The 31 DAEs of Halloween 2025: Deep-Dive Dispatch #1

After at least seven years of blog proprietorship and attendant stonewalling, my 31 DAEs of Halloween marathon finally launched in 2022. Affectionately if inadequately recapped a few posts south of here, it proved such a rousing personal success story that it almost immediately became a budding annual concern, one for which I find myself literally waiting with bated breath for the remainder of each year. October was already my favorite month bar none – the convergence of football, weather, and horror movies is located at the very apex of my happy place – and what better way to celebrate it than with gluttonous self-indulgence, a guided tour of the many and varied delights the horror genre has to offer? Prior editions of the fest sought to demonstrate horror’s formidable breadth and depth by relying (up to a point) on random chance to select exhibits from a comprehensive master list of contenders dating back decades. If there were scattered amazing films of recent vintage I hadn’t yet seen, I could certainly make an exception to accommodate them, but for the most part chance ruled the day and the results were strong. Each year, every year, and more than ever before, the 31 DAEs fest is to me something well worth all the anticipation.

Having been blessed with a bounty of well-reviewed high-profile releases, our 2025 edition has offered up handy and timely excuses to revamp both how exhibits are selected for viewing and how they should later be recapped for the site. After all, 31 movies neither appear on my screen nor my site by magical coincidence. For example, 2022 was a total random draw off a select list, with its movies reviewed in a mere sentence or two, tops, reflecting its origins as an oversized Facebook post repurposed for theoretically greater public consumption. 2023 was largely randomness off an expanded but still limited list, its movies reviewed within a recommended general length but without word restrictions in expanded capsule form across four installments. 2024 was a 15/85 randomness ratio new to old from a more inclusive list, and sadly not reviewed at all due to nonexistent workload management on my part. 2025 ended up more like a 30/70 randomness to calculation equation culled from the largest cross-platform master list yet, and I think the quality shows through. As a fellow horror fan and traveler of the internet’s seedy backroads, hopefully you’ll agree, and enjoy some condensed thoughts – note the strict 250-word max per capsule review – over this and another two installments to come. Calendar to the contrary, October isn’t over quite yet. We’ve still got lots of tricks and treats to discuss…

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28 Years Later (2025 Netflix) – Arguably the most influential horror movie of the last quarter century, 2002’s 28 Days Later revitalized the living dead on multiple levels, popularizing handheld video photography as a strategic tool, introducing the game-changing concept of “fast zombies”, and actualizing post-apocalyptic England with unprecedented scale and shattering, gut-level detail. Such a fetid, fertile world begged for exploration, and an underrated time-jump sequel seemed to portend periodic dispatches from our nightmarish future on an agreeably regular cadence. After twenty years of real-time radio silence, 28 Years Later emerges, presenting a quarantined British mainland fully given over to the rage virus and back to the elements. Original series mastermind Danny Boyle returns to the director’s chair with a meditative narrative, in which a beleaguered 12-year-old boy’s rite-of-passage Zombieland hunting trip reveals the tantalizing existence of the world’s only legitimate doctor, but an obsessive flair for visual impact. The film basically lives in the near-constant extreme juxtaposition between sudden, hyperedited incidents of flesh-ripping carnage and a procession of warm, ultra-widescreen nature documentary-worthy money shots. Just when one type of interlude has worn out its welcome, the other replaces it. The direct leap from weeks to years later short shrifts the kind of world building I would’ve hoped to see, and I also wasn’t thrilled Years explicitly sets up a sequel, though still beyond pleased that Boyle has given the franchise such an artful new lease on undeath. Revel in these numerous isolated moments of astonishing beauty and brutality. In the end, they’re plenty enough.

