{"id":900435,"date":"2026-10-30T23:30:18","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T23:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/900435\/"},"modified":"2026-10-30T23:30:18","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T23:30:18","slug":"heres-what-io9-is-watching-this-halloween","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/900435\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s What io9 Is Watching This Halloween"},"content":{"rendered":"

Halloween is on a Saturday this year, which means we can celebrate all day long<\/a>. No need to wait until after work to go to a party, trick-or-treat, or watch a movie<\/a>. You can get out of bed, grab a cup of coffee, and get the spooky vibes rolling right away.<\/p>\n

That is a lot more hours in the day to fill<\/a>, though, and we at io9 figured we\u2019d let you know what we\u2019re watching this Halloween to potentially offer some inspiration.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe poster for The Thing. \u00a9 Universal The Thing <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not big on costumes or parties, but it\u2019s hard not to lean into the spooky vibes of this time of year through on-theme pop culture. I save my yearly viewings of Friday the 13th for Valentine\u2019s Day, though, and Halloween just seems a bit too on-the-nose. So, this year, I\u2019m cueing up John Carpenter\u2019s 1982 classic The Thing. The visual effects are still gnarly all these years later, Ennio Morricone\u2019s score perfectly captures the feelings of intense isolation and growing paranoia, and it stars Kurt Russell and Keith David. What more could you want from a movie? \u2013 Jen Lennon<\/p>\n

\"Alien\u00a9 Impegno Cinematografico Alien 2: On Earth <\/p>\n

Every October we declare \u201chorror month\u201d in my house, conveniently minimizing the fact that we watch a lot of horror year-round. This year\u2019s pile contained several titles I hadn\u2019t seen before, including the pleasingly sleazy Bloody Moon, from the reliably sleazy Jess Franco, and our Halloween night pick: 1980 Italian import Alien Terror, aka Alien 2: On Earth. That alternate title was clearly aiming to fool someone, anyone, that it had a connection to Ridley Scott\u2019s 1979 blockbuster, which of course it did not. Already off to a good start.<\/p>\n

The plot follows a returning space mission in which all the astronauts have been replaced by monsters with explosive powers. That would be enough to go on, but it also features a run-in with a group of cave explorers, so hopefully we\u2019ll be seeing splatter galore in a set crudely evoking an underground cavern of some sort. Plus, the enticing promise of poorly dubbed dialogue? Can\u2019t wait. \u2013 Cheryl Eddy<\/p>\n

\"Pulse\u00a9 Toho Pulse <\/p>\n

This Halloween, having friends with blind spots in their Letterboxd filmography means living vicariously through them while rewatching some cult classics. And what better classic to spin the block on than Kiyoshi Kurosawa\u2019s 2001 techno-horror film, Pulse<\/a>? Knowing I\u2019m the Japanese cinema-head in our friend group\u2019s little movie book club, they foolishly assumed I\u2019d suggest Hideo Nakata\u2019s Ringu<\/a> (they only saw the American version and liked it enough) or Kurasawa\u2019s Cure<\/a>\u00a0since they were subjected to hearing me yap about it before I wrote a retro review for it. Fools. We only do deep cuts in my apartment (with a sizeable investment in a home projector for such occasions<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I chose Pulse as this year\u2019s Halloween watch specifically because my friends all felt like the horrors on display from the Backrooms<\/a> and Obsession<\/a>\u2014despite being a total vibe in their own right\u2014left a little to be desired. I reckon Pulse will marry those have-nots for anyone who feels the same. But mostly, I chose Pulse because there\u2019s one particular shot of a silhouette in the finale of Kurosawa\u2019s film that is burned into my memory as one of the most unnerving scenes I\u2019ve witnessed in a horror movie. It\u2019s just as chilling as Nikki\u2019s looming outline running in reverse in Curry Barker<\/a>\u2019s film. In fact, I\u2019d put money on Barker taking inspiration from it. Like a crab in a barrel, it\u2019s my civic duty to share prescient early aughts scares of Pulse with my friends this season, and invite you to do the same. \u2013 Isaiah Colbert<\/p>\n

\"Blair\u00a9 Artisan The Blair Witch Project <\/p>\n

Growing up, only a few movies truly terrified me. I loved watching slasher movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, and thought classics like The Shining and The Exorcist were amazing. But movies that actually made me uncomfortable? It was a short list. One was the original Halloween. Another was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And then there was The Blair Witch Project.<\/p>\n

Mostly, that was because I saw The Blair Witch Project in early 1999<\/a> when marketing still didn\u2019t make it clear whether it was real or not. I\u2019ve written about this extensively<\/a>. This year, though, I\u2019m ready for a rewatch not because I need a good scare<\/a>\u2014I\u2019ve gotten over that 25-year-old fear\u2014but because the film means so much to me and is having a bit of a nostalgic moment. From its connection to internet culture, the way its sequels each failed<\/a> in such unique ways<\/a>, the behind-the-scenes battles<\/a>, and even the upcoming reboot<\/a> (or whatever), all of it just makes me yearn for simpler days when a $27,000 found-footage movie could take the world by storm and make hundreds of millions of dollars. That there are new physical media editions<\/a> doesn\u2019t hurt either. \u2013 Germain Lussier<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows<\/a> to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books<\/a> that should be on your radar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Halloween is on a Saturday this year, which means we can celebrate all day long. No need to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,22523,377204,16822,170913,193047],"class_list":["post-900435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-halloween","tag-horror-month","tag-pulse","tag-the-blair-witch-project","tag-the-thing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}