The 13 best Halloween movie summaries on Wikipedia

Meet the “big babies” who will only read Wikipedia summaries of horror movies

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Not me though. I watch them through my fingers like an adult. —Kate

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Horror movie fandom is not exactly on-brand for me. Yet if you were to name any release within the past the past three or so years, I almost certainly saw it in theaters. I learned late in life that I like being spooked! And then going home and never watching or thinking about the movie again (except, involuntarily, Hereditary—in the middle of the night I will get the intrusive thought that Toni Collette is wedged into a corner of my ceiling).

My sleep paralysis demon…

It’s the communal experience, either watching in the theater or at home with friends, that makes scary movies fun. I know many people, however, who would never willingly experience even the playful fear brought on by a horror flick. And I get that. It’s a group of people in the middle, however, who intrigue me: The people who never watch scary movies, but read their Wikipedia summaries.

I did not realize how popular this phenomenon was until my friend Jehan encountered a fellow Wikipedia horror fan in the wild. “Have you read the one for Tusk?” they asked her, excitedly. (Apparently, you gotta read the one for Tusk [2014]). As the sheer number of people who responded to an Instagram Story I posted about this phenomenon attests, the hobby is surprisingly widespread.

Some people use Wikipedia as a kind of guardrail, keeping the summary open while they watch the film so they can be prepared for whatever might jump out at them next. “I will never forget opening the Hereditary wiki mid-watch the moment little diva head came off,” Tudum’s Ariana Romero tells me over Instagram.

Other viewers check the Wikipedia summary to decide whether they can handle the real thing. “Saw—not for me,” says Nolan Feeney, features director at BDG. “Turned it off [after] ten minutes. But with Wiki I can kind of test the waters.”

When a hyped horror movie hits theaters, those who don’t want to subject themselves to 90-plus minutes of gore and/or Octavia Spencer’s bob use Wikipedia to stay plugged in. “I do this for splatter horror, and the best one is Barbarian,” says Crystal Fawn. “The plot outline is borderline nonsensical and cracks me up every time. For some reason I can’t watch this ‘type’ of movie but the Wikipedia page allows me to participate in the conversation.”

“Before Hereditary even came out I heard it was wild and went around messaging people who had seen it at film festivals for all the details,” Meredith Haggerty says. “Because if I knew all the details it couldn’t hurt me.” (She still hasn’t seen it.)

In many cases, reading of the summary is an end unto itself. “I don’t like watching scary movies but they always have interesting plots and twists,” says All True’s Jesse Tyler. “I have read every Jordan Peele movie plot and seen none.”

“Social commentary through horror is theoretically super interesting to me,” Haggerty says. “I am just a big baby who never wants to be upset for any reason.”

As informative as Wikipedia-ing is, there are some elements of horror the summaries can’t quite capture. My friend Mary, who wanted to find out what happens in Weapons, left the entry with more questions than answers. “It was trying to still have the tone of Wikipedia, and be factual, but then some of the strangeness or absurdity of the film clashed with the matter of fact tone in a funny way,” she says. For instance (spoilers ahead?): “While watching Alex’s house, Justine falls asleep in her car; Alex’s mother enters the car and cuts a lock of Justine’s hair.”

Or:

Meanwhile, Archer Graff—the father of Alex’s bully Matthew, who is among the missing—begins his own investigation. After reviewing smart doorbell footage of Matthew and another child, he notices that their running paths converge but cannot pinpoint their exact destination. Both Justine and Archer dream about the children and a mysterious elderly woman with clown-like makeup.

“It’s like yes, yes, okay, they are reviewing footage—that makes sense,” Mary says. But “why are they both dreaming about an elderly woman with clown makeup? Where did that come from?!”

This Halloweek, I decided to crowdsource some of the best horror movies—not to watch, but to read. Below is the list, curated by big babies who never want to be upset for any reason for big babies who never want to be upset for any reason: