What makes a horror movie a Halloween Movie? Some may just say that any horror movie will do, but I don’t agree. Alien, The Thing, The Trollenberg Terror, and many others are good horror movies, but they aren’t what I don’t consider ideal picks for setting a Halloween tone.

I will now present a list of nine boxes that a movie can check. The more of these statements are true about the movie, the more PDR Halloween Approved the movie is.

1. The film is “spooky”. It’s about the atmosphere. The film is going for a gothic feel or trying to instill dread in some way. I feel like this is the easiest check on the list and honestly you probably wouldn’t be analyzing a movie to these criteria if it didn’t have this one for sure.
2. The film is set somewhere that Halloween happens. This means that the movie takes place in a country or time period where and when the characters would celebrate Halloween, even if they do not within the movie. If the setting is a big city, we’re at least focused on an apartment or residences of some kind. If the setting is the wilderness, there are some vestiges of civilization such as a campground. We’re not too far in the future or too far in the past that the period nature of the thing overtakes the Halloweenness.
3. The film is Autumnal. If Halloween is depicted within the film, this box is an automatic check, but even if it is not, the signifiers of the Fall are good too. Pumpkins. Colourful/falling leaves. Crisp evenings with the sun setting earlier.
4. The film features children or teenagers in prominent roles. They don’t need to be protagonists, but they need to be there. They need to be actual characters who can affect the plot and potentially be affected by the threat.
5. The film prominently features darkness. There are large sections of the film set after sunset or in dark attics and shadowy basements. It doesn’t have to be darkness that makes it hard for the viewer to see what’s going on in the movie. The effect of the darkness on the characters is what is important. The events of the movie are occurring in the dark, even if the movie is not itself dark.
6. The film does not heavily feature elements from other holidays. Pretty self explanatory, but I feel like there will be pushback to this one. There’s a strong tradition of horror movies and slashers that are about other holidays, but if you’re trying to create a Halloween mood, you don’t want some Easter Bunny-themed murderer or whatever drawing attention to other times of year.
7. Someone in the film wears some kind of costume or mask. Dressing up is one of the key things about Halloween, so its inclusion here basically gives a bonus point to any movie that actually depicts the holiday in action. And it nicely also gives a point to most slashers as well.
8. Someone in the film is dead. It can be someone who is killed by a monster or slasher within the film, but it is also acceptable to have the dead person be a ghost or skeleton or something that appears.
9. There are supernatural elements to the film that fit into “Halloween” archetypes of monsters. This is easily the most subjective item on the list, to the point where I could see it being argued as much as my main point. But it’s only a single item of the nine, so that’s fine. Ghosts, werewolves, Draculas, demons. Basically anything you’d find in a Monster Mash is a good fit for a Halloween movie. Robots and aliens can work, but when they do it’s moreso because of the spooky atmosphere than inherent in the monsters themselves, and that atmosphere was a whole different item on this list.. Similarly, things like minotaurs or dragons aren’t quite right. You know it when you see it and really only people being wilfully contrarian would fight too hard.

A movie doesn’t need to rate a full nine points to be good for Halloween. Four or five points seems like enough, really, and I bet anything six or higher would be more than adequate for the job.

I can only reiterate that this isn’t about the quality of the movie. I can say with authority that a lot of movies that check every box on this list will be crap. But they’re crap that can get one into the Halloween spirit. So now someone please go rank all horror movies by these criteria so that I may know in advance what to pick to get the Halloween feeling I crave.

But I do have to ask why I even bother? I mentioned years ago that caution tape is not a good Halloween decoration and I still see people using it as such. You’re all heathens ruining this, they Hallowest of Eens.

Hey everyone! It’s the most important anniversary of the millennium! It’s the ten year anniversary of PDR XXX! I encourage you all to celebrate by thinking about me while you achieve orgasm.

Anyway, my last few years have been downers. Let’s maybe turn that around, why not?

The Dark Lord Char’Nagh has returned! The year ends and a new one begins! Have you prepared yourselves? Is it even possible to have prepared yourself?!

The year 2020 will, of course, go down in history as yet another crappy one, but I have to admit that I’ve probably done better than a lot of people this year. My bankruptcy ended, leaving me without all that credit card debt. As far as the pandemic, I live in one of places that has had the best luck with avoiding the worst of it, and my job has continued unabated, which means I’ve had a source of income this whole time, which not everyone can say. 2020 was the year the Phone Guys celebrated a decade of continuous updates on this site. It’s the year I got the 50th Little Choy comic on here, as well as my 50th Beekeeper Review.

Though my poor car did die this year. I miss it so much.

Anyway, let’s hope for a good 2021. I mean, we can hope, right?

Hey Look Everybody! It’s New Year’s Eve.

Another year is over and the Dark Lord Char’Nagh is stopping by to make sure we’ve all improved our vocabularies over the course of the last twelve months. I hope you’ve all augmented your verbiage.

Haiku!

Fight for your candy.
Don’t let them take your candy.
It is your candy!

I have to admit that 2019 was another year of general unhappiness and confusion for ol’ PDR, but I guess I’m hopeful that it’s getting better. My life, I mean. The world in general still sucks. But I’m trying to make my own situation better. I’m only three months from being through the bankruptcy process, for example.

I assume I’ve mentioned on this site before the way that I try to create a Goals List every year, which is mostly just projects I want to get done and culture I want to take in. I used to base it around the New Year, but this year I’ve decided to base it around my birthday. This has proven to work better, given that the last three weeks or so of every year are generally full of distractions that make it harder to keep on top of things I’d rather be doing. The way I’m doing it now, I’ve still for until January 18th before I’m halfway through my year and I’m already more than halfway through my list. I assume I’ll talk more about it in 2020, but it feels good to actually be crossing things off and counting them as successes.

I hope the new year brings more of that along.

How is it possible that a year can feel like it is over in the blink of an eye, but also be a slog to get through? I guess that’s just how aging works.

But we did get through 2018. Congratulations, us. I’m still a failure this year, as Secret Government Robots is still about twenty pages from completion. Still! It was supposed to end in 2015, I think! But I am 80% sure it will be done this year and I will never have to draw another page of it again. I wish I could be more confident than that, but I have disappointed myself too many times.

But also, I didn’t get sick this year. That’s a win! I did have a sudden upheaval in my life in the form of leaving my home of fifteen years for some other place. This did derail me, but unlike the illness, this is probably a good thing ultimately.

Overall, 2018 was a year. In spite of some major life changes, I have little to say about it. Life is just an unending blur anyway.

So, how will the Dark Lord Char’Nagh treat us as we go into 2019? Nobody can know. Such is life.