Welcome to How to Start Watching, in which our staff will recommend movies that will help you start watching a particular genre, director, film movement, etc. It’s a list of movies, but with a purpose that isn’t recounting the best or even favorites. Each entry will suggest a few films that will help you find a way into more movies! A starter pack, if you will.

by Matthew Crump, Staff Writer

In a summer where some of our recent global horrors seemed like they were just starting to quell, an ironical heatwave cloaked North America, driving many of its inhabitants right back indoors. While you’re in there, consider killing the time with a selection of films I’ve curated to help get any burgeoning horror fan’s feet wet. My great hope is that, somehow, they will help you survive on the hellscape that we’re turning the surface of our Earth into. 

1. Texas Chain Saw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974)

Like most horror movie retrospectives, it all comes back to Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This highly influential film established many firsts within the genre that we will continue to see ripple throughout horror’s summer subgenre as we go. While it is never explicitly said that it’s summer, a group of young adults crowded into a beat up van on a roadtrip is unlikely to occur in any other season. It set a precedent that films like The Evil Dead, Cabin Fever, and even Cabin In the Woods dared to emulate, but none feel quite as hot, sticky, and desperate as their original source text. 

2. Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Just one year later, a film on the opposite end of the financial spectrum would revolutionize the film industry as we know it. Where Tobe Hooper scrounged together a shoestring budget of just $140,000, Steven Spielberg ran a production that went far over budget, eventually landing somewhere around the $9 million mark. Don’t let the price tag devalue its impact though, Jaws is the first film to lay the blueprint for what we now know as the modern day blockbuster. It’s influence is still felt today, and I have everyone at MovieJawn backing me up on this. 

What puts Jaws at the top of this conversation isn’t that it’s the first horror movie to be set in summer, it’s that it’s the first horror movie to take all the beach fun that the season offers and flip it on its head so effectively. Not only have there been an endless amount of shark movie rip-offs, but it essentially revived the monster movie model of the 40s and 50s on a new frontier: the ocean.

Next steps: Piranha and Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive are just a few of the aquatic nightmares left in Jaws wake. However, my personal guilty pleasure is J-Lo and Ice Cube in Anaconda.

3. The Burning (dir. Tony Maylam, 1981)

True horror aficionados might be aghast that I’ve skirted past the Friday the 13th franchise. Here’s the problem: there’s just too damn many of them. You would be hard-pressed to find another horror movie franchise more inconsistent than the one chasing around Jason and his machete. It’s impact in the sub-sub-genre of summer camp slasher films is undeniable, but for the beginners who just want to dip a toe in, I recommend The Burning. 

The successor to the original Friday the 13th by just one year, The Burning offers all the same fun and terror, just in a much neater, less time-consuming package than a franchise with 12 entries (and that’s not even counting the video game). One element of the burning that really sets it apart is the campers. Most of Friday the 13th is set chasing around camp counselors in the days before camp has opened, but The Burning sticks us right in the middle of the term, heightening the stakes that much more. Before you take on Jason Vorhees, first make sure you can handle The Burning’s Cropsey.

Next Steps: If you got the time, Friday the 13th (it gets good around the 4th one). If you can handle a problematic fav that understands absolutely nothing about gender, the Sleepaway Camp franchise.

4. The Lost Boys (dir. Joel Schumacher, 1987)

The 80s were a good time for horror movies. Such a wide range of terror came out of that era, all of which required SFX artists, set designers, and other crew to get increasingly more creative with how to pull off guts and gore with little, if any, computer intervention. The flashy, black comedy fun of The Lost Boys is no exception, offering us a quaint beach town setting that feels truly emblematic of both the era and season.

The heights to which The Lost Boys goes to set loose a motorcycle gang of vampires onto a few of the new kids in town is astounding. It takes a boardwalk packed with raving concerts, beachside arcades, and, most crucially, a life-saving comic book shop, and drops a seedy, punk-inspired underbelly right under its wooden planks. Not only does it offer a soul-sucking explanation for all the missing kids on milk cartons, but it’ll make you think twice the next time you plan a weekend away at your nearest beach’s promenade.

5. I Know What You Did Last Summer (dir. Jim Gillespie, 1997)

This is a summer slasher that did its homework, and it really shows. Besides Jennifer Love Hewitt’s extremely 90s bucket hat, most of this movie’s other merits lie in some truly superb cat-and-mouse stalking. There’s a chase sequence with Sarah Michelle Gellar where she dodges upwards of two dozen different attempts from “the fisherman,” giving any final girl before her a broken high-heel run for her money. Then the actual final chase sequence, which slips and slides around on a fishing vessel on open water, somehow manages to be even more thrilling. While the killer’s motive is admittedly somewhat overly-complicated for the slasher genre, it does all span across two deadly summers that help show how far the sub-genre has come since its inception 23 summers ago.

6. Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster, 2019)

The new wave of horror that’s crashed onto our screens in recent years seems to be darker and more character-driven than almost anything that entered the genre before it. With the rising horror director Ari Aster’s sophomore film, audiences seemed to be more polarized by it than Hereditary. It’s most common critiques are for its slow burning tensions and similarities to 1973’s breakthrough occult horror film The Wicker Man. Yet, for a new age horror movie that takes place almost entirely in the achingly bright, rolling hills of Sweden, the terror it instills with almost no literal darkness is something to behold. Regardless of what side of the debate you fall on, it's undeniable that summer is an integral part of it.

At the end of the film, Dani, portrayed flawlessly by Florence Pugh, is asked to make an impossible choice by one of the leaders of her new family. “These are the candidates for the final offering,” he says as Dani begins to slow her sobs. “Make your verdict.” Now I present the same call to action to you: Go back over the list and choose whatever summer horror movie you think will help you beat the heat. 

Oh, one more thing... Welcome to the family.

Next steps: This very convenient list I made on Letterboxd to help guide further exploration of horror movies for this season and future summers (assuming global warming doesn’t take us all out).