Happy Halloween! I’ve been waiting all month to be able to say that, but honestly I celebrate the spooky holiday all month long. Specifically, I celebrate the way you would expect someone that writes and talks about movies for a living to celebrate. I watch horror movies.
I have somewhat successfully watched a different Halloween-y movie every day in October for six Octobers now. It is a tough job to watch 31 movies in 31 days so here are a few tips if you want to join me next year.
1. Don’t be too strict on what counts as Horror. If there are zombies, werewolves, vampires, or witchcraft involved, it totally counts. Psychological thrillers and suspense can also slow down and class up your movie marathons. And no one has yet been able to show me two genres that go better together like (pumpkin flavored of course) peanut butter and jelly as horror and comedy. Oh and know how much blood and guts your friends can stomach before hosting parties. Save Hocus Pocus or Halloweentown for those crowd-pleaser kind of nights.
2. Don’t be too tied to a schedule. I mean unless you are a scheduling kind of person. Which I am not. There’s a reason this is coming out at the end of the month and not the beginning. If you asked me 31 days ago which movies I was going to watch, I would only have a few answers. Which leads to…
3. Have some staples. Four years ago when I got really into keeping track of which movies I was watching, I watched Halloween 1 and Friday the 13th Part 1. So every year since, I just watch the next one. Personally I watch Psycho and Cabin in the Woods every year. Sometimes I’ll pick a franchise to watch those a few nights in a row (that didn’t happen this year). I always pick a few that I’ve never seen before, which gets harder every year. Just have a loose idea of what you want to watch and then let life and time available dictate what you watch. Remember this is a movie every single day. Not easy.
Uh I think that’s it. Let’s get into what I saw this year then!
October 1: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Michael Myers is back! I mean he’s back again in theaters 40 years after the first one right now. And he was back 20 years after the first one in Halloween H20. Also he was back that same night, but 3 years later in real time for Halloween II. And Rob Zombie’s reboots brought him back for two interesting entries in the 2000’s. But I’m talking about the time he came back 10 years after the first one (and right after an amazing, but sans Michael Myers Halloween III) in Halloween 4. This continued the franchise’s theme of amazing endings when Jamie Lee Curtis’ daughter (homagingly named Jamie in the movie) seemed to take up the Michael Myers mantle by dressing in a familiar clown costume and killing her own mother. Too bad they totally ignored that in the sequel.
October 2: Jeepers Creepers
Where’d you get those peepers? There is a lot truly amazing in Jeepers Creepers. Specifically the ‘why’ behind the monster, the first 25 minutes, and the use of music. Especially the Boogeyman song in the end credits that is from the same era as Jeepers Creepers that we heard throughout the movie. Actually I think the late-90’s/early-2000’s tongue and cheek dialog and attitude toward the monster is the only thing keeping this from being one of my favorite horrors of all time. Well. My ‘one of my favorites’ I probably mean top 50 cause we’ll see how many times I say that during this article.
October 3: The Wicker Man (1973)
Anyone that’s only seen the Nic Cage version is probably wondering what the heck that gif is from. Well it’s from the original, British, musical, hippie crazed, naked version of The Wicker Man from 1973. Yes in the same year Reagan (from the Exorcist, not the future president. I hope.) was violating a cross in America, Christianity was facing a very different battle on the other side of the pond. There are pagan gods, virgin sacrifices, and a very ominous rendition of the 23rd Psalm. Also i’m serious about this being a musical. It’s a really cool different movie. Also. No Bees. What-so-ever.
October 4: The Devil’s Backbone
Cool ghost story with some blink and you’ll miss it scares like this one. It’s subtitled, so watch out for that. But it contrasts well with the Spanish Civil War and so location actually matters to the story which is good. Actually everything matters and was well thought out. Honestly for a horror fan like myself, listening to Academy Award Winner Guillermo del Toro’s director’s commentary for this was more fun than the movie. That man freaking knows what he is doing and it prompted me to add another of his movies to my calendar this year.
October 5: All Cheerleaders Die
Some concepts sound better than they end up being. Hell yeah I’m up for watching The Heathers crossed with Night of the Living Dead. Unfortunately this ended up having an impossible plot to keep track of filled with bad decisions. Not just the normal horror movie bad decisions from the characters. I mean bad writing decisions for the characters.
