It’s a curious celebration, Halloween: a night ostensibly dedicated to death and haunting that has somehow become an occasion for all things autumnally cosy. (Growing up in a country where Halloween fell in the bright blush of spring, it made even less sense.)
Halloween night itself may have served as the baleful setting for many a blood-freezing horror film – most obviously, and effectively, in John Carpenter’s original Halloween, which locates a sense of tingly, dangerous desolation in the banal Halloween festivities of American suburbia. But just as often the day serves as a movie backdrop for comedy, joy and romance, all rendered in warm russet tones.
There may be no greater Halloween night in the movies than in Vincente Minnelli’s four-seasons family portrait Meet Me in St Louis – most commonly associated with Christmas, but its extended sequence of children’s dressing-up and mischief-making around a Halloween bonfire is as gorgeous as spooky season gets on screen. As an evocation of child’s-eye wonder around this odd tradition, it’s matched only by Steven Spielberg’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial, in which the ordinary customs of disguise and trick-or-treating serve merely as a springboard for a genuinely uncanny adventure, as child and alien, both in tatty, let’s-pretend costumes, suddenly take otherworldly flight.
It tends to be in family films, of course, where Halloween still inspires sparkly-eyed awe: think the lavish (and notably Americanised) Hogwarts Halloween feast in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; the fairytale-style centring of the day for the imposing and lifting of witchy curses in millennial kids’ favourite Hocus Pocus; or Tim Curry’s catchy invocation that “Anything can happen on Halloween” in the endearingly shoddy 80s TV version of The Worst Witch (Internet Archive). An exception is the loveliest of all Halloween films, the half-hour Peanuts cartoon short It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Apple TV+), the comedy and pathos of which lie in the disappointment and demystification of unrealised childhood fantasy.
For adults, movie Halloweens tend to be couched in irony. In Mike Mills’s tender, autobiographical father-son story Beginners, a hipster Halloween party enables a meet-cute between Ewan McGregor’s grieving protagonist and Mélanie Laurent’s laryngitis-stricken stranger – his Sigmund Freud costume sending out all the requisite warnings about his personal damage. The politics of Halloween party costuming are wittily explored, meanwhile, in the landmark teen comedy Mean Girls, where “Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it”. Lindsay Lohan’s misfit new girl, elaborately dressed as a Gothic ghost bride, naturally misses the memo.
But even outside the horror genre, Halloween carries the potential for terror and trauma. Gregg Araki’s superb queer coming-of-age drama Mysterious Skin (Mubi) features one of cinema’s most disquieting Halloweens, in which two teenage boys are differently led by the night’s aura of secrecy and subterfuge into repetitions of their own childhood sexual abuse. In Australian director Nicholas Verso’s Boys in the Trees, two estranged childhood friends reexamine their relationship over the course of a jittery Halloween night fraught with masculine bullying.
Set over the whole month of October, Richard Kelly’s cult item Donnie Darko works towards Halloween as a day of reckoning and spiralling tragedy, its recurring, surreal visions ultimately rooted in a mangy bunny costume. In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay brilliantly stages the street pageantry of trick-or-treating – soundtracked to Buddy Holly’s twinkly song Everyday – as a cruel burlesque of the nightmarish violence already witnessed by Tilda Swinton’s bereft mother of a psycho. But it’s the uncharacteristically tart Frank Capra screwball classic Arsenic and Old Lace (Internet Archive) – set over the course of a Halloween that sees a newlywed’s honeymoon plans derailed by a cheerful pair of murderers in the family – that most jauntily reconciles the holiday’s capacity for lightness and dark.
All titles available to rent on multiple platforms unless specified.
New on streaming this week
Passages
(Mubi)
Ira Sachs’s sensual, febrile, thoroughly grownup love triangle is one of the year’s best films, powered by Franz Rogowski’s mercurial performance as a bisexual film-maker, pinballing between long-term partner Ben Whishaw and new, suddenly pregnant lover Adèle Exarchopoulos. It negotiates potentially soapy material with a greater interest in modern relationship politics and the less cerebral rush of physical touch.
Saw X
(Lionsgate)
Hitting streaming platforms from Monday in time for Halloween, the 10th instalment in this surprisingly enduring horror series is one of its most exuberant and inventive – certainly when it comes to choreographing elaborately grisly kills. Steeped in franchise lore, it’s really for heads only, but who else is showing up at this point?
Talk to Me
(Altitude)
The year’s sleeper horror hit is a nimble, nervily acted little shocker from Australia that milks far more from its generic-sounding premise – teens stumble upon an occult object that enables them to see the dead – than you might expect. Its story logic eventually goes haywire, but not at the expense of its tension.
Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed
(Universal)
Stephen Kijak’s documentary portrait of Hollywood’s most famously closeted screen icon offers a compelling, compassionate look at Hudson’s stymied personal life, though it goes less deep on his screen presence and underrated acting ability.
