Today starts the final weekend of October, with the Big Day only a week away. So, here’s a sampling of what’s coming up for your viewing pleasure this weekend, as you make your final plans for Halloween:
Max (formerly HBO Max) continues “No Sleep October” with the broadcast debut of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Trap, starring Josh Harnett as a concertgoer caught up in a law enforcement scheme to corner a serial killer who’s a member of the audience.
Netflix presents Don’t Move, from producer Sam Raimi, best known for his directorial work in the Evil Dead and Spider-Man movie franchises, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. According to the press material, Kelsey Asbille stars as “a grieving woman” who’s injected with a paralytic agent by a serial killer and must find some way to survive before her body shuts down.
AMC FearFeast goes full Jason Voorhees on Friday for its all-day Friday the 13th Marathon, with Parts VI–VIII followed by Freddy vs. Jason (admittedly, my favorite of both franchises), then Parts III, I, and II, and concluding with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.
Saturday is a Creature Feature Marathon, with a lineup of The Mist, Gremlins, David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Gary Busey vs. a werewolf in Silver Bullet, John Carpenter’s Christine, Jeepers Creepers, and Child’s Play, with Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999, starring Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci) and Eight Legged Freaks (2002; David Arquette and Scarlet Johansson exterminating giant spiders) carrying you through the overnight hours. And then Sunday is AMC’s Michael vs. Everyone Marathon, with Michael Myers wreaking havoc in Haddonfield, Illinois, through Halloween 5, Halloween 4, Halloween II, the original John Carpenter’s Halloween, Halloween H2O, and Halloween: Resurrection.
The Movies! Channel’s expanded Friday Night Frights schedule starts with Forrest Tucker battling The Crawling Eye (1958), followed by Devil Doll (1964); Anthony Hopkins versus his ventriloquist’s dummy in the thriller Magic (1978); Puppet Master (1989) and the 1990 sequel Puppet Master II; Night of the Demons (1988); Tawny Kitaen contending with the supernatural threats of the Witchboard (1986); Adrienne Barbeau fighting off ghostly, bloodthirsty pirates in John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980); and the 1986 anthology Deadtime Stories.
Last but not least, on Saturday, TBS is hosting The 24 Hours ofBeetlejuice, in case there’s a rare chance you’ve ever missed seeing the famous Tim Burton-Michael Keaton-Winona Ryder collaboration in the past 36 years. Shamelessly taking advantage of the box office success of its sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice? Absolutely. Overkill? For sure. But what else would you expect from the same station (as well as its sister, TNT) that has been running The 24 Hours of A Christmas Story every year since 1997?
Seems like a good way to pass the time while you’re putting together those little trick-or-treat bags for the little monsters that will soon come knocking at your door!
Halloween creeps ever closer as we enter Frightful Weekend #3 of October, and if you’re a horror fan who couldn’t make it to New York Comic Con this week, here’s a sampling of what you can watch to help keep you occupied while you’re perhaps conventioneering at home (all times listed are on the East Coast):
AMC FearFeast kicks things into gear with a 3-day weekend of movie programming: Friday is a House of Horrors Marathon, starting at 9:00 a.m. with Virginia Madsen (Candyman) starring in 2009’s The Haunting in Connecticut, followed by a pair of Stephen King adaptations: director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 cult classic The Shining (starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duval), and director Rob Reiner’s 1990 bone-shattering thriller Misery (starring James Caan and Kathy Bates, whose performance won her an Academy Award for Best Actress). The evening closes out with a trio of visits to the 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left, 2005’s remake of House of Wax, and the 2001 remake of Thirteen Ghosts. Be sure to bring a housewarming gift!
Saturday is a Final Destination Marathon, with FD2 starting at 4:00 p.m., followed by FD5, the original Final Destination, and wrapping up with FD3. Why show them out of order? I have no idea.
(Fun fact: Back in 2005, I wrote an original FD novel, for publisher Games Workshop’s Black Library imprint. Final Destination: Dead Man’s Hand had Death going on a rampage along the Las Vegas Strip after a group of unfortunates narrowly escape the doom of an elevator disaster. The book’s long out of print, but you can always track down a copy in the wild—or, if you’ve got some free time, you could listen to the Slash Trax Network’s unofficial unabridged audiobook readingof it!)
