How I learned to start screaming and love the horror movie

Buddy, you can keep your Christmases and your Easters, your Hanukkahs and your Eids. For someone like me, the annual celebration that really matters is the one that falls on 31 October — Halloween. This isn’t because I’m an inveterate trick-or-treater, out for candy and larks. It isn’t because I own shares in a pumpkin patch. It’s because I am a film fan, grateful for any excuse to indulge in horror movies as night’s dark curtains draw closer. No other time of the year offers such a perfect alignment of occasion and genre. ’Tis, after all, the season to be scared.

And this season is shaping up better than most. The British Film Institute has, since August, been presiding over a grand feast of horror cinema called Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (it runs until January of next year). Screenings have already been held in atmospheric locations such as the British Museum.