It’s the end of September, and that means it’s time to carve those Jack-O-Lanterns, string up those orange and purple lights, stick those spooky gel decals on your windows, and watch movies horrifying enough to give you goosebumps and a cold sweat.

I know what you may be thinking: Justin, SLOW YOUR ROLL! It’s technically not even fall yet, and I REFUSE to even think about Halloween until Oct. 1!

I don’t disagree with that, but I also know there are people who enjoy Spooky Season and who have fun giving themselves a good scare. So I don’t think there’s any harm in making the thrills and creeps last just a little longer. Even if the decorations, costumes, and commercialized hoo-haa isn’t your style, there is plenty of hair-raising entertainment to be found in movies. Some of the classic horror movies I have watched in recent years have plot lines that are so simple yet so effective that I think those concepts deserve to be re-imagined. Here are two older movie ideas I watched three years ago, whose story concepts, in my amateur adolescent opinion, have potential to be spoofed and reworked for modern audiences.

1. “The Shining”: what could be so terrifying about a normal working man on a nice family vacation with his wife and son to a hotel in the beautiful Rocky Mountains of Colorado? Apparently nothing, until a snowstorm traps the family in the hotel all winter, with the main character becoming more of a workaholic and gradually descending into murderous insanity as days pass! Even without the brief scene of blood flooding the hotel and the blood-curdling twin sisters in the hallway, the whole idea of being in the same building as a killer with no safe means of escape is one that makes my slightly claustrophobic insides squirm a bit—and I mean that as a compliment! Call it a severe case of cabin fever? I think it would be interesting to use that concept in a movie that starts out very lighthearted and comedic and then gradually becomes darker and more horrifying as it goes on. Maybe one about two good friends who are on a trip alone somewhere super rural, with only each other for company. They enjoy the peaceful countryside at first, but naturally, spending too much time with someone can make you a little bit tired of them and start criticizing them. Spite grows between them over petty matters, and the viewers are pulled along as the tension between the friends tightens and tightens until, one peaceful summer night, one of the friends snaps and strangles the other! The other friend tries to put up a fight to save himself, and both friends choke each other to their demise, leaving a house with two dead bodies in it. Happily ever after!
2. “Alien”: the ultimate last-person-standing competition, set in the black, inky realm of deep space. A spacecraft’s crew members are picked off (and in some cases, gruesomely picked apart) by ravenous extraterrestrials of unknown origin until only one person is left alive and must hurry to find a way off the ship before it explodes! I LOVE books and movies that constantly make me wonder “who will be next?”, whether or not I know who or what is responsible for the deaths. And very often, as is the case in Alien, the next person to die is the person I least expected to be killed, which only adds to my shock and glues me tighter to my seat! This concept has already been applied to people hiking up a mountain and underwater in a submarine, so why not expand it to involve a whole neighborhood cul-de-sac? Like my Shining concept spoof, everything starts out jolly and boring for everyone. One night, an affluent teenager in the cul de sac hosts a wild pool party at her house, inviting a few of her friends and their highschool sweethearts who live nearby. While the host and her boyfriend are chicken-fighting another girl and her boyfriend in the pool, the host, in her usual competitive spirit, jokingly says she wishes everyone dead. No one thinks twice about her lighthearted comment, and the party disbands after a while, everyone going home to sleep. When they wake up, the girl that the host chicken-fought is found dead in her sleep. 12 days pass like this, each one starting with a person being found dead peacefully lying in their beds. The neighbors realize that the original death was not suicide; they are in the midst of an elaborate murder plot! Animosity and tension grows among the neighbors; no one trusts anyone except their immediate families. On the 12th day, the last person completely vanishes, their body never being found. The viewer never sees who the murderer is until the 13th day, when the host girl’s mother sits by her poolside alone, mourning her daughter’s death. A strong hand shoves her head into the water and holds it there, drowning her…the hand of her own mentally insane yet insanely calculated husband! 

Both of these concepts rely heavily on suspense to keep viewers immersed in the stories and the interplay between the characters. In my opinion, suspense taps into a person’s most instinctive feelings of fear more than any amount of blood and gore can, so I believe it to be an essential component of quality horror. But that’s just me, a guy who loves poking around Party City and decorating his lawn with fake tombstones every year. So to all who read this, I say “Happy Halloween”—whenever you’re ready for it!