October 6: Night of the Living Dead
So if I’m going to watch a bad zombie movie, I had to cleanse the palate with a good zombie movie. The zombie movie. From Pittsburgh’s own George A. Romero. I have a friend who is a huge Walking Dead fan and has seen dozens of terrible zombie movies on Netflix that I learned had never seen this. Where zombies were born! Creatures created by the movies as opposed to all the other monsters that were written about in books first. It is old, had had no budget, and it was one of those movies you hype up and show someone and are constantly afraid that they won’t like it, but she did. When I write a textbook, this movie from 1968 will be the definition of standing the test of time.
October 7: Drag Me To Hell
People have been trying to shove this movie down my throat for years and I finally broke down and watched it. It’s okay. I don’t love the Evil Dead series as much as I’m supposed to as a horror movie fanatic. Sam Raimi definitely has a type, and I’m not it. I don’t think this movie is as good as any of the Evil Deads (or Spider-Man 2) but it’s fine. It had the best gross out scenes of anything I watched this year and the twist at the end was both funny and horrifying at the same time, which, of course it was. That’s Raimi’s thing.
October 8: Dead Awake
I was away from the internet for a few days here and had to rely on DVD’s I own or movies I could download from Netflix. This was one of the latter. Sleep paralysis certainly has scary movie potential after you experience it for the first time. Or even if you just read about it. But in practice, after the movie explained this real life thing, it didn’t really know what to do with it. Uhhhh let’s create a monster that’s trying to get you in your sleep. But it won’t be Freddy Krueger. Or scary.
October 9: Cabin in the Woods
I definitely own this movie because I watch it every year. I got to share it with two people that had never seen it before, and so I’ll say here what I said to them. Nothing. Please if you haven’t seen this movie, know that it is amazing, and try to know nothing else.
October 10: Funny Games
There are no words in my vocabulary for the feeling this movie gives you. There are no classic and comforting zombies or monsters here, just two psychopaths playing a game. It’s a bit art house-y, but I think going to actual film festivals has allowed me to watch potentially stuffy movies like this. And I’m glad because it was amazing. For those keeping track at home, this was my favorite movie I saw for the first time this year.
October 11: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
I grew up with Abbott and Costello. When I was still in elementary school my dad and I tried to memorize Who’s on First. Also the black & white Universal Monster movies were my very first introduction to horror. It’s tough to fairly look at the things we loved as a child. Maybe it’s not a great movie, but this movie and all the times Scooby Doo and the gang ‘met’ someone famous directly result in my love of horror and cinematic meet-ups. Universes, you might call them. Not related at all, I would also like to share my 2,000 word essay on why the failure of Universal’s Dark Universe is the saddest what-if in the history of cinema.
October 12: The Blair Witch Project
If camera work and cinematography are why you go to the movies then prepare yourself for the revolution that is The Blair Witch Project. I was too young to have seen this in theaters or get caught up in the hype that it might have been real found footage. I was just old enough to see the parodies. I’ve seen it before and watched it with a non-horror fan this time and made the mistake of telling him that nothing happens during the movie. He didn’t believe me for a while, but after almost an hour of our protagonists screaming each other’s names about being lost and looking for the map, he gave up and fell asleep. I still think it works better than Paranormal Activity, but since you all wanted to know, my three favorite found footage movies ever are 1. Chronicle, 2. The Fourth Kind, and 3. Cloverfield.
October 13: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
[image not shown due to gratuitous nudity]
Butt seriously, horror movies are known for their boobs, and this one might have the most.
Lol @ Final Chapter. Spoiler, there are a few more Fridays the 13th after this one. Heck this was only the second time Jason was wearing the mask. So people that know this sort of thing call Friday 4 the best of the Friday movies. That’s weird among horror franchises where normally the first is the best and then the sequels fall of a quality cliff. Friday is weird because the first one barely has Jason at all and the second has him wearing a bag on his head like the guy from The Town That Dreaded Sundown. This really is where the franchise finds its groove, right in time for them to call it ‘The Final Chapter’. Yeah right.
Sidenote: this franchise a la Halloween uses its fourth installment to set up the cute kid of the movie as the future killer. Then the fifth installments both ignore that.