Azrael (2024 Hulu) – Rejoice ye internet doomscrollers, grand if grim proclaimers, and otherwise pointedly pious peasantry, for, as Azrael opens, the long-fabled authentic rapture has apparently popped off, whisking the best of us into the sky forever and leaving the bulk of humanity condemned to scrape and scavenge its way through a primitive, tree-lined hellscape. What humbled, hardscrabble sinners remain have by way of atonement imposed upon themselves a blanket vow of silence, and, in between grunts and meaningful glaces, are lately consumed with appeasing roving packs of feral, bloodthirsty subhumans roaming the forest. Our titular heroine, played by budding genre icon Samara Weaving in mute Ellen Ripley mode, would appear to be an excellent sacrifice to said creatures were it not for her tenacity, wherewithal, and extreme survival instincts. What Azrael engages in, as the advantage repeatedly shifts between our girl, the discount rack death cult oppressing her, and the Descent-adjacent above ground monsters stalking both, is not world building so much as scene setting. The entire film seemingly takes place in and around that single post-apocalyptic commune, backdropped by miles of perfectly spaced forestry that could be Scandinavia or New Jersey’s Pine Barrens for all we know. Lack of dialogue brings as a perhaps unavoidable consequence a conspicuous lack of exposition, but never understanding quite what the hell is going on surprisingly doesn’t prove fatal. This is a particularly spare and unforgiving landscape, and a future I promise we don’t want any part of. At least Azrael is in her element.  

The Bad Seed (1956 Blu-Ray) – Everybody has unsavory thoughts. We like to think we’d never act on them. It stands to reason that outwardly angelic children might harbor and camouflage sinister intentions better than most, though we’re never sure how deeply or completely. Consider 1956’s The Bad Seed, a marquee name in classic horror that not only described its title character but quickly became succinct established shorthand for the “evil kid” archetype she embodied. Technically bloodless but awash in mannered psychological turmoil, this popular Broadway potboiler turned cinematic touchstone, in which the accumulation of circumstantial evidence makes a proper military housewife (Nancy Kelly, never less than convincing) question whether her showroom model eight-year-old daughter is the exact inverse of the beatific exterior she projects, presages Psycho in multiple ways. The drama never particularly lies with the question of whether pig-tailed, pearly white princess Rhoda (excellent child actor Patty McCormick in the role that made her famous) is, beneath her facade, a remorseless sociopath and perhaps even a murderer, but what effect that realization has on her doting mother as creeping suspicion mutates into tortuous certainty. Such was The Bad Seed’s potential to scandalize its original viewership that the producers clearly panicked, diluting the impact of its disturbing climax by immediately tacking on an all-smiles cast introduction as curtain call. Transgressive for the times and willing to address uncomfortable truths head-on, I would have cheered to see The Bad Seed display that one last bit of respect for the doubtless delicate sensibilities of its audience.  

Bring Her Back (2025 HBO Max) – Bottomless grief and related, if only ever temporarily buried, trauma cause extremely damaged people to behave in extremely damaging ways in Bring Her Back, the latest Australian horror export to, through torn flesh and sinew intimacy and sheer narrative audacity, break through to discerning audiences across the globe. Here in the States, we average one every other year lately, and this easily ranks among the most savage, harrowing, unforgiving, and heartbreaking I’ve seen. Rarely have I felt as profoundly, persistently uncomfortable as I did watching unfold this story of half-siblings – Piper, a blind but independent schoolgirl, and Andy, a fiercely loyal teenager three months from his conservatorship as her official guardian – betrayed by the system in the wake of their abusive father’s death, or as immediately suspicious of any character’s motives of as those of their new foster mother, Laura, whose outwardly sunny demeanor obscures oceans of desperate bleakness beneath. The ensuing domestic power struggle over Piper’s welfare takes several unexpected turns, ends in unspeakable tragedy, then offers a coda. Turns out Andy had ample reason to be overprotective. There’s also the small matter of Laura’s mysterious other ward, a mute child for whom the word feral fails to do justice even as shorthand, or what horrifying secret might be locked out in the shed in her back garden. I didn’t strictly understand everything I witnessed in Bring Her Back, and, though a fervent admirer, must admit I’m not planning a rewatch to fill in those blanks any time soon.

