The streaming service Shudder can be a godsend for horror fans — not just during October, but year-round, with its mix of horror classics, nonfiction shows related to horror culture, and at least a dozen original movies every year. Over the past two years, in fact, Shudder has acquired, produced, and/or released around 30 new horror movies, and as any Netflix subscriber can tell you, quantity of output does not always translate to high quality. It also becomes easier to read a perceived horror-movie hierarchy when some Shudder titles, like this year’s Dolly, Faces of Death, and Forbidden Fruits, receive theatrical releases before playing on the streamer, while plenty of other movies, well, don’t.
So it’s all the more welcome and surprising that October’s quartet of Shudder originals, none of which received a theatrical release, have yielded two particularly worthwhile entries: Hallowarrior and The Cycle.
Both movies played festivals earlier this year — Hallowarrior at Tribeca over the summer, and The Cycle at Brooklyn Horror Festival just before its Shudder premiere — and are well-crafted enough for the big screen, though we recommend you give them a spin on Shudder.
Hallowarrior Review:
Hallowarrior does a digitally-assisted impression of grainy 16mm film, capturing the eerie autumnal glow of a post-apocalyptic world (played by upstate New York). Milly Shapiro, who played the ill-fated girl in Hereditary and therefore has a lifetime place of honor in horror, stars as a young woman of ambiguous age; she’s definitely over 16, per a marking the wall of her childhood home, but it’s difficult to tell how long it’s been since everyone else in her family, and seemingly most of the world, died from some kind of mass infection. Going by the nickname Pumpkin, she stays at home and keeps time well enough to know for sure which day is Halloween — her favorite holiday. She decorates as best she can, carving makeshift jack-o-lanterns from household items, and even leaves out a bowl of well-preserved candy on her porch, hoping to attract other survivors.
The talented Shapiro, who also has substantial stage experience, has cleidocranial dysostosis, a condition that affects bones and teeth and often results in a shorter stature, more prominent forehead, and wide-set eyes. (It does not typically affect cognitive development or lifespan.) This gives the now-twentysomething Shapiro a distinctive look, a cross between her actual grown-up age and someone younger. Between this and her well-pitched performance, Pumpkin is able to seem both childlike and capable, perfect for a character who lost her entire family at a relatively young age yet has also had to fend for herself for what must be years. She’s equally believable warily aiming a loaded gun at strangers and sincerely offering them sweets.
And there are strangers; Hallowarrior is part post-apocalyptic character study, part home-invasion/siege thriller, and part unlikely celebration of Halloween iconography. When a group consisting of a couple and a young woman turns up at her door, Milly oscillates between understandable apprehension and eager-to-please neediness. Because this is a movie premiering on Shudder, it’s the apprehension that turns out to be more correct.
Hallowarrior runs a slim 79 minutes, so best not to say more about its specifics, but writer-director Ben Sottak gets a lot of atmosphere from his limited location, and Shapiro makes for an enormously empathetic heroine.
The Cycle Review:
The Cycle goes on significantly longer, aiming for a slower burn. Press materials have compared it to a David Fincher procedural; more accurate, I think, to say that it’s akin to an X-Files episode from around the time Seven was released, and that ain’t hay.
Like so many cases investigated by Mulder and Scully, this starts out as an inexplicable but human-scale murder, with one particular aged body seemingly out of place at a crime scene. Forensic expert Meg Garland (Deborah Ann Woll) is called in because the older corpse seems to be Meg’s long-missing father.
At one point, The Cycle pivots into a different sort of horror movie than the serial killer procedural; given the title and plenty of hints throughout, it’s not an unpredictable turn. How it goes about its subgenre shift, however, is more surprising, with a genuinely fresh take on an overfamiliar mythology, which in this case even manages to incorporate some semi-related but rarely linked other forms of spooky mythology.
I’m vagueposting, I know, but The Cycle benefits from going into it without too many assumptions about where it’s headed. It is okay to mention, however, that it has some terrific practical visual effects and design work that put any number of bigger-budget movies to shame, both in effectiveness and just plain aesthetic pleasures (if you can take aesthetic pleasures in the grotesque, anyway).
For such a major year in horror — one that saw Obsession become one of the genre’s biggest movies ever and Backrooms bring liminal-space internet-based horror to the multiplex — it’s been a slightly underwhelming October, with the major horror choices amounting to Other Mommy or Clayface. They’re both good, but it’s a little odd that so many of the year’s best horror movies came out months ago.
If you’re all caught up with those, both The Cycle and Hallowarrior are both strong enough to improve your Halloween week watches.
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Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
