Alsion’s Favorite Halloween Movies
The Halloween season is here with its cooler weather. Feel the chills down your spine with a thriller or cozy up with a childhood classic with some of our students’ favorite Halloween movies.
By: Kenric Hoang
It’s finally that time of year again, where the autumn weather comes rolling in and everybody can get their hands on their various pumpkin spice flavored delicacies. Everyone knows this season’s signature holiday: Halloween! And who doesn’t love a good flick to settle down and watch every year to get them in that spooky mood. We all know Mr. John sure does. But, let’s have a look at what some of the students at Alsion have as their personal top picks.
Alsion has many younger students who likely have not ventured out to viewing full on horror or thrillers and the results sure reflect that. The two top movies from the survey were the childhood classics: The Night Before Christmas and Coraline. The Nightmare Before Christmas is an amazing film that combines the spookiness of Halloween with the wonder of Christmas to make a visual treat with painstakingly detailed stop motion as its medium. It has a place in the hearts of 7 Alsion students. On the other hand, Coraline was probably burned into the minds of the respondents with its unsettling depiction of loved ones being replaced by impostors and heavy use of creepy-crawlies. It too masterfully utilizes stop motion to present this dark story, remembered by 5 Alsion students.
The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline were both prominent picks compared to the rest of the results, which only had one reply per movie. There were a few more children’s horror movies out of these like Monster House, Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and Scared Shrekless; all good movies in their own right, but a personal favorite that I didn’t think about was Coco. Coco is set during Día de los Muertos, a traditional Mexican holiday that honors the dead, that follows a boy’s journey through the Land of the Dead. While Halloween and Día de los Muertos are different holidays, they are back-to-back in the year, feature some similar iconography such as skeletons, graves, an underworld, and the undead, and the American and Mexican cultures are being shared, especially in states and territories along the border. Coco is a great example of media that has introduced some Mexican culture to the wider American audience, bringing the idea of respecting the dead, instead of just fearing them, to our Halloween celebrations.
The other responses to the survey held some interesting results like the Five Nights at Freddy’s Movie, based on the horror game series of the same name, which had only released this October just in time for the days leading up to Halloween. There were also a few responses with the more mature kinds of horror movies. These included: Fear Street 1, 2, and 3, Lights Out, The Shining, Ouiji, Scream 1, Scream 6, Insidious 1, US, and It. There is a nice mix of classics like The Shining and the Scream Series and some more modern movies like US and the Fear Street Trilogy.
This survey yielded a decently diverse selection of movies for everyone to enjoy this season, ranging from psychological thrillers to kids movies. At least one movie should pique your interests. Hopefully this article helped you find a Halloween movie to watch this holiday; either for chills and thrills or some good old nostalgia.
Image credit: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Henry Selick, 10/29/1993.