Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode, I want to talk about Halloween and help get you ready for Halloween.
Halloween is on the 31st of every October.
Because it is coming up.
I want to help you prepare by going over some TV shows and movies that can help you get in that Halloween spirit.
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Halloween is known as being a little bit scary, a little bit spooky.
And on today's episode, I want to talk about some TV shows and movies, specifically in high school settings, that you can watch to improve your listening comprehension, build your vocabulary and, of course, get ready for Halloween.
So if you want to learn more about these spooky Halloween recommendations, then follow along, because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast and of our previous podcast episodes.
There you will find the vocabulary list of the words and phrases that I used, so you can take them and build your English vocabulary.
And another thing that I want to mention before we get started is that I will leave a link to a website called streamwithvpncom.
I have no affiliation with the website, but it is a website that I use.
The reason is that you can put in any TV show or movie into the search and it will tell you every streaming platform that particular TV show or movie is playing in and what country it's available in.
If you have a VPN, like I do, you can then see what country you need to change your VPN to so you can watch whatever media it is that you're trying to watch.
I think it's really helpful.
That's why I use it.
I'm not getting paid to say this, but it is just something that I use.
And so I will leave a link for that.
So if you are interested in watching these TV shows or movies, you can go to that site and see where it is available.
Now let's get into these TV shows and movies.
The reason that I'm going over these and recommending these is that I'm a big believer in the input hypothesis.
If you have listened to our previous podcast episodes before, you already know this.
But if you're new, the input hypothesis is this hypothesis when it comes to language learning that the more time you spend reading or listening to a language, the better you're going to be with that language.
For that reason, I really encourage my students to try to watch and listen as much as possible, because that's going to help improve their English, naturally.
If you want more podcasts about Halloween, I have done multiple episodes.
I will leave links.
I will leave iCards for people who are watching on YouTube.
We've done episodes on the traditions around Halloween in the United States and of some of the classic Halloween movies and some scary podcasts that you can listen to.
So if you are interested in those, check out those links because that will get you even more input.
But on today's episode we're going to focus specifically on TV shows and movies that have to do with these Halloween themes that are set in high school.
Our first category is going to be campy.
Campy, if you haven't heard that word before, what that means is it's kind of silly.
It's kind of goofy.
Maybe it's made for children or kind of has a childish feel to it.
That is campy.
So the first group of TV shows and movies that I'm going to talk about are campy.
That means that they're not too scary.
These are not horror movies or TV shows.
This is not something that you're going to have a lot of blood and guts.
You're not going to have anything that's too scary, but it still has these spooky elements.
The word spooky usually means a little bit scary and also dealing with the paranormal, maybe ghosts or witches and magic.
If something has that element to it, it gets called spooky.
So our first category is campy and spooky, but not too scary.
The first one on our list is from 1996.
It was on the air from 1996 to 2003, so it's a little bit older.
And it is Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch stars Melissa Joan Hart as Sabrina.
She is 16 years old at the beginning of the show and she finds out that she and her aunts are witches.
She lives with her aunts and their talking cat named Salem.
I did an episode on the Salem witch trials last year.
I will leave a link for that if you're interested in learning more about why her cat is named Salem, what the connection between witches and Halloween and Salem is.
The show is really a comedy.
Sabrina is a very outgoing, friendly person.
The comedy comes from her being a witch herself.
While she attends a normal public high school.
She really has to hide the fact that she's a witch.
She has to hide that her aunts have these magical powers.
And that's where the comedy comes from.
From her dealing with this magical part of her life.
While also trying to live a normal high school teenage life.
It really is more of a fun comedy show, so if you don't like scary things, this is a great one to watch.
You watch her grow up.
By the end of the series, she goes to college, so you see her as she's growing up.
The episodes are relatively short because it is a sitcom, so this is a good way to watch the episodes quickly while still getting that English input in.
Our next show is from the same time period.
It's from 1997 to 2003 and it is called Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
This stars Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, and this character Buffy, is again another female high school student, but in her case she actually takes on more of an action role.
The show is a little bit more scary still not very scary, but has a little bit more action and horror in it than Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
The reason is that Buffy has to hunt vampires.
That means she has to fight them.
And besides vampires, she has to fight a lot of other supernatural beings.
The show centers around her having her friends help her on these quests.
She has to go and fight these supernatural beings, protect her friends, her family, the planet from these demons or vampires or supernatural beings that would harm the people around her.
There is a spinoff from this.
