Icon: enlarge
Horror high-pressure cleaner "28 Weeks Later": All shades of horror
Photo:
interTOPICS / LMK Media / ddp images
"28 Weeks Later", Amazon Prime Video
Time budget:
ten crucial minutes, 86 minutes encore
for fans of:
"The Night of the Living Dead", "Resident Evil"
After "28 Weeks Later" no further zombie films or series were actually necessary.
Because after this sequel to "28 Days Later" it was no longer possible to increase the genre.
In the first ten minutes you can see all the shades of horror that a zombie film can spread: maddening horror, frenetic fear, sheer panic.
In these ten minutes, a man runs for his life, the hand-held camera behind, lurching, overturning, the undead run so damn fast, they are so close, and you want to look away, but the cut creates an insane energy.
You just have to look.
If horror cleanses the affects, then this is the pressure washer.
Icon: enlarge
"Haunted Bly Manor" based on Henry James: a scary and dark love story
Photo: Eike Schroter / Netflix
"Haunted Bly Manor," Netflix
Time budget:
nine episodes of 60 minutes each
for fans of:
"Spuk in Hill House"
For decades, literary critics have pounded their heads over the question of which interpretation of Henry James' Schauer novella "The Turn Of The Screw" is the right one.
Which is because James has the story of two orphans and their emotional injuries conveyed by an unreliable narrator.
Horror as high literature - and now as a mini-series, because "Spuk in Bly Manor" takes the James novel as its basis.
Here, too, the horror does not arise from superficial effects, but develops as a very dark love story.
The fact that it only gets really scary after the first three episodes is a sign of quality in this case.
Icon: enlarge
Found Footage horror Blair Witch Project: Face to face with the witch
Photo: interTOPICS / Picturelux / ddp images
"Blair Witch Project," Amazon Prime Video
Time budget:
80 minutes of suspense, 10 minutes of terror
for fans of:
"Paranormal Activity", "Trollhunter"
Once again the pure horror, tickled out again with a handheld camera, this time especially in the last ten minutes.
Darkness, thunderstorm, a dark forest, a damp hut - nothing more is needed here to put viewers in a state of shock.
What was that pattern in the background?
Horror arises in the head, nowhere stronger than here.
Because we know that the footage doesn't really come from a real documentary, the makers of which mysteriously disappeared in the forest.
But that is exactly what the design makes us believe.
Icon: enlarge
Waiting for the "Big Pumpkin": Snoopy, Charlie and their friends celebrate Halloween without the horror
Photo: Apple TV +
"The Big Pumpkin," Apple TV +
Time budget:
25 minutes
for fans of:
Charlie, Snoopy, Sally, Lucy and of course Woodstock
In the USA the peanuts are part of the cultural canon.
Online petitions have recently been launched there to bring Charlie Brown and his friends back to linear television, where their adventures have traditionally been broadcast before major holidays.
Like "The Big Pumpkin" for Halloween.
Now, however, the rights to the Peanuts Apple TV + belong, and the platform's announcement that the film will be made available free of charge at certain times could not smooth things over in the USA.
In Germany, too, you can watch "The Big Pumpkin" between October 30th and November 1st without a subscription, and because the film is not otherwise shown on TV here, this is a good opportunity to watch a Halloween film with the children watch.
It's not a bit scary, on the contrary, it is touching: Charlie is waiting for the "Big Pumpkin" to bring him presents.
Icon: enlarge
Those looking for the truth: Astrid belongs to the "Truth Seekers" gang - and promptly gets a visitor
Photo: Colin Hutton / Amazon
"Truth Seekers," Amazon Prime Video
Time budget:
eight episodes of 30 minutes each
for fans of:
"Shaun of the Dead", "Hot Fuzz"
If "28 Weeks Later" is one of the ultimate zombie films, then "Shaun of the Dead" has to be the ultimate zombie film shipper.
In 2004, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg took on the genre, and now they're back with a horror comedy series.
Pegg has a pretty wig on, but doesn't do more than a guest appearance.
Frost takes on the lead role as a television technician with a creepy bushy beard who is a ghost hunter in his spare time.
The gags remain for the most part predictable, but horror and drama take off into surprisingly serious and gloomy spheres after a few episodes.
Icon: enlarge
The horror in "I see, I see": Not a monster, but mom
Photo: Capital Pictures / ddp images
"I see, I see," Netflix
Time budget:
95 minutes
for fans of:
"Dog days", "The piano player", "Come on, sweet death"
Many Austrian films don't need monsters or paranormal stories to spread horror.
The normal madness of human existence is enough for them, and maybe the old man from Ulrich Seidl's "Dog Days", who checks the correct weight of flour bought in the supermarket, is creepier than any zombie on a bell rope.
The most terrible figures in the Austrian horror cabinet, however, are undoubtedly the ten-year-old twins and their mother from "Ich seh, ich see": the boys at first engagingly childlike, then acting increasingly strangely, and the woman mum no longer recognizable after a facial operation, especially not from their own children.
Sounds scary?
Is worse, namely: disturbing.
(Read our review of the cinema launch here.)
Icon: enlarge Photo: AMC / Amazon
"The Terror", Season 1, Amazon Prime Video
Time budget:
ten episodes of 60 minutes each
for fans of:
"The thing from another world"
Nothing would be more wrong than to look at the horror genre as a kind of fairground ghost train, where a plastic grim reaper with lightbulb eyes provides a brief shock.
Horror films have always looked at the hidden shadows within ourselves, and often enough the source of horror turns out not to be a supernatural but a deeply human evil.
"The Terror" takes this seriously: Here a mysterious being sneaks through the polar night, but of course it is the human being who brings the horror with him.
It tells the story of the crews of the British ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which searched the Northwest Passage in 1845 and were killed.
In "The Terror" it turns into historical drama, horror thriller and a bitter reckoning with the excessive overestimation of the British Empire.
Icon: enlarge
Who fights with his demons: Stephen King at his instrument, the typewriter
Photo: Toronto Star / Dick Loek / Arte
"Stephen King: The Necessary Evil", Arte Media Library
Time budget:
53 minutes
for fans of:
"It", "Cemetery of Stuffed Animals", "Salem Must Burn"
How times change: When I was studying German in the 1990s, Stephen King was considered the author of mass-compatible horror novels, barely a hand's breadth more than trash.
Hardly any literary critic and certainly not a proseminar would have seriously dealt with his work at that time.
Today King is considered one of the most important living American authors, hardly any other writer has soaked up the prevailing culture of violence in the USA and spat it out as bloody horror escapades.
And hardly anyone has used and shaped pop culture in such a way.
In this documentary, King himself has a lot to say, in excerpts from the 1970s to today, and that's a good thing because the man can verbally polished and mentally dissect his own work.
"Horror is kind of a dress rehearsal for our own death," he says at one point.
If that's true, then Halloween is the perfect celebration.
And the review of the current "crime scene" can be found here.
Icon: The mirror
