I started with a simple idea: put together an international evening with wine, cheese, and a horror movie. It eventually became a little tour of the Romance languages—French and Spanish wine, Italian cheese, and a Brazilian movie in Portuguese.

The wine and cheese brought some refinement. Ghost Killers vs. Bloody Mary brought exploding heads and possessed feces. Somehow, the combination made for an excellent evening.

The Tasting

The lineup was a 2024 Jean-Baptiste Duperray “Glou Glou” Beaujolais-Villages, made from Gamay; a 2022 Viña Marro Rioja Crianza; and Lou Bergier Pichin cheese from Fattorie Fiandino in Piedmont, Italy.

I gave the wines a little chill and let the cheese warm up. That made a noticeable difference to the cheese. It felt firm, but the flavor became wonderfully buttery as it warmed.

The Gamay was a lovely pairing. Against the savory cheese, it almost tasted sweet, with a nice smooth finish. It was easy to enjoy the combination without picking it apart too much.

The Rioja changed the experience completely.

After a sip of Rioja, the cheese had a much more noticeable earthy flavor. I enjoyed it more because I felt like I could taste more complexity. Going in the other direction—cheese first, then wine—the Rioja felt drier and stronger. The order mattered.

I’m not sure how much was the contrast itself bringing different flavors forward, but that was part of the fun. The same cheese became two different experiences depending on which glass I reached for and which thing I tasted first.

A Surprisingly Good Horror Movie

For the Portuguese-language portion of the evening, I chose the Brazilian horror comedy Ghost Killers vs. Bloody Mary. I expected something silly and hopefully entertaining. I got something silly, entertaining, and considerably more exciting than I anticipated.

The premise involves a team of fraudulent ghost hunters encountering a very real haunting at a school. Their triangular ghost-hunting emblem establishes the level of reverence we’re dealing with pretty quickly.

The movie is gleefully ridiculous, but the ghost scares actually worked for me. It also commits enthusiastically to horrific, gratuitous, disgusting violence. Heads explode. Blood gets into onlookers’ mouths. The movie frequently answers the question “How much further could they possibly take this?”

Usually, quite a bit further.

At one point, a jump scare was followed by another exploding head. As my watch companion put it, “The movie has a tasting order too.”

That line is staying.

Spoilers, Specimens, and Supporting Characters

Spoilers ahead, including the ending.

I particularly enjoyed the preparation montage after one of the women has her head blown apart. There’s a satisfying shift into “Okay, now that we know what’s happening, let’s get ready.” The haunting starts to feel like a zombie survival movie, with possessed people becoming part of the threat.

Meanwhile, two teachers have a wonderfully deadpan conversation about their apparent status as supporting characters who exist to supply more deaths and blood. Professor Ricardo, the gym teacher, seems very aware of how horror movies treat people in his position.

This awareness does not prevent him from being assaulted by balls in the gym.

The movie also possesses a preserved fetus in a classroom specimen jar and sends it after the ghost hunters. I enjoyed the scene, but my immediate objection was oddly practical. Was that really supposed to be part of a high school biology collection?

We looked it up. It turns out there is a documented example of a Brazilian school having exactly that kind of specimen. Reports about the former Professor Nilo Póvoas school in Cuiabá describe a preserved human fetus that the municipal education department identified as part of its biology laboratory collection.

So, of everything happening in that scene, the fetus being in the jar had a factual defense.

The security guard’s encounter with possessed feces in the bathroom required a different kind of suspension of disbelief. Crazy and original, though. I’ll give it that.

The wine had earthy notes. The movie took that much too literally.

The Movie Kept Winning Me Over

As the story unfolded, I enjoyed trying to work out its rules. Breaking the mirror appeared to release the ghost, and mirror fragments became a way to hurt her. Then the movie offered what looked like a tragic explanation: a girl violently bullied in the bathroom who died by suicide.

Except that story was a misdirection. Catarina was the bully. The apparent account of her suffering had been written by another little girl, and the teacher who tried to protect her from the ghost hunters was rewarded by being attacked herself.

Finally, the mistreated member of the ghost-hunting team figured out how to trap Catarina again by saying her name backward three times into the mirror. I liked that the person being pushed around got to be the one who understood the solution.

For a movie throwing this much bodily fluid around, it kept me surprisingly invested in what was going to happen next.

An Excellent Evening of Questionable Taste

I’d happily share this movie with horror-loving friends who enjoy absurd comedy and outrageous gore. It was much better than I expected, and I finished it thinking the whole evening had been a success.

The tasting was fun in its own right. The Gamay made a smooth, almost sweet contrast with the buttery cheese. The Rioja brought out earthy complexity that made me appreciate the cheese differently. The movie supplied a completely separate range of sensations, several of which I hope never to experience personally.

I also discovered how much I enjoy taking notes this way—sending spontaneous reactions into a conversation while watching and tasting, asking questions, checking the occasional improbable detail, and keeping the jokes that emerge along the way.

French wine, Spanish wine, Italian cheese, Brazilian horror. I’d do this again.

Although next time I may check the bathroom mirror first.