Entertainment / 7 Great Hallowe’en Movies You Might Be Too Afraid To Watch!

7 Great Hallowe’en Movies You Might Be Too Afraid To Watch!

Entertainment Oct 31, 2016

by Matthew Currie

Break out of the Freddy and Jason rut and get yourself truly frightened with our list of Hallowe’en movies that you may never have heard of (and may be too terrified to finish).

The spooky season is upon us, and no doubt you’re on the lookout for some appropriately eerie home entertainment to keep you jumping at shadows and clutching the covers. Here are some prime candidates that’ve come out in the past year, from slow-burning exercises in dread to all-out blood-and-guts splatterfests; some you’ve heard of, but most probably snuck under your radar. Hailing from the U.S. to India to Germany to South Korea, it’s a veritable world tour of terror.

1. Phobia (Eros International)

^{Mehak (Radhika Apte) battles inner (and possibly outer) demons in Phobia.

Photo Credit: Eros International}

Based on the paltry box-office take, odds are you missed this Indian psychological thriller when it debuted in theatres last spring. Those who did check it out were, by most accounts, treated to a tense, intriguing tale of terror, anchored by Radhika Apte’s bravura turn as Mehak, a vibrant young artist who’s felled by a case of agoraphobia following a life-changing trauma; moving into a new apartment, she uncovers a diary belonging to the former tenant, a woman who vanished without a trace. Soon, she comes to believe she’s not alone in her new home. But is it a ghost that’s haunting her, or is there something more complex at work?

2. The Neighbor (Anchor Bay Entertainment)

^{Rob (Josh Stewart) stumbles upon a chamber of horrors in his sleepy Southern town.

Photo Credit: Anchor Bay}

Director Marcus Dunston reunites with Josh Stewart, his leading man in gory cult faves The Collector and The Collection, for this tale of an army vet named John who arrives at his small-town Mississippi home one day to find his girlfriend Rosie (Alex Essoe) missing. Signs point to his neighbour Troy (standup comic Bill Engvall, of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour); but when he sneaks into the man’s house, he finds that Rosie’s disappearance is just the tip of a very grisly iceberg.

3. Mommy (Anchor Bay Entertainment)

^{Mommy (Susanne Wuest) isn’t feeling like herself today.

Photo Credit: Anchor Bay/yahoo.com}

A unique exercise in slow-building dread, this German shocker centres on a pair of twin boys (Lukas and Elias Schwarz) who realize there’s something wrong with their mother (Susanne Wuest); ever since she came home from the hospital, her face completely wrapped in gauze, she’s been acting distant, and increasingly strange. Isolated at their house in the country, with no one to lean on but each other, it soon becomes clear that, whoever is underneath those bandages, it isn’t the woman they loved.

4. Beyond the Walls (Shudder)

^{Lisa (Veerle Baetens) discovers a grave new world Beyond the Walls.

Photo Credit: Shudder}

Horror aficionados can gorge themselves on a veritable buffet of shocks, scares and gore with Shudder, a new subscription streaming service from AMC. You’ll find genre classics aplenty in its library, along with exclusive titles like this creepy, lavishly shot three-part French miniseries.

It centres on Lisa (Veerle Baetens), a speech therapist who inherits a mansion from a dead man she’s never met. While exploring its dark and winding hallways, she stumbles into another realm, where ghosts and creatures beyond imagination seek to trap her in a labyrinth of her own shadowy past.

5. Tales of Halloween (Anchor Bay Entertainment)

^{The ghouls come out on Halloween night, to alternately spooky and silly results.

Photo Credit: Anchor Bay/avclub.com}

Anthology films that rope together multiple directors have traditionally proven difficult to pull off; inevitably, it’s going to be a bit of a mixed bag. And while that’s certainly true to some extent here, this particular Hallowe’en bag has more than enough treats to off-set the occasional apple.

Boasting talent like Neil Marshall (The Descent, Game of Thrones), Lucky McKee (All Cheerleaders Must Die) and Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw 2, 3 & 4) behind the camera, the tales in Tales are equal parts chuckles and scares. All set in one suburban American town on All Hallow’s Eve, stories range from a cop on the trail of a man-eating pumpkin to a man who learns his wife is actually a child-eating witch to a Jason Voorhies-like slasher being terrorized by a trick-or-treating alien.

6. 1920: London (Reliance Entertainment)

^{An ex-con (Sharman Joshi) battles a demonic fiend in 1920: London.

Photo Credit:}^{Reliance Entertainment/indianexpress.com}

The third entry in director Vikram Bhatt’s romantic horror franchise finds a Rajasthan princess (Meera Chopra) battling black magic after her husband (Vishal Karwal) is infected with a mysterious evil that systemically transforms his body and twists his soul. Desperate to find a cure, she must turn to her ex-lover (Sharman Joshi), a man she betrayed and sent to prison years ago, but who now stands as her only hope.

7. The Wailing (WellGo USA)

^{Detective Jong-Goo (Kwak Do-Wan) races to save his daughter and his village from an epidemic of bloodlust.

Photo Credit: WellGo USA/avclub.com}

One of the most acclaimed cinematic achievements of the year, this atmospheric Korean shocker kicks off when a stranger arrives in a sleepy rural community; not long after, the residents start slaughtering each other for no apparent reason. It’s a tough crime wave for Detective Jong-Goo (Kwak Do-Wan) to wrap his head around, but when his own daughter becomes afflicted with whatever madness is enveloping the village, he reaches out to a local shaman for help in unravelling the mystery.

^{Main Image Photo Credit: Anchor Bay/rogerebert.com}

Matthew Currie

Author

A long-standing entertainment journalist, Currie is a graduate of the Professional Writing program at Toronto’s York University. He has spent the past number of years working as a freelancer for ANOKHI and for diverse publications such as Sharp, TV Week, CAA’s Westworld and BC Business. Currie ...

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7 Great Hallowe’en Movies You Might Be Too Afraid To Watch!

by Matthew Currie

Matthew Currie

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