Horror is good for you (no, really)

lets make Horror Movie Clubs the new Book Clubs

Apr 06, 2024

Hey there! I was originally planning to save this for some later (more predictable, Halloween-y) date, but I have been reading “Nightwatching”(and right before that “Midnight on Beacon Street”, so a pattern is emerging) and thinking horror adjacent thoughts as a result, so here we are: a perfect rabbit hole to dive into on a rainy month like April.

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A pre-amble:

I love clubs - I feel as an adult person with schedules and deadlines, being held accountable to spend time with people you like around a genuine shared interest and unabashedly chat about things you culturally consume… it is lovely and we all need it.
Book Clubs (and the many potential reiterations - ie: Cook Book Clubs, Photography Book Clubs etc) are an obvious first place your mind goes to (and I love mine, I really really do) but….
Dare we suggest that on top of reading things together, WATCHING things together can be amazing? (men, I feel, are a little more into this being conditioned by all the group sports watching of their youths)

And what is more fun to watch together than Horror? Even if you don’t like Horror, it is very fun to watch it with people. In fact, my friend Erik who is a horror fan of the first order, figured that if he could get some cool, fun people together to eat and drink and watch horror movies, then his wife Kate who is not a horror fan (or wasn’t at the time) would actually start watching horror movies.

This was the driving force of the Horror Movie Club which I have been a part of for 8 years now (!!!) and is truly one of the biggest lights in my life.

How we do it is relatively similar to a Book Club model - there’s seven of us in it (hi! Jason, Morgan, Mitchie, Erik, Kate and Kat!) and whoever hosts, gets to pick a movie (and makes a dinner). We used to meet in person before the pandemic (in homes and cinemas), then switched to zooms, and then as people moved away from DC and to Virginia, Upstate NY and North Carolina (life! it happens), we supplement those zooms with seasonal weekend gatherings where A LOT of movies get watched, and sometimes haunted hayrides or private rentals of tiny cinemas happen too. It is, and I will keep saying this, the best.

Why does it work?

Watching a horror movie is like going on a roller-coaster. The energy, the adrenaline, the camaraderie is through the roof, and it feels really, truly like a shared experience. Plus, much like with books, your choice in horror tells us a lot about yourself - are you a psychological guy, or a body horror girlie or a comedy horror couple? Does your blood pressure require gore to start going up, or is a subtle, quiet home invasion the thing that sends you over the edge? Tell me you prefer US to GET OUT (personally, I do) and I learn so much more about you than I would if you just told me you are a Jordan Peele fan. Tell me you think Promising Young Woman is a horror, and I SEE YOU.

By the time the evening is over you will have laughed, cried, held each other’s hands and possibly even hugged - tell me what other form of at-home entertainment will deliver all that to a disparate group of people?

And since this newsletter depends on, well, recommendations - here’s some of those if you are interested in giving this a whirl. My husband also keeps a Letterboxd list of everything we’ve seen (though it seems it has maybe not been fully updated? hi Jason!) if you need to go beyond this, but trust me, this is a good start:

Eyes Of My Mother - every once in a while we go round-robin on which movies we saw we will NEVER forget, and this one wins every time. Shot in gorgeous black and white, it is a short (76 min), almost wordless journey into the world of Francisca, whose already oddball-ish, isolated life (where a former eye surgeon Mother teaches her about nature and anatomy and a Father is a distant and shadowy presence) is shattered after a psychopath invades their home. The less you know beyond this the better but the final result is so beautiful and terrifying it has an almost Grimm fairy tale quality (the fact that the lead, former dancer Kika Magalhaes has the qualities of a Disney princess - all Snowhite coloring, liquid movements and oversized eyes definitely helps the case).
Ready or Not - on the completely opposite end of the spectrum - it is very fun when horror movies are FUN. And this nutty wedding afterparty-gone-wrong fits the bill perfectly. There’s blood, there’s guts, there’s deals with the devil, there’s wearing your gore stained wedding gown with kick-ass Converse, there’s Andy McDowell and Adam Brody, there’s a recurring visual joke where the sexy maids keep getting killed in progressively more insane ways. I mean, this movie is like the hottest club in town, when it comes to fun horror - it has it all. The director (who also made the last two “Scream” movies) has a new horror coming out this month - Abigail and it looks just as bonkers.
The Witch - this is the movie that just made us step it up overall. Set in 1630s New England and starring the at-the-time-not-that-well-known Anya Taylor Joy - it is a masterpiece of sinisterness and atmosphere (Robert Eggers went on to mine these vibes further in “The Lighthouse” and “The Northmen”). Mainly, this movie is on the list because 7 years and a lifetime later since I’ve seen it you can’t say “Black Philip” to me without me freaking out.
“Strangers” - some people get scared by blood, gore, supernatural things, monsters, etc - but to me, home invasion stuff is BY FAR the scariest and requires the most hand-holding during. This 2008 thriller featuring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman (peak hotness for both) feels terrifying plausible, and pairs perfectly with Haneke’s “Funny Games” as the movie no-one trying to AirBnB you a house in Upstate wants you to see. I hear all the sequel(s?) suck though - so just stick to the original.
“Black Christmas” - we watched A LOT of older/classic-ish horror which ranges from amazing (“Rosemary’s Baby”, “Repulsion”, etc) to campy (“Tremors” was great, “Burbs” was so fun) but the 1974 OG “Black Christmas” (please do not watch the remakes) is something I keep going back to a lot. The cast is stacked (peak Margot Kidder and Olivia Hussey, young Andrea Martin etc), the premise is age-old but it works (a bunch of sorority girls start getting terrorized via prank calls and then…) and in 2024, it is a perfect prequel pairing to Jessica Knoll’s “Bright Young Women” (which happens to be a great Book Club pick book)

Honorable mentions once you get into a groove (all from this list): Jennifer’s Body (so fun), The Craft (another essential from the “hell is a teenage girl” cannon), Piggy (same), Silence of the Lambs (amazing and so rewatchable), Sleepaway Camp (so campy and OTT, they truly don’t make them like this any more), Audition (advanced horror viewing), Bones and All (so so so romantic), OG Scream (it was perfect), Wolf of Snow Hollow (one of the funniest movies, horror or otherwise, I’ve ever seen) and more. As I said up top - this is the perfect rabbit hole to go down, trust me.

Any recommendations - lean into it in the comments, I really, really want them.