October 14: Critters
Picture this. It’s 1984. Nightmare on Elm Street just put New Line Cinema on the map and they have money to burn. Warner Brothers just saw the success of Gremlins. What does New Line put into production? Their own little Gremlins, creatively called Critters. It was lame and lacking any of the fun Gremlins had. The shapeshifting space bounty hunters are a nice touch though. Gremlins didn’t have that…
October 15: Beetlejuice
I love Beetlejuice more and more every time I watch it. It was clever and meta in a time before that was vogue. It combined Burton, Elfman, and Keaton for the first of their two year tear on the box office before Batman. It gave a grim vision of the afterlife just by making it something that everyone in the mid-80’s could fear. Corporate. Also Beetlejuice is just a minor character in his own movie, yet he is used perfectly. Every time you are missing Beetlejuice’s presence, he pops up again. After you say the name three times of course. Hey wait.
October 16: The Fly
Welcome back to the Geena Davis Is Awesome portion of our programming. Yes Cronenberg is innovative and The Fly has the greatest practical effects in horror history (yeah you heard me The Thing, you’re overrated), but there is so much more to this movie than just the looks. Goldblum is genuinely scary as he bounces from unassuming, to cocky like he never could be before, to misunderstood genius, to scared and pitied. Generic slimy 80’s businessman is generic and slimy, but the real relationship is between (real life) couple Davis and Goldblum. They have an immediately believable chemistry and that’s a great rock to start from when building a horror story.
October 17: Coraline
By 2009 I was too busy watching real horror movies like The Fly and Critters to be bothered with Burton looking cartoons like Coraline. I put it in the same bucket as Nightmare Before Christmas and just didn’t watch it. To teenage me, a movie had to be from the 80’s to be properly scary. Turns out, in the shocker of the century, a teenager was wrong about something. Coraline is stunningly beautiful and tells a Wizard of Oz type story only with nightmares instead of a dream over a rainbow. It might be my favorite animated horror I’ve ever seen.
October 18: Hard Candy
If Coraline is vaguely a dark Wizard of Oz, Hard Candy is definitely a dark Little Red Riding Hood. The director has said that the red hoodie that Ellen Page wears wasn’t intentional, but as Ellen said in the gif above, I think that’s a bit of BS. She puts the power back in Little Red’s hand against a predatory, well child predator, but not in a wholesome way. It’s more of a thriller mystery, but the fairy tale parallels I think push it into horror’s camp. Dark retellings of classic stories fell October-y to me. And it’s my list. I watch what I want.
October 19: An American Werewolf in London
Okay but if you want an actual wolf in your story then I can accommodate that too. The transformation scene gets too much credit, although it’s streets ahead of anything Lon Chaney ever had. The heart in this movie comes in the chemistry between the two friends, both before and especially after the attack. Max Landis writes great ‘real’ dialog, and it must’ve been something he learned from his pop. The dead best friend angle was also ruined by the Dark Universe in Tom Cruise’s Mummy. If you were confused by that, come back and watch how it was supposed to have been done in a classic.
October 20: Blade II
Okay I know that gif is Blade 1 not Blade 2, but it’s one of my favorite movie quotes of all time. And evidence that Wesley Snipes makes everything better. Also I told you I’d be coming back to Academy Award Winner Guillermo del Toro. His entry into this edgy comic book adaptation was a sign of Hellboys to come by incorporating new visual designs, violence/action, and of course Ron Perlman into a comic book world that might not have been ready for it in the early 2000’s.
October 21: Peeping Tom
While preparing movies for my other job, I visited a professor at my local university and asked for some of his favorite horror movies. He gave me the boring academic answer of not wanted to rank them, but did advise me to watch Peeping Tom and go from there. My advice about Peeping Tom is that a stuffy academic film snob told me to watch it, and you can go from there.
October 22: The Witches
I mentioned my family friendly other job. We did a scary movie bracket (PG-13 or less) over there and this was one of the movies that my co-host wanted to talk about that I had never seen. It stars Anjelica Huston (obviously pictured above. But really. That’s her) and is about a witches convention that our little boy protagonist stumbles upon while on vacation. And they promptly turn him into a mouse. Jim Henson and co. were in charge of the puppet mice and those look really good. As well as the ugly witch make-up. Unlike Cronenberg above that has amazing visuals in an also great movie, this movie really only has its looks to rely on.
