Scary Movies for Spooky Season

Rachel Syme
Staff writer

There is little better, when the weather turns just chilly enough to necessitate a big scarf and a leather jacket, than to duck into a movie theatre to see a film that makes your blood run cold. Sure, you can binge scary movies at home, huddled under a blanket, locked safely behind your front door’s deadbolt, with a bowl of popcorn in hand, but few experiences rival that of watching a horror flick in the company of dozens of strangers, all of you gasping in unison with every jump scare. Freaky films are meant to be shared, in the dark, like campfire tales. Starting on Oct. 29, the Lower East Side arthouse cinema Metrograph begins its “Halloween at Metrograph” series, featuring fright-night classics such as Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” a gothic-horror adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” from 1979, starring Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani—and thousands of rats—and Andrzej Żuławski’s creepy body-horror film “Possession,” from 1981, also starring Adjani, in which a German spy, played by Sam Neill, discovers that his wife may or may not be cheating on him with a gooey, worm-like creature. The film contains one of the great gross-out scenes of all time, in which Adjani has a bloody, violent miscarriage in a Berlin subway station and slams her body around as if in the throes of an exorcism.

If you are in the mood to see some brand-new slashers, you can check out the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival (Oct. 17-24), in partnership with Nitehawk Cinemas. The festival showcases more than a dozen independent films, at both Nitehawk’s Williamsburg and Prospect Park locations, including the New Zealand director James Ashcroft’s sophomore effort, “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” starring John Lithgow as a psychotic nursing-home resident, and the New Jersey director Ryan Sloan’s “Gazer,” about a woman who has dyschronometria, the inability to tell how much time has passed. The festival will also screen the new documentary “Generation Terror,” from co-directors Phillip Escott and Sarah Appleton, about the booming nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands horror-movie industry, and the ways in which films like “Scream,” “The Blair Witch Project,” and “Saw” forever shifted the genre. If you don’t happen to be in Brooklyn but still want to join in, the festival operates its own streaming service, called, fittingly, Nightstream.

Speaking of fresh frightening films, for my money, one of the best things you can do this season is to run to see the French director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” while it is still playing on the big screen. The thriller stars Demi Moore as a famous exercise guru named Elisabeth Sparkle (think Jane Fonda in her spandex era) who is fired from her aerobics show by her piggish boss (Dennis Quaid) when she turns fifty. She is despondent and adrift and angry, until she learns about a mysterious, neon-green fluid available on the black market (the titular “substance”) that promises to restore her youth and allow her to create a “better version” of herself. What this means in gory practice is that, after just one injection, Moore’s spine splits open—a goopy, grisly sequence that is wildly fun, if nauseating, to behold—and a shiny, taut new body (Margaret Qualley, looking resplendent) slithers out. The way the substance works is that Elisabeth and her youthful avatar, named Sue, are supposed to switch places each week, but as Sue begins to enjoy the perks of her perky assets, she begins to steal more and more time from her older creator, leading to disastrous and hideous results.

The film has one of the most bombastic and surprising endings I’ve seen in years, one that is as unexpectedly touching as it is horrifying and hilarious. Moore is giving perhaps her best performance to date, a redemption that feels all the more poetic given her intense personal struggles with aging and body image, which she wrote about in her 2019 memoir, “Inside Out.” The film allows Moore to be funny, formidable, and truly brave—she goes to ugly places where few beautiful women dare to tread. I was nervous going into the film, as I tend to be squeamish when it comes to needles and nosebleeds, but in the end it was a total blast. So go ahead, leave your house and see something that scares you. Be brave.