So a spinoff means one of the characters that was in this show ended up getting their own show.
And that show is called Angel.
Angel is one of the characters that is in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
You can watch the TV show Angel, which focuses on the male character Angel and his journey, his dealing with the supernatural realm.
Our next show is called Teen Wolf.
This is a little bit newer.
It is from 2011 to 2017.
It focuses on a character named Scott McCall, and he was bitten by a werewolf.
This means that he starts changing after this bite.
And again he's in high school.
So he has to deal with growing up, being in high school while also having this supernatural, magical part to his life.
This one is a little bit more of a drama.
You have a little bit more drama and romance in this show and some horror elements as well.
Less of a comedy than Sabrina and probably more similar in tone to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
If this is something you're interested in, this is another good one to watch, because the episodes aren't that difficult to follow along with, and another great way to get some input.
And the last show on our list is Wednesday.
This is a lot newer.
It's from 2022 and the newest season should have just come out when this podcast comes out.
It is a Netflix show.
So if you have Netflix, you'll be able to watch this.
It focuses on one of the characters from the Addams family, specifically the daughter named Wednesday.
I have to say this is one of my favorite TV shows.
I absolutely loved the first season.
It really is just a well-written show.
It does have some scary elements to it because Wednesday comes from a family that deals with the supernatural.
She has her parents who have some weird magical abilities among them, and then she goes to a school that is known for having people who have some type of magical aspect to them.
Her roommate is someone who is a werewolf or trying to become a werewolf.
There are mermaids and vampires and a lot of the things that you associate with halloween at her particular school.
The first season centers around a murder and her trying to investigate to figure out who is the person who is responsible for it.
Because it is directed and created by Tim Burton, he has done a lot of Halloween movies.
He was on the list that we talked about when I gave the original Halloween movie recommendation episode.
It's in his signature style, so it has a lot of gothic elements to it, but it's also really clever.
Wednesday herself, personally, I think she is a very funny character.
She has a lot of jokes, so it still has that comedy aspect, while also having that horror and the gothic element as well.
Our next set of TV shows and movies are still going to be spooky, but they're going to be a little bit more suspenseful.
So these are going to be a little bit more scary, a little bit more creepy.
Creepy is maybe when you start feeling some goosebumps on your arms, when you start getting a little bit more scared.
So this is kind of a step up from the first batch.
Our first film is from 2001, and it is Donnie Darko.
It stars a very young Jake Gyllenhaal as the main character of Donnie Darko, and he is a teenager who starts seeing some weird things.
What happens is that part of an airplane actually falls down and lands in his yard, in his house, and from that some strange things start happening in his life.
He starts seeing this creepy rabbit, something that's kind of unnerving to see.
Unnerving means it makes you feel weird.
There's something strange about it.
So he starts seeing this rabbit who tells him that the world is ending.
This movie is something that's called a cult classic.
I mentioned this in my previous episode, when I talked about A term that we use for a movie that wasn't super popular when it was in movie theaters but has gained popularity in the years since.
And this is one of those films.
It's a good movie.
It wasn't extremely popular when it first came out, but it has a lot of strange things about it that people like.
Next in this category is pretty little liars.
Pretty little liars is a tv show.
The first couple seasons are set in high school.
So there is a mysterious figure, a mysterious person whose name is a, and a threatens four girls after one of their friends goes missing.
This show really goes into the mystery of what happened to the missing friend, who A is, and why does he keep threatening or taunting these four girls?
There are a lot of secrets, a lot of mysteries, a lot of plot twists, which means that something happens that you weren't expecting, and a lot of cliffhangers.
A cliffhanger is something that occurs in a TV show or movie that is unresolved.
You don't get the answer right away, so you want to watch the next episode or the next movie in the series.
There are a lot of cliffhangers because this show and the storyline has a lot of mystery to it.
The next show is called Riverdale.
This was from 2017 to 2023.
It is based on the characters of this comic strip called Archie Comics.
The comic strip itself is a comedy, kind of old-fashioned when you think of it, but this TV show is definitely a modern adaptation and a lot scarier.
It has the characters from that Archie comic series, but in very different scenarios than in the original newspaper comics.
The show is set in a small town which is called Riverdale, and the characters attend Riverdale High School.
As the show progresses, it moves into a very dark and strange territory.
There are murders, there are supernatural powers, and even alternate universes.
Therefore, there are a lot of spooky elements and scary things that happen when you're dealing with serial killers and cults.
