Horror Movie Month 2025
It’s December, and I should’ve posted this in early November, but I didn’t. I did other stuff. Now, though, I’m on a long plane flight, so I guess it’s time to write a bit of bloggery. (Did I really never write up 2024? Well, maybe later.)
Here’s what we watched for Horror Movie Month this year!
October 1: Heart Eyes (2025)
This is “what if a rom-com was also a slasher?” It was a bit uneven, and didn’t quite nail either part – understandable, but still, you hope for excellence, right? It was novel and fun enough that I’m glad to have watched it. It’s from Josh Ruben, who did some other stuff I also liked.
October 2: The Borderlands (2012)
Hey, this was surprisingly decent. Vatican-sponsored ghost hunters are investigating a haunting. Is it bunk or not? There was nothing particularly special about this movie, except that it was well done. Good cast, good pacing. It’s nice to find a new competent, enjoyable, unexpected movie like this!
October 3: Departing Seniors (2023)
There’s a murderer at a high school, and somebody can see the murders coming in visions. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t terrible, but it was retreading old material, and there were lots of little problems. Why was the school always so empty? If it’s nearly graduation day, why are people wearing big coats?
Watch It’s a Wonderful Knife instead, maybe.
October 5: V/H/S/Halloween
I think this was my favorite V/H/S movie so far. They’re all sort of uneven messes, but this one had the most fun I can remember. I especially enjoyed the weird framing story about the soft drink focus group. Also, Fun Size was fun and weird. More like this one, please, V/H/S people!
October 5: Bring Her Back (2025)
I saw this as “best new horror of 2025” a bunch of places. It was a very well made movie, well written, well-acted. It was a good film. It was also just so grim, for much of it. It was a movie full of desperation. I’m glad I saw it, and yeah, it was good, but I think we usually are looking for something more fun in Horror Movie Month.
October 6: Presence (2024)
Remember in The Menu, how the chef is making this extremely high-technique food that is hard to criticize for any lack of technical merit, but which sparks no joy? That’s this movie. It’s a well-made haunted house movie, but I didn’t care about what happened to anybody in it.
October 7: Ick (2024)
This movie reminded me of Detention (2011) and that’s a good thing. Brandon Routh plays a guy who was a high school football star and is now sort of washed up. There’s a weird black fungus that grows all over everything, and has been there for decades, and nobody cares. It’s just there. Then, one day, things change. It was weird and fun and unexpected. It wasn’t as good as Detention, but I liked it a lot.
October 8: Somnium (2024)
Big change in gears here from the previous movie. This was a slow-paced, moody movie about a would-be actor in LA who gets a job at some kind of weird dream therapy place. It looks right out of an early 80s Cronenberg movie. She walks around the place at three in the morning, surrounded by sleeping people in wood-paneled rooms. I liked it! I also liked that it was very happy to have a simple moral.
October 9: The Collector (2009)
This was pitched as “Would you like to see a movie that’s kind of like Saw but has been mostly forgotten?” It wasn’t as smart as the original Saw trilogy, and went on way too long. It’s sort of “Home Alone, with adults, and lots of blood.”
October 10: Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project (2025)
This little indie movie was a mess, but I had fun. There’s a guy who wants to make an indie horror movie, and is not a skilled filmmaker. His crew have a lot of heart, but are sort of hopeless. They send a guy in a bigfoot costume out into the woods in hunting season. Also, the set might be haunted? I enjoyed it.
October 11: I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)
This could’ve been a lot worse. If you have any fond memories of the original, go for it. Otherwise, eh.
October 11: [REC]⁴ Apocalypse
Gloria and I had seen the previous REC movies, but I don’t think we’d seen this one. It was good! With Satanic zombies back on the mainland, a bunch of people are aboard a ship trying to study the problem. So: people in an enclosed space, at sea, with a zombie out break. You can imagine the rest, mostly. It brought back the newscaster from the first two movies, which was fun. (The original REC is definitely worth watching!)
October 13: How to Kill Monsters (2024)
A police station is taken over by monsters and demons and the riff raff inside have to save themselves. There’s a fun framing device where the movie starts at the end of a horrible bloodbath and then you’re sort of figuring out how it all fits together. Like a bunch of other movies on this list, it was enjoyable, but not great.
October 14: Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer (2024)
Every year we end up with one or two movies that we thought were going to be sort of horror-y, or maybe just creepy thrillers, but don’t work out that way. This was one, this year, and no regrets! Steve Buscemi plays a retired serial killer who approaches a struggling writer to pitch a collaboration on memoirs. But after a little bit of farce, he’s roped into pretending to be a marriage councelor for the writer and his wife. Really weird, and who doesn’t want to see more Steve Buscemi?
