Favorite Spooky Season Movies | Group Chat

Featuring Pazuzu, Jordan Peele, and COVID-Era Cult Classics

Note: From time to time, Cinemantic’s four main contributors — Tyler MacQueen, Graham Piro, Caleb Boyer, and Daniel Mitchell — will jump on a call to chat about anything and everything movie-related. This conversation, on the topic of “Favorite Horror Movies,” was recorded on October 9th and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

---

GRAHAM: My favorite horror movie is a movie that came out in 2020 called The Empty Man. It was dumped onto streaming during the pandemic and had the ignoble distinction of being the last movie released by 20th Century Fox before Disney acquired it. It was filmed in 2017, I think, and Fox had no idea what to do with it because it is incredibly weird.

It’s hard to summarize, but it’s about a cult that worships this entity called “The Empty Man,” and they need a vessel for the entity to come into the world. That’s basically it, but it is incredibly unnerving. There’s a whole 20-minute prologue that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie until the very end. It’s atmospheric and a very slow burn but, at the same time, a really interesting exploration of the cult classic horror movies of the past.

Not only that, but The Empty Man constructs a plot twist at the end that is a great subversion of the plots of so many horror movies. Most modern horror flicks rely on what’s called the “trauma plot,” where things can’t be scary on their own. There has to be something behind the scariness; there has to be a trauma in the character’s past that the horror is a metaphor for. And, without giving too much away, the movie pulls off a twist that subverts that expectation.

So it works on multiple levels: it’s an incredibly creepy movie that doesn’t rely on jumpscares, has disturbing imagery, and a pretty remarkable reflection and commentary on modern horror.

TYLER: How was it regarded when it first came out? Because quite frankly, I’ve never heard of this movie.

GRAHAM: It was put into theaters in September 2020, so no one saw it. And it got decent enough reviews, but it’s garnered a cult following since it was put onto streaming. A lot of horror movie sites and writers have noticed it, written about it, and advocated for it.

TYLER: So it’s gonna be the Blade Runner of horror movies?

GRAHAM: Yeah, Disney really did this movie dirty.

DANIEL: Admittedly, horror is not my genre of choice. However, I think the one that’s probably been on my mind the most has been Get Out. It’s wild to think that this was Jordan Peele’s debut feature, with just how amazing it is. He clearly has such a deep understanding of the genre.

Given the social commentary aspect of the movie, the layers of the story that are unpeeled really leave you unsettled—and it’s a movie that definitely deserves several rewatches. You pick something new up on every watch that seems innocuous initially but really helps further the story and the ideas.

The part I’m thinking of first is at the beginning of the movie when Chris and Allison Williams are pulled over. It seems completely irrelevant until you realize that William’s character can’t have him going to jail because her family needs him to carry out their evil deeds. Even a small throwaway scene is crucial to the plot, and that’s not something you really pick up the first time.

It’s not a horror movie, per se. It's more like a psychological horror, and I like that type of horror the most if I have to watch one.

TYLER: Should Get Out have won Best Picture? That was the year of Lady Bird, right?

DANIEL: Ummm…

GRAHAM: The Shape of Water won that year.

DANIEL: Dunkirk. Dunkirk should have won.

CALEB: This Substack is for Christopher Nolan fans only.

DANIEL: You could have had any one of seven great movies win, and I would have said “Movies are awesome.” Lady Bird, Dunkirk, Get Out, Phantom Thread, I mean, it was a great year.

But, you know, Get Out was nominated for four—Picture, Directing, Actor, and Original Screenplay and actually won for its script. The fact that a horror movie hit a nerve with the Academy really shows how great it is.

CALEB: Also, Graham, I really want to see The Empty Man now. I pulled up the trailer, and it looks awesome.

GRAHAM: So I will say that the trailer is not indicative of what the movie actually is. The trailer makes it look like a really generic slasher movie, but it’s not.

CALEB: Well, the trailer I watched shows people doing a ritual dance around a massive bonfire fire and that freaked me out!

I gotta say that for me, it’s Hereditary. That movie truly terrified me. I really did not watch horror movies until I met my wife, Emily. Before that, I had little exposure to the genre. I had watched some of the old black and white, Universal-era monster movies but nothing modern. Partially, the reason that I didn’t care for horror was because most of the ones that I had seen had too much reliance on jump scares.

In Hereditary, there are only eight jump scares. The rest of the movie is a masterclass in tension and atmosphere. It is unnerving in a sense I cannot really describe. I think it’s horrifyingly brilliant. I went to bed but could not fall asleep. I was so scared.

Maybe this added to the movie, but when Emily and I watched it, I lived with Tyler in a first-floor apartment next to a parking lot. It was dark when we watched it, and there is a scene where the family’s treehouse is lit with this intense, bright red light. We’re watching it, and it’s getting really tense. All of a sudden — the apartment windows are flooded with red light! I grabbed Emily’s arm and gasped… only to realize that it was a car backing up into a parking spot.

TYLER: So I’m in the same boat as Daniel, I really don’t care for horror movies most of the time. When thinking about my favorite, my first thought is usually The Shining, but, as I’ve said off group chat, I don’t really consider it a “horror” movie but more of a supernatural thriller. That leaves the king of all horror movies: The Exorcist.

Even though it’s a part of a genre that I don’t care for, it is probably one of my all-time favorite movies. It’s not treated like a horror movie but a family drama. The mother, helpless to care for her daughter, constantly turns to science, which cannot answer the questions about her daughter’s bizarre and disturbing behavior. In the end, she is practically forced to turn to the Catholic Church for help. It’s a movie that asks the question: Where does science end and faith begin, and what is the proper relationship between the two?

I can’t articulate it well, but there’s a great New York Times op-ed that was published this summer that does. You should check it out.

The late, great director William Freidkin always said that The Exorcist was about the mystery of faith. Amidst the turning heads, pea-soup vomit, levitating bodies, and grotesque dialogue, there’s a story that is both ancient and relatable. Much like many audience members, the film’s central characters wage an internal struggle between what they see and what they know. While validating the premise that Heaven and Hell are real forces in the world, the film’s ambiguous ending leaves many questions unanswered.

Coming out of this movie, we don’t know everything. And that’s okay. Because that’s what it means to have faith.

---

Reader, what’s your favorite horror movie? Let us know in the comments below!