Of course, those are scary, but there's also still a lot of humor in it.
Every season of the show has at least one musical episode where the characters just start singing.
So you still do get some of that humor and some of that campy aspect to it.
Riverdale actually has a crossover with the next show on our list, and that is The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
This is another show based on Sabrina, the character from Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, but this is much darker.
This is a Netflix show from 2018 to 2020.
There are four seasons of it on Netflix.
Even though it has the same character and the same basic parts of the plotline, the tone of the show is definitely different from the Sabrina the Teenage Witch version in the early 2000s.
Sabrina is still a witch.
In this, but also in the show, are demons, occult rituals, satanic lore and just a lot of scary moments.
The creator of Riverdale also did this show.
There is some crossover between the shows and the tone is pretty similar to Riverdale.
So you get that teenage drama aspect.
You get the horror aspect with a lot of dark things like occult rituals, demons, and witchcraft.
And our last category is of the horror and slasher films and TV shows.
These are definitely going to be the scariest out of all of them and the ones that are most horror-based, the ones that are thought of as horror movies and TV shows.
The first one is Carrie.
There is the original version from 1976, which stars Sissy Spacek as Carrie.
And then there is a modern version as well, from 2013, that has Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore as her mother.
Both of them pretty much have the same plot.
There is the character Carrie who grows up with a very abusive and religious mother.
She is an outsider in her high school.
She doesn't really have friends.
She's not popular and she actually gets bullied by some of the other people at her school.
The most memorable scene is one of the final scenes in the movie which is on prom night.
I did an episode about prom where I mentioned this movie because this scene is very famous.
She gets bullied and I'm not going to spoil it but her prom night does not go very well.
And it does not go very well afterwards for a lot of people at her school.
If you want to watch the 1976 version, that one is considered to be better.
The one that's more considered to be a classic.
The remake wasn't really that popular when it came out.
But if you want something more modern, you can watch that one as well.
The storyline is pretty much the same for both of them.
Our next movie is a sci-fi horror film from 1998, and it is called The Faculty.
It stars Josh Hartnett and Elijah Wood when they were very young, and it is set in Harrington High School in Ohio.
What happens is that the faculty, which means the professors, the teachers at this high school, start acting strangely.
So the group of teenagers band together.
They try to determine what's happening.
And they find out that aliens have taken over the bodies of the faculty at their high school.
It's up to them, of course, to fight the aliens and make sure that this doesn't spread to everyone in town.
It definitely has that whole alien invasion feeling to it.
And because it's from the 90s, it also has a lot of 90s dialogue and fashion.
If you're interested in movies from that time period, if you like the 90s, then this could be a good one to watch.
And our last TV show is Freakish.
Freakish was originally on Hulu from 2016 to 2017.
There are two seasons and 20 episodes of it.
It is a teen horror post-apocalyptic drama.
What happens is that students at Kent High School show up for a weekend detention when, all of a sudden, there is a disaster.
A nearby chemical plant explodes, which releases a toxic cloud.
Everyone who gets exposed to it has some type of consequence.
Either they die from it or they get mutated into these zombie-like creatures.
The students are trapped in their high school.
They have to figure out how to survive while avoiding these zombie creatures and, of course, avoiding getting exposed to whatever chemicals cause these mutations.
If you were a fan of the TV show The Walking Dead, if you like zombies and post-apocalyptic survival movies or TV shows, this could be a good option.
It's very similar to The Walking Dead, but set in a high school setting.
Like I said, there's only 20 episodes and they're about 25 minutes each, which is a good length of time if your English level maybe isn't as high.
That is a shorter episode so you're able to watch it.
And if your English level is high, if you're able to understand everything, it's a short enough time to binge.
Watch them.
You can watch multiple episodes if you want to because they are relatively short.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you found something that maybe you would want to watch to help get ready for Halloween.
If you did, if you're interested in one of these or multiple, please let me know.
Tell me in the comments what looks interesting to you.
Or if you have some suggestions that I didn't include on this list, please let me know.
Halloween is a big holiday here in the United States.
It is... an important cultural event every year.
We have a lot of media about Halloween, and that's why there's so many TV shows and movies that have these kind of Halloween themes to them.
If you want more episodes like this in the future, please let me know.
I know I've done a couple of these recommendation-type episodes for Halloween, so if you're enjoying them, if you want more, please tell me about it so I can plan more in the future.
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Until then, keep learning English.
