2015 was, compared to its immediate historical kin, not as good a year for horror films as usual. The last decade has actually experienced a wonderful deluge of horror films, especially from the indie world, and horror nuts the world over are celebrating the overwhelming amount of great new low-budget product from a team of interesting new filmmakers. 2015, however, might have been a “breather” year. Many horror films were released (horror never experiences a low ebb), but there were slightly fewer than usual. What’s more, most of the mainstream horror films (Insidious: Chapter 3, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, Sinister 2, The Lazarus Effect, Crimson Peak) were either plain or just plain bad. At least we got to see M. Night Shyamalan get back on his feet with The Visit.
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But there were some very good, rather notable, and undeniably scary horror films to come out in 2015. Indeed, one of the best films of the year is also one of the scariest. There were, of all the horror films released in calendar year, two that definitely vie for the title of Scariest of 2015: David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and The October Society’s Tales of Halloween. We shall now put them in a bottle together, shake it up, and watch them fight.
The Case for Tales of Halloween:
Epic Pictures
Tales of Halloween may be a film you didn’t get to see. It experienced a very, very limited release this October, and only the most stalwart of horror fans managed to catch it. Luckily, it’s proliferating online, and this wonderfully creative gem is ready for discovery. Tales of Halloween is a series of 10 short films, each made by a different director, many of them notable or well-known for horror movies. Amongst them were Lucky McKee (May), Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II), and Neil Marshall (The Descent).
Tales of Halloween, like all anthology films, banks on its variety. Each of the ten shorts is of a decidedly different tone, which means that even if you hate one film, you’ll rotate through to a new some soon enough. Something has to stick, right? Some of the shorts are fun, some of them are dark and twisted, some of them are quiet and suspenseful, some of them are even downright silly. But unlike most anthology films, which tend to have at least one or two outright stinkers in the lot, Tales of Halloween is surprisingly consistent. There are, of course, some segments that are better than others (it’s the nature of the beast), but none of them stoop into outright awfulness or even mediocrity; these are all pretty good.
But more importantly, the overall product is held together by that most elusive – not to mention joyous – feeling: the spirit of Halloween. It’s rare that a movie can capture the feeling of the Halloween season so well; previous successes are only perhaps Trick ‘r Treat and John Carpenter’s Halloween. There is a raucous, violent happiness that comes from loving Halloween, and all the filmmakers in the aptly named October Society understand that. So they’re making scary movies, but they’re also extending a hand to all of the lifelong trick-or-treaters in the world. So when you see a young boy slitting open his parents to retrieve his stolen Halloween candy, you’re not only scared and repulsed, you’re in good company.
The Case for It Follows:
Dimension Films
While a comforting form of communal horror is a rare and wonderful thing, it has to be acknowledged that fear – real fear – is only achieved by the greatest of horror movies. A good horror movie will scare you. A great horror movie will be about fear as an intellectual and philosophical concept. A great horror movie will tap into something universal in the human psyche, and uncover what makes us fearful to begin with. It won’t just make you jump or squirm. It will shake you to the bones.
And in that regard, It Follows is actually one of the better films of the year. It Follows is about a ghost that is transmitted from person to person sexually. The ghost takes the form of a person – any person – and does nothing more than slowly walk toward their afflicted host. If the ghost ever catches up to you, you die. The only way to get rid of it is to sleep with someone else and pass it on. But if they die, you’re back in the ghost’s sights. This is not only a novel concept, but it’s also kind of brilliant; it’s surprising that a film about a sexually transmitted haunting hasn’t caught on before.
That sexually transmitted haunting is, on a visceral level, plenty scary. The filmmakers managed to turn still shots of people slowly walking into the fuel of nightmares. But more than that, we can see the concepts at work: The ghost can easily stand for our fears of sexually transmitted diseases, and how we can contract illness and death from a casual sexual encounter. Or, perhaps more chillingly, the ghost represents a strange, lingering puritanical guilt about the sex act that seems to permeate human consciousness. We may have sexual agency in the modern world, but the shadow of disease and all the weird social stigmas we attach to our own sexual histories may be more dangerous than we’d like to acknowledge.
The Winner: It Follows
Dimension Films
Tales of Halloween is wonderful, and I don’t want to tell anyone not to see it. But its deepest thrills come more from a shared crucible of shared horror love than they do from genuine fear. Sure, many of the segments within the film are terrifying and gory and gut-churning, but as a whole, the film is great because it understands something profound and important about being a horror fan, and an enthusiast of Halloween. It’s a bigger, friendlier mixture with fear merely folded into the batter.
It Follows, by contrast, is a batter made entirely of fear. It’s interested in dread and psychological terror. It’s not hugging a friend, but squeezing a rarely-touched part of the brain. It’s great low-budget filmmaking, exploited to its full effect.
Top Image: Dimension Films / Epic Pictures
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. He also contributes to Legion of Leia, and Blumhouse. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
