Big-screen scares to add to your Halloween fun
Halloween now rivals Christmas and Thanksgiving on favorite holiday rankings.
Once upon a time it was simple: Kids in homemade costumes would go to their neighbors and get candy.
Now that tykes outing has turned into an extravaganza with trick-or-treating extending over weeks, and there’s a deluge of specials on TV and hitting big screens nationwide.
In a new twist, two Hollywood films are being re-released: Producer Guillermo del Toro’s “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” returns with supernatural tales specifically for kids and Quentin Tarantino’s very adult Oscar hopeful “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
Why the Tarantino? It rates as an esoteric Halloween-style horror because it ends on the day when Charles Manson’s cult targeted pregnant Sharon Tate and her friends for a slaughter that, 50 years later, still reverberates with its chilling pointlessness.
“Joker,” among the year’s biggest hits and controversial for its innate connections with reel life and real-life killing, is the prime Halloween treat despite being in theaters for a month.
And on the street if not in movie theaters where it’s forbidden, Batman’s most notorious villain will undoubtedly prompt holiday revelers to dress up in costume.
So too will Angelina Jolie’s “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” see kids (and adults) donning the dark fairy’s signature horns and black winged dress.
A fan favorite for over 50 years, Morticia Addams, initially brought to life by the slyly slinky Carolyn Jones on television, is back in a digitally animated “The Addams Family,” voiced now by Oscar winner Charlize Theron.
If this season has a theme, it’s a reflection of the nation’s political divide with the one percent and everyone else — the Haves and the Haves Not.
It’s a literal theme in the critically praised South Korean horror comedy “Parasite” as a poverty-stricken family mounts a stealthy home invasion of the wealthy, blasé Park family.
New this Halloween week is the horror thriller “Countdown” in which it’s technology — in this case a killer app — that accurately announces a patient’s imminent death. Only it’s not a patient but a nurse who is told she has just three more days to live.
Then there’s the mighty madness of “The Lighthouse,” a two-hander whose lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson) become completely unhinged. Are they so freaked by the isolation? The blinding light? Or is it a malevolent ghost?
Movie horror, of course, isn’t confined to Halloween. One of the darkest, most disturbing films ever made from a Stephen King story opens Nov. 8: “Doctor Sleep,” a sequel to “The Shining,” in which the battle between the murderous and the good has never been more clear or more vital.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2Nk1Cn4
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