Anbefalingsliste - Matei N. Balan

The All Hallows’ Eve has traditionally been the night when the dead walk among the living. So what better theme for a list of recommendations than this? No, we’re not talking about zombie or vampire movies, but about those scary stories that blur the line between our world and theirs. Here you have everything from Lovecraft style cosmic horrors, demonic possessions that there’s nothing you can do about and real life creepy stories that will put some of the fictional ones on this list to shame.

Bildetekst. Opphavsrett: New Line Cinema / IMDb

In The Mouth of Madness (1994)

The problem with a lot of horror movies is that they lie to you. Evil can’t really be bested or defeated. That’s why some of the scariest movies out there leave you wondering if the protagonists’ efforts had really been for nothing. Or that’s at least what you might start asking yourself while watching John’s Carpenter 1994 horror masterpiece, In The Mouth Of Madness.

In this jewel of darkness that the 90s have given bestowed us with we follow John Trent (Sam Neil), an insurance investigator who must look into the disappearance of a successful horror writer. With an atmosphere reminiscent of Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, the movie quickly spirals down in a type of horror that will scare you to shreds by keeping hidden more than it shows and by giving you a glimpse into the true power of evil, against which insurance investigators certainly have no power against. In the Mouth of Madness represents the third installment in what Carpenter has called his “Apocalypse Trilogy”, preceded by The Thing (1982) and succeeded by Prince of Darkness (1987), both of which you should completely let your guard down while watching them, as they aren’t scary in the slightest.

Bildetekst. Opphavsrett: Web Crawlers / Earios

Web Crawlers (Spotify, Apple podcasts)

Sure, movies are scary. But have you tried real life stories? At least that’s what Ali Segel and Melissa Stetten, both of them comedians, promise to scare you with in their podcast. They discuss everything from unsolved mysteries to obscure and out-of-your-mind-creepy cults, paranormal happenings and other stuff that people can only explain by saying it must have been the wind, a creaky board in the floor, or a meteorological balloon.

In one particular episode, to give just one example, Segel and Stetten describe what one Massachusetts family went through in the 80s after they became convinced their house has been occupied by a demonic presence. As it turns out, it was just someone living in their walls.

Bildetekst. Opphavsrett: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Bron Creative & Monkeypaw Productions / IMDb

Candyman now and then (1992, 2021)

Critics have complained that the Candyman (2021) sequel confuses the fans of the 1992 Candyman as they have the same name. This is also an indication of how scary these two movies are taken together. If not for creepiness of its main monster, a man with a hook for a hand who allegedly passes to children candy with razor blades hidden in them, then for the horror of its side monster: racism.

In the 1992 movie we follow a skeptic grad student who writes a dissertation on collective stories and myth when she stumbles on the the Boogieman of Cabrini Green - a known ghetto in the Chicago area. While conducting research, our protagonist finds out that some communities has stronger demons to battle. Then, with the recent 2021 sequel, we follow one of the characters in the first movie (can’t tell you which without spoiling it) as they, in turn, start poking at the urban myth of Candyman, only to find out that…

Dead if true: Jezebel’s 2021 Scary Stories Contest (jezebel.com)

Every year before Halloween, Jezebel encourages their readers to leave their scariest non-fiction stories in the comments section. Now, the non-fiction rule seems to be important here, but as Jezebel has no way of enforcing it you’ll be left to your own confused devices to judge what might be true or not.

Last year for example, someone told a story about a family that moved into their dream farm house. The first fall they were there, while the children were out playing in the woods, they found a big plastic bucket with the following items in it: “duct tape, zip ties, safety goggles (like you’d wear if using a saw or in a chemistry lab), a gun scope, a large hunting knife, a dark-haired wig and a bundle of something soft wrapped in black plastic bags.”. Charming, right? Jezebel handpicks the creepiest stories and publishes the on the week before Halloween, on its website. So stay vigilant.

