It’s Halloween week here at IFC News, and we have two notably horrifying pieces. Horrifyingly good! Er, yes.

Haunted House Alternatives: When you’re weary of the same old spooky mansion on the hill where all those terrible things happened that one time, why not turn to a haunted alternative? We examine eleven substitutes for the standard house, from spaceships to schools to submarines.

Tales From the Dark Side of Anthologies: Nick Schager examines some prime selections from the horror anthology film genre, including "Kwaidan" and it’s obvious contemporary counterpart, "Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror."

Also: Aaron Hillis talks to Julien Temple about "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten":

You use a clever device where all your talking heads give their
testimonies around communal campfires, a kind of assembly Strummer was
fond of. Is it true your first campfire test footage went a little
crazy after magic mushrooms broke out?

Oh yeah, it was a dry run. There was a blizzard, it looks great. I shot
it because the cameraman collapsed from the mushrooms, so we didn’t
have a cameraman. I was shooting the mayhem with infrared so the snow
really stood out — the sparks going up, snow falling down, and people
were flying high. It was great, all the Manchester guys like [Happy
Mondays percussionist] Bez, [former Stone Roses bassist] Mani, and I
think I brought mushroom tea, or I put mushrooms in the tea. I can’t
quite remember but everyone was not really concentrating on being
interviewed after a while. This was always going to be a trial run just
to get something done down at Joe’s house, but then Bez threw up, still
finished the interview, and I started to feel strange myself.

Michael Atkinson on "Into Great Silence": "There’s a fascinating tension in the film between what Gröning wants to show us and exactly how little he can — that is the point, after all, of the monastic life, that what happens in the material world is irrelevant. Yet it’s all you can film."

On the podcast, we look at Ridley Scott, king of the director’s cut.

Matt Singer reviews "American Gangster": "The problem in execution is that ‘American Gangster’ doesn’t add anything new to the dialogue between the cop and criminal archetypes."

And Christopher Bonet has what’s new in theaters.

+ IFC News