October Favorites: The Final Three and A Short Story Classic

With three more days before Halloween, I’m going to finish my Halloween Favorites series with three of my all-time favorites scary movies.

There are others from when I was a kid, of course, but it’s difficult to find them anywhere unless you have the old VHS tapes lying somewhere or if you can find them streaming online or on Youtube (Salem’s Lot, Amityville Horror, The Exorcist, The Changeling (it had George C Scott in the title role and it’s apparently one of Stephen King’s favorite movies), and Ghost Story adapted from a novel by Peter Straub and the movie starred such powerhouse stars as Fred Astaire, John Houseman, Melvin Douglas, and Douglas Fairbanks).

These last three movies I’m featuring below are probably the last horror movies I’ve seen in awhile because somehow, I’ve kinda lost my appetite for them even though I tell myself I’ll watch more. I also don’t have any time with a list of books I need to finish before the year’s end!

The Others (2001)

“Sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living.”

What can I say? This one has everything I love about a horror story, fog, a tormented heroine, an old house, and mysterious servants. There are also ghosts and a spooky album and a term called memento mori…

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth was a horror movie disguised as a fairy tale to me. I really thought it would have a happy ending (sorry, spoiler). Still, everything about it is just amazing. The story, the creatures, the soundtrack are all just perfect.

The Orphanage/El Orfanato (2007)

This is my all-time favorite movie when it comes to anything scary. Only this one is horror that’s also got a hauntingly sad story.

I also have never seen a woman as beautiful as Belén Rueda in my life. I remember thinking just how breathtakingly beautiful she was throughout the whole movie as she played the heartbreaking role of a mother whose son disappears and she just won’t give up until she finds him. If you haven’t seen The Orphanage, definitely check it out. It’s originally in Spanish (El Orfanato) and I wouldn’t watch any English adaptation no matter what because the original is just hauntingly beautiful just the way it is.

So that’s it for my spooky list of favorite movies to re-watch (or, at least, think about) for Halloween. I still have 25k words to write on that holiday novella #2 at the same time that Naughty Pen wants to write her own story, too, set during a Halloween Ball. But I need to be disciplined and stick to the holiday novella for now…

And speaking of books, probably the best horror story I’ve read is Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Yes, I know The Haunting of Hill House is amazeballs but I was first introduced to Jackson with The Lottery and so many years later, I’ve never forgotten it.

Have you read The Lottery? It was first published in The New Yorker in 1948 and you can read it here.