Briefs for Halloween 2026

We're up to Halloween for another year, which means a usual crop of horror movies on all the channels, including FXM. Granted, the schedule this morning started off with Black Widow which isn't exactly horror, but it's always nice to see something like The Innocents show up. As for TCM, they've got some Looney Tunes horror cartoons in the end-of-the-morning block. The first of them is Transylvania 6-5000, a short that I haven't seen. YouTube TV, unsurprisingly, lists it as the feature frilm from the 1980s that had the same title, which I also I have to admit that I've never gotten around to seeing. My memory is of Ed Begley Jr. being on The $25,000 Pyramid whichever summer the movie came out, promoting it to the hilt.

Tonight is also the night when the clocks go back one hour. Unfortunately, none of the schedules I've found mention what's going to be filling that extra hour. That hour comes during The Seventh Victim, which is listed as starting at the first 1:30 AM with the following movie starting at 3:00 AM. The Seventh Victim is only 71 movies, so there's clearly that extra hour there.

There are several deaths worth mentioning this week. Of course the first two that people are going to notice are the two Star Trek-related deaths. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov on the original series, died on Sunday at the age of 90. And then on Wednesday, Patrick Stewart died aged 86. He'll be best remembered for having taken his career in a completely different direction by playing Capt. Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but before that he was a Shakesperean actor.

Dying the same day as Patrick Stewart, and a death more likely to be overshadowed by Stewart's, is Elke Sommer, who was about a week shy of her 86th birthday. I first saw Sommer as part of the team doing the Miss Universe beauty pageants back when that was a a big thing on CBS and I think still hosted by Bob Barker. At the time I had no idea what she was famous for, but she was one of those European actresses that Hollywood brought over in the 1960s to try to turn into the next big European star. Sommer had the great good luck to be in A Shot in the Dark, but she was also in some stinkers.