HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Night House (2020)

Grieving widow Beth (Godzilla vs Kong's Rebecca Hall) returns to the lake house her husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), built for them, but can't shake the feeling she is not alone.

Desperate to understand why Owen killed himself, Beth starts to dig through his belongings as she spirals into a maelstrom of paranormal activity, lucid dreaming, and paranoia.

The more secrets about Owen she unearths, the more threatened Beth becomes by whatever is haunting her home.

Despite the best efforts of her friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) and lovely neighbour, Mel (Vondie Curtis Hall), an elderly widower, to get her to cease her pursuit of "answers" and move on with her life, Beth is a woman on a mission.

Perhaps I watch too many movies, but there are some pretty hefty sign posts/red flags in the first act of The Night House that - knowing I was in for a ghost story from the get-go - pretty much spelled out what was going on.

Despite the nice, measured, slow burn I couldn't help but feel the movie may have shown its hand a bit early with the first of Owen's note books that Beth comes across, with its strange diagrams and cryptic notations.

There are plenty of clues to the underlying mystery throughout the film with many left ambiguous even as the central conceit is spelled out in a necessary info-dump.

Director David Bruckner delivers some really impressive camera tricks, particularly in his use of shadow entities, but also in a wonderfully disturbing sequence with an invisible ghost, as well as a striking, sudden, switch of POV as Beth's dreams overlap with her reality.

He also has an uncanny knack of building to what you expect to be a jump scare, but then taking the scene in a different direction, which only accentuates the creepiness of the situation.

Even the story's ultimate resolution is atypical for this style of predominantly threatening and violent ghost story.

Unfortunately, there is an inescapable sense that the film doesn't do enough with some of its more intriguing elements, such as the lake itself, the "other house" (that exists in different forms in dreams and reality), Beth's real connection with the entity, the "mirror world" etc

While occasionally evoking comparisons with other modern ghost stories, from Twin Peaks to Final Destination, The Night House certainly has a style all of its own.

Sometimes this obfuscates the narrative a bit too much, but generally it creates something that is truly memorable - if only for some of its clever imagery, at the expense of its plot.

However, as intriguing and enthralling as Brucker's direction of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski's script is, The Night House truly belongs to Rebecca Hall, whose central performance as Beth dominates this 107-minute movie.

She is in almost every scene, often alone, and wholly convinces us of Beth's heartache, despair, deterioration, confusion, anger, and fear. 

Ultimately, The Night House feels a bit patchy, but it's certainly unnerving viewing and never resorts to cheap tricks when trying to elicit a reaction from its audience.

The Monkey (2025)

Having been abandoned by their father, twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (both played by Christian Convery) are searching through the junk he left behind and discover a creepy-looking, wind-up, drum-playing toy monkey.

Very quickly the young boys realise that by turning the key, and setting the monkey drumming, random people in their environs start to die in statistically improbable ways.

Unfortunately, one of those people is their mother, Lois (She-Hulk's Tatiana Maslany), which drives the final wedge between the constantly-feuding twins.

Twenty-five years later, the monkey returns to plague Hal's (Theo James of The Time Traveler's Wife) life, but now - even though he has cut himself off from pretty much everyone - he fears this force of evil might harm his own son, Petey (Colin O'Brien).

Petey is being raised by Hal's ex-wife (Project Blue Book's Laura Mennell) and her new husband, self-help guru Ted (Lord of The Rings' Elijah Wood), who is going to adopt Petey and excise Hal from the boy's life completely.

Thus, Hal has a final week to spend with his son before losing him to Ted.

Learning that the aunt who raised him and Bill after their mother's death has also died in a "freak accident", Hal hopes to track down the monkey - and finally destroy it - when he returns to her house, with Petey in tow, to deal with the disposal of the estate.

However, this just sets in motion a series of violent events around Hal that end up in a reunion with his twin (also played by Theo James).

Bill has been driven insane by his involvement with the cursed monkey, and now sees its magical power as a route to a kind of immortality, regardless of the cost to others.

Based on a Stephen King short story, produced by James Wan (of Saw and The Conjuring fame), and written for the screen by director Osgood Perkins (who also wrote and directed Longlegs), The Monkey is a gloriously gory dark comedy and meditation on the randomness - and inevitability - of death.

Except for its drumming, the mysterious monkey is never seen moving (Bill claims it "teleports") which gives this absurdist Grand Guignol a distinct flavouring of the Annabelle movies blended with the Final Destination franchise.

The very definition of weird fiction, there are no easy answers to explain the enigmatic animatronics' origin or abilities, and no pat resolution to Hal's troubles... but that's rather the point. 

Full of mesmerising, bizarre and creative kills, The Monkey clearly aims to challenge its audience whether to laugh out loud or squirm and wretch as it segues from set piece to set piece.

More shocking than scary, this wonderful film is an over-the-top, blood-soaked rollercoaster that doesn't let up for its 97-minute duration. 

MONSTER MAYHEM: Tarot (2024)

A clichéd group of generic college students have AirBnB-ed a spooky mansion in the Catskills for a drunken (yet, admittedly, rather tame) birthday party for one of their number: Elise (Larsen Thompson).

Low on drink, the group search the house and discover - behind a "keep out" sign - a basement reminiscent of the Warren's 'storeroom of evil' from The Conjuring franchise.

