Forgotten Hollywood classics, esoteric video art pieces and the latest from foreign filmmakers and festivals: MUBI certainly offers a broad catalogue of movies for its subscribers to stream, and their devotion to offering as wider a selection with the broadest horizons is an admirable one. Sometimes you don’t want to be challenged, though. Sometimes you want a film to scare the bejesus out of you.
Which is why, along with a retrospective of the multi-disciplinary black American filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, MUBI‘s October line-up includes a healthy dose of horror, just in time for Halloween. That said, it’s a characteristically eclectic selection of seasonal chillers, drawn from the length and breadth of cinema history.
“What We Fear: A Halloween Series” offers six “very different kinds of horror movies, each exploring the darkness within and without in their own distinct ways.” The season starts with David Robert Mitchell’s recent classic of the genre It Follows, and includes other contemporary examples of top-class horror such as Jennifer Kent’s terrifying exegesis on grief and creepy storybooks, The Babadook, and Cold In July director Jim Mickle’s superior remake of Mexican cannibalism family drama We Are What We Are.
Looking closer to home, MUBI have also delved into the Hammer Horror vaults and shored up a forgotten classic in the form of Terrence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein, a 1957 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s story which dispels all memories of the Universal black-and-white version with gaudy Technicolor and a stellar cast including Peter Cushing as the mad doctor and Christopher Lee as the monster.
Then there’s the real curios, albeit ones helmed by horror royalty. John Carpenter is best known for his genre-defining Halloween and gory remake of The Thing, while George Romero is the man who invented the modern zombie with his Dead trilogy. None of those films are included in this season. Instead, Carpenter is represented by his (unjustly?) maligned remake of Village of the Damned, and Romero by his occult drama Season of the Witch.
“What We Fear: A Halloween Series” begins this October on MUBI.
