heyy since you recommended some macabre books would you recommend some movies/tv shows too?
loved the list btw, looked for almost all of them on goodreads (i think We Have Always Lived in the Castle will be the next book i read)!
DO I! ∠( ᐛ 」∠)_ that's my bread and butter!!
you're in luck, sweet nonny -- I regularly forget to update my letterboxd diary, but I do have several lists of various flavors of spooky movie, ranging from gently atmospheric to "just fuck me up" to Ew Gross (/pos). I even have a list for each of my necromancer OCs over on my original fiction blog, if that happens to be something you'd be interested in (but if not, no sweat!)
one thing that I'm not 100% sure is on those themed lists, but I need to shout out: if you haven't seen them, do yourself a favor and watch the OG Candyman (1992) and Nia da Costa's sequel Candyman that came out a few years ago. You can watch those back to back, don't worry about Farewell to the Flesh and Dia de Los Muertos (especially the latter, jfc). Watch them either the same day or at least close together, and see how da Costa brings new life and perspective into the series as a Black director. It is riveting. I love what she did with the mythos. And the shadow puppets!!! I will talk about those forever!!
after you watch those two, if you want more of Tony Todd being handsome and charismatic and doomed as Daniel Robitaille (bc you have excellent taste), feel free to watch the weirdness that is Candyman II: Farewell to the Flesh - set in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, which makes it one of my favorite sequel movies. I generally do not recommend Candyman III: Dia de los Muertos, bc I personally think they botched using that whole setting/holiday and the story itself, but if you're a completionist I can't stop you. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
as for television, I can make the following recommendations:
The Addams Family 1960s series, for some casual sitcom fun (the '90s movies will always be my favorites, but these are a close second).
True Blood (Listen. I know it's campy trash. The show knows it's campy trash. But it's stupid and spooky and ridiculous, and very, very free of the "everyone is hot and no one is horny" complex we see going on lately, because My God are these people horny. for all its flaws, I still end up rewatching it when I need a boost. Feel free to skip the last season, though, that ends up being some bullshit.)
Six Feet Under (From the same creator as True Blood, only earlier. One of the shows of my heart. I love this stupid fucked up family so much. Prone to the politics of its time, and also frustratingly white at points, but I still cried like a baby through the entire series finale.)
AMC Interview with a Vampire (IF YOU HAVEN'T STARTED THIS SHOW PLEASE PLEASE DO; IT IS GOURMET VAMPIRES WITH SUCH A RICH TAKE ON THE SOURCE TEXT)
Pushing Daisies (Bryan Fuller pre-Hannibal series! Only a couple seasons long because it was axed before its time, but one of my favorite works of art to ever exist. The costumes, the sets, the score, all of it is terminally tangled in my soul.)
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities (GdT is my favorite director, bar none, so I love his series of short films. I wish we got another season, but alas.)
The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell (Part over-the-top craft show, part crass undead puppets, this whole shindig is so weird and sweet that I love putting it on for a relatively light watch. She also has a youtube channel where she got her start, and still uploads some pretty elaborate projects there!)
Marianne (Genuinely frightening. and French! An author is haunted by an entity somehow tied to her series of books, but it's been so long since I watched it I don't want to say more. Definitely check it out if you want something scary-scary.)
The Haunting of Hill House/The Haunting of Bly Manor (with the understanding that these are In Name Only adaptations -- I like Mike Flanagan, and I love gothic horror, and I go into these having to remember that they are separate creatures from their source texts. I still think they're a great time on their own terms.)
The Summer Hikaru Died (Anime. I haven't caught up on this yet, but there's a reason its trending on tumblr. What do you do if you're a closeted teenage boy and your best friend/crush dies on a mountain, but you're the only one who knows he's been replaced by a supernatural mimic-type creature?)
FAKE DOCUMENTARY "Q" (A Japanese youtube found footage series with multiple seasons; it tends to end on more ambiguous notes than American found footage, which I think leaves more to the imagination. I've rewatched a lot of these episodes multiple times bc the endings bother me so much, I want to see them again and see if there's anything I missed)
The Duke of Death and His Maid (More anime, but pretty light-hearted compared to Hikaru. A wealthy duke is cursed to kill anything that he touches or touches him, so he lives alone in a huge house with his childhood butler, and his maid, a very buxom attractive young woman his own age whom he's known since childhood. There's a lot of 'she's into him and he can't touch her or else' humor that's similar to Pushing Daisies but a lot... hornier, for lack of a better term, but it ends up being extremely sweet. I tore through the seasons over the span of a couple weeks. Lots of cute spooky aesthetics and magic.)
Unsolved Mysteries (Both the OG with Robert Stack, and the reboot! The original series that scarred a lot of people for life, with bite-sized mysteries that are genuinely strange and haunting. In the Robert Stack seasons, a bunch of them even get updates about how they were solved after the fact!)
Castlevania and Castlevania: Nocturne (Bloody, grim, kind of gross at points, very funny at others. And my baby Alucard is voiced by James Callis, who was one of my original bi awakening blorbos Gaius Baltar in the Battlestar Galactica 2000s reboot, but that's neither here nor there lmao.)
Robert Morgan (of nauseating stop motion film... Stopmotion) has a youtube channel with lots of haunting and similarly nauseating stopmotion short films!!
Manoghosts is another horror creator I like from various spaces, who also has some short films on his youtube worth watching.
Local 58 youtube channel (I can't imagine anyone hasn't seen this by now, but still a favorite, and still one I like to recommend.)
These are all I can think of for now, but if I remember any more, I'll be sure to come back and add them here.
I'm glad you liked my rec list, and I genuinely hope you like We Have Always Lived in the Castle! Merrikat is a narrator that permanently lives in my brain now, and definitely inspired some of my own writing. It's perfect for Spooky Season, for sure!
