Criterion has gone all out this year for the season of spooks. Their fall release has been brilliant. Each of the titles includes some form of horror or horror adjacent narratives. These are very Halloween specific with one of them even taking place on Halloween. For the most part we see a few titles that could possibly match up if you stretch you imagination but this year they are all right on the money. 
Cure is a part atmospheric crime film and part philosophical meditation. Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is tracking a series of identical murders, committed under the same bizarre circumstances. Nothing seems to connect the murders and Takabe becomes increasingly frustrated…
Arsenic and Old Lace tells the story of a Writer and notorious marriage detractor Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) falls for girl-next-door Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), and they tie the knot on Halloween. When the newlyweds return to their respective family homes to deliver the news, Brewster finds a corpse hidden in a window seat. With his eccentric aunts (Josephine Hull, Jean Adair), disturbed uncle (John Alexander), and homicidal brother (Raymond Massey), he starts to realize that his family is even crazier than he thought.
In the story of of La Llonora Alma is murdered with her children during a military attack in Guatemala, but 30 years later when the general who ordered the genocide is found not guilty, Alma comes back to the world of the living to torment the man.
In Eve’s Bayou over the course of a long, hot Louisiana summer, a 10-year-old black girl, Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett), discovers that her family’s affluent existence is merely a facade. The philandering of her suave doctor father, Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), creates a rift, throwing Eve’s mother, Roz (Lynn Whitfield), and teenage sister, Cisely (Meagan Good), into emotional turmoil. Eve, though, manages to find some solace with her quirky psychic aunt, Mozelle (Debbi Morgan).
In Night of the Living Dead A disparate group of individuals takes refuge in an abandoned house when corpses begin to leave the graveyard in search of fresh human bodies to devour. The pragmatic Ben (Duane Jones) does his best to control the situation, but when the reanimated bodies surround the house, the other survivors begin to panic. As any semblance of order within the group begins to dissipate, the zombies start to find ways inside — and one by one, the living humans become the prey of the deceased ones.
In Lost Highway From this inventory of imagery, Lynch fashions two separate but intersecting stories, one about a jazz musician (Bill Pullman), tortured by the notion that his wife is having an affair, who suddenly finds himself accused of her murder. The other is a young mechanic (Balthazar Getty) drawn into a web of deceit by a temptress who is cheating on her gangster boyfriend. These two tales are linked by the fact that the women in both are played by the same actress (Patricia Arquette).
Like I said, it’s quite a collection of great films. Plus, Criterion is really going all out on all of these Criterion covers. The art is brilliant. Especially the very Halloween-ish cover of Arsenic and Old Lace.
If you want to pick yours up in time for your Halloween marathon this year head over to Criterion’s site right HERE.
