May the Source Be with You | The Source Weekly - Bend, Oregon

May the Source Be with You

October edition

Can we just take a moment to be excited that Halloween is around the corner? I realize for the normies it might just be another random holiday stuffed into another random month, but for folks like me—the real weird ones—the entire month is spent searching for something genuinely scary. As someone who's been a diehard horror devotee since fifth grade, it's hard to find new media that genuinely sits in the brain like a demonic polyp and gives me weird feelings in my heart parts. But still I search. Here are a few things that might scare the hell out of you in time for Halloween.

May the Source Be with You
Courtesy of IMDb
Oh, NOOOOOO, NOT THE BEEEEEES!!!!!

In Pod We Trust:

I have a lot of scary podcasts I go to for the full-blown nightmare fuel, but none have kept my mind alive with terror all night more than the "No Sleep Podcast." These short little tales of terror feel so strange and otherworldly that they linger long into the night. Check out the episode about the Curse of the Gilded Echo...it's a faux true crime creeper that's a good place to start.

"Alice Isn't Dead" is a serialized road trip into cannibalism, insanity and murder from part of the creative team behind "Welcome to Night Vale." It's not as funny, but the structure of the entire podcast being told from the point of view of a woman driving a truck across the nowheres of America searching for her dead wife while telling her whole story into a CB radio is a good one. You can feel the night outside her window, ever encroaching and ready to swallow her whole.

It's a couple of years old, but a lot of people haven't discovered the deeply disturbing podcast "Rabbits" yet. Imagine if David Lynch created an alternated reality game in the 1980s that was causing people to disappear in the present. Set in the Pacific Northwest, "Rabbits" will absolutely get you ready for Halloween here in Central Oregon.

Plus, don't forget "My Favorite Murder!" It might be funny, but the crimes are real and still super disturbing. Their discussions of the Golden State Killer will remind you how scary that guy is and how life affirming it is that he was finally caught. Produced locally, also don't miss the "Killer Cocktails" podcast, focused on true crime and... you guessed it... drinks.

Now Streaming

I found a few pretty great horror movies over the last few weeks out there streaming in the wild. The Hulu original movie "Wounds" starring Armie Hammer and Dakota Johnson is deliciously creepy as it follows a bartender who finds a phone in his bar that basically starts haunting him. It's a slow burn that gets under your skin early on and then gets progressively creepier as it goes, building to a crescendo of madness and blood by the paranoia-fueled ending.

If you want some chuckles with your violence, "Little Monsters" is a horror comedy on Hulu about a kindergarten field trip group that gets attacked by zombies and have to be protected by a never-was rockstar and the kids' religious and peaceful teacher (played by a perfect Lupita Nyong'o). A perfect horror movie for people who want to be spooked just a little bit for Halloween.

May the Source Be with You
Courtesy of Hulu
“Little Monsters” is a bloody good time.

But, if you're in the mood for a stone-cold horror classic, Netflix just added "Candyman," a deeply disturbing look at poverty, racism and a killer with a hook for a hand that's also filled with bees. His whole body is filled with bees, not just his hand. Jordan Peele is getting ready to remake this, so now is the time to get scared by the bee-filled original.

Have a safe and spooky Halloween! I'll be over here trying to scare the actual hell out of my actually evil cat.

Jared Rasic

Film critic and author of food, arts and culture stories for the Source Weekly since 2010.
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