November befuddles us all. A decidedly festive scent hangs in the cold air, but is it old pumpkins or new mince pies? Christmas lights tangle with leftover cobwebs, and in JCRs everywhere, we scratch our heads. What is a November movie?

I made it my mission to find out by watching one classic film a day for one week in November. Between Monday and Friday, I clambered from the pits of horror to the summits of sentimentality – in the hope that tracking the transition from Halloween to Christmas might give me purchase on the interlude between them.

MONDAY – As the week kicks off to a drizzly start, I can still taste the ‘death-by-chocolate’ pudding from a Halloween formal; skeletons linger in shop windows, and Halloween horror is still in season. Why not go big with what Empire described as “the most purely horrifying movie ever,” 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Five teenagers stumble into the slaughterhouse of a depraved family, featuring a grave-robbing hitchhiker and an almost-dead, bloodsucking grandpa. It may not be, as the opening credits assert, ‘a true story’, but the chainsaw and carcasses are real, and a gripping performance from Marilyn Burns intensifies the illusion. It’s enough to put you off your pudding.

A vile film, Massacre is still suffocatingly well-made, seminal, and exudes a mad, unfiltered creativity most of us channel only in childhood or dreams. The final shot of Leatherface swinging his chainsaw against a dusty orange sky is a nightmare transplanted to the screen. It’s a fitting epitaph to Halloween. But the spooks aren’t over.

“A vile film, Massacre is still suffocatingly well-made”

TUESDAY – Floating spheres brighten King’s Parade, and the macabre vibes are thawing, though lawns grow frostier. Let’s swap the chainsaw for a roque mallet, and turn from psychotic farmers to a psychic hotel. The Shining is Kubrick’s eerie adaptation of a richly psychological King novel, lurid with iconic close-ups, saturated colours and a haunting patchwork soundtrack. As a family fractures over a winter spent in the haunted Overlook Hotel, Jack Nicholson shines, monstrous, as his namesake Jack Torrance, but Shelley Duvall can’t be overlooked (despite her inexplicable Razzie nomination) as Wendy: a broken woman finding the strength to protect her child.

In contrast to a deranged father, the theme of motherhood’s saving power gives this film a surprising twinkle of Christmas spirit. And, far more seasonal than Texas’s sweltering heat, The Shining culminates with what’s practically a trip to Winter Wonderland. Still, on the scale of festive Jacks, Torrance is more O-Lantern than Frost.

WEDNESDAY – The Cambridge week ends at this odd juncture. Squeaky-floored, jäger-fuelled boogies in Revs always feel like an early climax. So, it’s fitting that the film which seems to be the direct answer to the November movie conundrum should land right in the middle of my article – stop-motion musical The Nightmare Before Christmas. It reflects, rather than solves, our ambiguity: director Henry Selick has variously insisted Nightmare is essentially a Halloween and a Christmas film. Yet, one thing is for certain: producer Tim Burton’s fingerprints are everywhere – in the detailed sets, spindly shadows and uncanny, idiosyncratic character designs, which compensate for a rather wandering plot.

Like Selick’s Coraline, Nightmare walks the beautiful tight-rope of children’s horror. The professor who unhinges his scalp to scratch his brain seared itself into my own eight-year-old brain. Though it ends in love and snow, the opening number’s insistence that ‘Life’s no fun without a good scare’ is what sticks with you.

“Beneath its gritty surface, Die Hard is a Christmas film: case closed”

THURSDAY – The dawn of the Cambridge week kicks me out of bed with its cold boot, and Christmas trees are popping up, but my head is down – Thursday is Essay Crisis Day. The odds are against me; I'm overwhelmed, desperate; what better way to get some perspective than by revisiting action classic Die Hard, in which Detective McClane finds himself in a situation almost as dire as my own? A retired cop, stunts, explosions, and Alan Rickman’s icy turn as a scene-stealing European villain: the ingredients are clichéd, but mixed up with enough gusto to make you forget it.

As Willis muscles his way through vents, lighter in hand, sweary catchphrase at his lips, ‘80s hyper-masculine ideals tower over the film, conspicuous as Nakatomi Plaza. Our hero’s teddy-clutching-dad side, however, softens him for the 21st-century palette. Divorced-couple love stories like this one are rare now. Probably because filmmakers don’t want to give children false hope. But Christmas is all about hope. Beneath its gritty surface, Die Hard is a Christmas film: case closed.

FRIDAY – My fish and chips are salted with a splash of tears. Something has certainly shifted over the course of the week. Woolly garments flap in the wintry winds, and Christmas jumpers no longer jar. And though watching The Muppet Christmas Carol  before December might be the cinematic equivalent of an untimely self-inflicted Whammagedon, how else could I conclude this voyage? Only It’s A Wonderful Life has prompted more Christmas-Eve-cry-fests over the years than this, the definitive version of the definitive Christmas story. As Muppets blend seamlessly into gorgeous Victorian scenes, Michael Caine’s searingly sincere performance dignifies Scrooge’s redemption with Shakespearean pathos.

The songs are all great. I’m partial to the existential jesting of Marley and Marley, but ‘Feels Like Christmas’ is the film’s triumph: no song better does ‘what it says on the tin’. The first jingly notes will wipe Halloween from your mind quicker than your dad wipes his eyes at the death of Tiny Tim.

I may be the first to say this, but Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Muppet Christmas Carol are not so different. Lofty adult tastes often exclude both the slasher and the family film, but these two titans of each genre excel in generating extreme feeling – sheer terror, sheer joy – while retaining some thematic nuance. Massacre has its moments of laughter and camaraderie; meanwhile, bleaker elements underlie the Muppets – hello, Ghost of Christmas Future. Deadly threat is integral to Die Hard as motherhood is to The Shining: it’s not just The Nightmare Before Christmas which dwells in both light and dark. Watching these films in November, a thematically grey month, highlighted that nothing is ever black-and-white.

Maybe every film is a November film.