You've heard of this one, it fucking rules

September 29, 2023 4:16 PM

Benito’s 50 New Streaming Spookums for Halloween 2023 - it’s spooky season so Benito Cereno has another list of streaming movies. It’s the good shit, check it out.
posted by Artw (16 comments total)

Letterboxd interface can be a little tricky so if you’re just seeing movies and not ratings and descriptions you may have to click around. You’ll want the ratings and descriptions.

Also noting that you the Hollywood strike is only half done so you can enjoy the writing in the movies but you have to feel slightly guilty about enjoying the acting.
posted by Artw at 4:19 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this.

Everyone seems very positive about No One Will Save You, so that was already on my October watchlist.

I tend not to watch much horror/thriller stuff, so when fall rolls around and I want to watch a few scary stories, I need this sort of roundup. The mostly 1-2 sentence descriptions and prominently visible streaming services are exactly the amount of info I want when picking out something to watch.
posted by the primroses were over at 4:59 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Couple on their that Benito rated that basically bombed with critics, so I didn’t bother with them - those are going to be particularly interesting to check out.
posted by Artw at 5:04 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can say Men and A Wounded Fawn are both strong examples of artsy-fartsy horror that absolutely Does Not Work For Me, whereas Skinamarink is SO fucking formally weird that although I find it incredibly frustrating and will never watch it again -- I tried -- I'm like, "You gotta see it."
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:33 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd classify The Menu as more of a Labor Day movie.
posted by neuracnu at 5:56 PM on September 29, 2023 [9 favorites]

I've seen half of these, and--I think without spoilers but linking to their Fanfare threads for more detail--I'd second Prey (a Predator movie with relatively little horror to it), Slash/Back (a very low-key Inuit YA girls' adventure with special effects comparable to, say, modern Dr. Who), No One Will Save You (a young woman with a vintage arts & crafts aesthetic has to deal with an alien home invasion, and there's a gimmick to how the story is told), Huesera: The Bone Woman (a film from Mexico that slightly echoes the mother / child themes of La Llorona (1960), briefly shown in the film, but adds LGBTQ+ themes), Deadstream (a livestreamer goes to a haunted house), The Menu (a satire of elite / fine dining restaurant culture--surprisingly, without involving cannibalism, but not without other horror elements), Nope (a Jordan Peele film that is hard to tag, because the stuff outside the main situation is important too), X (the 'Texas Pornstar Massacre'), Barbarian (an AirBnB horror story), Scream V & Scream VI (which were just fun; V is a 'requel' so it's OK to jump in there, even if you don't remember the earlier films well), and Brooklyn 45 (an engaging WWII-themed one-room séance story). Leaving out lukewarm or mildly negative opinions of a number of others, I will note a special dislike for Resurrection and even moreso Infinity Pool, which are definitely not for me.

Some alternatives on Shudder that I'd recommend are Saloum (Senegalese production about a group of mercenaries getting out of the proverbial frying pan for a bit), Host (a Zoom-during-lockdown horror story), Psycho Goreman (an absurd parody of tokusatsu or Power Rangers-like stuff, also on Hoopla--I laughed), The Medium (no Fanfare thread yet--essentially found footage of a pseudo-ethnographic film that goes very wrong), Watcher (low-key psychological horror, also on Hulu), Satan's Slaves: Communion (an Indonesian film set in a haunted apartment building during a cyclone), Moloch (a horror film about bog bodies seems long overdue), and Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes (an homage to 70s Euro-horror, also on Tubi and Freevee). I also enjoyed Malignant (an homage to 80s Dario Argento; on Max and Hulu), Werewolves Within (a comedy loosely based on a video game version of the parlor game Werewolf; on Hulu), and Becky & The Wrath of Becky (revenge films about a teenager and how she deals with neo-Nazis; on Paramount+ and Hoopla). Benito Cereno rated most of those films favorably too--typically four stars, though I think he didn't rate Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes or the Becky movies--so I look forward to seeing the other recommended films from the link.
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:02 PM on September 29, 2023 [9 favorites]

Between the last (and by far the best) segment of the otherwise comparatively weak V/H/S 94 (there's a new one due on Shudder soon! advance word is good!) and Deadstream, Joseph and Vanessa Winter are off to a huge start. They've both got absolutely ridiculous energy and Deadstream is just a blast start to finish. It's become a movie I just put on sometimes because it's so fun and giddy in its spookiness.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:12 PM on September 29, 2023

I think it's relatively new on Shudder, so maybe missed a cutoff or something, and it's maybe not Halloween-y - but I think Perpetrator deserves a spot here.

Love this list! (You really DON'T have to see X to enjoy Pearl!)
posted by dragstroke at 6:23 PM on September 29, 2023

The Menu might be a little contextual, but it's one of my favorite movies from the last couple of years. Having had a fair share of pretentious dining experiences, the characters are amusing and it was just my cup of tea (Wild Bergamot and Red Clover Tea, that is).

I'm not into the horror genre, mostly. Especially if it includes jump scares and a ton of gore. I'll dabble in Dead Alive, the occasional zombie movie or The Evil Dead franchise from time to time, but most of the genre just isn't for me, fwiw.
posted by Chuffy at 12:02 AM on September 30, 2023

On a sadder note looks like we should enjoy letterboxd while we still can as it just got bought.
posted by Artw at 6:22 AM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

For what it's worth (I know, I know) the company that just bought Letterboxd, Tiny, holds itself out as a very different kind of buyout/investment company, one that invests in growing, profitable businesses and doesn't just milk them dry. Here's who else they own and here's their cute home page where they swear they're not like all those other evil fuckhead venture capital and private investment firms, for real this time, we swear, with their awful "Pressure to provide 10–100X returns" and who will "Typically flip your company in 3–5 years."

We'll see, but that does raise us innocent naifs' hopes a bit.

Also, I got a chucklesnort out of the paragraph near the bottom of Artw's link about Netflix's glowing praise of Letterboxd in a January press release, when Netflix joined, given it wasn't that long ago when Netflix stopped allowing users to post reviews and then outright deleted 10+ years of community review content, claiming declining interest after years of doing little to to support or cultivate that community.
posted by mediareport at 6:23 AM on October 1, 2023

Also, also, here's Benito's 2022 list, which had a few films I hadn't heard of and reminded me that October is the perfect time to once again make AMC+/Shudder one of my two monthly streaming picks.
posted by mediareport at 6:29 AM on October 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Watched No One Will Save You a few days ago, and Something In The Dirt last night. I'm gonna try to watch something from this list every day this month, but we'll see how I actually do.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 8:47 AM on October 1, 2023

Something In The Dirt would be something I rate extremely highly from this list, though I’m biased in already being a big Benson and Moorehead fan.

The theramin thing at the end is worth looking up.
posted by Artw at 12:10 PM on October 1, 2023

I was all set to watch Get Out and Us today on Netflix and they aren't there with absolutely no explanation as to why. If I hadn't seen articles on the web from a few days ago, all assuring me those films (and BlackKklansman and American Made, also not there) were dropping on October 1, I would think I imagined the whole "Coming This Week" page on Netflix.
posted by dannyboybell at 4:16 PM on October 1, 2023

When he says there are two new Scream movies on Peacock, does he mean to say Paramount+?
posted by Clustercuss at 7:48 PM on October 2, 2023