Of course, the kids poke around. Of course, they find a deck of creepy, hand-drawn tarot cards in a wooden box. Of course, one of the students - Haley (Harriet Slater, aka Fran from Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny) - knows how to do readings.

Breaking the 'golden rule' of tarot (that you don't use someone else's deck), Haley does tarot readings - tied to the subject's horoscope - for all her friends and herself.

They all have a good chuckle, except Haley's ex-boyfriend Grant (Wrong Turn's Adain Bradley), and then settle down for the night.

After a long drive back to the university, the gang all go their separate ways... and that's when the killing starts.

Elise is the first to die, then Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz).

Only then do the survivors realise that their friends are being bumped off in ways that are literal interpretations of Haley's vague, metaphorical tarot card readings.

Searching for answers online, the first name their Google search throws up is a discredited - and kooky - expert called Alma Astrom (Olwen Fouéré, the most recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Sally Hardesty).

Alma, of course, knows all about this cursed deck of tarot cards and their origin, and even has a personal connection to the cards - as a survivor of a similar murder spree to the one our protagonists are caught up in.

In a nutshell, the cards were cursed by a Hungarian peasant - known only as The Astrologer - who transferred her essence into the cards so she could kill any who receive a reading from them.

Now, our heroes have to find a way to remove the curse before too many of them are brutally slaughtered by The Astrologer's manifestations of the demonic forms she drew on the Major Arcana.

Written and directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg - based on the 1992 novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams - Tarot feels like an '80s throwback, direct-to-VHS, monster flick.

However, as the film is really on-the-nose with its unsubtle, supposedly spinetingling, goings-on it also comes across as a parody of the genre for the most part.

The characters are so two-dimensional that we can't really get invested in their fates beyond a surface level, yet - for some reason - all the kills (essentially the 'selling point' for this kind of teen flick) are either off-camera or overly shy about showing anything resembling gore.

The script oscillates between wanting to be the foundation of a serious horror franchise, stylistically suggesting Final Destination and Nightmare on Elm Street during its 92-minute runtime, and being a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the same.

As the plot gets increasingly silly, characters are forced to exposit about how these unconvincing twists could actually have happened, which compounds the suggestion that this really could be a parody.

To be fair, Tarot isn't awful (we've all seen a lot worse), but the most terrifying thing about this would-be horror movie is its mediocrity.

The Toll (2020)

A jet-lagged traveller from Chicago, Cami (Jordan Hayes, who has a look of Kate Mara about her), lands at Hamilton International Airport in Canada in the middle of the night.

She has flown up to visit her dad who lives on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, but her flight was delayed by a storm, so she now has to hail a rideshare to complete her journey.

The overly chatty and socially awkward driver, Spencer (Max Topplin, who has a bit of Tim Key, from recent Alan Partridge series, about him), kind of gets on Cami's nerves, but she really starts to freak out when his GPS sends them off down a dark road she has never travelled before.

However, checking Spencer's route, Cami accepts that this is an alternate way to her dad's place.

Only shortly after that, when they are heading down a pitch black country road, they are suddenly spooked by someone seemingly stepping out in front of the car.

But when they check, there's no one there.

Unfortunately, getting back into the car, Spencer discovers it won't start and they are stranded.

Both he and Cami, separately, decide to walk and look for help, but whichever direction they go, they end up back at the car.

That is just the beginning of their night of terrifying weirdness.

All credit to writer-director Michael Nader, The Toll does a phenomenal job of slowly building tension, then easing off, then escalating matters once again.

Nader's track record has primarily been with short films, and while this certainly has the feeling of a well-contained short horror film, it doesn't drag its heels or feel padded.

Beginning as a very modern psychological horror, with Cami's growing paranoia about being 'trapped' in a car with a peculiar stranger, the story then takes a dramatic supernatural turn that increasingly reminded me of the unusual occurrences in As Above, So Below.

For the first half an hour, of this 75-minute movie, we're just with Cami and Spencer, and the strained atmosphere feels so unnervingly real.

It's the early hours of the morning, they're alone in some dark, spooky woods, without phone service, with only Spencer's bow and arrow for protection (he's a bow hunter, who keeps his equipment in the boot of his car, much to Cami's initial horror). 

It isn't until they cross paths with a local that they learn they have somehow been drawn into the parallel world of The Toll Man, a paranormal entity who - attracted by a scent of death around our protagonists - demands a payment in blood before he will let them resume their journey.

There's maybe one or two minor jump scares, but mainly The Toll relies on the psychological weapons in its arsenal, as well as such tricks as shadows moving around in the darkness behind the main characters.

Increasingly they are pulled through a series of surreal nightmares that seem determined to undermine the couple's recently developed confidence in each other, trying to force one to kill the other.

These mind-games are a supernatural spin on Jigsaw's challenges in the Saw franchise, testing the mettle of Cami and Spencer, served up by an unseen - and unheard - antagonist à la Death in the Final Destination franchise.

The dynamic between the two main characters swings back and forth, eventually going to a very dark place at the climax of the film.

While other characters do pop up, largely in the nightmare sequences, it's Jordan Hayes and Max Topplin that carry this great little Canadian fright feast.

And after watching this: I'm never getting in an Uber ever again!