On October 2, I turned on Donnie Darko for the first time in quite a while, and I had one of those moments where you suddenly notice something about a movie you have watched before but somehow never really considered. I realized ironically the day I watched the movie was actually she same day the movie begins.. October 2, 1988, with a culmination on October 31..

Obviously, Donnie Darko is a lot of things. It’s science fiction. It’s psychological. It’s a mystery. It’s a time-travel movie, depending on how you interpret it. It’s a movie about alternate realities, fate, death, adolescence, mental illness, God, free will and probably another dozen things people have been arguing about since the movie came out in 2001.

But it’s also very explicitly an October movie. So for that reason, Donnie Darko is a Halloween movie..

The story begins in early October 1988. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. That countdown takes us through October and directly toward Halloween. And when everything finally comes together, it happens on Halloween night.

There’s a Halloween party and there are people walking around in costumes. There are dark streets and autumn leaves. All that visual… And, of course, there is Frank.

Frank is a giant rabbit, which admittedly should make him sound more like something that belongs at Easter. except nobody has ever looked at Frank and thought that guy should be delivering Cadbury eggs.

He’s basically the anti-Easter Bunny.

But when you really consider the time frame of the movie, Frank makes even more sense as a Halloween figure. He’s a man in a grotesque rabbit costume who appears out of the darkness and tells Donnie that the world is going to end. He’s frightening, mysterious and somehow exists in this strange place between the living and the dead.

There’s an old idea associated with Halloween that this is the time of year when the veil becomes thin when the boundary between our world and whatever might exist beyond it isn’t quite as solid as it normally is.

Well, the veil is definitely thin in Donnie Darko. Except Richard Kelly takes that old supernatural idea and essentially gives it a science-fiction vocabulary. Instead of simply having ghosts crossing from the world of the dead into the world of the living, Donnie Darko gives us the Tangent Universe and the Primary Universe. Reality itself has fractured and two things that aren’t supposed to exist together suddenly do. Time becomes unstable while the living and the dead don’t necessarily stay in their proper places..

Donnie Darko also feels like fall.

You can sense it in the bones and roots of the film with fallen leaves and gray skies. The suburban streets and school hallways add to that mix. There is a melancholy running underneath everything that feels like that particular stretch of autumn when summer is definitely gone but winter hasn’t arrived yet.

Even the school scenes feel like October.

And that brings me to something else often almost forgotten about this movie: just how beautifully made its opening sequences are.

In the original theatrical version, Donnie wakes up inexplicably on a mountain and eventually rides his bicycle home while “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen plays.. Donnie wakes up somewhere he shouldn’t be, looks around, smiles, gets on his bicycle and rides home. We don’t know what’s happening yet, but already it feels like we’re somewhere between a dream and reality.

“Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears begins playing. The camera moves through the school, and within the length of essentially one song, Donnie Darko introduces us to an entire little universe of people. The continuous school sequence really does use “Head Over Heels” as we move among Donnie’s classmates, teachers and the different social groups inhabiting the school.

Within just two minutes, we don’t need long introductions to learn who our lead characters are.. this musical moment brings us a visual version of their collective stories without any dialogue to interrupt it..

There are movies that spend twenty minutes introducing their characters. Donnie Darko somehow introduces an entire world in the length of a Tears for Fears song.

The movie basically tells us: Just watch these people. You’ll understand.

“Head Over Heels” isn’t a Halloween song and it isn’t even really an autumn song. Yet somehow, when we hear it in Donnie Darko, it feels like October and the song kind of stayed a honorary tune of this time of year since being in the movie..

Halloween is about masks, and almost everyone in Donnie Darko is wearing one even before anybody puts on a costume.

Jim Cunningham presents himself as a wholesome motivational speaker preaching about fear and love while hiding something horrific. Kitty Farmer presents her worldview with absolute moral certainty. The school itself appears orderly while underneath that order are frightened, confused, angry, lonely kids trying to understand themselves and each other. Donnie’s neighborhood looks like an ordinary, comfortable American suburb while the universe itself is quietly coming apart.

Then Halloween arrives and everybody finally puts on actual masks.

A part of the reason we don’t normally put Donnie Darko alongside Halloween movies is because we’ve spent the last 25 years trying to figure out what the hell Donnie Darko actually means.

People have debated Frank… debated whether Donnie understands what’s happening to him. and everything else including Frank.. The Director’s Cut even brought The Philosophy of Time Travel material more directly into the movie, explaining concepts such as the Tangent Universe, the Artifact, the Living Receiver and the Manipulated Dead, although Kelly himself described those pages as something to be interpreted rather than simply treated as unquestionable canon.

