by Justin Query

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How you spend the spooky season can sometimes be as important as where you spend the spooky season: around a campfire; in a darkened basement; seated in an abandoned theater. This week, Front Center Seat collects yet another week of sinister movies — motion pictures highlighting the most frightening locations you could find on a map — as well as an additional midnight feature meant to make you wish you’d never come here.

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10/11 … [REC] (2007)

The spooky season is generally associated with haunted houses, but in this Spanish thriller, a TV journalist (Manuela Velasco) & her camera person (Ferran Terraza) are trapped in an urban apartment building that is apparently Ground Zero for a virus that turns the building’s residents into manic monsters. Only the building’s uppermost penthouse holds the answers behind the outbreak.
Available on Tubi.

10/12 … The Haunting (1963)

Moviemaking journeyman Robert Wise (Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), West Side Story (1961), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)) takes up residence in the horror genre with what critics agree is the quintessential haunted house film. This MGM picture follows four people – an anthropologist, a seemingly haunted woman, a psychic, and the mansion’s cynical heir – into the belly of an allegedly spectral home that could destroy them all. 

Available on Amazon Prime and more.

10/13 … The Lost Boys (1987)

When the single mother (Dianne Wiest) of two teenage boys (Jason Patric & Corey Haim) moves her family to Santa Carla in this Warner Bros. film directed by Joel Schumacher – the so-called Murder Capital of the World – none of them suspects that a gang of teenage vampires (led by Kiefer Sutherland) is responsible for the community carnage. They are also equally ill-equipped to keep the bloodsucking killers from infiltrating the impressionable family’s new home, emotionally or physically.
Available on Sling TV.

10/14 … Friday the 13th (2009)

This remake of the classic slasher film is more a reimagining of the franchise’s first three films, as the audience is introduced to the bloody location of Camp Crystal Lake: where Pamela Voorhees avenges her son’s tragic death (Part I), where Jason Voorhees avenges his mother’s murder while wearing a burlap hood (Part II), and where he slaughters teens, ultimately donning his famous hockey mask (Part III).
Available on Amazon Prime, Hulu, Max, and more.

10/15 … Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Zack Snyder’s frenetic remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie classic doesn’t amble too far from a local shopping mall at all but infuses the narrative and its social commentary with more creative gore and even more dynamic performances (including Sarah Polley, Ty Burrell, Jake Weber, Ving Rhames, and more). Snyder’s film remains a rare horror remake that truly earns its place at the dinner table.
Available on Peacock.

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This week’s Scary Places Midnight Feature …
Session 9 (2001)

Directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist (2004)), this atmospheric and claustrophobic haunted house film follows a hazardous materials team into Massachusetts’ Danvers State Mental Hospital. It’s where the prefrontal lobotomy was perfected. It’s also where this dilapidated hospital will apparently infect each of the workers charged with cleaning the place of man-made debris. Unfortunately, the spiritual debris is not so easily removed from the place.
Available for purchase on multiple streaming services.

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Next week’s theme: Unique Horror

A film crew producing a horror movie finds itself the target of widescreen monsters; a handful of friends navigate their way through the tropes of a famous slasher film; and more …