Opphavsrett: Fox International Production Korea / Anatomy of a scream

The Wailing (2016)

In this South Korean horror masterpiece we are challenged to make sense of what appears to be a demonic possession in a small Korean village. The director, Na Hong-Jin, leads us on different courses of action and encourages us to spill out everything we think we know of such events, and consider to what use would this knowledge be if such a thing would come to pass.

What might at first feel like a confusing story, which never quite allows you to be satisfied with an answer quickly turns into a series of uncomfortable revelations. Just like with In The Mouth of Madness, the viewer is left wondering if there really would be a solution to fighting demonic and other worldly evils. That might a question you’ll never truly want to answer.

I'm a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service (Reddit, 2015)

It really isn’t Halloween without the classics, and I’m not only talking about movies. The far and wide and deranged Internet community has managed to produce some of its own horror masterpieces in the past ten years.

Perhaps one of the most gripping ones (no, it’s not going to be Slender Man) is the series of creepy pastas written by an anonymous (at the time) Redditor. The stories are a series of recollections by one unidentified Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service who encounters everything on the job from drunk and lost hikers, to sets of stairs that appear out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, and, you’ve guessed it, lead to nowhere in particular. That, plus kids who’ve been invited for a walk by the man with a fuzzy face. Read up and enjoy. But if you’re into the great outdoors and love going camping for days, out in the wilderness, I really can’t guarantee you’ll be comfortable with doing that anytime soon.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

This movie is a milestone for horror cinema. It might not be credited with being the first movie to use the found footage gimmick, but it is certainly the one that put it on the map and truly stablished it as its own horror genre. All the other found footage movies that followed have followed in the footsteps of the Blair Witch.

The story follows a crew of film students who set out to film a documentary in the heavy forested are of Maryland. The subject of the documentary is a local legend known as the Blair Witch. The crew disappears off the face of the earth while filming, but their equipment and footage is recovered a year later. Same as with the last one; this movie might dilute for a while your courage to go out and camp into the woods, overnight.

The Watcher (thecut.com)

You know what’s scary and creepy, and it won’t let you sleep at night? Knowing that you have neighbor with so much time on their hands and such a sick mind that he will go the extra mile torment your family. I mean, that’s what you’d hope, that it’s a neighbor sending creepy letters to your house and giving intimate details of what’s going on inside (stuff they couldn’t possibly know about). It has to be a neighbor, right?

Well, one family in Westfield still doesn’t know the answer to that question. This non-fiction story (this is not sarcasm, this stuff really happened and still happens to someone) was documented by The Cut magazine. The details are as follows. Shortly after they moved into the house, back in 2014, the Broaddus received a letter that contained this message “657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming. My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.”. What followed was a time and energy consuming effort to find out who might have send the first letter or the ones that followed.

Opphavsrett: Grim & Mild, Blumhouse Television & iHeart3DAudio / Apple Podcast

13 days of Halloween (Spotify, Apple podcasts)

This podcast is truly unique. It stays away from stuff that we might, more or less, find out about on Wikipedia and Reddit by ourselves. What it does instead is to create a truly unique auditory adventure.

You have thirteen episode to listen over the course of 13 days during which you will immerse yourself in some extremely chilling stories. There were 13 last year and there are going to be thirteen more this year.

The Empty Man (2020)

The Empty Man (2020) is without a doubt one of the most underrated movies of 2020. You can blame de pandemic, the studios for not promoting it almost at all, and you can blame yourself once you’ve found out about it and decided to not watch it. This movie, direct by David Prior, is perhaps one of the most original horrors to have come out of the genre in the past ten years.

Very much like the other fiction based stories on this list, The Empty Man takes a strange approach to the inexplicable and turns it into a monster with no real identity. The sheer horror of the movie is conveyed through how many different ways the evil at the center of the story is teased through. You have teenagers saying its name in the night three times, you have dangerous cults that venerate empty images, and you have strange summer camps where people are used as empty vessels for It. I mean, what can go wrong?

Ny uke, nye anbefalinger #42 - Halloween 2021