The Ghoulish Plot: it’s the 70s, and a mysterious killer starts murdering people randomly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not only is he committing murders, but he begins sending letters and coded messages to the media in the area claiming the puzzles will lead to his identity.

Over the course of years, multiple people become obsessed with identifying the killer and in the course of the investigation lose spouses, careers and their sanity. Based on a true story, you already know they never really figure out who the killer is…but in the meantime find some creepy and foreboding potential suspects (one of whom is played by a notable cartoon voice actor) and find themselves busting into a double wide trailer filled with squirrels. Y’know, that old cop story chestnut.

While not technically a ghost story, this movie is creepy from start to finish and you can feel the fatigue and stress in every frame. Director David Fincher reportedly had the actors do dozens and dozens of takes in order to get that exhaustion to show up on the screen while still making a fast-paced intriguing flick. While I hadn’t seen most of the movies on this year’s list so far, this one is currently in my collection as a 4K Blu-Ray and I’d recommend it at almost any time of the year if you’ve never seen it…so why not watch it during spooky season?

This movie was also made prior to the height of the whole serial killer/murder podcast trend, and the film also shows the awful outcomes that follow these sprees that the podcasts never seem to: ruined lives and families and people who end up feeling unsafe for the rest of their lives as a result of what happened.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: you mean, OTHER than how they never figured out who Zodiac was? The next scariest part is how a cartoonist could afford a car, kids and multi-bedroom home in San Francisco proper in the 1970s, meanwhile when we lived there we were making tech money and sitting with our cats in 500 square feet.

Spookiness Factor: from the start, you can feel the hopelessness and dread and the smartest people involved in the case realize their only hope is to run away from it as fast as possible. There’s no magical solution to this one, it’s a realistic nightmare.

Rating: 10 out of 10 Ghirardelli Chocolates