, he could get through it only by inviting over a friend.
“I’m not a scary-movie person,” said Slade, fresh off a sellout performance at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. “I just don’t do them well.”
When it comes to horror flicks and Halloween, watching through barely spread fingers seems a common trait among some of Denver’s more prominent citizens. Choose a boldface name, and that person is not-so-boldly watching scary films from behind the couch.
Mayor John Hickenlooper was 8 years old and had just moved into a new house when his older sister took him to see “Brides of Dracula.” That 1960 B-movie special featured vampires drifting through window cracks in vapor form.
“I didn’t have any garlic to repel the vampires,” Hickenlooper said. “So I nailed plywood over my bedroom windows. My mother was less than enthusiastic about the large nail holes in my window casing.”
Perhaps 8 is a turning point in horror-movie appreciation: Tammy Ealom of the Denver band Dressy Bessy remembers watching an awful B-flick “Food of the Gods” at that age.
“My parents took my brother and me to a lot of drive-ins because it was cheap entertainment, and I think they thought we’d fall asleep,” Ealom said. She didn’t. Thus dripped into her impressionable brain pan the sordid details of “Food of the Gods”: The town’s water supply is contaminated by a “nuclear something”; rats and worms grow to the size of houses, then “basically eat people.”
“I saw it again about a year ago,” Ealom laughed. “And it was pretty silly. But when you’re an 8-year-old kid, it’s cheesy and all, but you’re thinking, ‘Geez, could rats really get that big? I hope not!”‘
The magnification of a drive-in screen is a common theme when it comes to peoples’ horror-movie memories. Denver poet laureate Chris Ransick was working at a Los Angeles-area drive-in when “The Exorcist” was re-released in 1979.
Ransick’s job was to walk through the 1,250-slot parking area in the dark, picking up broken glass and scouting for sneak-in spectators. The nights that still give him chills, he said, were when Linda Blair loomed over his shoulder, projectile vomiting at those stolid priests.
“I was a good Catholic boy at the time, and the sight of that possessed girl, 40 feet high, doing her devil thing night after night . . . it kind of ruined me for a time,” Ransick said.
KUSA-Channel 9’s Adele Arakawa goes on record that her own Halloween moment onscreen may not have happened yet. “I’m spending my Halloween night moderating a debate between the major gubernatorial candidates, Bob Beauprez and Bill Ritter. I’m not saying that’s a scary thing, just stating the facts,” Arakawa said.
Duly noted. Arakawa lets on that her favorite scary movie is Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”
“Classic suspense. I think I saw it for the first time when I was 10 or so,” she said. “So it scared me to death. I never did want a bird as a pet after that. I’m not much for gore, although I’d probably take ‘Alien’ as a second choice.”
The current governor’s favorite scary movie may seem an aberration, but as they say, horror is an ice pick through the eye of the beholder. Bill Owens claims his annual Halloween classic is actually “Top Gun.”
“A closer analysis reveals any number of truly scary moments,” Owens writes in an e-mail. “MiGs flying through perilous conditions over the Indian Ocean, running out of fuel, dogfights, landing on an aircraft carrier in the dead of night. Even the pilots’ names, like Iceman and Viper, invoke fear. After the last trick-or-treater has left for the evening, I can think of nothing better than pulling out the DVD of this classic chilling movie,” Owens writes.
“In the interest of full disclosure, I should also note that ‘Top Gun’ is my favorite holiday movie, as well as being my favorite musical. Goose’s rendition of ‘Great Balls of Fire’ is especially moving.” (OK, the fact the governor of our fine state knows these details may be the most terrifying thing yet.)
Owens gets to his punchline: “The film has even become more frightening over the years, since few people could have imagined just how scary Tom Cruise eventually would turn out to be.”
Some of our respondents temper their Halloween fear with goofball comedies. Growing up, Vesta Dipping Grill executive chef Matt Selby was never a big fan of his friends’ “horror movie sleep overs.” Other than a lingering crush on Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween,” the fright films “would destroy me,” Selby said.
What he remembers more fondly are the Abbott & Costello marathons that KWGN-Channel 2 used to offer on Halloween nights. “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.” “Abbott & Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” “Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man.”
“Now, I watch those movies with my daughters,” Selby said. Then, when they’re asleep, I watch ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ or ‘Halloween.’ I can handle it now.”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at mbooth@denverpost.com. Or try the “Screen Team” blog at denverpostbloghouse.com
