Hello Family,
The following five films scared the shit out of me.
Ha!
I’m sorry to begin this post with such a blunt and vulgar statement, but it’s true. And when I say scared the shit out of me, I mean that in every way except literal. These films tap into a primal dread living somewhere inside my body and gave me nightmares; had me thinking every bump in the night was a sure sign that some demon or serial killer was finna get me. 😅
Why would I even watch movies that are capable of making me this jumpy and suspicious? In a post from last Halloween, I explained that I’ve been watching horror films for as long as I can remember. I was one of those kids who was exposed to them at a very young age because the adults in my life measured my courage—and manhood—by whether I was able to overcome being scared to death. My continued fascination with horror films must most certainly be a remnant of that.
I no longer believe that being able to watch horror films makes me “brave” or “more of a man” (the meaning of which is chilling). As an adult, I’ve come to understand that why I watch these films, what really scares me about them (and what scares me about all media, to be honest) is what they reveal about certain imaginations, which, of course, speaks to certain realities.
So, I thought about it. Could I determine which five films scared me most of all? Compiling this was both difficult and surprisingly easy. Horror tends to leave a mark, and not just in ways that are obvious. And there’s so much of it to go around.
Thus, in the spirit of the upcoming Halloween holiday, here are:
5 Films That Scared the Shit Out of Me!
This post contains spoilers.
5. Talk to Me (2023)
Talk to Me is the first film in a very, very long time where I was in an audience of people screaming and leaving the theater because they were frightened by what they were seeing on screen. Does that even happen anymore given how exposed current generations are to horrors via the Internet?
I have to say, this film was genuinely scary, in the old-fashioned “Now I don’t want to turn off the lights at night!/Is this blanket enough to keep the ghost from getting me?” type of way. And that was a complete surprise because I find most modern horror films to be bloody; too gory, maybe; gross even; they might even be interesting. But the lot of them are just not scary at all.
It didn’t surprise me that Talk to Me is peculiarly racialized. For example, while it seems as though the blame for all the shit that pops off demonically in this film should be placed at the feet of the instigating white character, he is low-key coded as sympathetic/heroic. Instead, the film seems to suggest that Black/Brown/Indigenous/queer characters are primarily responsible for the chaos unleashed. I find this racial dynamic to be present in most movies in the demon-possession subgenre. It’s almost like these films are a metaphor for the dominant caste’s fears of being “contaminated” or “corrupted” by the Other.
When discussing recent horror flicks—including the new Goosebumps series on Disney+, a new Shudder movie called Puppetman, and the latest Netflix series from Mike Flanagan, The Fall of the House of Usher (based on the literary works of the man who customarily married his 13-year-old cousin, Edgar Allan Poe)—a filmmaker/scholar friend of mine agreed that filmmakers are becoming more and more sophisticated in their anti-Blackness, hiding the common stereotypes, tropes, and general bigotry behind what seems like a liberal “inclusiveness” and “visibility.” She and I concluded that the most dangerous kind of bigotry is the kind that’s embedded in entertainment deemed “brilliant” because they become effective Trojan-Horse-type assaults on the psyche. James Baldwin broke down this shit down in the 1970s, in his essay about The Exorcist (which I will get into later).
In any event, despite having to operate as the living Nkisi Nkondi figure in Talk to Me (which, if you’re a thoughtful viewer, you will recognize that as what makes this film so scary), Sophie Wilde as Mia gives a bravura performance and does her best to invest the character with a sympathy that the script tried(?) but failed to give her. Wilde is, by far, the most magnificent force of this terrifying and innovative film—a film that was very adept at modernizing demon possession, making the recent reboot of The Exorcist feel redundant and regressive.
4. Stepford Wives (1975)
My fear of this film might have a lot to do with the fact that my mother took me to see it when it was originally released in theaters, and I was only four years old. LOL! And there’s something about films in the United States from the 1970s—I don’t know if it’s because of the lingering hopelessness of the Nixon era, the stark desolation caused by the recent assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the promising changes that didn’t manifest after the Civil Rights Movement, but films from this time period have a certain gritty, sinister, fatalistic quality to them—much like the blighted Brooklyn I remember growing up in before gentrification made it something else.
The Stepford Wives is no different. This film attempts to articulate the fear and danger that comes with confronting a rigid patriarchal structure: how women are expected to submit to a non-life of household chores, child rearing, and rape disguised as sex; how men are required to gut even the possibility of humanity from our own bodies in order to fit the culture’s idea(l) of “manhood.”
To this day, the end of this film breaks my heart with its nod to racial assimilation (in more ways than the obvious one), which is to say, its resignation to pessimism.
The Stepford Wives also does something that not many films did back in those days: it presents children as the albatross around women’s necks; suggests that they are a severe obstacle to women’s liberation, holding them back in especially dated motherhood roles that erase women’s personhood and makes them vulnerable in ways that freedom would never. I hope someone writes more about this interpretation someday.
And as for the climax: I can’t get the image of those blank, unfinished eyes out of my head.
Because I know what they represent.
3. The Exorcist (1973)
As I mentioned earlier, James Baldwin put me on game about what this film is really about. But he put me on years after I was already terrified by it.