We’ve spent so much time trying to solve this movie that we’ve overlooked something sitting right there on the calendar.

It’s October.

It’s Halloween, and a Halloween movie doesn’t necessarily need Michael Myers, witches, or trick-or-treaters ..

Donnie Darko understands that peculiar feeling that there might be certain nights when ordinary reality isn’t quite as solid as we think it is when the veil gets thin.

Or, in this case, when the Tangent Universe and the Primary Universe collide.

SO THAT’S THE ARGUMENT.. underneath all of it is an October story and really a melancholy autumn story about masks, death, fate, strange things appearing in the darkness and a world in which the boundary between realities has suddenly become dangerously thin.

Donnie Darko is a Halloween movie.

And maybe Frank isn’t the Easter Bunny after all. Maybe he’s been a Halloween rabbit the entire time.

It’s a rain day in the past.. which one are you renting?

The horror movie fandom has always been a big tent. But lately, that tent seems to be turning on itself — at least if you believe the internet, Twitter and TikTok streams out there.

Back in the old days, one could say people who loved horror would watch anything from Hitchcock and Frankenstein, to old black-and-whites, all the way to Freddy, Jason and Michael. Even the Saw movies had their impact. Horror was horror. You could like one corner of it, hate another corner of it, and still somehow all fit under the same tent.

But now, it would appear that there’s a generational divide that took place somewhere along the way. There’s an offshoot of horror fans who have gone the obsession route and are beginning to potentially lecture older fans about their choices.

One of the biggest examples is Freddy Krueger.

You see, there have been a lot of videos lately about how Freddy was a child murderer and, because of that, the entire 1980s celebration of him — blanketing him everywhere with the exception, perhaps, of cereal boxes for kids — was questionably immoral, distasteful and wrong.

Anyone who lived through the ‘80s or ’90s can remember Freddy was definitely everywhere. Along with ALF and Ronald Reagan, the guy was a pop-cultural phenomenon. There were products, posters, toys, video games, board games and just about everything else you could find.

Was evil being marketed to kids?

Maybe.

And kids were eating it up.

But horror fans for a long time didn’t question that because horror fans understood something pretty basic: Freddy Krueger wasn’t real.

They knew the backstory. They knew why Freddy got burned. They knew exactly what kind of monster the character was supposed to be.

But they also knew it was fiction.

And that’s the big deal here.

It was fiction.

Now it sometimes feels as though we’re blurring fiction and reality together so much that people are treating the Freddy backstory almost as though it actually happened, and then getting angry at 40-plus-year-old horror fans who may have dressed as Freddy for Halloween, owned a Freddy poster or had a couple of action figures.

Let’s take Jason, too.

Jason Voorhees was a deformed child who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake while counselors who were supposed to be watching him weren’t paying attention. There’s our origin story. There’s the tragedy that eventually gives us the horror icon.

But rumors and speculation surrounding newer incarnations of Friday the 13th have also brought arguments over Jason’s appearance and whether his deformities should still be depicted the way they traditionally have been. Is that because people find it offensive now? Is it simply a creative decision? Is it an attempt to avoid controversy?

Whatever the reason, even that becomes another debate.

Horror and pop culture have always tied together remarkably well. As a matter of fact, if you look at the horror movies of a particular time in history, you can get a pretty good gauge of what pop culture — and society itself — was doing at the time.

The ’80s were wild, people, and I think Freddy shows that.

The ’70s were brutal, cynical and increasingly distrustful, and the horror films that came out of that period reflected it.

And horror has always had messages underneath the blood.

George Romero didn’t simply make movies about zombies. His films became commentaries on society, consumerism, class and race — sometimes intentionally and sometimes because audiences found meanings in them that even Romero said he hadn’t originally planned.

So yes, horror has always lectured us a little bit, too.

But it usually did it through the story.

Now it seems like a newer part of the fandom wants to lecture the audience and question people who liked certain things before, using the modern lens of today to judge what somebody enjoyed 30 or 40 years ago.

And that’s so often what alienates people from each other.

Judging the past entirely through the modern lens of today just doesn’t work very well, because here’s something we sometimes forget:

The modern lens of 25 years from now will judge this era, too.

And perhaps not too fondly.

The big tent of horror fandom seems frayed. Maybe there have been a few too many stab wounds in the tent and too much air got in, or too much warmth got out. But there’s definitely a divisive tone among fans of several movies and franchises, along with this need to use a particular film of choice to lecture someone else about why their film of choice is wrong.

It’s not just horror, of course.

It’s happening throughout pop culture, social media and politics, and perhaps that same thing is simply bleeding over — no pun intended — into the horror genre.

