From Five Nights at Freddy’s to The Exorcist: Believer, movies have failed Halloween this year

Say what you will about Halloween, but it’s usually a great time of year to be a horror fan. Louis Chilton asks why this year’s cinematic offerings have been all tricks and no treats

(AP, PA)

It might be time we Brits stop trying to make Halloween happen. Spooky Season, as the Americans call it, has never really taken root over here. Trick-or-treating is indulged with an air of wary obligation. Decorations are laid around half-arsedly, if at all. But there’s one area of life where Halloween has naturally, fulsomely come into its own: at the movies. If there’s one thing the holiday is good for, it’s for manifesting an annual spike in horror films. It’s a crying (or screaming) shame, then, that Halloween 2023 has left horror fans cold – and thoroughly un-chilled.

Those wishing to go to the cinema on 31 October this year will have a few options to choose from, each less appetising than the last. The big Halloween weekend release is Five Nights at Freddy’s, an adaptation of a schlocky video game franchise starring Matthew Lillard and Josh Hutcherson. “What should’ve been an intricate, twisted, and absurd treat is demoted to generic horror movie sludge,” wrote Clarisse Loughrey in a two-star review of the film, also criticising the film’s “bloodless” PG-13 age rating (15 in the UK). There are alternatives, of course – the tamer still (but markedly more enjoyable) Hercule Poirot adaptation A Haunting in Venice, which will be in its seventh week in cinemas, or the truly execrable franchise sequel The Exorcist: Believer. Look further down the menu and the festive spread is even more meagre: there’s the dismally received Dear David, adapted from a viral Twitter thread, the lacklustre Stephen King prequel Pet Sematary: Bloodlines on Paramount+, or the insipid time-travel slasher Totally Killer on Prime Video.

It’s not like the well suddenly dried up as soon as the calendar flipped over to October; 2023 has been an underwhelming year for horror fare all round. The standouts have been indie efforts like the Australian possession chiller Talk to Me, camp evil-doll horror-com M3gan, and the fun Russell-Crowe-on-a-moped-adventure The Pope’s Exorcist. It’s been a pretty solid year when it comes to franchise entries – Pearl, the off-kilter prequel to last year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre riff X, was one of the better horrors, as were Saw X, Scream VI and Evil Dead Rise – but masterpieces these are not.

Horror is often held up as an anomaly in the world of commercial cinema. It’s the only genre where small-budget films regularly prove massive hits, where relatively small filmmakers can make 18-rated projects exploring dark, serious subject matter that still manage to get a wide release. But it’s not invulnerable to some of the major diseases of contemporary cinema – a giddy overreliance on sequels and franchise entries being one such affliction.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a sequel, of course, but it becomes a problem when they start getting made in lieu of original projects. Last year was, comparatively, a banner year for original horror. Many of 2022’s best films were horror, or horror-adjascent; not only this, but most of them also found fresh and innovative ways to experiment with the genre. Top of the pile were Nope – Jordan Peele’s utterly sui generis fusion of horror, satire, sci-fi, and western – and Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, whichweaved shocking cannibal horror into a romantic coming-of-age road trip narrative. Other horror-inflected releases also ranked among the year’s best new films: punchy, stylish throwback X; haunting David Cronenberg sci-fi Crimes of the Future; allegorical Detroit-set chiller Barbarian;wacky,internet-addled Bodies Bodies Bodies. There were still a plethora of franchise sequels, some bad, some good – but original material set the standard.

For whatever reason, the crop this year has failed to give cinemagoers all that much to scream about. But that’s not to say that horror fans are completely without options this Halloween. Increasingly, multiplexes are embracing repertory screenings – older releases, brought back to screens years or even decades after their making. Don’t want to face Poirot? Call The Exorcist. Don’t fancy Five Nights at Freddy’s? Try one night with The Shining. The fact that audiences and programmers are turning to classic films to get their Halloween spook on testifies to the enduring power of these movies, yes – but also the creative aridity of this year’s release schedule. Still, though, when it comes to shoddy festive releases, it could always be worse. Time to start counting down the days until Christmas.