October (Halloween month) is here! It’s my absolute favourite time of year, filled with cinnamon-soaked foods, chilly but sunny days and horror movies aplenty.
For a couple of years I celebrated Halloween month by watching a horror movie every day in October, but that won’t be happening this year. I have no idea how I ever had the time or stamina for such an overwhelming challenge! Instead, this year I have a list of movies that have been on my radar for a long time that I’ve not got round to seeing yet, and I shall be choosing from them at random. A low-pressure challenge, because 2025 has been fucking stressful enough.
This week I watched three movies. It’s been an eclectic week, with a selection of horrors from different decades. Here are my reviews.
The Strangers (2008)
I kicked off Halloween month with The Strangers, which follows a couple in the midst of a breakup returning from a wedding. James proposed to Kristen in the carpark of the wedding venue, but she told him she just “wasn’t ready yet”. To be fair to her, I don’t think I would have reacted too well to being proposed to at the tail end of someone else’s wedding, especially not in the carpark.
Anyway, the two awkwardly return to a house owned by James’ father, where they had planned to stay the night before going on vacation. Suddenly there’s a knock on the door – a woman hidden in the shadows asks for someone named Tamara. It’s the early hours of the morning and the woman is acting oddly, so they send her on her way.
Kristen has run out of cigarettes, so James offers to go get some. While he’s gone, the woman asking for Tamara comes back – but this time she has two masked friends with her. They disappear when James returns. James dismisses Kristen’s hysterical fear of the strangers, until they come back yet again, but this time they want to get inside the house…
The idea of this movie is solid. What’s scarier than a home invasion? And I like the senselessness of it; you don’t know why these people want to cause the couple harm, so you don’t know if there’s anything that can be done to stop them or if they can be reasoned with.
However, the execution of this movie really falls flat. The couple are frustrating as they either underreact or overreact, and the strangers don’t actually do anything other than stare through the windows for a really long time. The pacing is so off – the tenseness builds, but I then found myself getting bored when nothing came of it. Overall, this movie was unsatisfying and they are so many other home invasion movies that do the same thing but much better. 2/5
Cube (1997)
Cube was much more interesting than The Strangers, and also had a very simple concept – a group of strangers wake up in a room together, which they later find out is one of many rooms that form a giant cube. There is a hatch on each wall (including the ceiling and floor) leading to another room. Some of the rooms are dangerous, with sound-activated lasers and wires ready to slice up anyone who enters, but some are safe and allow them to move through to the next room. The group are forced to work together to find out how to escape this maze, but tensions rise as they simultaneously try to discern if they can trust one another.
This low budget movie has some incredible visual effects. There are some ropey ones too, but generally the gore is well done and really effective. The cube’s rooms are also really cool-looking and add to the claustrophobic feeling of the movie.
I don’t want to go too much into the details of the plot as it’s quite complex, but there are a number of twists and turns that I really enjoyed. It’s a wild ride, and for such a unique and captivating concept, this movie deserves its cult classic status.
Which brings me to the characters, or lack thereof, and the acting in general. This is where the low budget shows. Because the concept of the movie and the technical details are so excellent, it highlights the lack of likeable, believable characters. The characters are just there to move the plot along, and any scene that calls for heightened emotion or conflict just has a lot of shouting and crying, with no real emotive pull for the audience. I’m not sure if the acting is ropey or if the script was just hard to work with, as the performances aren’t all terrible, it’s just clear that the people in the story weren’t as much of a priority as the puzzle of the cube.
Overall a cracking movie though, and a cult classic for good reason. 3.5/5
When a Stranger Calls (1978)
When a Stranger Calls begins in that classic American teen horror movie way – a couple are getting ready to go on a date and are waiting for the babysitter to get to their ginormous house so they can leave (they’re late and horny and the numbers are on the fridge). While the babysitter settles down for a quiet night of studying and/or waiting for her boyfriend to call, she gets a call from a British man. “Have you checked on the children?” is all he says. He then keeps calling and repeating this frightening question.
While many young women in horror movies dismiss such situations, this babysitter calls the cops pretty quickly, but they tell her not to worry because “this kind of thing happens all the time”. No wonder there were more serial killers in the 70s than in any other decade with that kind of attitude. The babysitter calls the police two or three more times before they agree to keep tabs on the phone line, but by that point it’s too late…
This is another hard movie to review as I can’t reveal too much of the plot, but essentially this movie is split into three sections – the beginning bit with the babysitter, a boring bit in the middle where the cops try and catch the creep on the phone, and the ending, which is awesome but I can’t share any more details about it without spoiling the other two parts.
This movie is so very sloooow, and the middle part has many pointless deviations from the plot that constantly made me wonder if they were just doing random stuff to try and fill up some time. There were also a lot of aimless chases, but they’re genuinely worth getting through for the ending. It’s a frustrating watch because there are so many great elements to it, it’s just a shame that it loses so much of the tension in the middle.
The acting is solid, and Tony Beckley is a brilliantly unhinged villain, but unfortunately a third of it feels like a cop procedural show that’s been going on for too many seasons. 2.5/5
And that’s all the movies I watched this week – fingers crossed week two is a little more inspiring.
If you’re looking for a spooky little story for Halloween month, my novella, The Festivities of Morkwood, is available in paperback and ebook:
You probably haven’t heard of a village called Morkwood.
It’s unlikely you would have passed through it, let alone stopped to visit – Morkwood sits in the corner of nowhere, unassuming and quiet.
Until December, that is.
Each day in the lead up to Christmas, the villagers of Morkwood come together to open the doors of a giant advent calendar called the Advent House. Everyone is expected to participate in a tradition steeped in local legend.
But not every door of the Advent House is something to look forward to. Like most long-established rituals, this one is rooted in fear.
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