If you are a lover of horror movies, this Halloween night is ideal for a good marathon of stories to keep you awake. At La Vanguardia we have selected a series of classic titles and other more recent ones that surely won’t let you sleep. Do you dare to see them?
Released in theaters on September 30, Parker Finn’s feature film debut has been one of the season’s great successes with a story of psychological horror centered around a terrifying smile. The chilling story, which has excited Stephen King himself, introduces us to Dr. Rose Cotter, a woman who begins to experience terrifying events after witnessing the suicide of one of her patients. Through a frenetic story, the director plays at subjecting the viewer to not being able to discern between what is happening in reality and what is going on in Rose’s mind. In addition to sweeping the international box office, it was the most viewed film of the last XIX Film Festival.
Another interesting and terrifying debut is the one starring the American Zach Cregger and it is available at Disney. The film, a clear tribute to Wes Craven’s cinema, introduces us to a young woman (Georgina Campbell), who travels to Detroit to attend a job interview and decides to stay in an Airbnb. However, when she arrives at dawn, she discovers that all the rooms are booked and that there is a strange man (Bill Skarsgård) already staying there. Despite the strange situation that she finds herself in, the protagonist decides to spend the night there, but she quickly discovers that the tenant is hiding something else.
The mythical film directed by Sean S. Cunningham in which the villain Jason Voorhees ended the lives of several young people who spend their vacations in a summer camp generated up to 12 deliveries. A very young Kevin Bacon was one of the victims of the hockey-masked killer.
Tobe Hooper impressed us almost half a century ago with this chilling cult film set on a hot summer afternoon in which five friends will become cold cuts at the hands of a bloodthirsty family with the chainsaw as their favorite appliance.
The Mexican Guillermo del Toro presents this television series that narrates eight hair-raising horror stories and is available on Netflix. Macabre stories that arise from some of the most prestigious horror creators of the moment, such as the directors of ‘Babadook’, ‘Splice: Deadly Experiment’ or ‘Mandy’.
The French Pascal Laugier is behind this orgy of violence and blood where everything happens quickly and intensely. In France in the early 1970s, Lucie, a girl who disappeared a year earlier, is seen walking down a road. She is in a catatonic state and is unable to tell anything about what has happened to her. The actresses Mylène Jampanoï and Morjana Alaoui star in this uncomfortable story of revenge taken to the extreme.
That you can succeed with a horror film with a small budget is something that Damien Leone knows very well. In 2016, his Terrifier was released, where the psychopathic clown Art terrorizes two girls during Halloween night. The B-movie cost just $100,000 and received poor reviews, though audiences loved it. It is available on Amazon Prime Video. Now, Leone returns to the fray with a much more gory sequel that has caused several viewers to have a really bad time at the cinema, causing them to vomit and faint.
Sam Raimi’s film is an orgy of blood, screaming, possession and death. Five boys are going to spend the weekend in a cabin lost in a thick forest in the mountains of Tennessee. Once installed, and when they are having dinner, the trapdoor that gives access to the basement bursts open. Surprised, they decide to go down to investigate. There they find a tape recorder, a strange ritual knife and an ancient book.
The oldest film on this list was directed by Herk Harvey – it was the only one he ever made – and it became a cult B-movie. The director was inspired by a spooky-looking abandoned spa resort, the Saltair Pavillion, for build a room in which the line that separates the living from the dead becomes increasingly blurred.
Based on the bestseller by writer Ira Levin, it is one of the best supernatural horror films of all time, with great critical and box office success that later served as inspiration for other films in the genre. Roman Polanski drew a story with visual minimalism that turned the everyday into the worst of nightmares. Here the fear did not come disguised as special effects, nor did it have the face of zombies, here the real horror was hidden in the skin of ordinary people. All this wrapped in small satanic details that stormed the screen to immerse the viewer in a claustrophobic atmosphere guided by a story full of mystery and ambiguity starring a very young Mia Farrow.
Another classic directed by William Friedkin, who will be 50 years old next year, cannot be missing from the list. The film adapts the novel by William Peter Blatty that was inspired by a real exorcism that occurred in Washington in 1949. Regan, a twelve-year-old girl, is the victim of paranormal phenomena. Her mother, terrified, after submitting her daughter to multiple medical tests that offer no results, goes to a priest with psychiatric studies. This one, convinced that the evil is not physical but spiritual, that is to say that it is a diabolical possession, decides to practice an exorcism.
Six years after the violent death of her husband, Amelia (Essie Davis) has still not recovered, but she has to raise Samuel (Noah Wiseman), her six-year-old son, who lives in terror of a monster that appears to him in dreams and threatens to kill them. When a haunting storybook called “The Babadook” shows up at his house, Samuel becomes convinced that the Babadook is the creature he’s been dreaming of.
