There’s so much to love about Fall. The vivid, changing colours of the leaves, the arrival of all things cinnamon- and pumpkin-flavoured, and the satisfying cool air that always necessitates a change of wardrobe and the return of the mighty sweater. So-called “Spooky Season” is also the perfect time to discover new spine-chilling cinematic adventures or revel in the haunting atmosphere of some tried and true favourites. To that end, some of That Shelf’s critics have pulled together seven curated double bills to enjoy as you settle in with leftover candy after the trick-or-treaters have all gone home. Whether you’re a fan of the classics or into the newest feature scares, there’s a little something for everyone…with a few sweet snack suggestions along the way. Enjoy!
The Uninvited (1944) & The Haunting (1963)
There’s something about a spine-tingling flick in black and white that fits the Halloween bill best. The extra layer of horror added when you can’t quite make out what’s lurking in the shadows is a part of the fun. There are a host of films that benefit from that quirk of cinema, but two of the very best are Lewis Gilbert’s spooky ghost tale, The Uninvited, and Robert Wise’s truly terrifying gem, The Haunting. Both deal with otherworldly homes, and with lost (and dangerous) souls from the past taking their tragedy and trauma out on our various heroes and heroines. The cast of each nail their various roles, from Gail Russell’s haunted Stella Meredith and Cornelia Otis Skinner’s obsessive Miss Holloway, to Julie Harris’s timid but troubled Nell Lance and Claire Bloom’s sophisticated and clairvoyant Theodora. Sound design also proves essential to the films’ creep factor—particularly the plaintive, ghostly cries that echo through the shaded hallways after the sun sets. You’ll want to sleep with the light on after taking in this double bill, that’s for sure. And you could do worse than two films hailed by Guillermo del Toro and Martin Scorsese as two giants in the genre. If you’re in the mood for a third, steer clear of the 1999 Haunting remake and go with with Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961).
Pairs perfectly with: Reese’s Pieces, a tasty option (and a nod to another film classic) quiet enough to not disturb the edge-of-your-seat atmosphere set by these two features.
-EB
Candyman (1992) & Candyman (2021)
Released almost 30 years apart, Bernard Rose and Nia Dacosta’s Candyman films make for a unique legacy sequel pairing. Despite sharing a title, Dacosta and Rose take very different paths to delivering on their themes. Where many sequels glorify legacy characters, Candyman (2021) looks at Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) through a different, more critical lens. Rose shifted Clive Barker’s original short story from the UK to Chicago and, by casting Tony Todd as the titular villain, added a racial component to the story that didn’t previously exist. Looking to make a name for herself through the urban legend of the Candyman who stalks Cabrini-Green, Helen brings the monster back to life. Helen feels foreign in the places she investigates but plows ahead with little consideration for the lives she upends. But she is also aware of the duality at play in Chicago. “Two people get murdered and the cops do nothing. A white woman’s attacked, and they lock the place down.” Candyman (1992) brushes up against making a statement on the failings of our racist society but stops short of something more pointed. Who’s telling the story is just as important as the story itself. By making the face of her film Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) from the marginalized community of its predecessor, Dacosta alters how we perceive Candyman as a character, focusing on a community cast in the shadow of fear. Dacosta’s film isn’t afraid to play with mythology either, adding a multitude of boogeymen. You see, Daniel Robitaille isn’t the only Candyman, which the film illustrates through shadow puppetry depicting generations of men formed into collective legend. Just as Helen was eager to delve into Candyman lore, a whole industry of curators is equally happy to take Anthony’s art once it’s tied to crime. Not to processing grief but commodify it for prestige. Are Helen and Anthony villains? Watch both and decide.
Pairs perfectly with: Butterfingers
Scare Me (2020) & Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
Horror films that go back to the roots of telling ghost stories around a fire are a very specific pleasure. Telling tales, trying to make the hairs on your neck stand on end and the hope of nightmares later, get to both the intentionally unsettling nature of horror, and the communal roots of storytelling.
Scare Me is arguably the best recent example of telling scary tales by the fire, but it never lets go of the cinematic tools at its disposal. At its core it is a movie with two strangers spinning horrifying yarns, trying to scare one another. But like any excellent horror story, it’s simple premise is deceptively terrifying. To pair with that is another film that is driven by the power of story, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. A much more conventional movie, the inertia in Scary Stories is the power of the written word and the dangers of those words coming alive. Perhaps this double feature will inspire a good ole fashioned round of swapping scary stories, then a restless night filled with anything but sweet dreams. Nighty night!
Pairs perfectly with: Sour Patch Kids
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) & The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Okay, let’s get this out of the way now: yes, Silence of the Lambs is a “cop film” and not a “horror movie.” But how many films make one’s skin crawl like Jonathan Demme’s classic thriller does? Lambs is just about the creepiest film ever thanks to the chilling performance of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, but also thanks to the leering glances that appear in the intimately framed film as men throw pervy looks at Jodie Foster’s FBI ingénue Clarice Starling on the job. The best monsters for Halloween night aren’t zombies, witches, or werewolves—they’re the ones who look like everyone else.
