NoctHorror 2025!

This weekend, my partner and I wrapped up the sixth annual NoctHorror (formerly OctHorror, renamed because it kept creeping further and further into November), our annual Spooky Season film festival we do for our friends. Normally, we watch 13 films over Zoom and wrap the month with a pub quiz about those films, but this year I went a little overboard and made the films themselves into the puzzle. I kept all 13 films a secret until 24 hours before each screening, and sent the players puzzles along the way so they could try and suss them out, as well as an overarching mystery. There's a lot of internal lore that's built up over the last six years, so sharing all of the clues won't make a ton of sense, but check out this tube map I made for one of them:

The symbols on the left are part of the "ancient language Dra-Q-Lese" spoken by long-time antagonist "Count Dra-Q-La", and the map points the players both towards the next three films in the series and hints at the broader theme of the month, which culminated in drawing a giant pentagram on a map to triangulate the Count's hideout. I was even extra-devious this year and made some of the stops clickable in the PDF, so savvy players could uncover hidden mini-quizzes that netted them extra points in the finale. I'm extremely proud of it, but woof am I tired. 😅 Part of this year's event was a symbolic "passing the torch", and I'm excited for someone else to take the reins next year, at least when it comes to picking the films.

This year, we watched:

1. A Quiet Place
2. Bodies Bodies Bodies
3. Poseidon
4. 247℉
5. Let It Snow (2020)
6. Saloum
7. Anaconda
8. Bacurau
9. In the Shadows in the Mountains
10. The Edge of the Shadows
11. The Platform
12. Omen
13. Congo

And before you even start — I know that some of those aren't horror films. I was going for a whole geographical theme, it all made sense in the end.

Of the selection this year, I liked Saloum and Bacurau the best (RIP Udo Kier), and despite Omen being a straight-up drama (despite what the trailer and marketing sell it as), I recommend that to pretty much anybody. In the Shadows in the Mountains and The Edge of the Shadows aren't good movies by any means (sorry, Malik), but it was so cool to see a Greenland local's take on their folklore.

Because we started this tradition deep in the COVID-19 pandemic, all of our screenings were over Zoom, which is a legally dark-gray area, but hypothetically one way to facilitate this sort of thing is:

• Buy as many of the films as possible on DVD
• Hook your DVD player into an HDMI switcher (so you can swap between it and your Nintendo Switch and your Apple TV)
• Plug the output of the switcher into an HDMI splitter
• Take one of the outputs from the splitter and plug it into your TV
• Take the other end of the splitter and plug it into an HDMI-to-Analog converter (for example a Mini HDMI2AV Upscaler 1080p, hypothetically)
• Take an RCA cable from the output of the converter into an Analog to USB Video Capture Device (there are a hundred generic versions of these)
• Optionally, use a USB to USB-C converter to plug that into your laptop
• Use OBS Studio to take in the audio and video from the caputure device, making sure to add any necessary filters to account for "buzz" that might happen during the analog conversion
• Start the OBS virtual camera
• Open Zoom or your video communication app of choice
• Set your camera and microphone to the OBS virtual camera (and make sure to enable any "high-quality audio for musicians" settings)

In the end your setup could look something like this:

And voila! Hypothetically, you'll be watching your favorite films with your friends, as though you were all in the same room together. The digital-to-analog conversion helps make sure DRM won't stop you, and gives everything an actually pretty pleasant late-VHS/early-DVD vibe.

In case you're looking for any further inspiration (or if you're me next year, trying to remember this), here's what we watched for previous NoctHorrors:

2024

This year we had a "teen horror" theme, with everyone picking cabins in the fictional "Camp Dra-Q-La" and competing for prizes throughout the month. We watched:

1. Jennifer's Body
2. Ginger Snaps
3. I Know What You Did Last Summer
4. Final Destination
5. Fright Night (1985)
6. House of Wax (2005)
7. The Lost Boys
8. Chopping Mall
9. Jeepers Creepers
10. The Funhouse
11. Happy Death Day
12. Sleepaway Camp
13. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2023

This was our first themed year where we voted for "space", so naturally I included a fully-voiced HAL 9000 to "help" me run the quiz (I did, somehow, shove him out an airlock in the end).

1. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
2. Killer Klowns from Outer Space
3. Plan 9 from Outer Space
4. The Thing
5. Jason X
6. Leprechaun 4
7. Hellraiser IV: Bloodline
8. Planet of the Vampires
9. Solaris (1972)
10. Event Horizon
11. Sunshine
12. Predator
13. Alien

2022

This was before we were officially doing themes, but even then I was always playing with the idea of how each film could relate to the next one, so the whole thing had kind of a semi-logical flow to it.

1. Dracula
2. The Wolf Man
3. Monster House
4. The Cabin in the Woods
5. The Evil Dead
6. Drag Me To Hell
7. Friday the 13th (2009)
8. Halloween 3: Season of the Witch
9. Old
10. Us
11. Parasite
12. Pet Sematary (2019)
13. Shaun of the Dead

2021

This was when we landed on doing 13 films for the event, which gave us a good (spooky) number and meant we could schedule it in a way that fit for more of our friends' schedules. As always, the real monster is "having other responsibilities"!

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
2. Psycho
3. The Birds
4. Rosemary's Baby
5. Don't Look Now
6. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
7. Halloween II
8. Bloodbath at the House of Death
9. Silence of the Lambs
10. Candyman (1992)
11. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
12. It Follows
13. One Cut of the Dead

2020

We started this right in the middle of a lockdown, half out of our minds anyway, and just needed to do something. So we thought it would be a good idea to watch one movie every night for the entire month of October (save for Halloween, when we did the quiz). And it was a good idea at the time! Just... not one I'd do again.

1. Hocus Pocus
2. The Addams Family
3. Sleepy Hollow
4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
5. Corpse Bride
6. The Craft
7. Halloweentown
8. The Blair Witch Project
9. The Frighteners
10. Halloween
11. The Shining
12. Scream
13. The Mummy (1999)
14. Crimson Peak
15. Bram Stoker's Dracula
16. Rocky Horror Picture Show
17. The Sixth Sense
18. The Faculty
19. Death Becomes Her
20. Coraline
21. The Wicker Man (1973)
22. The Wicker Man (2006)
23. Pan's Labyrinth
24. Monster Squad
25. Carrie (1976)
26. Under Wraps
27. Nosferatu
28. Hellraiser
29. Beetlejuice
30. Young Frankenstein