I've Found A Way To Get That Horror Movie Fix Without The Nightmare Fuel
Every year, when the weather turns cold and Home Depot's 12-foot Halloween skeleton resumes its realm of horror, the moment I meet my first spider of the season, I get a weird urge to watch a horror movie. The only problem is that I'm a scared cat.
A small snippet from my personal Venn diagram of horror-scary-but-not-too-scary movies. Hocus Pocus 2 isn't scary enough, but Halloween Ends is a cortisol surge that I don't need in my life. Ghostbusters . an insult to my aesthetic needs. Smile more like a screaming face with fear. And events . The name speaks for itself.
I said it's hard to get rid of that terrible seasonal itch when your skin is as thin as a cut shower web, as it really was. This seems contradictory. do you watch horror movies or not? But when everyone on Twitter is suffering from Midsomer-induced insomnia , or when a scientific study reveals the scariest movie of all time , how can I not want to know more?
Whatever the fear that attracts and repels ordinary people, I have it too. I don't know why "should" Scream to find out who the killer is. I think it's just a natural human drive, a tug of war between seeing and not seeing. We all, to one degree or another, enjoy the delightful sensations of the gloomy. I only need it in small doses.
Put it in the rubric "What I'm doing isn't really weird" (see also: Looking for Hot Adam Driver ). Turns out I'm not the only one who watches horror movies in a safe way. My favorite medium for a long time has been Wikipedia's plot summary, but it's just a gateway to a world of spooky-looking, splayed fingers. Scary cat friends, read on for all the other ways you can replace (or prepare) for watching horror movies this Halloween.
Plot summary full of spoilers
I have been reading the Wikipedia page on horror films for many years. Unlike movie reviews, Wikipedia will guide you through every story, twist and spoiler with a welcome clinical detachment that cuts through all the creepy vibes. I don't need to know if the movie is good , I just need to know what was so bad about Sinister .
For example, those who have seen Midsomer will understand the huge gap between watching and reading a play; wiki version. You can then click to find out what Blood Eagle is, and the mere thought of seeing it on screen will have enough spooky vibes to keep you going next year.
Another good option is Movie Spoilers, which contains spoiler-filled and well-researched reviews of American Beauty in Zoomodel.
Podcasts and YouTube Reviews
On YouTube and wherever you find your podcasts, there is a thriving industry of spoiler-filled movie retellings, from the genre-independent summary of All Spoilers to the horror-loving Dead Meat and Found Flicks. There are also collections made specifically for scared cats; I recommend the Scary, Unwatched and Destroyed podcasts, both as a conversation with a friend that is cinematically fearless but with more production value.
Personalized activation alerts
Being thin-skinned is only part of the problem with horror films. I also have a problem with extreme melodrama or danger (there's a difference between crying over a sad movie and crying because your sanity suffers even more from the darkness of a fictional character's life). "Manchester by the Sea " did me good. And you can bet I'm already snoring on the Son's wiki page.
Is the dog dying there? As for Smart Preset, the free app lets you choose a set of triggers and alerts for every possible movie. You can search the database for everything from "cannibals are present" to "someone spat or spat" and of course, if any furry friends have been harmed.
In the same vein, Who's the Jump is a comprehensive flight catalog with accurate timestamps so you can plan accordingly if you choose to watch. Scary Counter provides an additional public service by ranking films on a separate scale as creepy, scary, and disturbing, as well as tagging them with general triggers such as "torture" and "demonic possession."
Parent Guide
Sometimes you just have to admit that you have a childish mindset. And if, like me, you don't really like kids, maybe you should get into parenting. For example, IMDb has built-in parental guidelines that go beyond the MPA classification to distinguish between acceptable material such as "profanity" and the more misogynistic "violence and disgust". Here I found a dire warning from the 2004 horror movie Saw: “One person shoots another (survives).
Alternative sources of parental comfort for the caring parent include Kids in Mind, which warns about separation and the giant spider in Hocus Pocus 2 , and a wide range of kid-friendly (and not-so) media, including Common Sense Media. books and podcasts. , not only for things like "violence and horror" with age recommendations and ratings, but also for excessive consumerism. (On the subject: Common Sense Media is also a great place to find cool stuff like thoughtful books about LGBTQ+ youth and great movies with Puerto Rican characters and protagonists.)
Just watch this damn movie...
I don't know who needs to hear this, but horror movies are a lot less scary when you watch them on a Sunday morning with the blinds open and the lights on. There's also the "look ahead to know what's coming" trick if you can only deal with obsessive vibrations after they've gone.
Are You Ready: Watch the best horror movies on Netflix , Prime Video and HBO Max . For the bravest of me, also check out our list of the best horror movie streaming services . And of course, you can always watch a non-scary Halloween movie and be done with it. Before you know it, it's going to be the Hallmark Christmas movie season .
