The School of Good and Evil are some of the movies to be excited about as the fall season gets closer to start. With the reduced time of natural daylight and leaves starting to fall, it's time to revisit some of the movies that share the cozy, yet eerie atmosphere that autumn usually evokes.
With great rom-coms and horror films set during fall to check out, it's also the best time to watch the exciting amount of gloomy teen films that offer a dark turn to the high-school setting.
This article addresses themes such as suicide, violence, and sexual abuse.
Mean Creek (2004)
Mean Creek is often regarded as the dark version of Stand By Me. Set in a small Oregon town, a group of teenagers orchestrates a malicious plan to deal with the town bully, but what started as an innocent trick ends up going too far.
Every action has consequences, and Mean Creek aims at bringing the weight of doing the wrong thing from a teenage standpoint, but while this is a recurring theme in teen movies, the film takes much darker proportions. The eerie atmosphere of the film adds up to the psychological study of each character as they delve into a situation that forces them to act independently, with no one else to resort to.
Donnie Darko (2001)
one of those movies that make no sense, but it can also be an accurate portrayal of teenage life back in the '80s if one removes the time traveling plot and the creepy bunny that haunts the main character.
With an engaging Halloween-season feel to it and a great fall ambiance, Donnie Darko is a memorable experience for those looking for something darker to watch in autumn. Donnie Darko follows a set of troubled teenagers trying to deal with a mysterious chaos theory plot as a sinister accident triggers a chain of events that can potentially lead to the end of the world.
Brick (2005)
Brick was the first movie to show the world how Knives Out director Rian Johnson's specialty is crafting puzzling mysteries revolving around a bunch of weird characters. Among teenage femme fatale and violent thugs, there's Brendan, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a teenage loner who engages in an exhausting amateur investigation about the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend.
Brick presents the high school underworld as never seen before; a reality where drugs, murders, and blackmail drives teenagers into the most absurd situations.
River's Edge (1986)
River's Edge is a hidden gem of the '80s and delivers one of Keanu Reeves' early roles; a teenage underdog trying to cope with a disturbing secret. The high school reality of the film exposes a fragile American society; poor teenagers fooling around with no real prospects in life. To break this hopeless routine, one of the boys of a group of friends invites everyone to go see the body of a girl he just murdered.
The film doesn't try to understand each character's motivation for their questionable attitudes, but rather dive deep into how the secret sways them into different actions. The discovery of the corpse ignites something in that group of teenagers they didn't know they had within, and will forever change them for better or for worse.
Mysterious Skin (2004)
Gregg Araki has always been interested in the overlooked portion of teenage wasteland, but the themes he addresses in Mysterious Skin are much more heavy and disturbing than those of his other films. Dealing with sensitive topics such as child abuse and sexuality, the movie delivers a crude depiction of the long-term effects of abuse and shouts out the importance of always having someone to confide in about painful secrets.
The movie tells the parallel stories of two troubled teenagers who share a dark past: Neil is a hustler who secretly offers services as a sex worker, while Brian is a nerdy young man who believes he was abducted by aliens when he was a kid. When the two finally cross paths, a horrifying truth will be uncovered.
The Lost Boys (1987)
The Lost Boys is a must-watch from the '80s and one of the most innovative vampire movies out there. Cleverly balancing high-school tropes with comedy and inventive horror elements, the film captures the fall feeling in the unusual setting of a coastal California town: a place that should supposedly be a sunny paradise, but in fact, is infested by a gang of vampires.
As two newcomers begin to suspect there's something wrong going on in the town, the film does a great job of portraying 80s conventions and adapting them to a peculiar vampire lifestyle. Alternating between the plot of vampire hunters and the process of becoming one of the creatures, The Lost Boys builds up to a fun, yet terrifying clímax.
The Virgin Suicides (1999)
The Virgin Suicides is a delicate movie that displays only the tip of an iceberg of themes such as girlhood, religious fanaticism, and family oppression. All the real motivations and words unsaid lie in an impenetrable layer of repressed feelings and ambiguous emotions, conducted through dream-like sequences and the frail recollections of a group of boys obsessed with the young girls next door.
The Lisbon girls are five teenage sisters who evoke a mix of fascination and curiosity from everyone who lay eyes on them. Behind the mask of the seemingly perfect life their parents try to convey, the girls hide secrets that soon escalate into an horrific act.
All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)
All About Lily Chou-Chou captures the generational angst of growing up in the early 2000s like no other film, portraying the rise of the internet as a welcoming escape to the complicated reality that overwhelmed teenagers. Two best friends share a common ion for a musician known as Lily Chou-Chou, but while their love for music continues the same, the different directions the two take in real life lead up to actions with dark consequences.
The film delicately explores the feeling of growing apart from real life and friends with melancholy and longing. The dream-like songs produced to give life to the abstract figure of the fictional singer Lily Chou-Chou brings the story even closer to reality, but the dark aspects of the film are as shocking as they are important for the atmospheric portrayal of growing up with an unpredictable person who gradually becomes someone dangerous.
Paranoid Park (2007)
Paranoid Park is the kind of teen movie with one horrific scene that changes the tone of the movie completely. Right from the start, it's known that the protagonist, a young skateboarder going through hard times with his parent's divorce, is involved in the mysterious death of a security guard. When the circumstances of this death are revealed, the immense guilt the boy dwells on becomes much more understandable.
For this reason, the movie has a gloomy atmosphere for most of its running time but still has time to explore themes typical of teen coming-of-age movies such as loneliness and first love. Paranoid Park is immersive and honest and will resonate with anyone fighting their own private battles.
Heathers (1989)
Decades later no other movie managed to top Heathers' sharp satire of teenage life. Without romanticizing its characters too much and subverting the most popular teen stereotypes, Heathers depicts high school as the lair of the worst people in the world.
With dark humor and outrageously funny quotes, the film follows the unusual romance between a popular girl and the school rebel as they engage in a series of illicit acts to make a difference in their school. Winona Ryder is charmingly terrifying as Veronica Sawyer, a character difficult to comprehend but painfully easy to like even with all the atrocities she commits.
