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I love being scared, I love dressing up in costume, and I love taking candy from strangers (and babies), so it stands to reason that I also love Halloween.
It’s one of my life’s great disappointments (break out the violins) that most of the adults in my life do not share my affection for this holiday — truly one of the best, what with its unlimited candy and extremely limited fraught family dinners.
While the opportunity to gorge on Rockets and mini-Mars bars and even those weird molasses-flavoured, filling-remover toffees was obviously a highlight for me (a truly candy-deprived child, yet ANOTHER in my list of sufferings), the frisson of fear that came with wandering the dark streets filled with goblins and imps and skeletons and Greatest American Heros (my Grade 3 costume) was a also a delicious treat.
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No apples, or we’ll TP your house: Jill (left) and her sister Claire circa 1977. (Jill Wilson / Winnipeg Free Press)
I’m not a slasher fan, but I enjoy most horror flicks (even though I often watch them through the holes of an afghan) for the way they deliver that queasy fight-or-flight jolt of dopamine from the safety of a sofa or a movie seat.
The Shining is probably the most-named No. 1 on scary-movie lists (while also being the source of what might be my favourite Simpsons’ spoof moment), producing indelible chills and psychological terror without cheap jump-scares. Why are British children so unsettling?
I saw the mockumentary Paranormal Activity at a midnight showing in an Ann Arbor, Mich., theatre filled with college kids; I enthusiastically glommed onto the ginned-up expectation of terror — the film’s grassroots campaign hinged on the fact people had reportedly been fainting and freaking out at screenings. It wasn’t until I got home and couldn’t sleep because there was an attic crawl-space door in my eyeline (that’s where the evil spirit lives!) that I realized how much it had affected me.
More recently, Alex Garland’s Men delivered some of the most harrowing onscreen moments I can remember, mostly because the unnatural goings-on are just heightened, frightened reality. It stars Jessie Buckley as Harper, a grieving woman who rents a house in the English countryside. Every man/boy in the village is played by the same actor, Rory Kinnear (so creepy!), and the film plays with all the ways men prey on women or make them feel unsafe. It escalates into an over-the-top conclusion, but a scene where Harper is walking alone through a tunnel and a lone man suddenly starts running toward her will make the blood of any woman who’s walked with her keys preventatively spiked out in her hand run cold.
As for novels, Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon — the book before Silence of the Lambs — literally made the hair on my arms stand up; the man really gets into the headspace of killer Francis Dolarhyde. (Watch Michael Mann’s 1986 adaptation, Manhunter, instead of Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon. Brian Cox is a low-key Hannibal Lecktor [sic] whose madness is all in his eyes, and Tom Noonan — always an interesting actor — gives a towering performance as the pitiable, monstrous Dolarhyde, known as the Tooth Fairy for his treatment of his victims.)
What are your favourite things that go bump in the night? Email me your recommendations for Halloween viewing/reading/experiencing and I’ll put together a newsletter of spooky suggestions for the season.
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