Autumn has fallen and it’s time once more to celebrate the primal, compulsive instinct of fear. Rainestorm finishes its horror trilogy and goes to the well one last time to highlight 31 days of spooky scares that season the eerie atmosphere of Halloween.

Hex cast: 2012

The charm: A terrifying little delight that manages to blend several horror elements into one: The Sixth Sense, Night of the Living Dead, The Crucible and Scooby-Doo, to name a few. One has to be reminded that it’s a children’s film because it can be truly frightening. The sequence where Norman must retrieve a book from his dead uncle’s clutches conjures up recollections of Young Frankenstein, but the joke is more unsettling here, laced with icky sight gags and a sense of claustrophobia. The movie goes astray as the third act starts to build, all sense of logic abandoned for empty slapstick, and the derailment goes on for far too long before it rights itself in the climax. However, the production design is perfectly suited for Halloween shenanigans, utilizing a color palette that is even richer than Monster House, from which it also borrows several elements. If nothing else, it is beautiful to look at and director Henry Selick nicely captures the essence of the season.

Focal point: [SPOILER] The revelation that big, dumb, brawny jock Mitch is openly gay, the first for a mainstream children’s film.

Entrancing trivia: After the credits, a short featurette shows a time-lapse video of the creation and modeling of the Norman figure used for filming.

Speak the words: “You think just because there’s bad people that there’s no good ones either?”

Companion spell: Coraline (2009). Free of Tim Burton’s shackles, Selick spins a marvelous adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book that is a visual banquet, with superb supporting characters that do double duty in two separate dimensions. One of the few movies I wish I had seen in 3D.

Cursed by: The Nightmare Before Christmas. Not nearly as good as its reputation, with clunky musical numbers, a marked lack of charm and the stamp of Tim Burton’s contrived weirdness.