The Pamphleteer’s Halloween Horror Movie Round-Up
Twenty years ago, Halloween was the territory of exhausted parents taking trick-or-treaters around the neighborhood and hip urbanites going on pub crawls in revealing attire. But this year, the days surrounding Samhain have become a bona fide $12.2 billion year seasonal juggernaut more lucrative for event planners than the summer wedding blitz and Christmas.
There may be no better symbol of our cathartic escape from the realities of economic and cultural devolution than the ever-expanding footprint of Spirit Halloweens in our hollowed-out Flyover State strip malls. Yet, the public appetite for horror movies that have turned this historically sluggish box-office period into fertile terrain for high-profile releases deserves equal attention because no movie genre better reflects the cultural anxieties du jour.
Is our desire for the Terrifier franchise’s carnage tapping into similar currents that made the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre an interrogation of Vietnam’s effects on the homefront? Is Smile 2 a continuation of horror’s recent religious turn that we discussed earlier this year or just a limp successor to 2024’s instant classics like Longlegs and MaXXXine? For those tired of Jack Skellington and Rocky Horror rep programming, we rank the five horror releases playing in theaters this long Halloween Weekend.
5) Terrifier 3
Not since Jigsaw has a horror villain invaded the pop-culture consciousness more thoroughly than Art the Clown. A silent, demonic presence who defies all logic as he leaves a trail of carnage throughout Anytown, USA’s Miles County, Art is this decade’s definitive boogeyman.
Writer/director Damien Leone has benefitted from the goriest Cinderella story in Hollywood history as Art’s extended scenes of torture and mutilation have captured the type of buzz that turned the $2 million Terrifer 3 into the #1 movie in America earlier this month and allowed it to amass $55 million at the global box office in less than three weeks. However, with apologies to The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway, it is Art The Clown’s runaway success—not Taylor Swift’s—that is most indicative of America’s societal decline.
David Howard Thornton’s brilliant pantomime performance as Art owes a serious debt to Keaton and Chaplin, but the Terrifier franchise shows little interest in the social critique of its comedic predecessors or the allegorical power of movies like Texas Chainsaw or Halloween. Leone clearly thinks the clash between Art and final girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) is a mythological battle between good and evil. But, it’s just lazy, contradictory worldbuilding that’s more concerned with shoehorning increasingly gruesome deaths into scenes of overt Christian symbolism not out of place in a lowest-common-denominator evangelical flick.
Leone opts to set Terrifer 3 at Christmas, not for any substantial thematic purpose, but so the movie can revel in abject imagery like a tree decked with a Hallmarkish dad’s intestines and topped with his head or a dude bro college roommate (played with gusto by Nashville’s own Mason Mecartea) getting a chainsaw to the scrotum after watching Art eviscerate his girlfriend when the clown interrupts a winter break dorm shower quickie.
Still, it’s not Leone’s violence that’s most offensive, but his hamfisted attempts to inoculate himself against criticism. A throwaway pandering flashback in which a young Sienna asks her now-deceased comic-artist dad why girls can’t be superheroes too has all the depth of an Upworthy-light meme that sparks a well-deserved shitpost frenzy.
Three movies into a franchise that should have stayed buried deep in our streaming menus, Leone sets himself up as the type of filmmaker who rips off the most infamous passage from American Psycho for his penultimate money shot, demonstrates he has no understanding of the novel, and makes clear he thinks his target demo is too stupid to notice. Terrifier 3 doesn’t implicate its audience or comment on violence; it’s a simple and cynical “gorno” cash grab that exploits humanity's worst impulses for the sole purpose of lining its creator's pockets.
4) Smile 2
Few saw the $100+ million success of Parker Finn’s Smile coming in 2022, but the tale of a demonic parasite that infects its hosts and forces them to commit suicide in front of its next victim proved audiences were finally ready to abandon their couches and get back to the theater for something other than superhero fare. That film’s obligatory follow-up finds a drug-addled pop star (Naomi Scott) hoping to revive her career after a traumatic car accident next in line to encounter the grin-inducing entity.
