Spooky season begins in style with a robust slate of horror classics and mediocrities alike, and that’s just referring to the first five Halloween movies. There’s much to recommend, including 4Ks of the classic Universal monster movies, but I really want to talk about What Lies Beneath. Not often seen as a classic even by the most hardcore Robert Zemeckis auteurists (it is, after all, a movie he made in the middle of production on a bigger, better movie), it’s little more than a technical exercise and it’s the best goddamn technical exercise you’ve ever seen, letting Zemeckis’s always-mobile camera dictate story more than the (passable) script; like the 2020 Invisible Man, it works as a teaching tool on how basic cinematic grammar can scare you. It’s beautiful and elegant and graced with one of the best setpieces of Zemeckis’s career, plus it somehow works on a character level too because Michelle Pfeiffer is so goddamn good in it.

Dead Again (Paramount)
Dracula 4K (Universal)
Elvira’s Haunted Hills (Shout Factory)
Ema (Music Box)
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (Sony)
Frankenstein 4K (Universal)
Halloween 4K (Shout Factory)
Halloween II 4K (Shout Factory)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch 4K (Shout Factory)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers 4K (Shout Factory)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers 4K (Shout Factory)
The Hunt for Red October 4K (Paramount)
Night Shift (Warner Archive Collection)
Onibaba (Criterion)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Paramount)
The Relic (Paramount)
Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Kino)
Space Jam: A New Legacy (Warner)
The Time Machine (Paramount)
What Lies Beneath (Paramount)
The Wolf Man 4K (Universal)