Screen Grabs: Halloweek brings the scares, killer clowns and all

This being Halloweek, we should offer some scary movies for the occasion, though I’ll admit to not having seen several that are currently in their theatrical first run, like Black Phone 2 or Frankenstein. (I did see Shelby Oaks…but that doesn’t really merit a recommendation.) To my mind, there have been five very good horror movies in 2025 to date, and surprisingly most were actual hits. The under-radar exceptions were Joe Deboer and Kyle McConoghy’s Dead Mail, a unique mix of twisty captivity thriller and twisted black comedy; and Japanese writer-director Yuta Shimotsu’s first feature Best Wishes To All, a mind-messing conspiracy piece about the true source of happiness.Both went directly from festivals to the streaming platform Shudder earlier this year.

The others were pretty high-profile: The Philippou Brothers’ macabre take on parental grief, Bring Her Back; Zack Cregger’s many-layered dissection of a community catastrophe, Weapons; and Ben Leonberg’s chiller starring man’s best friend, Good Boy. The latter will probably still be in cinemas by the time you read this, but the others are all now available on various streaming sites. I guess I have a taste for what’s called “elevated horror,” since none of these are stock slashers or monster movies—they are interesting psychologically, and don’t provide (or require) a jump scare every few minutes to keep you awake.

Looking for other genre releases from the last month to plug for your holiday pleasure, I pretty much struck out. Probably more horror films are being made now than ever before…but a lot of them are still, ya know, pretty crap. Better than most, though still not very inspiring, were a couple continuations of streaming franchises.

V/H/S/Halloween, the eighth feature in a V/H/S anthology series that began in 2012, is variable as usual but neither the best or the worst of its lot. This edition’s theme means there’s a lot of repetition—people go trick-or-treating or attend parties, then die horribly. The so-so wraparound material has unlucky volunteers taste-testing a new soda that has immediate, lethal effects. Probably best among the five individual segments are segments are the least snarky: [rec] series co-creator Paco Plaza’s Spanish-language “Ut Supra Sic Infra” finds police taking a sole survivor back to the site of a mysterious massacre, where unfortunately history repeats itself. The always-interesting Alex Ross Perry’s “Kidprint” finds a small town plagued by youth disappearances. It’s truly disturbing, though I can’t say I was enthused about that effect being arrived at via focus on terrified, sadistically tortured children and teenagers. Other episodes also dole out violent abuse to the underaged, and if that’s going to be a new normal for horror movies… I’ll pass, thanks.

Another ersatz “found footage” franchise is Hell House LLC, whose first entry a decade ago was pretty creepy; after two weak followups, 2023’s HH LLC Origins: The Carmichael House was a surprisingly strong rebound. Once again written and directed by Steven Cognetti, Hell House LLC: Lineage is an overlong letdown, with effective stand-alone setpieces (involving the animate clown statues that wreaked havoc previously), but too much somber, plodding, and low-energy content between. It also errs in assuming we’ll recall characters and plot details from prior installments—they weren’t that memorable. So the density of flashbacks and ghostly cameos here is pretty much wasted on viewers, especially those for whom this is a first Hell House experience. While the decision to stray from strict found-footage conventions here was a good one, otherwise this series seems tapped out. Lineage premieres on Shudder Thurs/30; V/H/S/Halloween launched there earlier this month.

Not exactly horror, but with plenty of deliberate grotesquerie for your delectation, is the latest Spike & Mike animation package, something which began in 1977 and began accruing a serious following once they launched the “Sick and Twisted” editions in 1990. Current Spike & Mike’s Animation Extravaganza appears to be a melding of prior approaches, with some general-interest new ‘toons, a few revived golden oldies, and more new ones pushing the bad-taste envelope. Many of the twenty-odd shorts crammed into these 85 minutes are one-joke joints of no great inspiration, albeit done in an array of animation styles. And I really could have done without the two live-action “hosts,” who appear to annoy each other as much as they do us.

But eventually there are some works worth waiting for, even for a viewer who (like me) is not necessarily predisposed towards the genre. Noteworthy were the dystopian slacker mayhem of Debt & Misgivings by Conor Cole, DJ Garcia and Maya Ash Buttmaggot; Preston King’s Kafkaeque Detektive Thumb and the Infinity House; Max Landman’s all-balloon stop motion phantasmagoria Baloney Beacon; Max Johnson’s frenetic music video collage Beautiful Day; birthday celebration gone very wrong Doodlepops, from Loserville Animation Studios; and the return of Brad Neely’s Cox + Combes’ Washington, a rap tribute to the Founding Father that will surely not be included in this government administration’s revision of U.S. history. The Animation Extravaganza opens Fri/31 at theaters nationwide, including SF’s Regal Stonestown Galleria.

