New take on old age story

With Halloween haunting the middle of the week this year, those who want to hide under the covers and pretend it’s not there can. But for those of us eager to jump on our brooms and fly off to the witches’ ball, it means we have two weekends to indulge our dress-up fantasies, eat pumpkin-shaped buckets full of cheap, second-rate sweets, and watch many hours of horror films and TV shows.

Personally, I like to dedicate the entire month of October to ghosts, ghouls and gore, wearing fake vampire teeth, bathing in fake blood, and surrounded by black cats and jack-o-lanterns.

And in New Screamland, there are a multitude of options for indulging in the spooky holiday.

On Sky, the Food Network is doing Halloweekend, where you can learn to make candy apples, coconut bones and witches’ brooms on shows such as

and

Once you’ve made your scary treats, skip over to TVNZ OnDemand for the cheesy but cute British comedy about a couple who inherit a rundown mansion that’s full-to-bursting with spooks and spectres.

For more serious fare, Netflix is the streaming equivalent of a haunted castle.

There’s creepy psychological thriller starring Sam Worthington; starring Armie Hammer as a bartender who’s losing the plot;

Soderbergh casts Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas as Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca and tasks them with providing a Greek chorus of commentary. Meanwhile, Streep, Sharon Stone, David Schwimmer and dozens of others act out various scenarios that Mossack Fonseca’s distortion of the law directly or indirectly caused.

The Laundromat isn’t a great film, but it is an original, stylish, clever, subversive, proudly theatrical, and entertaining one. And I’d rather watch Soderbergh’s view of the scandal again, before any number of pious and forlorn documentary versions on the same material.

Speaking of pious and forlorn (not in a bad way), Netflix’s run of the BBC Wales drama Hinterland is well worth a look.

The show is a Welsh crack at the troubledoutsider-detective-in-rural-community genre. And it does pretty well.

The dialogue is pithy, intelligent and sparse, the landscapes are epic, the storylines have a nice way of calling back to previous episodes, and the performances are superb. ghostly medical horror witchy French horror series and by horror powerhouse Stephen King and his equally horrifying son Joe Hill, and which stars horror’s No 1 darling Patrick Wilson

There’s also

(if you watch one horror this weekend, make it this one), and And that’s just for starters. Basically, you could spend the month digging into Netflix’s creepy, offerings, and have the time of your life. Amazon Prime Video gives it a run for its money however, with (well, it’s about demons, sort of, so that counts),

American serial magnificent witchy horror the criminally underrated series, barmy vintage vampire movie and a veritable witch’s cauldron of trashy horror, most of which is probably unwatchable but good for a laugh. Lightbox is no slouch either, with

(yes, it’s a horror), and another which started its second

King offering, season this past week.

Meanwhile, at Neon, there’s the king of all Halloween movies, as well as

and the later seasons of the long running series Happy haunting, ghouls and boils! and Fury

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout. Penguin Random House, RRP $35

For Elizabeth Strout’s readers, the reappearance of Olive in a second volume of stories about the residents of Crosby, Maine, is almost too good to be true. This collection of 13 stories finds Olive right where the first left off, after the death of her husband, Henry.

While she is still prickly and judgmental, her early 70s turn out to be a time of unexpected change, and we follow her well into her 80s. This is the land of the old-old, marked by indignities from assisted living centres to what Olive will call ‘‘poopie panties’’.

It is a journey rarely taken in fiction, and is involving and moving.