NIGHT OF IT KNOWS WHAT SCARES YOU

Every Halloween season I watch THE OTHER, a favorite among forgotten or unsung horror films. This is one of those movies near impossible to talk about without spoiling some secrets, and THE OTHER is all about secrets. I can safely tell you the movie takes place in 1935 New England, and concerns one summer in the life of the Perry family, particularly the twin boys Niles and Holland. Underneath the pastoral landscape of the town, lies and secrets fester … and suspicious deaths occur fairly regularly. Director Robert Mulligan also filmed TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, and THE OTHER can be read as the dark reverse of MOCKINGBIRD’s deeply felt nostalgia. Under the hot summer sun, behind the barns and bales of hay, down in the apple cellar, something is very, very wrong.

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IT KNOWS WHAT SCARES YOU, PART 2

Today’s Halloween movie recommendation is a quieter brand of horror, a black-and-white supernatural and psychological thriller based on Henry James’ classic 1898 ghost story THE TURN OF THE SCREW. But before you yawn and write it off as potentially dull, there are some diabolic currents running through the 1961 adaptation THE INNOCENTS. No surprise, Truman Capote wrote the screenplay from the novel. This movie will creep up on you, wrap its cold arms around you like the chilliest mist, and you’ll find yourself thinking about it again days later. There were things you couldn’t talk about in polite society in 1898 — or even 1961, for that matter — but those things are here, just out of sight, registered in the expressions of the adult and children characters … deadly questions that are never completely asked.

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