The next category I’ll cover in my horror movie project is Supernatural/Paranormal. These are movies where the scares come courtesy of some extraordinary phenomenon.

This is a broad category with several subsets, including yesterday’s featured Monsters, and Demonic Possession, which I’ll get to later this week.

One of the pleasures of my horror movie binge has been catching up with titles I’ve known for years but never managed to see. One such film is 1979’s The Amityville Horror, which set up shop in my childhood brain as a truly terrifying experience.

Turns out it’s a rather lackluster family drama with few true scares and a lot of discussion about marital finances. It does have the comforting shagginess I love in so many 70s movies, and a great performance by Margot Kidder (who similarly impressed me in a movie I’ll cover next week).

More successful is 1982’s Poltergeist, which gives the haunted house story a delightful Spielberg sheen. Though credited to director Tobe Hooper, cinema lore suggests that producer Spielberg took the helm for much of the film’s shoot. Both men have denied it, but no matter the truth, the movie certainly has its share of wonderful Spielbergian set pieces.

The oldest supernatural film I watched is 1964’s Kwaidan, a three-hour anthology of Japanese ghost stories. The four short films included are more thought-provoking than scary, and the film’s pleasures come from seeing the folk tales brought to life through breathtaking cinematography.

Smile (2022) squanders an intriguing premise with an unimaginative ending, and holds the record for the most jump scares of any horror movie I’ve seen in the past year.

The most notable purveyor of supernatural thrills is Stephen King, and the four film adaptations of his work I watched all fell into this category.

It: Chapter One (2017) is an extremely solid adaptation of one of my favorite King novels — or half of it, anyway. Unfortunately, 2019’s It: Chapter Two loses the charm of the first film by focusing on the adult versions of its adolescent heroes. What could have been a classic two-parter turned into a missed opportunity.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) strayed from its source material and was famously derided by King, but it remains a creepy classic. As much a psychological horror as a supernatural one, it portrays a man’s descent into madness with chilling precision.

Brian DePalma directed the first Stephen King movie adaptation, based on King’s first novel, with 1976’s Carrie. It is the quintessential high school horror movie, with much of its terror coming from the treatment of Carrie at her classmates’ hands before she lifts a finger (or a fire hose, or a knife).

Carrie would win my Best in Show for this category if it wasn’t for my final entry, Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out. This is another movie that could fit into the psychological horror category, but the brain-swapping premise gives it a home here as well. Peele’s debut is scary, funny, smart, and thought-provoking, and one of the best films of any genre in the past decade.

Next up: Psychological Horror