Scare Tactics

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/briefing/scary-movies-halloween.html

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There’s a creepy new Ryan Murphy series on Netflix called “The Watcher,” about a couple who buy a suburban New Jersey home and soon begin receiving menacing typewritten letters. “Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard?” the letter writer asks, signing the missives “The Watcher.”

I devoured the seven episodes of the series in two big gulps this week, even though I’d read the 2018 New York Magazine article on which the show was based and so knew how the story ended. It is spooky season, after all. The air is crisp, the shrubs betangled with ersatz cobwebs. Time to buy two-pound bags of fun-size peanut-butter cups and stream something that’ll haunt your dreams.

“The Watcher” stars Naomi Watts, who also appeared in one of the most frightening movies I’ve ever seen, “The Ring,” a remake of a Japanese horror film, which was released 20 years ago this week. The film begins with a provocation: “Have you heard about this videotape that kills you when you watch it?” a teen girl asks her friend, setting up the nightmare to follow. The near-obsolete technology that’s central to the premise notwithstanding, “The Ring” is still scary two decades on. “There’s a random element to the film, a loss of control and disruption of balance that makes it work,” the director, Gore Verbinski, told the critic Beatrice Loayza.

In trying to understand why some people love being scared senseless, Steph Yin, writing in The Times in 2016, suggested that haunted houses and other spooky trappings of Halloween can provide a “jolting escape” from the ordinary. “When immersed in a scary situation, you can suspend your disbelief and live in the moment,” she wrote, “And that loss of control can feel really good.”

For me, that checks out: It’s the immediacy of scary movies, their wholesale monopolization of my attention, that makes them so alluring. I’m drawn to thrillers more than straight-up horror films: unseen, mounting dread over explicit monsters or gore. I’m eager to watch the latest installment of the gripping anthology series “The Sinner,” which stars Bill Pullman as an idiosyncratic detective who investigates a different crime each season. The second season of HBO’s documentary series “The Vow,” about the NXIVM cult, just premiered, and it’s chilling in its own way, an examination of the forces that drew people into the thrall of a Svengali figure. And this weekend I’m planning to see the movie “Smile,” which has been compared to “The Ring” and the equally fearsome 2015 movie “It Follows.”

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to scare the wits out of myself. If you have suggestions for films that fit the bill, drop me a line.

Programming note: Starting today, the product recommendation service Wirecutter will share tips and advice every Saturday. Scroll down for this week’s offering. — Melissa

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Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.