Widescreen: One treat for fraidy cats, one treat for horror hounds as Spooky Season begins

Hear ye, hear ye! Being that it is October the First, his royal highness Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, declares that Spooky Season has officially begun. Time for Tim Burton movies to take over basic cable, and time for Jamie Lee Curtis to turn the tables on masked intruders.

But what if you don't like horror movies? What if you like the trappings of Halloween, but not the scares?

Comedian Alison Leiby doesn't like horror movies either, but she wants to know what happens in them. So her friend and fellow comedian Halle Kiefer explains them in great detail on the fun podcast "Ruined," available on iTunes, Spotify and other platforms.

Kiefer asks Leiby to guess the twists and predict who will survive as she tries to put the gory sights of films like "The Evil Dead" and "Re-Animator" into words. This week's hour on "The Sixth Sense" (yes, Alison did know the twist already) begins with a discussion of the pros and cons of dating Pinhead, the pointy-faced demon from "Hellraiser."

My pick for the funniest episode: Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds."

But if you do like horror movies ...

... and you have HBO Max, it's time to meet the "The Empty Man."

Released in theaters at the height of the pandemic, "The Empty Man" had no marketing campaign, no big stars, and a director whose previous works had been special features for David Fincher DVDs. It was also the final theatrical release from 20th Century Fox before new corporate overlord Disney changed the name to 20th Century Studios. It grossed all of $4.8 million at the global box office.

But earlier this year, the film started making waves with the tastemakers in the informal group known online as FilmTwitter. Could this footnote in film history actually be a secret masterpiece?

That might be going a bit far, but "The Empty Man," starring James Badge Dale ("24") as a grieving Midwest detective trying to find his friend's missing daughter, is a disturbing, ambitious film that upends expectation at every turn, beginning with its opening sequence: Do you expect a missing-person drama to begin with hikers in Tibet finding a monstrous, inhuman skeleton that makes them catatonic?

A terrifying nighttime trip into the woods sets up the mind-bending concluding scenes, which I found myself watching multiple times.

Watch "The Empty Man" now, and you'll have something obscure and provocative to recommend to all your spooky friends for the rest of the month.

• Sean Stangland is an assistant news editor who remembers the thrill of discovering "Donnie Darko" on DVD 20 years ago.