Also falling into the category of at least horror-adjacent is the program this Sat/1 at Other Cinema, which features “Halloween Horror auteur” Rodney Ascher, a former SF resident best known for his remarkable Room 237—a 2012 documentary about Kubrick’s The Shining and its obsessive viewers that some might argue is better than that film itself. The evening will focus on his shorts, including 2010’s The S From Hell, which was about the 1960s Screen Gems logo…or rather its brief, mysteriously spine-chilling synthesizer musical theme, which until I saw Ascher’s film I had no idea terrorized thousands of other little kids besides me back then. We are also promised glimpse of his collaboration with late sexploitation queen Doris Wishman, a “16mm monster mash,” and more. Show is 8 pm at ATA Gallery, costumes encouraged. Further info is here.

You don’t have to look far for credulity-stretching horrors in real life, as three new documentaries prove. Two are at the Roxie this weekend. Director Emily Mkrtichan will be present for a Q&A after the Sat/1 screening of There Was, There Was Not (more info here) which follows four women of the Republic of Artsakh. After the fall of the Soviet Union, then a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the territory became independent… for 30 years. At which point there was a second Nagoro-Karabakh War, killing thousands, ultimately driving the ethnic Armenian majority out.

The principals here include a stubborn aspiring politician in capitol Stepanakert (when she loses, a radio announcer notes “Once again, no women were elected to the council”), the co-founder of a women’s health center, and a would-be Olympic athlete who has to switch her training regime to suit military needs. Perhaps overshadowed by events in Ukraine, this entire conflict got so little media coverage in the west, it’s unfortunate there’s no narration and not much in the way of other explanatory materials here—so we don’t get a terribly clear sense of what’s going on in the political “big picture.” But the more intimate focus Mkrtichan chooses vividly conveys the haplessness felt by citizens robbed of not just of homes and loved ones, but their very national identity.

Also present at the Roxie that day and the preceding night will be director Elizabeth Lo for Mistress Dispeller (more info here), which opens for a regular run Fri/31. Her stranger-than-fiction tale examines an emergent profession one can presumably only find in China: Agents available to break up your husband’s relationship with his side piece. They accomplish that not through incantations or physical intimidation, but through elaborate “undercover” schemes utilizing actors and social media, all designed to wean the errant spouse off infidelity while making him think that’s his idea.

Zeroing in primarily on one wealthy woman who engages such a professional to rein back her adulterous other half, Lo chronicles a tangled real-life drama whose mechanizations almost defy belief. Nonetheless, or perhaps as a result, it’s hard to look away—this is fascinating stuff, not least for the way that ‘dispeller’ Wang Zhenxi manages to make herself indispensable to both client and mistress. (We never do quite find out what the husband thinks, or the extent to which he grasps how he’s been played.) Surely this is one job that AI won’t be taking over anytime soon.

The most essential—if also infuriating—feature among this documentary trio is Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk’s The White House Effect, which premiered at festivals last year and is finally reaching Netflix this Fri/31. If you don’t think you’re mad now, you certainly will be after these 97 minutes. They detail a largely forgotten backstory to climate change: Notably how it originally was a topic of broad political consensus in the U.S., and how quickly/permanently that got turned into a “controversy” whose doubters were entirely hatched by fossil-fuel-industry propaganda, greed and bribery.

In 1988, everyone was talking about “the Greenhouse Effect,” which amidst record-breaking droughts and high temperatures was a source of widespread concern. The science behind it had been on the government’s radar for at least a decade already, though of course progress during the Carter administration got rolled back during the Reagan years. But despite his having made a fortune in Texas oil, George H.W. Bush campaigned for office as “the environmental President,” his promises to address relevant pollution and other issues apparently quite sincere…at first. He even appointed the World Wildlife Fund’s William K. Reilly, a true environmentalist, to head his EPA.

Yet once this Bush won his election, that tune changed in a hurry, apparently under huge pressure from industry lobbyists. Legitimate scientific research got “softened,” “modified” or suppressed outright by the White House, while dubious “experts” began surfacing in the media to claim oppositional findings. It was all very much reminiscent of another industry’s then still-recent fight against medical science, which had likewise drummed up bogus corporate-funded “studies” avowing that cigarettes had no relationship to cancer.

A punchy assembly of diverse archival materials drives Effect, which is as engrossing as a narrative thriller, even though you know how it’s gonna end. In the long run, denialism triumphed sufficiently that the U.S. never meaningfully addressed the evolving crisis, which—let’s face it—has probably already passed a tipping point. Short-term profit won; humanity’s future lost. This excellent feature is enraging because it makes crystal clear that there was a moment when that tide could well have been turned, when all the important people agreed what had to be done. Then money talked—three words that could well prove an universal epitaph.