Hold My Hand: the best and weirdest new horror to watch this fall

It’s Halloween weekend and you’re tired of being outside in whatever thing you made out of tulle and duct tape. The CVS candy sales haven’t even hit yet. What are you supposed to do with yourself until nighttime, when, if you are an adult, you’re allowed to go inside a bar with spooky decor and drink hot cider with rum or something in it?

How should you spend the hours until the costume party starts and you have to tape the tulle back on and stick your face in a bucket of water? Is there absolutely anything to do right now, other than search for scary playlists and curl up in a ball and cry and cry and gnaw on a caramel apple until your teeth start to come unstuck from your gums a little bit?

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

It’s no fun to enter a movie-viewing experience asking, “Does this movie need to exist?” and I would never prescribe it as a habit. But once in a while, there comes a film that raises the question so forcefully, it’s impossible to ignore. My Friend Dahmer, an adaptation of the 2012 graphic novel by Derf Backderf (a nickname, but it’s in the film credits, so my hands are tied here), is one of these. It tells the story of Jeffrey Dahmer’s adolescence, from suburban mall humiliation to prom-night disappointment. Off-screen, Dahmer raped, killed, and dismembered 17 young men between 1978 and 1991, and was sentenced to 16 life terms in the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

Culturally, we don’t think enough about morbid girls. There aren’t very many of them in our movies, beyond the silent, violent ones Emily Yoshida described for Vulture earlier this year, writing about Logan, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones: “Their age and increasing silence has become a handy crutch for writers who might otherwise have a harder time bringing female leads to life.” Young women in movies tend to be just as confused as young men are, but with way less room to be super weird about it.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

The trailer for American Satan was emailed to me in a typo-riddled press release promising a starring turn for Game of Thrones’ John Bradley, who plays Samwell Tarly. His character is named Ricky Rollins. If that was not already more than enough to sell me, American Satan is billed as a supernatural thriller about a rock band called Relentless, which makes a deal with the devil for fame, fortune, and to save Denise Richards from breast cancer. All they have to do is murder a rude competitor played by Nickelodeon’s Drake Bell, most recently in the news for sparring with Josh Peck about a wedding invitation snub, and endorsing Donald Trump.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

Sadie and McKayla do everything together: homework, prom, cheerleading practice, after-school smoothies, dissing ex-boyfriends, murdering some people to get more followers on their joint Twitter account, etc. They tweet together from the handle @tragedygirls, posing as sweet and innocent — but simultaneously knowledgable and calm — bystanders of the gore plaguing their hometown.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

The horny teenagers gather in a big house in the woods, unchaperoned. The horny teenagers wear bikinis. The horny teenagers drink beer. The horny teenagers die. This is the plot of Sebastien Landry and Laurence Morais-Lagace’s Game of Death, which follows in the grand tradition of pubescent fornication slasher movies. It opens with a scene of a boy masturbating, and ends with a scene of extreme bloodshed. This time around, the killer isn’t a walking nightmare or a drowned camper in a face mask, but a board game. It’s like Jumanji, but much more likely to decapitate you.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

What do you want from a horror movie? Is it horror? Genuine horror? If so, I don’t know, just look at the world around you instead. Because today, we’re here to discuss a horror movie that’s secretly about joy.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

Fall is a mood, obviously. The mood is a blaze of glory before a slow march toward death. Locations can also be moods, and the best horror movies I have seen understand this. Super Dark Times, the debut feature from director Kevin Phillips, takes its from a semi-anonymous suburb in upstate New York, which happens to be the same general setting that my adolescence took its mood from. It’s a place where glaciers carved out dramatic landscapes and dozens of lakes, and the dominant accessory for those landscapes is many hundred-year-old trees that turn briefly scarlet and then into skeletons. You couldn’t ask for a prettier horror movie mood, in my biased opinion.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

Christmas is scary. You’re waltzing toward credit-card debt and decorating your home with dried-out dead plants covered in electric accessories. You’re singing songs about infanticide and 400-pound animals that can fly. You’re expected to feel nothing but joy, but sometimes you feel sad or angry because the people around you aren’t behaving the way you want them to. Maybe you swallow that sadness alongside half a pound of fudge, or maybe you start acting like a total freak.

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

The most interesting thing about any teen movie is what it assumes about the world teenagers live in. Friend Request, a new horror film from German director Simon Verhoeven, assumes that they use Facebook.