Ending the weekend is Slasher Sunday: At 6:45 a.m., it begins with Jordana Brewster (The Fast and the Furious) and R. Lee Ermey (The Frighteners) in the 2006 gorefest The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, followed by Tony Todd as the hook-handed, lovelorn Candyman (1992); 1989’s Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, in which the hockey-masked killer rampaging through New York City (well, mostly Vancouver, British Columbia); the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (also starring R. Lee Ermey); the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street; the original Halloween (1978), by writer/director John Carpenter; the original Friday the 13th; and finally Robert Englund’s iconic turn as Freddy Krueger in writer/director Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
Max (formerly HBO Max) continues “No Sleep October” with the broadcast debut of writer/director Ti West’s hard-core thriller MaXXXine and its prequel X (both starring Mia Goth). And don’t forget ’Salem’s Lot (adapting the famous Stephen King vampire novel) and the thriller Caddo Lake, which both premiered earlier this month.
On Friday, Netflix presents Woman of the Hour, starring and directed by Anna Kendrick. In 1978, real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala was Bachelor #3 on the popular TV game show The Dating Game, and the “winner” picked by contestant Cheryl Bradshaw. She soon discovered just how bad a choice she made… It’s “based on a true story,” which means a number of liberties were taken with the true events of that encounter—specifically, in real life, Bradshaw canceled the date after meeting Alcala because he creeped her out, and that was the end of that. So, the movie is really a fictionalized what-if-they’d-gone-on-that-date scenario, but it should be suspenseful, anyway!
Also on Friday, the Hallmark Channel begins its annual Reign of Holiday Terror with its Countdown to Christmas (“Good Lord! Choke!” gasped horror fans everywhere): around-the-clock programming that starts bright and early at 6:00 a.m. But even horror fans have been found to enjoy the…er, cookie-cutter template of Hallmark’s Christmas movies—especially when they have horror connections!
Take, for example, Friday’s Let It Snow (2013), starring Candace Cameron Bure. It’s directed by the appropriately named Harvey Frost, whose credits include episodes of the 1980s’ Friday the 13th: The Series, the 1990s’ The New Addams Family, and Grimm. Or Saturday’s On the 12th Date of Christmas (2020), a comforting romance from Gary Yates, the director of Eye of the Beast (2007; starring James Van Der Beek and a monster octopus) and Maneater (2007; Gary Busey vs. a hungry tiger). A lot of Hallmark directors and writers have a literal skeleton lurking in their closets…if you look closely enough…
And it’s not just horror directors who offset their terror tales with family-friendly films. There are two Hallmark movies—One December Night and My Southern Family Christmas—starring none other than living legend Bruce Campbell, star of the Evil Dead franchise. And Michael Ironside—of V, Starship Troopers, and the recent Late Night with the Devil fame—plays a friendly old gent in Hallmark’s Pumpkin Everything.
In addition, I just discovered there’s a yuletide romance currently in preproduction called Christmas in Transylvania, set in Dracula’s Castle and no doubt planned for the 2025 bingeathon. So, yes, the horror connections are strong, even when it comes to Santa Claus.
Keep in mind, there’s also Letters to Satan Claus, which you can catch on streaming services like Hulu and SyFy. This 2020 horror movie, starring Karen Knox, parodies the Hallmark format with the tale of a TV anchorwoman returning to her hometown, only to learn that a typo-ridden letter she wrote as a young girl to “Satan Claus”—instead of Santa—might lead to a monstrous killing spree by the bad man himself.
Finally, The Movies! Channel’s expanded Friday Night Frights schedule goes toe-to-toe with the Hallmark Channel, unleashing 1958’s Earth vs. the Spider (no, it’s not a court case—although it could be!) at 6:00 a.m., followed by 1943’s The Leopard Man. And then it becomes all-vampire programming for the rest of the day!
First up is the teenaged vampire-girl of 1957’s Blood of Dracula, followed by Christopher Lee as the lord of vampires in 1958’s Horror of Dracula and 1969’s Dracula Has Risen from the Grave; Darren McGavin as reporter Carl Kolchak in 1972’s The Night Stalker; the 1974 adaptation of Dracula, starring Jack Palance, written by Richard Matheson, and directed by Night Stalker producer Dan Curtis; and Sylvia Krystal stalking 1980s Hollywood as Dracula’s Widow (1988; the directorial debut of Christopher Coppola—brother of Nicolas Cage, and nephew of legendary director Francis Ford Coppola). Then comes 1970’s House of Dark Shadows, a spin-off from Dark Shadows, the classic gothic TV soap opera created by Dan Curtis. 1971’s Lust for a Vampire, 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre—starring Klaus Kinski as the rat-faced Count Orloff—and the original Nosferatu (1922) round out the programming. (Perfect timing for those last two entries, because this Christmas brings the cinematic terror of writer/director Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu remake!)
