🍂Fall Recommendations🍂
📚Books, 🍿movies, and other 🍁fall things I love!
Fall has always been my favorite season. I love crunching through leaves in my hiking boots, I love the melange of scary and camp that comes with Halloween, and I love tailoring my reads and watches to the season. I offer below a “choose your own adventure” of sorts for your own autumn consumption. Of course, there are SO many fabulous horror movies and books. The ones I list here are favorites of mine, or things you might not have heard of. But there are plenty of classics, too. Please chime in with your suggestions for fall favorites in the comments!
If you love pumpkin spice lattes and fuzzy socks…
Read: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George, Love Nina by Nina Stibbe, The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
Watch: When Harry Met Sally, Terrace House: Opening New Doors
Try: Baking pumpkin chocolate chip bread, going to a pumpkin patch or apple orchard, meeting a friend for a brisk morning walk with pumpkin spice lattes, setting a timer for ten minutes and drawing or painting a pumpkin within that time.
If you love haunted houses…
Read: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, The Garden by Clare Beams, The Only One Left by Riley Sager
Watch: The House on Haunted Hill, The Haunting (CGI is bound to be trash, but this movie was one of the first that truly scared me as a kid, and I will always love it.), It.
Try: Making your own garland of hand drawn ghosts and pumpkins to hang in your window, finding a spooky sounds playlist and playing it on speakers when kids come to trick-or-treat, leaving up the cobwebs around your house instead of dusting—‘tis the season!
If you love a dash of laughter along with your horror…
Read: “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder (I’ll never stop recommending this.)
Watch: Barbarian (Everyone in my family hated this but me, who loved it. A perfect mix of pure terror and laugh-out-loud absurdity, if you ask me!), Cabin in the Woods, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (I will always be in love with Tim Curry because of this movie.)
Try: Taking a heels dance class, mixing a signature fall cocktail or mocktail, giving yourself a challenge of buying a Halloween costume at a thrift store for only $20
If The Ring scared the bejeezus out of you as a kid…but you loved it.
Read: Ringu by Koji Suzuki (This is the Japanese novel that the film is based on!), My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones, The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
Watch: The Conjuring, Smile, The Ring, Kwaidan (an anthology of four Japanese short horror films that came out in 1964. We watched these while I was pregnant and they have stayed with me. There was something so unsettling and simple and beautiful about them.), the German Netflix film Prey.
Try: Going on a walk with a scary podcast (try Spooked!) at dusk on a blustery evening, watch a scary movie with popcorn in the basement with all the lights off with your friends, go on a remote hike at a state park (up to you to decide if you want to pretend you’re in Prey or not)
Bonus Zombie Round!
Read: Severance by Ling Ma
Watch: Night of the Living Dead, the HBO series The Last of Us, Scooby Doo on Zombie Island
Which media do you turn to when the leaves change colors? Give me your recommendations, please—especially things that truly scare you and movies/books with a Nora Ephron vibe! I hope you’re enjoying this season!
With love from my kitchen table,
Kaia
Obsessed with all of these recommendations for every shade of fall! Amazing, as always! ❤️❤️❤️ I always look forward to these newsletters!
This is such a brilliant list! I wish I wasn’t terrified of horror movies. Gratefully I’m able to listen to recounts of people’s favourite horrors.
I once joined an online horror group to tell them that my favourite horror movies are:
Top of the Food Chain (an under-appreciated Canadian directed wryly hilarious alien-horror)
Ginger-Snaps (a Canadian horror movie, queer, sisterly love, and growing up metaphor)
I want badly to be able to read Grey Dog by a local author and librarian whose research was living in one of the old timey villages during a summer camp when she was 11.
I love the idea of scary things. I was once a costume designer on a horror film filmed in an old asylum in Vancouver and the being on set after midnight was TERRIFYING. The movie itself not too scary.
I try so hard to be watch scary things but mostly I cover my eyes and let my partner tell me what we’ve watched.
The Blair Witch Project kept me out of the woods for years! (And I loved the woods!)
This year my partner and I live in a neighbourhood that LOVES Halloween, and we’ve collected a ridiculous amount of outdoor decorations that we intend to put up the moment October 1st rolls around.
Thank you for letting me talk about something I love but scares me. My love of the spooky is strange being that I’m so scared of scary things. 😂