Long before everyone threw spoons during The Room, they tossed toast at The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The O.G. midnight movie still holds strong as the most fun you’ll have on Halloween night. The cult hit lets movie buffs dress up and fly their freak flags, or be as square as Brad and Janet as they like. While some cult hits don’t age well, Rocky Horror not only holds up but improves as years go by thanks to the mainstreaming of drag with RuPaul’s Drag Race that shows how ahead of their time Dr. Frank-n-Furter was. End your Halloween double bill on a fun note and do the Time Warp again!
Pairs perfectly with: First off, fava beans pair better with a sauvignon blanc, so someone needs to stage an intervention if your host opens a Chianti. (And let’s remind James Bond to stir a [gin] martini while we’re at it.) But in the spirit of Halloween, I like a good pumpkin beer topped with a dash of freshly grated nutmeg. For maximalist fall snacking, a pumpkin ale goes perfectly with a bag of Hardbites Thanksgiving Stuffing chips. Nom nom!
Alien (1979) & The Thing (1982)
Not only are Alien and The Thing two of the greatest monster movies of all time—with very different aesthetics—but collectively they have more to say about the origins of human evil than most documentaries. Come for the masterful use of rubber and goo, stay for the subtle dissections of capitalism and xenophobia.
Pairs perfectly with: Black liquorice
The Fog (1980) & Prince of Darkness (1987)
Halloween isn’t Halloween without a John Carpenter double feature. From Halloween (the Slasher Original) to Christine and from Prince of Darkness to Ghosts of Mars, his films didn’t miss — or rather missed infrequently — dominating the horror genre stateside like few filmmakers before or since. Pick two, any two (minus one or three exceptions) and viewers on the other side of the digital screen can be guaranteed frights, thrills, and chills delivered at the highest possible level. Carpenter wasn’t afraid of tackling big, thought-provoking, subversive ideas and themes either, sometimes so stealthily and subtlety that audiences, not to mention some critics, ignored or dismissed them outright.
If you have to pick two and only two for a John Carpenter starter pack to unspool on All Hallow’s Eve, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to go wrong with The Fog and Prince of Darkness, the former Carpenter’s follow-up to Halloween, then the largest commercial indie hit; the latter, a bizarrely enthralling mix of H.P. Lovecraft-inspired cosmic horror, religious horror, and straight-up science-fiction. Both feature expertly crafted set pieces typical of Carpenter’s oeuvre, unforgettably arresting imagery, and genre-elevating scares.
In The Fog, a superficially straightforward, supernatural ghost story, a town’s violent, colonialist past returns not to just haunt the descendants of its greedy, corrupt founders, but to slice and slash their way through them. Some life debts, The Fog argues, can’t be paid off with gold or prayer, only blood and body parts. Only then can the wronged dead rest and the present move forward, unencumbered by past sins. Cross-cutting smoothly between the ever-encroaching, pulsating fog and its murderous occupants, rapidly dwindling survivors searching for literal and figurative sanctuary, and an embattled lighthouse DJ (Adrienne Barbeau), The Fog brings old-school, efficient, economic storytelling, the kind Carpenter openly admired in one of his central influences, Howard Hawks, ending well before it’s outstayed its welcome. Come for the dread pirate ghosts, stay for Carpenter’s thematic exploration of the American project and its colonialist past.
Fast forward seven years and five films later and you arrive at the grandly ambitious Prince of Darkness, considered an outlier in Carpenter’s filmography at the time, but in retrospect, it fits in nicely into Carpenter’s so-called Apocalypse Trilogy (bookended by The Thing at one end and In the Mouth of Madness at the other). Reflecting Carpenter’s fascination with quantum physics, time travel, and Satanism (among other subjects), the genre-smashing Prince of Darkness pits graduate-level physics students, their exuberantly fearless, eccentric professor, and a super-secret order of Catholic priests against the darkness-bringer himself, the Antichrist (aka Satan, aka, the Devil). Except the Antichrist hasn’t made his entrance yet: He’s imprisoned, unborn, swirling around a centuries-old metallic cylinder in green goo form. After a pitched, overnight battle, only an act of supreme self-sacrifice can save humanity from the apocalypse, at least until the Antichrist tries again.
Pairs perfectly with: Some classic caramel-covered apples.
The Tingler (1959) & Matinee (1993)
Not all Halloween double bills need to be scary, and so this family-friendly double bill delivers more laughs than frights. Director William Castle never met a gimmick he didn’t love, be it flying skeletons in the cinema or a buzzing “shock section” seating in theatres. In The Tingler, starring Vincent Price, that meant encouraging viewers to “scream for their lives” to ward off a giant caterpillar-like creature that lives in the human spine. Watching—and screaming—from home is just as fun now as it was in 1959, especially when you see the barely-hidden strings pulling the very fake tingler around the set.
Once you’ve screamed for your life, put on Matinee, Joe Dante’s 1993 ode to 1960s cinema. It is the perfect pairing. John Goodman stars as a Castle-like empressario who brings gimmicks to a screening of the fictional kitschy horror Mant! during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Plus, it stars Hocus Pocus and Eerie, Indiana star Omri Katz, making it a great opportunity to add Hocus Pocus as a third family-friendly Halloween feature if you’ve got the stamina for a triple bill.
Pairs perfectly with: Candy corn
