It’s that time of year again; time when the warm, long nights and the smell of barbeques in the air give way to the impending cold as we say goodbye to summer and get our first warning bells that winter is coming (unfortunately no relation to the endless wait for George R.R. Martin’s next book, but since there might be a few of you I accidentally led on, have this meme). It’s the time when all the heat-averse people start breathing sighs of relief, and I start grumbling about the cold as I prepare to hide for six months in the safety of the indoors. But I promise this is not a post about how best to hibernate, because in between the end of summer and the worst season of the year, we have the second-best season. October. Spooky Season. Halloween! And, most importantly, the season when all the quality horror movies and TV shows are slated to come out (give or take a few weeks).

I’m sure I’ve mentioned Mike Flanagan’s work (The Haunting series, Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep, and others) countless times. He’s always been my mainstay every Spooky season, but since he jumped the Netflix ship to join the crew of Amazon, I’ve needed something else to look forward to as the weather starts turning. So, as a huge fan of Guillermo del Toro, when I heard that he’d be taking on Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel Frankenstein in his next film, I was actually okay with the inevitable end of summer. But since I missed my window to see it at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (my wallet thanks me, though my heart does not), and I’ll have to wait until it gets its day in theatres or pops up on Netflix, I need to tide myself (and those who’ve had their interest piqued) over in the meantime. Thankfully, October also happens to be a season when classic monsters are never out of style. So, gather your plastic fangs and bedsheets because we’re going on a tour of vampires, werewolves, and Frankensteins (oh my!), and the many adaptations they’ve starred in.

The thing about del Toro’s Frankenstein that first grabbed me is that it’s meant to be an actual, faithful adaptation of Shelley’s work, rather than reducing Frankenstein’s plot and philosophical questions on creation, science, and power to the grumbling, bumbling scarefest of the first 1931 adaptation. Not that there’s anything wrong with a grumbling, bumbling scarefest, but when people are still confused about whether Frankenstein is the monster or the doctor, something faithful is a breath of fresh air. Junji Ito (can it ever be Spooky Season without mentioning Junji Ito?) has done something similar in his illustrated rendition of Frankenstein, which highlights the grotesque nature of the Doctor’s act of god in a way that only Ito can manage to put to paper. Also, there’s a little story in the back dedicated to Boss Non-Non, Ito’s grumpy grandma of a Maltese dog, in case you need an emergency reading break.

If you are looking for something a little more lighthearted, though, Lisa Frankenstein’s dark, 80s, totally goth rom-com about the reanimated man that’s captured the heart of a grave-obsessed teen will be right up your alley. Lisa, the quintessential quirky heroine, can’t seem to get her luck to turn around. Mom killed by a serial axe murderer, a bad stepmom and an even worse stepsister, it’s no wonder that she enjoys hanging out in graveyards and fantasizing about a particular interred piano player. A well-aimed lightning bolt makes for a grim meet-cute when it strikes the grave and Lisa gets to meet the dead man of her dreams (with a few missing bodily essentials). But hey, nobody can be perfect, I guess, and love is a journey, even if that journey takes you on a mission to find a spare hand or two. It’s Bride of Frankenstein meets the black humor of Heathers and the zaniness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (an evergreen part of every Halloween season), so if you want to freshen up your Spooky Season watching list, Lisa Frankenstein isn’t a bad place to start.

But if all things dark, broody, and vampires are more your style, you can’t go wrong with last December’s Nosferatu. It’s a feast for the cinematic eyes, that plays with symmetry, culture, and Gothic Romantic art, making this movie more than just a tale about a real estate house call gone wrong, but… well… cinema. But while I do have to give it accuracy points, the movie’s rendition of the most infamous vampire is more an homage to the 1922 film than the Bram Stoker novel that inspired both (and a healthy fear of garlic and/or mirrors).

If you wanted to stay away from dark, ancient, Eastern European castles, though, why not take a trip down to Christmasland? I promise this is not an attempt to convince anyone that The Nightmare Before Christmas is more of a Halloween movie than a Christmas movie. Christmasland is the slightly less fun “amusement” park where resident vampire Charles Manx takes unsuspecting kids in Joe Hill’s N0S4A2. There’s only been one to ever escape this terrifying playground, and now, as an adult, Vic McQueen is called back to Manx’s stomping grounds to stop him from claiming his next victim: her own child. Hill’s psychological take on vampirism is refreshing, too, if maybe a little on the nose. Instead of wanting to suck blood, he gorges himself on the unhappiness of his victims, replacing it with something far darker and more manic. If you want to spend your Spooky Season putting on your detective hats and unravelling the mystery of that, you can check out the two-season TV adaptation too.

Since Guillermo del Toro is the one who started us off, I also can’t talk about vampires without mentioning his viral take on vampirism in The Strain. When a plane suddenly stops in the middle of JFK International Airport, with radio silence from the pit crew, CDC specialist Dr. Ephraim Goodweather is sent to investigate. What he finds is an aircraft filled with dead passengers, except for four who have been infected with an ancient but terrible virus that escapes the plane and threatens to cause a full-scale apocalypse across NYC. When I still had cable TV, The Strain was a near-constant Halloween season companion for me. The stakes (pun fully intended) feel bigger than the threat of a vampire wanting to eat a small village of people, and it’s fully aware of the long history behind the monsters. While it offers something new, it also does its best to mix it in with the classic parts of what came before it. While it might not get all the accuracy points, it does get points for being a good, scary vampire story.   

Werewolves are a little hard to place in the accuracy department, though. Some of the earliest mentions we have of werewolves come all the way from Greek mythology’s Legend of Lycaon, while some insist that the first werewolf story can be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh. I’ll also add Little Red Riding Hood into the werewolf cannon as, when I was writing this post, I discovered that it was added to Charles Perrault’s book of fables and fairytales a little after a bunch of Frenchmen claimed to be werewolves when it was discovered they were serial killers (“lycanthropy made me do it”, as it turns out, does not hold up in a court of law). While the story existed in oral traditions long before that, the little literary conspiracist in me thinks they might be tangentially related, and I promise I’m not just using this as a convenient segue to talk about The Wolf Among Us. It’s a comic-turned-groundbreaking narrative video game that takes place in the land of fairytales, and you get to take control of Bigby Wolf (aka the Big Bad Wolf), the sheriff of Fabletown. When a murder makes the streets of this reality haven much less the stuff of “happily ever after”, you and Bigby are sent to investigate and unravel the twisted mystery and maybe prove that a Big Bad Wolf isn’t so bad after all. While being strikingly modern, The Wolf Among Us captures the thematic darkness that’s present in the original fairytales it bases its story on, making this a perfect way to fill your Spooky Season time.

And lastly, if you’re looking to add some more werewolves in your life with something that doesn’t start with Teen and end with Wolf, let me point you in the direction of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Link, after being dragged through an alternate dimension called the Twilight Realm in his search for missing village children, is transformed into a wolf and tasked to complete a grand adventure that will set both worlds back in balance. But things aren’t all bad when you get to run around as a fluffy canine being captained by a bossy, pint-sized, imp-like thing with sass for days (or nights, technically). It makes this addition to the classic Halloween monster list the most lighthearted of the bunch, so if you’re looking for something that’s probably a bit more sugar-filled to match your personal bowl of sweets and/or Halloween candy rejects, it’s time to boot up ye olde WiiU.

With that, let’s wrap up here. I wish you a very merry, auspicious start to Spooky Season. I’ve just gotten word that Del Toro’s Frankenstein is getting some more time on the silver screen, and tickets will be mine. Until next time!