Horror Time: Rewatching 3 Scary Movie Classics for Halloween (Psycho, The Exorcist, The Shining)

It’s October! If October is known for one thing, it’s that it’s capped off by one of the best holidays: Halloween. Halloween is a day when ghouls come out of the shadows and ghosts chase children down the street. It’s a day when people dress up in costumes so that demons do not recognize them and drag them down to the underworld. (Or so they say.)

Anyways, in honor of it being Halloween month, I decided to rewatch some of the best regarded, and supposedly scariest, horror movies ever to grace the big screen. Let’s take a look at the defining horror movie of the 1960s, then the 1970s, and finally the 80s, and see how they each hold up in 2023.

Psycho (1960)

Paramount Pictures, 109 minutes

So, usually when I do reviews, I try to make them completely spoiler-free. With Psycho though, it’s hard for me to write about my feelings on the film without spoiling a good bit of the story. If you just want my spoiler free thoughts on the movie, I’d say: It’s still worth watching, both as an important piece of cinema history and as something that holds up as suspenseful. It might not necessarily be too scary for most of the runtime, but it’s well-acted and keeps your interest (mostly).

The rest of this review will have some spoilers, so you’ve been warned.

Psycho has become such an important part of American movie culture that it’s two major twists, which I feel not knowing would add substantially to one’s enjoyment of the film, are widely known. Those twists are that Norman Bates is the titular psycho (and not his mother, who he killed years ago), and that the movie’s lead character, Marion Crane, is murdered in the famous “shower scene” midway through the movie. Killing off the lead so early would definitely have been shocking to audiences when Psycho was first released.

I think the shower murder, in general, holds up as being a really well designed way to show a brutal murder without having the scene be at all gory. A large part of the success of this scene, and of the entire film actually, is due to the fantastic musical score by Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann was a frequent collaborator of director Alfred Hitchcock, and what he’s composed here is one of the top scores ever.

The acting in Psycho is still really good, and the location of the Bates Motel is iconic too. Concerning the story itself, except for a long scene at the end of the film where a character we’ve never met before basically explains what we just watched to us, everything moves along at a good pace.

In 2023, I don’t think Psycho is actually very scary – it’s more of a suspenseful thriller than true horror by today’s standards. The idea of being murdered in the shower, a perceived safe space where a person’s guard is totally down, is still frightening, but since we know it’s coming (since it’s such a famous scene) that moment loses a lot of its impact.

As far as quality though, I think that most people will enjoy Psycho. If you’re wanting to watch a Hitchcock film, this is probably the one that holds up the best.

Grade: 8/10

Scary Factor: 2.5/10

The Exorcist (1973)

Warner Bros. Pictures, 122 minutes

Some movies really stand the test of time. Even though they may be from decades ago, they still hold up as quality films. The Exorcist, once believed by many to be one of the scariest movies ever, is most definitely not such a motion picture.

I think that at the time it was produced, The Exorcist was really able to capitalize off the fact that few moviegoers had ever seen any sort of halfway decent special effects. Plus, having a young girl be possessed and act in such a vulgar manner was shocking and horrifying to the gentle sensibilities of your average 1970s American.

By today’s standards, the special effects look like something anyone could do with a simple YouTube tutorial after a trip to Party City. The actions of the young girl just aren’t shocking (or scary) to a 2023 audience. When it comes to actually being frightening, I think The Exorcist is probably around the same level of “scary” as the new Disney+ Goosebumps series. That is to say, unless you are a child under the age of 10, you will not find The Exorcist the least bit scary.

If you accept the fact that The Exorcist isn’t scary at all in 2023, how does it hold up overall as a movie? Well, not too well. The acting here is subpar, with the performance of the lead, played by Ellen Burstyn, being particularly melodramatic. If anything, as a whole, the movie ends up feeling long and quite boring.

Anyone who says The Exorcist is either a scary and/or quality movie is one of two things: Someone remembering a fifty-year-old film with rose colored glasses, or a very small child. Judging from how it was received upon its initial release, I can only imagine that if people in the 1970s were showed an actually scary movie, something like 2005’s The Decent, they would literally die of fright.