And maybe some of it is good, at least to a degree.

Maybe it is good that a modern society stops for a second and ponders why a fictional child murderer became a pop-culture celebrity for an entire decade. That’s actually an interesting conversation to have.

But I have a theory as to why Freddy became so popular, and perhaps the fandom can agree on this one.

The Freddy remake was terrible.

And perhaps any future Freddy remake will be equally terrible, because the reason Freddy was popular — the reason the whole thing worked — was Robert Englund himself.

If he didn’t play Freddy, it just wasn’t the same.

It’s as simple as that, folks.

We weren’t laughing at Freddy, quoting Freddy and buying Freddy merchandise because we were celebrating a child killer. We were celebrating a fictional character, an outrageous horror creation and, most importantly, the actor who brought that character to life.

Because horror is fiction.

At least we hope it is.

Because when horror becomes real life?

Well, I guess that’s a discussion for the true-crime fandom.

They can handle that one.

This website typically does not offer opinions. We just give you the facts as we find them—as the name signifies, when we have time. So forgive a brief interruption of the norm and just hear this one out for a moment.

I was taking a brief, beautiful early fall walk near a bus station today in a small capital city in the United States. The sun was shining, the sky was bright, and suddenly that sunshine was spilling down on top of a woman clearly in mental distress, shouting and bellowing out prayers to Jesus at the bus stop and raging incessantly while everyone around her ignored her.

In the midst of all this, a small group of other people, seemingly intoxicated by meth or fentanyl, slowly proceeded in a death march into oblivion as their drugs had clearly taken hold. Their lives, at least in that moment, seemed lonely and deprived of all the goodness this world actually has to offer.

Seeing things like this—and actually looking, not just walking away, but really looking—you realize you can’t help. Or maybe you’re not brave enough to try. So you keep walking, too.

And the world moves on with this cold and callous response, while somehow we still attempt to call ourselves normal, educated and civilized.

Meanwhile, civilization itself breaks down around us, and yet we have the audacity to call them mentally ill. We ignore our own reflections in the mirror because we don’t want to admit that perhaps the mentally ill ones are also the cold and callous people who exist in this society and pretend the reality around them isn’t happening.

Oh, it’s happening all right.

It’s happening every day and every moment. And as we get crushed by kill shot after kill shot of reality, we keep going about our business in the strangest way possible: pretending that our business is just fine.

Civilization itself may have broken down, but damn it, we need the $7 coffee to prove that we’re still civilized.

Well that’s all folks! This week the summer ends in the autumnal equinox officially begins..

All the beauty, all the pumpkin spice, all the chill…

I deeply lament the passing of summer this year, mostly because of the speed and ferocity with which it was gone. The heat slammed into our bodies like some supercharged particle of unobtainium, and then suddenly, almost without warning, we’re left with the crushing blow of daylight fading and the night creeping in.

Each winter in life comes after the fall. Autumn can be a beautiful time—the colors, the cool air, the leaves falling—but as one ages, you begin to realize that autumn is also the annual reminder of our own life’s winter. And unlike the seasons, that winter does not eventually give birth to another spring. It settles in, grows colder, and eventually ends in the cold.

Each passing year, winter seems to get a little meaner, a little colder, a little bleaker and a lot more lonely. As we age, we survive the people who go before us, and we’re left trying to understand the strange passage of time and the strange currencies that come with it. Memories become more valuable. Years become more expensive. People become irreplaceable.

And as the fall leaves come down and the gray skies of winter settle over top of us, each tick and tock of the clock gets hauntingly louder, echoing through our very existence.

Maybe that’s why the passing of summer hurts a little more than it used to.

A Corpse in Kensington has been talked about for some time amongst the socials, and now it’s getting to the point where more people will finally have a chance to see it.

The independent psychological slasher rom-com takes place on Halloween 2010 in the Kensington neighborhood of San Diego and follows a loner who reunites with his old crush and her boyfriend years after high school, just as a suspicious series of killings begins around them. The film also features the late Michael Madsen in one of his final roles.

But there seems to be a little more going on here than simply another killer on the loose. Writer-director Brian Patrick Butler has described the movie as being about living in the past, idealizing the past and obsessing over it, while also looking at the strange realization that eras sometimes end before we even recognize they’re gone.

Inde Navarrette will host Saturday Night Live on Halloween 🎃

The Obsession breakout star will make her SNL hosting debut on October 31, 2026, with Gracie Abrams serving as the musical guest.

After her incredible performance as Nikki Freeman in Obsession, she’s also set to appear in the upcoming X-Men film and The Waffle House Index.

October 31. Inde Navarrette. SNL. Halloween.