I’m sure you’ve heard all the legendary stories of people passing out in movie theaters and how church attendance skyrocketed after the release of the film (which low-key might have been the intention all along: freak folks the fuck out enough so that their movie-ticket money becomes church-tithing money). The Exorcist was a bar-raising, culture-shock of a film. But in The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin breaks down what he believes this film is actually revealing:
For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. This devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.
The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children—can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet. At the end of The Exorcist, the demon-racked little girl murderess kisses the Holy Father, and she remembers nothing: she is departing with her mother, who will, presumably, soon make another film. The grapes of wrath are stored in the cotton fields and migrant shacks and ghettoes of this nation, and in the schools and prisons, and in the eyes and hearts and perceptions of the wretched everywhere, and in the ruined earth of Vietnam, and in the orphans and the widows, and in the old men, seeing visions, and in the young men, dreaming dreams: these have already kissed the bloody cross and will not bow down before it again: and have forgotten nothing.
Go awwwwwwffff, Godfather!
I wholeheartedly believe him.
So: With this film, Catholics, and white Americans in general (maybe all Americans; shit, maybe all of the world, too!), told on themselves. Through classic projection, they/we unintentionally revealed things about the secret workings of their/our hearts and minds—in particular, how they/we really feel about children. Spinning heads, pea-soup-projectile vomit, thrashing beds, staircase spider-walks, and bloody crucifix masturbations notwithstanding:
The truly terrifying thing about The Exorcist is us.
2. Get Out (2017)
As I’ve said before: The more I watch this film, the scarier it becomes. Influenced by both The Stepford Wives (1975) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Get Out strikes at the deep and primal fear of what happens to the Black person who enters into white spaces as the Only Black Person. It eviscerates the idea of the “well-meaning ally” as well as the notion of solidarity between “people of color”; it also has some terrifying things to say about interracial dating, integration, white employers, and white liberals, and positions Black people as singularly preyed upon for our aesthetics, art, culture, knowledge, and talents, yes; but also our very bodies—in ways athletic and laborious as well as sexual.
Repeat viewings reveal additional levels of sociopolitical commentary that eviscerate precisely because of how indistinguishable they are from reality. “The Sunken Place” is one of the scariest ideas ever enunciated in a film, in my opinion; and if you’re a Black person, you can see the real-life evidence of it all the time—even in the people closest to you. Perhaps you could have seen it in yourself, too; but the design of “The Sunken Place” is such that it’s meant to deny you this very ability above all. Because if you know, you know, which means you will have to do. And to have to do is one of the riskiest of all endeavors. Because to do involves the only revolutionary act: love. And in so doing, you become aware of how you have been, all that time, a tool in service of the opposite; and not many people can reckon with that and remain unscathed.
You got all that from “The Sunken Place?” Yes. Yes, I did. LOL!
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Daniel Kaluuya and Betty Gabriel give absolutely brilliant performances.
Get Out officially my favorite horror film of the 21st Century, and quite possibly my favorite horror film of all-time.
I’m still trying to figure out how Jordan Peele got this movie past the gatekeepers.
1. Jesus Camp (2006)
The scariest part is that unlike the other films on my list, this one is actually real, not just metaphorically. There are people out here really indoctrinating children into what I can only describe as death cults, forcing them to suspend disbelief, denying them access to discernment, making them fearful of wisdom and critical thinking, and brainwashing, traumatizing, and abusing them in the name of Jesus Christ.
The kids in this documentary are being tortured—boldly, proudly, publicly, repeatedly; live and in technicolor, on camera—and no one is doing anything other than watching or cheering it on. And perhaps that’s because the torment is wholly by design: this is how you create pliable laborers and soldiers willing to die for causes they’ve been convinced are just, but are really just frenzied colonial interests transferred up (or maybe down is more accurate) onto a joyless and sadistic deity, playing on superstitions, anxieties, egos, and ignorance in order to appear unquestionable and righteous.
This film compels you to ask: Is this really what your god wants? You cannot help but conclude: If so, then keep your god and yourself as far away from me as possible.
Sadly, the misopedists win in this one, y’all; and bitterly, the losers, over and over again, are children. And if they survive these onslaughts (and so many do not), these children sometimes grow up to become precisely the woeful duplicates their torturers wanted them to become (think of Kirk Cameron, for example).
That’s why I find this film to be the one that scares the shit out of me most.
While we’re on the subject of films…
My first cousin K.D. Wilson is making a whole movie, y’all!
It’s called Phantom Pain:
In 2009, Pain, a genius, uncanny masked detective, has 5 minutes to prevent a Tokyo University dropout from giving the world's largest Bitcoin collection to a psychopath.
You can peep the trailer below.
He’s my favorite auntie’s son, so please support his Kickstarter campaign. This project will only be funded if it reaches its goal of $15,000 by Friday, November 17, 2023 11:03 a.m. EST. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Thank you.
That’s all for now, Fam. Until next time, be well. And remember: kindness is free, but cruelty is incredibly expensive. And you pay for it with your life.
Have a safe and happy Halloween!
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert