Spooky Things 4: Spooks Galore
The wind rattling loose shutters. A fire alarm. Goosebumps. You check your to-go bag when you get home and see the workers messed up your order. A shadow shifts in the dark of night. You get in an empty elevator and just before the doors close someone else enters. The smell of weed in an otherwise idyllic locale. Sounds of scurrying along the roof. A trail of ants in your house.
Autumn has arrived once again, and the hairy, scary, thrilling, chilling month of October has as well. What, you didn’t see the decorations in stores? Oh, you did? Good for you. In any case, the time has come to once again look at what spookiness has occurred and what spooks await.
I recently saw the movie Buddy and I thought it was good (spoilers ahead). It didn’t quite capture the type of horror I like in my horror movies or shows, but it did provide unsettling content. The most horrific bit, to me, was the real-world segment in which the mother character (Cristin Milioti) gradually realizes something significant is missing from her life that she’d forgotten about: her daughter. I find this element scary in two ways: the first way is that I can relate to not remembering something very important and it reordering my life subtly and drastically; the second way is that I can relate to not being remembered by others and their lives being reordered without apparent difficulty. Probably one of the scariest thoughts anyone can think of is that they matter to no one and nothing. Anyway, this concept carries further when the mother character gets pulled into Buddy’s world and the real world subsequently reorders itself instantaneously in such a way that she never apparently existed. Wild stuff.
OooOoOOooo!
On a similar note, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the show running from the late ‘90s to early 2000s) had an episode called Hush in which villains called The Gentlemen stole an entire town’s voices and proceeded to make nightly excursions to murder people. The Gentlemen’s unnatural movement and facial expressions as well as their methods of the murder are frightening on their own, though what really gave rise to my experience of spooks in the episode was this sort of nursery rhyme a girl sings in a dream Buffy has:
“Can't even shout. Can't even cry. The Gentlemen are coming by.
Looking in windows, knocking on doors. They need to take seven and they might take yours.
Can't call to Mom. Can't say a word. You're gonna die screaming but you won't be heard.”
The last sentence unsettled me the most, again for similar reasons as the aforementioned idea of not being remembered or mattering. Though, there is an added idea of being helpless in addition to being alone.
Boo!
And again on a similar note, Iron Lung (the Markiplier movie released earlier in 2026) involved a convict serving a sentence in the cramped quarters of a futuristic submarine as he ventured through another planet’s ocean of blood in search of who-knows-what. There’re the same obvious ideas of being helpless and alone, but there is also the scary idea of him potentially not being alone. This idea ties into wider lore that I, myself don’t fully have a grasp of, but here’s the gist: life suddenly winked out of existence save for the people who were in spaceships, and so the remaining people were burdened with the task of surviving as well as potentially learning what the heck happened. There are plenty of horrifying and cosmic ideas of horror this premise involves, like the idea that the reverse actually happened and that everyone in spaceships actually suddenly disappeared into a new dimension while people on planets remained where they were, or that the life on planets somehow became the ocean of blood the main protagonist convict guy has to search. In general, the main horror to be had here is the unknown.
I think that’s most everything I wanted to discuss for now regarding what spooks there were. As for spooks to come? That’s also relatively unknown, but something that comes to mind is… Halloween, of course! Nothing is as spooky as pumpkins, costumes, and candy! Shiver me timbers, that’s a little too spooky to talk about. Happy Halloween!