October 17: Vicious (2025)
Polygon suggested this would be a great pick if you liked Weapons. It wasn’t. I guess I was supposed to feel sympathy and horror for the protagonist, but I didn’t care. It was not compelling or scary.
October 18: Dark Match (2024)
Another “flawed but worth it” entry! A group of near-nobodies in the local professional wrestling circuit book a high-paying gig at a private party in the woods. Could it be that the private party is actually a horrible, horrible place to end up? Yes, it could.
Special note: I kept thinking, “Who is this actor?” Turns out he played Bill in GTA V, and I recognized his face from his likeness in a video game. Woah!
October 19: https://letterboxd.com/film/together-2025/
This was another “best of the year” candidate, said the Internet. It wasn’t my favorite, but it was good. It had some serious ideas, and was nicely creepy, but also had a great sense of humor. It’s hard for me to explain much without saying too much. There’s a couple with a long-term relationship. They move to the sticks for a fresh start. Things get weird. Great pacing in this one, I thought, too.
October 20: Here for Blood (2022)
This was definitely one of the best movies we watched! It reminded us of McG’s The Babysitter (2017), and in a good way. There’s a busy young woman who is a bunch of college classes and maybe a couple jobs, one of which is babysitting. She needs to cram, so her boyfriend agrees to take one of her babysitting jobs. Meanwhile, somebody has planned to stage a home invasion while she’s babysitting. They expect the petit woman, not her massive mixed martial artist boyfriend. It’s a trip!
October 21: Minutes Past Midnight (2016)
I don’t remember it well at this point. It was an anthology. I remember that some of it was terrible. On the other hand, there was one lovely and funny bit with Arthur Darvill as a serial killer who falls in love.
October 22: Willy’s Wonderland (2021)
Not good, per se, but I think I’ll still recommend it. It’s a rip off of Five Nights at Freddy’s, where Nic Cage is conscripted to spend a night cleaning an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese style place. The animatronics are out to get him. He fights back. Also, there are dying teenagers.
This movie is all about Nicholas Cage, who has zero lines and punctuates his night of cleaning and demonocide by drinking soda and playing pinball. Unhinged.
October 23: Cherry Falls (2000)
This got on my radar as “the most underappreciated slasher of the post-Scream boom”. Yeah, I could buy that. It wasn’t great but it was definitely fun and quirky. Also, my household likes Brittany Murphy. The premise: a serial killer is at work in the town of Cherry Falls. Their schtick? They only kill virgins. (The sherrif comes to this conclusion incredibly quickly with a shockingly small amount of evidence. But he is right.)
The town’s teenagers are urged to lose their virginity as quickly as possible.
If this movie had been made 15 years earlier, it would’ve featured a staggering amount of nudity. In 2000, though, it would have none. I wonder just when that changed!
October 24: Scared Shitless (2024)
A plumber enlists the help of his germaphobic son to go clean and fix some toilets. Little did they know that these toilets… are haunted! It was short and stupid and fun, and I am glad we watched it.
October 25: Death of a Unicorn
I don’t know why this wasn’t good. It felt like they overworked the dough. Everything was there for greatness, but it didn’t pan out. Dude hits a unicorn with his car. The unicorn’s parents come back for revenge. At one point, Richard E. Grant eats a piece of unicorn meat. Anthony Carrigan is in it and, as always, is great.
October 26: Grafted (2024)
Kind of a mess. A young woman with a skin disorder is trying to find a new skin graft technique so she can fit in. But she accidentally kills a few people and it gets worse. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. Some good Kiwi accents in it, though!
October 28: Boys from County Hell (2020)
This one had been sitting in our Shudder queue for ages! It was worth the wait. In a village in Ireland, there’s a cairn that attracts a very modest number of tourists. The claim is that it’s the grave of an Irish vampire whose story inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. The level to which anybody believes this is unclear. Meanwhile, the cairn has to be knocked down to make way for a new motorway. Could this free the evil lurking beneath? Yes.
This was another case of “an unexceptional premise made really well”. The pacing, the casting, the sense of humor, all worked well to make a really enjoyable little movie.
October 29: Good Boy (2025)
Was this whole movie a metaphor? I’m not sure.
There’s a guy who is either sick or suicidal or haunted, and he skips town to go stay at his dead uncle’s house, which even the casual observer can tell is a really bad idea. His sister tells him so, but he’s a jerk and won’t listen. He does take his dog, though. His dog is also worried about him, and the movie is entirely from the perspective of the dog – it’s not all in the dog’s point of view, but we’re following the dog, so we have to work things out from what the dog can see.
The dog was great. The movie was only okay.
That’s it!
We watched some other things not reflected here. Most notably, we started watching “It: Welcome to Derry”, which was fine.
I think it was a decent year, and I’ll have to see if I can remember enough about 2024’s movies to write those up too…