C.H.U.D. (1984 Tubi) – Though not (yet) a member of its target audience, and with no professed desire to ever join it, I nevertheless remember being highly susceptible to horror movie advertising as a child. To the shortlist of traumatizing but intriguing poster imagery containing the likes of Magic, Motel Hell, and Children of the Corn, you can add the arms and glowing eyes visible through steam wafting out of an upturned manhole cover from C.H.U.D., a surprisingly underwhelming but still entertaining mid-eighties monster movie with more on its tiny mind than any five contemporaries chosen at random. Manhattan’s homeless population has begun mysteriously vanishing, and three amateur sleuths running independent parallel investigations – a bereaved police detective, a bottom-feeding fashion photographer with journalistic aspirations (John Heard, pre-Home Alone), and a crusading soup kitchen proprietor (Daniel Stern, also pre-Home Alone) – want to know why, and also why the city fathers seem so intent on concealing the secret behind these disappearances. No points for intuiting some of what’s going on once the titular acronym has been defined as “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers”, though some points remain murky to the bitter end. C.H.U.D. is truly a story that lives in the margins and breathes not in its high concept but in its subplots – the detective’s crusade to avenge his late wife, the friction between the photographer’s domestic and professional goals, whatever the hell is happening at city hall – rendering the periodic attacks by its rubber-suited namesakes novel if strangely anticlimactic.

Companion (2025 HBO Max) – You only get one chance to see Companion for the first time, and I want very much for you to walk in cold but receptive. This is a movie whose animating central mystery is among the more engaging I’ve seen in recent years, one for which the phrase “spoiler alert” provides woefully inadequate warning. Treading carefully only affords me enough runway to maybe describe the first fifteen minutes, in which middle class climber Josh and his doting, codependent girlfriend Iris arrive for a weekend getaway with a trio of friends at the secluded lake house of another’s rich but shady lover, though suffice to say that if those are the limits of your expectations, the Lifetime Network has an entire cable channel dedicated to fulfilling them. Questions of fulfillment and self-actualization actually lie at the heart of Companion, which, from its idyllic beginnings, quickly enough veers in unsuspected directions, offering up a masterfully entertaining, consistently surprising, emotionally piercing treatise on the contours and limits of devotion, while also satirizing romantic convention and occasionally getting delightfully downright bloody. While Companion might not be quite the sort of movie Alfred Hitchcock would be directing if he was around today, I’d still like to think that, with its common central themes of deceit, desire, and the unjustly accused, the master of suspense would approve. Given my own prejudices, I certainly didn’t start Companion with the particular rooting interest with which I ended it. That proved the biggest, and most welcome, surprise of all.  

Corpse Bride (2005 Peacock) – Tim Burton was an established brand name by the time he lent a sketchbook of hand-drawn concept art and his own sterling reputation to the 1994 stop-motion animated masterpiece The Nightmare Before Christmas. Its enduring success suggested that Burton’s trademark strain of macabre whimsy could sufficiently sell a movie whether or not he actually drove the bus. Emerging through the cemetery fog years later, Nightmare’s spiritual successor, Corpse Bride, is the fourth such painstakingly articulated marvel in his oeuvre, one that seems somehow the most quintessentially Burton on its face yet the least like a passion project. Another dark but jaunty musical splitting its scene between the neighboring lands of living and dead, with Johnny Depp voicing a timid, flustered bridegroom who, through a series of misunderstandings of interplanery protocol, finds himself betrothed to zombie spinster Helena Bonham Carter, Corpse Bride feels like the kind of pitch that today could’ve been regurgitated by an ambitious AI. That pays disservice to its ample spirit, and discounts the details that enliven most every frame – see the late Christopher Lee’s cameo as an imperious minister, or the standout three-part Disney-style harmony by an encouraging black widow spider, the Bride herself, and the Peter Lorre-impersonating maggot (natch) who lives in her head and serves as her conscience. Viewers of Corpse Bride will generally arrive knowing what to expect, and emerge unperturbed for having had their preconceptions so thoroughly met. This is Tim Burton as Halloween comfort food, deceptively simple, dependably quirky, and undeniably tasty.  

