Movies to Stream: The horror was for love

Violent, suspenseful movies featuring troubled marriages and grief-stricken couples kick off my month-long scary movie series

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Well, here we are again. October is upon us, and so too are those infantilizing buzzwords: Spooky season.

In my very first column, I talked about how embarrassing it is to use that phrase as someone in their mid-30s.¹

Well, it still is… but here we are! The only way out is through.

This week, I’m kicking off a month-long focus on seasonally appropriate streaming recommendations. Thankfully, I love horror movies. So, to kick things off, I’ll be looking at horror movies about love. Fraught marriages, sinister plots, haunted houses- how romantic!

These selections range from masterful exercises in suspense to ruthlessly gory marital showdowns. Let’s dive in!

(Unless otherwise noted, all movies are available to rent from Apple, Amazon, etc. in addition to the listed streaming services. But if you watch them and like them, I’d consider buying physical copies 😃).

Double Feature: Don’t Look Now (1973) and Possession (1981)

Both films are streaming for free on Kanopy. Possession is also streaming on AMC+ and Shudder.

Two haunting European marriage stories for the price of one!

Set amid the beautifully damp decay of Venice, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as John and Laura, a married couple who leave Britain after their child drowns.

While in Italy, they meet two sisters, one of whom hints at a supernatural ability to “see” their deceased daughter. Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now has a potent atmosphere of dread and death- seances, funerals, even a supposed serial killer on the loose. It is a powerful portrait of grief-induced paranoia that builds to an astonishing conclusion.

“Roeg’s cinema makes us aware that if we only use our eyes, we will realize—as he slyly has John state early on—that ‘nothing is as it seems,’” David Thompson writes.²

While Don’t Look Now is a masterclass in gradually mounting suspense, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession is a potent cocktail of cinematic maximalism, and a great date night movie for sickos.

An extraordinary Isabelle Adjani plays Anna, a married woman who abruptly asks her husband Mark (Sam Neill) for a divorce when he returns to their home in West Berlin. She gives no real reason, but he bewilderingly agrees.

This separation sets off a brutal battle of wills; much of the movie is Anna and Mark getting into loud, aggressive fights in front of their young son. One of these bouts involves an electric knife that somehow cuts them both; it ends up being one of the least violently absurd moments in the film.

Mark eventually hires a private investigator to look into Anna’s increasingly bizarre behavior. It is here that Żuławski’s film descends into total madness, as Anna’s grotesque, otherworldly secrets are unleashed.

“Possession isn’t just a monster picture,” Michael Pattison writes.³ “It’s a marital drama, a tainted romance, a black comedy, an oblique espionage thriller and a psychotronic allegory that unfolds at an absurdly, even farcical pace.”

Double Feature: Antichrist (2009) and mother! (2017)

Antichrist is streaming for free on Kanopy. mother! is streaming on Paramount+.

This double feature is not for the faint of heart. In fact, there’s a good chance that if you watch these movies back to back you will need a shower.

These films are shocking, bloody exorcisms that seem like they were pried directly from the subconscious.

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist traumatized me when I first watched it in college. I’d never seen anything as brutally uncompromising or sickeningly violent in a movie before. I’ve returned to it a couple of times since, and still find it as hypnotic as it is vicious.

The film features Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe as an unnamed married couple who go to a cabin in the woods to heal after the death of their young son. Nature doesn’t want them, and they don’t particularly seem to want each other. As Dafoe’s condescending therapist husband pushes Gainsbourg’s character through senseless grief exercises, she becomes progressively more unstable.

Von Trier has made a name for himself as one of the preeminent arthouse provocateurs, and Antichrist may be his most successful work in that regard. The woods swallow the Gainsbourg whole and then spit her back out. Then, she turns on herself and her husband.

“Like Kierkegaard, von Trier has always thrived on assaulting ‘good taste,’ and conventional pieties,” Ian Christie writes, “and here he has mobilized the resources of horror cinema to delve into the long history of ‘monstrous femininity’ and misogyny—not to reassure us that it’s all in the past, or easily curable by therapeutic platitudes, but to make us feel the true horror of facing our buried fears and conflicts.”⁴

Darren Aronofsky’s divisive psychodrama mother! plums the self-lacerating depths of being married to a hopeless narcissist.

Pinned to the bewildered, helpless face of Jennifer Lawrence’s character, his portrait of marriage is ruthlessly calculated, pinpointing the tremors in her character’s face with every small betrayal by her husband (Javier Bardem).

As strangers arrive at their secluded home and disrupt their routine, mother! traipses around social boundaries to create a gradually increasing sense of isolation.  And like Antichrist, the film’s creeping paranoia is later thrown out the window as Aronofksy abruptly descends his movie into chaos. 

Certainly not everyone gelled with mother!‘s horrifying final act; I’ll always remember the string of walkouts in the theater when I saw it opening weekend. However, the movie is incredibly hard to shake. No less than Martin Scorsese wrote an op-ed defending it upon its release,⁵ saying:

It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted — the subjective camera and the POV reverse angles, always in motion … the sound design, which comes at the viewer from around corners and leads you deeper and deeper into the nightmare … the unfolding of the story, which very gradually becomes more and more upsetting as the film goes forward.

Other Movie Recommendations:

Crimson Peak (2015)- Streaming on Prime Video.

Guillermo Del Toro is at his best when he drops all pretenses of conveying Big, Important Themes and leans into his horror influences. To that end, Crimson Peak is his strongest film.

Its tale of gothic romance becomes rife with tension and terrifying imagery as Edith (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman haunted by ghosts and grieving her father, slowly uncovers a sinister plot involving her new husband Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) and sister-in-law Lucille (Jessica Chastain).

The rotting mansion that Thomas whisks Edith off to is an indelible creation. Large black moths collect on the walls, the elevator moves on its own, and the basement contains locked vats that shake as if someone is trapped underneath. Red clay seeps through the grounds around the manor, mixing with snow and staining the lawn crimson. Fun!

The climax of this delightfully atmospheric haunted house movie gives this week’s column its title. Lucille, whose incestuous death waltz with her brother has been interrupted by Edith, declares: “The horror was for love. The things we do for love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret. This love burns you and maims you and twists you inside out. It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all.”

Do you have a good idea for a seasonal column theme? A favorite horror film you’d like me to spotlight next week? The Normal Newsletter phone lines are now open 📞

1. My first column was almost a year ago now! Wow!

2. Don’t Look Now: Seeing Red

3. Writing’s On the Wall: Close-Up on Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession

4. All Those Things That Are to Die: Antichrist

5. Martin Scorsese on Rotten Tomatoes, Box Office Obsession and Why ‘Mother!’ Was Misjudged