Ghost Hunt

It’s the only anime on the list, but it’s a good one. This one leans into Japanese horror but is also still an anime. That means that it has some lighter moments in it. However, it also does have some really good horror moments in it. Mai finds herself in a school where there is a ghost. She runs into the president of the SPR, Shibuya Psychic Research, and gets a job with him. She then goes on a lot of adventures and mysteries with ghosts and other monsters. That’s the basics of it, but it’s a nice fast anime to watch that I really enjoyed.

Locke & Key

Locke & Key is a great one to checkout because the second season is coming out tomorrow. Locke & Key follows the Locke family as they return to Rendell’s home after his death. His wife and kids go there, and Bode, the youngest starts to hear weird noises. These lead him to finding keys and to finding Dodge. The keys do amazing things, very fanciful and terrifying in nature, but Dodge doesn’t seem to want to use them for quite as simple things as Bod would want.

Locke & Key is on Netflix and based off of a comic book series by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son. The comics are much more violent and adult in nature than the show. The show on Netflix is more YA (young adult) focused, which I think works well. It still has that sense of uneasiness and dread in the show, but makes it more accessible to people. Really fun one to watch and not that long a watch.

Dark

Another Netflix show, this one about time travel and murder. I will say immediately that this is a show that is better watched sub titled than dubbed. The difference is fairly jarring while watching dubbed. And it’s a show that at least the first season, I need to watch the others, is really good. The time travel is well done and the mystery that is happening in the town works so well. The whole premise just feels like something different. And the title definitely matches what it is.

The show itself isn’t too violent or really contain many jump scares, but the mystery that is progressing throughout the story is just unsettling. The time travel works to make it even more unsettling as you go along. Aesthetically this just works really well.

Supernatural

It’s hard to make a list like this without putting Supernatural on it. I have not watched all of the show, it is a lot to get through. But it is a good show for Halloween because it is monster of the week a lot of the time. Sam and Dean are brothers who know about all the things that go bump in the night. It also has that element of angels and demons throughout the whole series as well.

Now, this is a series that you could start watching now and probably continue until Halloween of 2022, so much longer than most. And it is repetitive in what it does. But the first couple of seasons are more horror focused and tell an interesting story. Then after that it will get into more spoopy than spooky at times, but it’s still fun. There is just a ton of it so beware.

Helix

This one might be harder to track down, but this was a SyFy channel show that was basically The Thing, but not. An experiment goes wrong on the south pole and this disease or thing is spreading to people on the base. Is it an accident or is there some more nefarious plan behind it. The fact that I’m asking that question means that there is a more nefarious plot behind it, but how it unfolds is good. And who is infected and how they try and avoid getting infected works really well.

This, I think, had two seasons on SyFy. I can’t vouch for the second season, but the first is worth a watch by itself. This horror is all about the suspense of the unknown and is probably more traditional horror and jump scares than almost anything else on the list.

What Are Your Favorite Shows to Watch at Halloween?

I know there are a lot of horror shows out there that I didn’t mention and some that are more spooky than spoopy. There are shows like Grim which I need to watch again that I really liked. But are there any out there, knowing my tastes, that you think I’d like?

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Ravenloft is the home to the Vampire Strahd who has been trapped there and lives an eternal life. All the people are trapped there in fact, and in the 5th Edition Adventure, The Curse of Strahd, characters are pulled from the Forgotten Realms into Ravenloft. Not just the people, but souls as well. There is no rest for anyone, because when you die your soul will be put into the next child born. And if there are more people than souls, so be it, those people are shells of people going about their routines that have been created for them.

Most of the games that you’re going to play in Ravenloft are going to be surrounding trying to lift the curse and take out Strahd. Even if it means that you can’t leave Ravenloft, to let souls be able to leave and have rest is going to be a driving force to the game. And campaigns in Ravenloft are going to be more deadly by nature because resurrection magics don’t work in the setting, so if you’re dead, you’re dead and your soul will be reborn, but you won’t be adventuring anymore. Granted, there’s a chance that if you die, you’re just becoming a vampire and joining Strahd’s undead.

When thinking about this setting, besides the vampire, it’s going to feel different because instead of the more traditional fantasy feeling houses, this world is going to have that run down Victorian era feel to it. And there are going to be things, cults, monsters, and the like, hiding around the corners. This is going to be a good setting for that spooky horror game as it’s going to feel more familiar to the players because it’s less steeped in fantasy. A downside to this is that you can’t play many/any other types of game in Ravenloft. There’s a lot of dark things to toy around with and you can focus on different pieces of it, though it’s likely to come back to Strahd in the end, but there is no grand world to travel through, there are mists that keep adventurers from being able to escape Raveloft and Strahd’s reach. So try as they might, the only momentary release from the darkness of the world is death. For that reason, you’re not likely to find happy NPC’s around Ravenloft as well. They are going to be feeling the weight of the darkness that locks them in the lands, and even though they don’t know who their soul was previously or have those memories, they’re going to be feel the weight of being reborn again and again.

This sort of setting is going to work well for some groups. I think that I could enjoy running or playing a game in it, but there has to be buy in that this is the type of game that you’re going to be playing. It’s going to be more depressing than your normal fantasy, and if you have new players, it’s not going to be what they expect from Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know that Ravenloft is an advanced setting, I would say more so that it’s a setting that you need to warn people about. And not just once in passing, repeat it when picking to play in this setting, because it will feel different than they are expecting. But it does offer a lot of options in terms of delving into that spooky sort of game.

Have you played in the lands of Ravenloft and fought against the Vampire Strahd? How do you like it compared to the more fantasy focused worlds of D&D?

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