A Halloween Movie for the Horror-Hater

With Halloween just having passed, many thrilling movies have recently finished crossing the screens of viewers around the world. While some are family-focused, most people who love this time of the year lean towards far darker films.

For decades Halloween has been synonymous with the horror genre and costumes of favorite monsters and maniacs have been worn to parties and treat-or-treat outings. However, this year I decided to watch an old Halloween movie that captures a very different feeling for the season: Arsenic and Old Lace.

Released in 1944, Arsenic and Old Lace is a dark comedy that takes place on Halloween night and focuses on a strange family that believes its grim undertakings are well-meaning gestures of kindness, with Carey Grant starring as a member of the family struggling through his new realization of his family’s madness.

The movie itself blends humor and suspense very well, just enough to make it entertaining and also to keep you on the edge of your seat, not to mention it never limits itself to being purely for a specific age.

Unlike movies today, despite the fact that murder and dead bodies play a large role in the story of the film, the audience never actually sees a dead body. They are always hidden, in dark lighting or silhouetted, leaving the image entirely up to the imagination of the viewer.

The film was adapted from a stage play, a fact which certainly adds to this factor of the film. It is much harder to have dead bodies in stage plays for long stretches of time. Another reason may be that the film itself came out in the midst of the Hays Code, which was a set of industry-enforced guidelines active from 1934 to 1968 that highly censored the content of films, including things like violence and vulgarity.

While the ending of the Hays Code gave more creative liberty to filmmakers, it also allowed them to lose sight of the benefits that could come with a more restrictive approach to creating movies.

Filmmakers have leaned heavily into increasing visual violence in their movies ever since restrictions were raised—especially in the horror movies that resurface every Halloween—and to this day many movies seem to depend on gore. It has become less about the scariness of the creative ideas or the thrill of the story and more about the disturbingness of the visuals. For many of these filmmakers, it seems like their goal is to make their movie as unwatchable as possible, which would seem completely counterintuitive to their jobs as entertainers. Some people like the challenge of enduring the movies, some of the movies are genuinely well made, but many just make the stomachs of audiences churn as they look to the bottom corner of the screen.

When it comes to choosing a good Halloween movie, Arsenic and Old Lace is a classic that will make you want to watch it again year after year. Its story has stood the test of time and is fast paced enough to give a thrill without the burden of unnecessary gore found in other Halloween movies. Even though Halloween has passed, I would highly recommend a viewing here in the closing days of Fall before Winter rolls in.