Capsule #119 ft. Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

Hey guys and ghouls!!

Holly’s away in Mexico (just in time for the Day of the Dead), so I’m bringing you a special Halloween edition of 𝔠a҉𝔭s҉𝔲l҉𝔢. Below you’ll find what I think are the greatest horror films ever made, but don’t be scared, there are a couple of less spooky options if you like a Halloween vibe without any jump scares. Though we’re blessed that this special day has fallen on a Friday this year, sometimes the best way to celebrate Halloween is with a movie night at home. If that’s your preferred route, tune into one (or a few!) of these…

Happy Halloween!! 🎃

Circe “Boos” (Hughes) x

The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick)

My first exposure to The Shining wasn’t through the movie or the book - it was The Simpsons’ ‘Treehouse of Horror V’. Bart plays Danny Torrance, he’s got the “Shinning” (can’t get sued), and has to save his family from an axe-wielding Homer. I love that episode; I still quote it all the time (“No blank and no blank make blank something something” is perfect for any occasion!). Eventually, I got round to watching the masterpiece of a movie that inspired it and became totally evangelical about The Shining. Stephen King took a loud dislike to Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his book, calling it “cold” and “perverse” (common themes in most horror stories, I would argue), but the man loves Mike Flanagan, so what does he know? I know nothing, except that The Shining is the greatest horror film ever made.

Death Becomes Her (dir. Robert Zemeckis)

I feel like the late ‘80s and ‘90s had their own sort of Technicolor - a specific colour palette that ties so many films from that era together. The Slums of Beverly Hills, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, both Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure AND their Bogus Journey; all are good, but Death Becomes Her is the best. The campy comedy stars Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, who, in seeking both revenge and the affection of a dopey doctor played by Bruce Willis, make a deal with a witch (Isabella Rossellini <3) to be young and beautiful forever. No, it’s not necessarily a horror film, but it’s full of darkness and gothic glamour, and plays with maybe the most terrible concept of all: eternal life.

Le Vourdalak (dir. Adrien Beau)

In a world filled with cheap, half-arsed CGI - or worse, AI-generated visuals - embrace tradition. Choose vampires played by puppets. Le Vourdalak came out in 2023, but you could easily mistake it for a lost ‘70s gem: it’s all natural light, pre-iPhone faces and genuine horror. It’s hugely underrated. The story, based on a book by Russian poet Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, follows a hapless French nobleman who gets lost travelling through Eastern Europe and takes shelter with a local family whose patriarch has become something ˚⊹.otherwordly ࣪⊹˚. So nice to see a filmmaker reject modernity and give a classic tale the energy and imagination it deserves.

Mandy (dir. Panos Cosmatos)

You can probably guess a lot about this movie just from the fact that Nicolas Cage is the lead (i.e. it’s nuts). Mandy is also deeply unserious while simultaneously taking itself very seriously (classic Cage!). This is another one that’s not strictly a horror movie, but it centres around a surreal and psychedelic showdown with a demonic biker gang/cult, unfolding like a vivid, slightly terrifying dream. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I will tell you that in one scene, just when we think our hero might have the upper hand with a chainsaw, a member of the demonic biker gang/cult comes out wielding an even longer chainsaw. That’s the vibe.

The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez)

As a horror fan, I wish I had been capable of basic cognition when The Blair Witch Project came out because I can only imagine how revolutionary it was. The film rewrote the rules of movie marketing with a mad guerrilla campaign: missing-person posters, ‘documentary evidence’ websites, and interviews that blurred the line between fact and fiction. People felt it was actually real. The first time I watched The Blair Witch Project was as a teenager, with my brother and his friend, in pitch black, sitting in the kitchen around my mum’s laptop. It turns out that this is the perfect setting for this film. Do not, I repeat, Do Not watch this at a rooftop cinema surrounded by people and the sounds of cars honking over your headphones. You need to give this one the chance to properly scare you. Turn all the lights off, watch it on your own. I promise, you will be very, very afraid.

Hereditary (dir. Ari Aster)

I’m not one to look away during a horror movie, and there’s one scene from Hereditary that’s permanently etched into my brain because of that. This is ultimately a film about fatalism and the way one family’s complicated, fractured dynamics build tension to an almost unbearable boiling point. Layered on top of that is the story of the demon king Paimon and his summoners, whose influence slowly unravels their lives. Hereditary is an intense watch, but somehow strikes a balance between gruesome and gratuitous. It’s made me a life-long Ari Aster fan, I’d watch paint dry if he directed it.

Over the Garden Wall (dir. Patrick McHale with Nate Cash)

Neither a film nor a horror, I still think Over the Garden Wall is mandatory viewing for anyone who loves Halloween. This 11-episode animated mini-series, easily watchable in one feature-length sitting, sees brothers Wirt and Greg wander through the Unknown, trying to find home but somehow becoming “more lost than ever”. Along the way, they stumble through bizarre vignettes, adopt a singing frog and narrowly escape the clutches of the Beast. It’s funny, a little bit spooky, and set to an incredible soundtrack (featuring Chris Isaak). My friends and I have made it an annual autumn comfort watch.

The Orphanage (dir. J. A. Bayona)

I’ve saved the most harrowing for last. The Orphanage is a supernatural, psychological horror so potent it leaves a mark (but, you know… in a good way). It starts with its lead, Laura, returning to the orphanage where she grew up, now an adult with a family of her own, hoping to reopen it as a home for children. But a darkness from her past rears its ugly head in the form of ghostly sightings that eventually reveal a new tragedy. You may need to queue up an episode of something cheery as a palate cleanser after this one.

This week, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Charlie is Lead Editor at The Fuller Project. An award-winning editor, writer and podcaster, she specialises in cross-disciplinary project-based work, spanning journalism, literature, audio and screen. Previously, Charlie was Editor-in-Chief of the groundbreaking gal-dem magazine and later a Senior Staff Editor at The New York Times. In 2024 she completed a fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where she investigated underreported missing person’s cases. She is the editor of the books Black Joy (Penguin, 2021) and I Will Not Be Erased (Walker, 2019), and the editor and lead author of Mother Country (Hachette, 2018). Her first narrative podcast, The Missing Sister, was released in 2025.

📺 Watching: In addition to all of those spooky films… the Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere in the cinema, The Chair Company (Tim Robinson stans rise up!), and Jack Antonoff and Hayley Williams on Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians.

📖 Reading: Murderland by Caroline Fraser. Though it's marked as one in Waterstones, Murderland is not a true crime book. It's a beautifully written non-fiction thriller that investigates the North American love affair with environmental destruction through the lens of some of its most infamous serial killers.

🎧 Listening to: Some Like It Hot, the new bar italia album, THE BPM, the new Sudan Archives album, and curiously giving Demi Lovato’s Brat-esque release It’s Not That Deep a spin.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, do refer them! 🥺

See you next week 💋

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