Finn’s film is an aesthetic masterclass with every shot perfectly choreographed and riddled with dread. Thanks to Scott’s fully committed performance, Smile 2 also doubles nicely as a study of the perils of celebrity.
Unfortunately, though Finn has opted for some thematically dense territory, he remains mired in a world of cool shots and narrative mindfucks that come off as first-year film student tributes to Christopher Nolan or M. Night Shyamalan.
Smile 2 could have been a shrewd interrogation of audiences’ obsession with violence as entertainment and its moral implications. Instead, Finn wants the world of dread only a demon can muster while skirting even the slightest discussion of faith. It’s a fatal flaw that keeps Smile 2 focused on style rather than the spiritual weight that made its predecessors like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist some of the 20th Century’s greatest works of art.
3. Venom: The Last Dance
Though not technically a horror series, Marvel’s tale of an alien symbiote that bonds with Tom Hardy’s muckraking journalist, Eddie Brock, has become a consistent staple of the October box office thanks to its Gothic imagery and the anti-hero’s gooey black attire. In this epic conclusion, Brock and Venom find themselves on the run from the police, a special forces unit housed at Area-51, and Knull (Andy Serkis), the Thanos-like King in Black, whose release from an intergalactic prison hinges on acquiring Venom’s DNA.
In taking the reins of the franchise after writing the two previous installments, Kelly Marcel gives Hardy ample time to shine in his dual roles, which critics have regrettably long overlooked despite The Bikeriders and The Dark Knight Rises star turning in some of his best work. Though its relationship to a larger cinematic franchise prevents it from being fully realized, The Last Dance is an absolute blast, a film equal parts spooky and hilarious that still manages to offer some cogent commentary on immigration and the worst excesses of the military-industrial complex.
2) Speak No Evil
Horror factory Blumhouse gets back to its gritty roots with this remake of the 2022 Danish thriller that struck terror into the hearts of thirty-somethings everywhere who are terrified of making new friends. When Ben and Louise Dalton (Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis) meet a set of hip young parents (James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi) on an Italian vacation, they think they’ve found their people. But on a weekend jaunt to their new friends’ country house, the Daltons slowly realize they may well be in the crosshairs of a pair of serial killers who just want to build the perfect nuclear family.
Director James Watkins (The Woman in Black) shakes off the remake baggage thanks to his keen insights into the limits of the white liberal middle class, while McAvoy exudes a sense of alpha menace that shows he could go toe-to-toe with the Goslings and Drivers. Meticulously paced and tense as all hell, it’s an unofficial tribute to Straw Dogs made for the Jordan Peterson Era.
1) The Substance
The most disgusting and unsettling scene of 2024 comes not from Art the Clown’s sociopathic frat-boy antics, but Dennis Quaid sucking down a plate of shrimp in a trendy L.A. bistro fifteen minutes into French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s campy body horror satire that won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Deceptively simplistic, the film follows Oscar-winner turned daytime workout host Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) as her ouster from Hollywood due to her age leaves her with little choice beyond trying the titular black-market drug that promises eternal youth. Birthed from her back in a scene as nauseating as it is gut-bustingly funny, Sparkle 2.0 takes the name Sue (Margaret Qualley) and quickly morphs from a nobody into the toast of Hollywood as she goes full Dorian Gray on her progenitor.
The Substance works because Fargeat never shies away from boundary pushing even when easy feminist platitudes would have put her in critics’ good graces. The film is Barbie’s dark half, a parable that can’t be pinned down largely because its surreal world moves tired debates into entirely new territory. In an increasingly risk-averse Hollywood of intimacy coordinators and Bechdel Test dry runs, Fargeat and her actors are unafraid to both celebrate and disintegrate the nude female body in a film so complex it calls out the male gaze for the trite and outmoded concept it is. The Substance may have grossed less in a month than Smile 2 or Venom did on a Friday, but it’s destined to join the ranks of essential Halloween viewing in addition to appearing on an avalanche of best-of lists in the coming weeks.
All films are now playing in theaters. Speak No Evil is now available for digital rental and purchase. The Substance premieres on Mubi today.