Dr. Giggles (1992 Shudder) – There’s more than trace Halloween DNA in the makeup of the comparatively silly Dr. Giggles, or, since much of the action takes place in the corridors, waiting room, and makeshift operating room of an abandoned hospital, perhaps it’s more appropriate to namecheck Halloween II. Either way, the 1992 slasher is an appealing throwback in spirit and tone to the halcyon decade in whose ranks it just missed natural inclusion. Communal amnesia clouds the memory of a decades-old massacre perpetrated by a small town doctor when his demented, delusional son escapes a nearby mental institution determined to assume the family mantle and finish the job. Dependable intellectual heavy Larry Drake makes a great tittering madman, anti-hippocratic to the core despite any stated intentions, dressed in a snappy three-piece beneath a white doctor’s coat, and carrying an apparently bottomless satchel of improvised medical murder weapons, while Holly Marie Combs, later of long-running TV series Charmed, brings vulnerability with an interesting aloofness to her designated Laurie Strode. The heaviest lifting here is reserved for the good doctor’s encyclopedic knowledge of medical quips – he has barely any dialogue that isn’t punny punctuation to his latest killing – and for the dilapidated multi-purpose dwelling at 5714 Tivoli Court, a combination haunted house on the outskirts of town and shuttered full-service hospital that ably, if often incongruously, cuts corners to serve whatever narrative purpose the screenplay requires that moment. The visual payoff to his grave threat to “do what doctors do best” made me laugh out loud.  

Dracula, Bram Stoker’s (1992 Blu-Ray) – Overheated, irrepressible, and boldly, baldly operatic in tone, scope, and ambition, the 1992 vintage of Dracula was one of the first films of that decade to make a lasting impression on me, paving the way in its peculiar way for an unfolding festival of delights from Scorsese, Burton, Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, and their auteurial like. Boasting a stellar, appealingly hammy cast comprised of equal parts stage royalty and New Hollywood and, in the formidable, shadow-casting Francis Ford Coppola, some of the most confident, verging on arrogant, direction in film history – despite its official name, this Dracula is no more truly “Bram Stoker’s” than it was in 1979, or 1958, or 1931 – this is the luxury hotel version of horror, replete with grand appointments, dazzling costumes and production design, and sensuous, at times mesmerizing, shot construction and photography. It wants to titillate your fellow guests just short of scandalizing them, and rile them rather than trafficking in outright scares. Always in clear view, many critics saw Coppola’s heavy authorial hand and attendant handiwork as needlessly showy and perhaps even fatal to the enterprise, when in reality his obsessive care, relentless craft, and, dare I say, borderline hubris are its rocket fuel. Is Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula a perfect movie? Gods, no, but it is a perfect personal vision. I can hardly imagine a greater waste of materials than to ponder “perfection”, when we got this lyrical, bloody entertaining Gothic hayride instead. 

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025 HBO Max) – “Hey, I read ‘Gammy’s Death Book’ and there’s all kinds of house-related ways to die in there. I could trip down the stairs, or fall into a…toilet, or whatever. I’m coming with you!” With that solemn interpretation of sacred text from its late grand matriarch, what remains of the plucky but doomed Reyes family embarks on the fateful road trip that closes Final Destination: Bloodlines. Already in its rearview are the cascading, nightmare-inducing premonition that prevented a Stratosphere-style novelty restaurant from tragically collapsing in 1958, plus some brutal, and brutally funny, appetizer deaths to chew on. Of course, Final Destination’s signature multi-stage DIY Rube Goldberg mechanisms that, once triggered, count down to sudden, grisly ends for any hapless victim awaiting the invisible inevitable, long ago perfected the “death as exclamation point” kill. Two excellent thrill rides and a baseline serviceable third saw it become the go-to franchise for crowd-pleasing horror before squandering its accumulated goodwill on another two corner-cutting quickies that only made sense to New Line Cinema’s accountants. Fourteen years into market-mandated exile, Bloodlines conclusively proves there’s virtue aplenty in taking the time to carefully craft a proper Final Destination instead of mindlessly pumping one out every couple of years. The result is a wildly entertaining, intermittently moving odyssey that would’ve substituted spectacularly for the series’ own stated “final” chapter. Ironic, given the fact that its success has surely greased the wheels for yet another installment. Death retains both its undefeated record and sense of humor. Tony Todd, FTW.