October has shambled in, and that means the spooky season is upon us. With Halloween lying in wait at the end of the month, we have four weeks to get ready for tricks, treats, and frights. And there’s no better way to chill until the 31st than by watching a chilling horror film or two. Happily for fans of the genre, some decent recent options deserve a watch. Three of them come from Asia, and one is a Scandinavian export. Despite foreign-language dialogue that requires English subtitles, all of these offerings provide the requisite gooseflesh expected from a great horror movie.
Horror in cinema takes many forms, and each has its proponents and detractors. It’s tempting to devalue the preponderance of slasher/serial killer bloodbaths, embraced for their fevered variations on how to murder someone in as extreme a way as possible. But villainous Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street, demented Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th, and their deadly counterparts have slayed on through multiple successful installments of their respective franchises, regardless of how absurd or over-the-top their methods of slaughter can be.
Movies that find the fear factor in supernatural or ritualistic situations can be more disturbing than waves of on-screen splatter, because that sense of dread can linger long after the final reel has run. Then there are the good old-fashioned creature features that rely on traditional monsters, many of which originated in myth and literature. To their credit, the films covered here take bits and pieces of classic horror styles and recombine them in fresh ways.
‘Ghost in the Cell’
Not to be confused with the Japanese cyber-punk action franchise Ghost in the Shell, director-screenwriter Joko Anwar’s Ghost in the Cell is a freaky, energetic, often darkly comedic thriller set in an Indonesian prison. This jailhouse is a hellhole where the incarcerated range from murderers to white-collar criminals and the danger to prisoners is as likely to come from their fellow inmates engaging in martial arts punch-ups as it is from the sadistic guards empowered by the dictatorial, self-serving warden. When a wimpy journalist wrongly convicted of killing his boss is tossed in with these miscreants, a series of gruesome killings starts to thin the population in lockup, resulting in the most artistically mutilated corpses imaginable. Whereas no one would willingly spend time in a haunted penitentiary with a violent spirit that forces the members of rival gangs to team up for their own survival, watching the craziness happen in Ghost in the Cell is a riot, prison and otherwise.
Ghost in the Cell is currently in select theaters.
‘Never After Dark’
A subtle but profoundly disturbing ghost story from filmmaker Dave Boyle, Never After Dark tags along with Airi, a nomadic Japanese medium who communicates with the dead. She is hired by a mother and son to encourage a nasty specter to leave their remote country home. Upon her arrival, Airi asks to be left there on her own to make contact with the entity. In a deliberate and unsettling manner, the apparition reveals itself. The more Airi interacts with the unearthly force, the more she learns about the history of the house and the nature of its denizens, and the deeper she is plunged into mortal danger. According to the mystical rules, spirits become increasingly dangerous when the sun goes down, thus the title Never After Dark. But the bolder this ghost gets, the less likely it is to abide by any paranormal strictures. Moeka Hoshi is excellent as Airi, enigmatic upon her arrival at the house and relatively calm and in control until the character becomes caught in a genuine life-or-death struggle. As ghost stories go, Never After Dark is scary good.
Never After Dark is currently in select theaters.
‘Colony’
If there’s one thing the Korean director Yeon Sang-ho knows how to do, it’s crafting a movie about a zombie apocalypse. His epic Train to Busan featured an infestation of the brain-eating undead on the rails as a rapidly spreading infection imperils the passengers on the KTX line from Seoul to Busan. In his latest feature film Colony, a biotech conference is thrown into chaos when an embittered researcher releases a rapidly mutating virus as an act of revenge against a colleague. The building where the conference was held becomes ground zero for the outbreak with hordes of zombies rampaging through the facility. The authorities respond by sealing off the entire complex, trapping a group of the uninfected inside along with a scientist (Gianna Jun) who is desperately trying to figure out how to stop the virus from spreading. All the while, the infected are developing a hive mind, making them an even greater threat. Colony is literally a thrill a minute, a white-knuckle ride that will have you jumping out of your seat as the frenzy escalates.
Colony is currently available to stream on demand.
‘Nightborn’
The waves of pain, exhaustion, and depression that can plague new mothers are reflected in the Finnish fantasy Nightborn, a hypnotic mix of folk tale and body horror confected by director Hanna Bergholm and her co-screenwriter Ilja Rautsi. Recently married Jon and Saga have moved to her family’s long-abandoned dwelling in the deep woods. After a bout of outdoor lovemaking, Saga (Seidi Haarla) reveals that she’s pregnant, much to the delight of Jon (Rupert Grint, best-known as Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter film series) who can’t wait to raise the child in a loving environment. To Jon’s eventual distress, their offspring is … different. It soon becomes evident that the newborn is somehow connected to the local flora and fauna in an unsettling way that evokes trolls of Scandinavian legend. The Bergholm-Rautsi duo was also responsible for the delightfully weird 2022 satire Hatching about an abused girl raising a bird-like beast that could enact vengeance on her behalf. While Hatching is a wild excursion into oddity, Nightborn is a considerably creepier exploration of the tension that can manifest between nature and nurture.
Nightborn is currently available for streaming on Shudder.
