Halloween Movies
Halloween is the perfect night to sit back and watch your own mini-horror movie festival. Try a blend of scary old classics and some of the newer chillers, and don’t forget the popcorn!
HALLOWEEN1-H20 No Halloween festival would be complete without the maniacal Michael Myers and his Halloween capers. There’s a whole series, so just pick the one you want to b scared by. Halloween 1 introduces audiences to 21-year-old Michael as he goes on his first killing spree, hunted by his psychiatrist Dr Loomis. British actor Donald Pleasance, a horror film veteran, plays Dr Loomis, with scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis as Michael’s quarry, the lovely Laurie Strode. Michael never stays dead of course, and comes back in a series of sequels, but if you want to have some sort of closure, play Halloween 1 back to back with Halloween H20, in which Jamie Lee Curtis returns to reprise her original role of Laurie, 20 years later. THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW Pick the 1999 Tim Burton movie with Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci. This is the quintessential movie version of the quintessential Halloween ghost story. The story was original written by American writer Washington Irving in the 18th Century, about a headless horseman that terrorizes the locals around Sleepy Hollow. In this version, Depp plays Ichabod Crane as a New York policeman investigating the strange murders, using the `latest’ scientific methods. Tim Burton mixes humor, horror and his charismatic stars to good effect with lots of gore. DRACULA A mini-horror movie festival wouldn’t be complete with a classic from the vaults of the British Hammer Horror movie company, and this one has two of horror’s greatest stars – Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing – in their original roles as Count Dracula and his nemesis Dr Van Helsing. After seizing the jugular of Van Helsing’s assistant, Jonathan Harker, Dracula comes to England and goes after Harker’s fiancé, the lovely Lucy. Based on the classic novel by Bram Stoker, this is the original Dracula movie, and still the best. BEETLEJUICE Take a laugh break with this classic 1988 comedy horror starring Michael Keaton as the most loathsome ghoul ever to haunt the earth. Beetlejuice takes over the lives of a charming, but newly dead couple played by Alec Baldwin and gorgeous Geena Davis. How they outsmart him with some Harry Belafonte songs and the help of a Gothic teenager makes for chills and laughs. RING Choose the original Japanese version for maximum chills, or the American remake with Naomi Watts for satisfactory scares. The story is the same – a young reporter, who is also a single mum with a child, discovers that the urban legend of a video tape that kills is actually the truth. In the Japanese version, director Hideo Nakata uses the eerie body skills of dancer Inou Rie to create a truly scary ghost, while the American ring changes the spook’s name from Sadako to Samara and introduces a truly scary young actress Daveigh Chase in the role. 13 GHOSTS A slick and scary shocker, with Monk’s Tony Shaloub and Matthew Lillard from the Scooby Doo movies. Shaloub and his kids are trapped in a glass house with the unquiet spirits of 13 mad as hell ghosts – murderers, freaks and suicides all intent on mayhem. Or you could try the 1960 original directed by horror master William Castle. GHOST Wind up with something romantic and uplifting after all that horror. This 1990 movie starred Patrick Swayze and Demi Moor at the height of their careers, when they were young and beautiful and utterly appealing. Directed by Jerry Zucker, it drew on documented near death experiences to present as accurate a picture as possible of death according to those who had almost been there. Among the highlights are Patrick Swayze singing `I’m Henry the Eighth, I am’, and Whoopi Goldberg as a sham medium who discovers (to her horror) that ghosts are real. |  |
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