It's fine to say a movie has some merit because it was influential on films that followed it (something The Exorcist was), but that doesn’t by default make it a good movie. This one just doesn’t hold up as scary or enjoyable.

Grade: 3.5/10

Scary Factor: 2/10

The Shining (1980)

Warner Bros. Pictures, 142 minutes

There are a few things that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining really does perfectly, but it definitely misses the mark in some key areas. Starting with the positives though, the cinematography and set design in this film are fantastic. The entire look and feel of the Overlook Hotel is great.

There are some really well-done tracking shots with Danny on his little bike pedaling down the long hallways. There’s a reason that carpet is so iconic, too – the design of every room in the hotel is just visually on point. If there’s one major strength of The Shining, it’s the horror atmosphere Kubrick is able to create. There’s this feeling of dread and impending doom in The Overlook that works perfectly for a horror movie.

One issue I have with the movie is that the scary parts of the hotel feel very, for lack of a better word, “random.” What I mean is that there’s not a well explained threat or story to go along with most of the scenes that are supposed to be frightening. There’s the woman in the bathtub, Danny writing “redrum,” and the former caretaker who murdered his twin girls, but there’s not a thread tying these things together besides the overall idea that the hotel is just haunted. I wish there was more to it all, or some sort of overall explanation.

While I can at least deal with the idea that it’s simply a haunted hotel with lots of spooky happenings to an extent, I think the real weakness of The Shining is its characters. Stephen King, who wrote the book the movie is based on, famously hated the movie. He said of the film, “The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all… All he does is get crazier. In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that’s a tragedy. In the movie, there’s no tragedy because there’s no real change.”

I couldn’t agree with King’s statement more. Jack Nicholson’s performance in The Shining is over-the-top and without subtlety. It’s a man running around acting so ridiculous that it feels almost silly at times. There were a number of scenes in The Shining where the way the character Jack was acting reminded me a lot of a Jim Carrey movie performance – where he’s making all these wacky faces and being goofy. Nicholson’s performance, though it’s become iconic, is a big miss for me. While the portrayal of Wendy by Shelley Duvall is better, she’s largely a one-note character in the movie.

As far as holding up over time, the movie is still watchable, though it’s really not too scary at all by today’s standards. The atmosphere is great, the story and the characters aren’t. There are some frightening ideas here, but the actual movie itself isn’t particularly chilling. I think that people who remember The Shining as being one of the scariest films they’ve ever watched would be surprised by just how not scary it feels in the 2020s.

Grade: 5.5/10

Scary Factor: 4/10

When Did Movies Actually Get (Really, Really) Scary?

A few thoughts after watching Psycho, The Exorcist, and The Shining:

So, after watching these three movies, I was sort of surprised that none of the three held up as being really terrifying by 2023 standards. Before watching these films, I actually watched the 2017 horror film, Annabelle: Creation, a week earlier.

I’m not a particularly big fan of movies that take place in the Conjuring universe of films, but Annabelle: Creation was surprisingly good (somewhere in the range of a 7/10 in terms of what rating I’d give it), and I’d consider it to be a movie that’s scarier than your average horror movie of the past ten years, but not exceedingly so. As for its scary factor rating, I’d give it around a 7.5/10.

I’m glad that I did happen to see Annabelle: Creation recently as it gave me a recent horror movie to compare these old classics to. I would definitely say that neither Psycho, The Exorcist, or The Shining, are close to as scary as Annabelle: Creation. I think a lot of times movies might’ve been “scary” when they were initially released, but that scary factor definitely goes down over time. We’ve either been desensitized to lots of horror, or moviemakers have become better at frightening us (or maybe a bit of both).

I’m planning to watch more horror movies that were instrumental and sort of defined horror for the time period they were released in the next couple of months, so maybe I’ll be able to find an older film that truly holds up as horrifying in 2023. Until then, stay away from seedy motels, avoid becoming possessed by demonic entities, don’t take on any work as a caretaker at an isolated hotel, and, of course, have a spooky and happy Halloween!