October 23: Annabelle
Creepy doll! Ahhh! But represented by my gif again (I really hope y’all are enjoying them, I probably took more time choosing gifs than I did writing. But also it’s 2018 so most people pay more attention to the gifs than the writing anyway.) most of the actually scary scenes in the movie have nothing to do with the doll. It’s another 70’s cult movie (holla Wicker Man) but this time the murderers allowed their blood to soak into a doll that a pregnant wife just got for her unborn baby. Or something. But that couldn’t have actually been the creation of Annabelle being evil because there was a whole movie called Annabelle: Creation. I’ll be honest, I prefer the Insidious Universe to the Conjuring Universe and I didn’t pay a ton of attention to this one. Hey. I watched 31 movies this month. I should get an off day.
October 24: Candyman
There are scarier gifs in this calendar countdown, but this one embodies Candyman. He is such a unique killer because he isn’t senseless, unrelenting, particularly violent, or bloody. He is classy. He knows what he wants and he gets it. And he may or may not be real. This movie perfectly allows its main character to experience success and then immediately rips it away. It is the best urban legend style horror.
October 25: Blood and Black Lace
Equal parts beautiful and mysterious, this is one of the seminal Giallo horrors. Nothing is more Italian than setting your horror in a fashion house and killing off models. There is also a who-done-it plot going on about a diary and infidelity, but don’t worry too much about that. Just watch for the creative kills and pretty colors.
October 26: Suspiria (2018)
Speaking of pretty colors. That gif is from the original which I’ve seen a few times before. I just wanted to watch another Giallo before I got to screen a new entry to the genre. The ‘remake’ carries the same name and spirit, but enough differences to be held on its own. In fact check back on Friday when it gets its wide release and I’ll have a full review of it right here!
October 27: Warm Bodies
*Me trying to write about 31 creepy movies without coming off too creepy*
Cultural intelligence is important when participating in culture. Remakes can be better understood if you’ve seen the original. Warm Bodies is a cute little zombie movie, but it is also a remake of Romeo and Juliet. And they made that pretty obvious. I mean, that’s a story that is engrained enough in our cultural lexicon that you don’t have to have read the play in ninth grade to recognize it here. I hope. But it’s also a well constructed movie. Little throwaways like explaining that the bone monsters will attack anything with a heartbeat at the beginning coming back when love starts to reignite the zombies’ hearts are the things I live for in movies. Seriously. It doesn’t take much to make me happy.
October 28: Event Horizon
I am partial to horror/comedies, but sci-fi and horror have been known to go well together too. After all in space, no one can hear you scream. But there are no Aliens per-say in this movie, just our own horrors. It starts out like a good episode of Star Trek where our crew is on a rescue mission accompanied by a new member of the team that can explain what we’re up against. So OF COURSE he is going to be the bad guy. The gif is not that much of a spoiler. Or shouldn’t be. Anyway the horror part of this movie is where the Black Hole Machine™ starts forcing the crew to experience their worst fears. A simple space movie turns gory real quick. It had production issues and never got a sequel, but honestly call this Cloverfield Horizon and watch this instead of Cloverfield Paradox and you’ll be much happier with the direction of that franchise.
October 29: Night of the Creeps
The bad news is, they’re dead.
What’s up Tom Atkins. I’ve missed you since you inspired me to grow a mustache last year during Halloween III: Season of the Witch. What have you been up to? Being a down on his luck retired cop asked to come out for one more job because the teen you saw murdered 30 years ago is back from a cryogenically frozen death with a mouth full of maggots that are seeking to take over the world with their zombified hosts?
The usual, I see.
October 30: Halloweentown
Did you freaking know that the official verified YouTube channel for Disney Channel has been playing all four Halloweentown movies? Commercial free? Back to back to back to back? This is the future I hoped to live in when I was growing up with this franchise.
October 31: Psycho
Why are we publishing this so late on Halloween? Well because I had to go to my job, come home, and watch Psycho. This is how I spend my October 31st every year. With the all time greatest slasher/horror/thriller movie ever made. Norman Bates might be my favorite character to ever be on the big screen. So many old movies can be rough to watch with modern eyes because acting was done so different back then. But then you watch this movie from 1960 and see that people weren’t naturally stiff and proper.
Horror can be misunderstood by critics and shunned by audiences. It gets a bad reputation around movie circles, and sometimes for good reason. I can acknowledge that not all the movies I watch are strictly speaking high quality. But no matter how I fill the first 30 days, I know that on Halloween Night I will be watching possibly the greatest movie of all time. And it just so happens to be scary.
Happy Halloween.
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Looking for a few less creepy Halloween movies? Check out 10 Less Scary Halloween Movies instead!