Scary films for the spooky season

Rachel Syme
Staff writer

There is hardly anything better, When the weather just gets cold enough that you have to wear a big scarf and a leather jacket than go to the cinema to see a film that will make your blood run cold. Sure, you can watch scary movies at home, huddled under a blanket, securely locked behind the latch of your front door, with a bowl of popcorn in hand, but few experiences can compete with watching a horror movie in the company of dozens of strangers. the way you gasp for air at the same time with every jump scare. Weird movies are meant to be shared in the dark, like campfire stories. Starting October 25th, the Lower East Side arthouse cinema Metrograph will be showing horror classics like those by Werner Herzog “Nosferatu the Vampire” a gothic horror adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1979 Dracula 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 sticky, worm-like creature. The film contains one of the greatest scenes of all time, in which Adjani suffers a bloody, violent miscarriage in a Berlin subway station and flings her body around as if in an exorcism.

Isabelle Adjani in Possession.Photo by Limelight International / Everett

If you feel like watching some brand new slashers, you can check this out Brooklyn Horror Film Festival (October 17-24), in association with Nitehawk Cinemas. The festival will screen more than a dozen independent films at Nitehawk's Williamsburg and Prospect Park locations, including New Zealand director James Ashcroft's second film. “Jenny Pen’s Rule” starring John Lithgow as a psychotic nursing home resident and New Jersey director Ryan Sloan “Gazer,” about a woman with dyschronometry, the inability to tell how much time has passed. The festival will also show the new documentary film “Generation Terror” from co-directors Phillip Escott and Sarah Appleton about the booming horror film industry of the 1990s and early 2000s and the way films like “Scream,” “The Blair Witch Project” and “Saw” forever changed the genre. If you don't happen to be in Brooklyn but still want to get involved, the festival runs its own streaming service, which, fittingly, is ” Night Stream.

Speaking of new scary movies, for my money one of the best things to do this season is to watch French director Coralie Fargeat's film “The Substance” while it's still playing on the big screen. In the thriller, Demi Moore plays famous fitness guru 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 desperate, helpless, and angry until she learns of a mysterious, neon green liquid available on the black market (the titular “substance”) that promises to restore her youth and allow her to become a “better version” of herself to create yourself. In gory practice, this means Moore's spine splits open after just one injection – a sticky, creepy sequence that's hilariously funny, if nauseating to watch – and a shiny, taut new body (Margaret Qualley, looking radiant) slides out. The way the substance works is that Elisabeth and her youthful avatar named Sue are supposed to swap places every week, but as Sue begins to enjoy the benefits of her naughty assets, she begins to steal more and more of her older creator's time. leading to disastrous and hideous results.

The film has one of the most bombastic and surprising endings I've seen in years, one that's as unexpectedly touching as it is terrifying and hilarious. Moore delivers perhaps her best performance yet, a comeuppance that seems all the more poetic given her intense personal struggles with aging and body image, which she wrote about in her 2019 memoir: “From the inside out.” The film allows Moore to be funny, impressive and genuinely brave – going to ugly places that few beautiful women dare to go. I was a little nervous at the beginning of the film because I'm squeamish about needles and nosebleeds, but in the end it was an absolute blast. So go ahead, leave your house and see something that scares you. Be brave.