HORROR GALORE: Spooky season means equally spooky movies

If you’re looking to watch some spooky films this season, but don’t know where to start, then here’s four great movie suggestions to help start your binge watching.

“The Nightmare Before Christmas.” 

An old film from 1993 that almost everybody’s heard of, this is a sweet film for families to watch together with its PG-13 rating. It has an audience rating of 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and its run time is 76 minutes, giving you a good non-scary way to spend the evening for viewers who don’t want to be terrified out of their socks. 

If you aren’t aware of what this film is about, here’s the movie’s description, “Despite having recently presided over a very successful Halloween, Jack Skellington, aka the Pumpkin King, is bored with his job and feels that life in Halloweenland lacks meaning. Than he stumbles upon Christmas town and promptly decides to make Yuletide his own.” 

Critics have given praise for this stop motion film, such as, “Part avant-garde art film, part amusing but morbid fairy tale, it is a delightfully ghoulish holiday musical that displays more inventiveness in its brief 75 minutes than some studios can manage in an entire year” (Kenneth Turan) and, “This full-length animated movie was shot in stop motion, with all the febrile, twittery fascination that the medium exerts; it has a magic-toy shop feeling, with unexpected objects stuttering into life.” (Anthony Lane)

The next movie on the list is another friendly well known film named “Hocus Pocus.” “Hocus Pocus’” plot is, “The people of Salem capture and execute three witches for practicing witchcraft. Before their deaths, they vow to return to Salem 300 years on Halloween to exact their revenger. Three hundred years later, a skeptical, newly transplanted Californian, Max, explored the ruins of the legendary witches’ house and asks the witches to manifest themselves. Disregarding the warnings of his sister and girlfriend, Max lights the Candle of Black Flame. With that, the witches reappear to wreak havoc on the town. The kids take off with the witches spellbook. The sorceresses, who will die by the morning light if they don’t recite the incantation for immortality, have to get the books by whatever means they can.” 

This film came out in 1993, just like “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” and it has a nice PG-13 rating, and its audience scoring is 70 percent. From the words of critics, this film is, “Silly but irresistible,” (Carrie Rickey) and that, “Hocus Pocus remains a delightful family comedy, spooky but never scary as it romps its merry way through the graveyard.” (Jeff Shannon). Its run time is 96 minutes.

Continuing down the list, the next suggestion is a movie that has actually just come out. Halloween (2018), which stars Michael Myers from the old classics, has a 97 percent want to see rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is rated R and has already achieved great comments from all whos been able to view it. 

“It’s smart, scary, well-timed, immensely entertaining and one of the best times you’ll have at the movie theater in 2018,” said Eric Eisenberg, who’s a critic who’s had the honor of seeing this new film before any of us. 

If you’d like a description for this movie, it’s about Jamie Lee Curtis returning to her iconic role as Laurie Strode, who comes to her final confrontation with Michael Myers, the masked figure who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree on Halloween night four decades ago. It’s 104 minutes long and will be out by the time this article is released, so if you’d like to see it, get over to the local theaters.

The last movie on this list is another highly liked film, which shows from its 83 percent audience rating, called “A Quiet Place.” 

In “A Quiet Place,” a family of four must navigate their lives in silence after mysterious creatures that hunt by sound threaten their survival. If they hear you, they hunt you. 

This move is 91 minutes long, is rated PG-13, came out this year (2018) and has ratings such as, “A Quiet Place is a superb exercise in understated terror that puts to shame ‘horror’ films that rely on jump scares and cheap theatrics.”

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