🎬 Your curated Halloween watchlist

💀 What’s your favourite scary movie? Whatever it is, I have the perfect movie marathon for you…

Oct 19, 2023

I love scary movies. Always have, and maybe I always will. This means I know a thing or two about deliberately scaring myself witless. So if you’re looking for thrills and chills on Halloween, worry not, because I’m about to tell what should be gracing your screens this October…

[If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like horror, or has a lowly opinion of it as an art form, I want to start by saying that today’s newsletter is probably not for you.]

Ghostface hun artwork by me - and subject to some questionable copyright infringement

Our annual Halloween movie night is the only night my crazy-ass let’s people into our home with the sole purpose of sharing my obsession - and living out my weird fantasy of running my own cinema where the floor ISN’T sticky and no one ever talks…

But the perfect spooky movie night requires expert planning. Choose incorrectly and you are risking the ✨vibes ✨. You need to read the room, strike a balance of both nostalgic and timely content, and also have appropriate snacks to hand. Trust me, last year we watched Hellraiser while eating pizza and we collectively concluded that this was a mistake. Why do they make some of these movies so gooey?

Anyway, to save you the hassle of rooting through Netflix, here’s my own curated list for the perfect Halloween movie night, whatever your tastes may be...

Disclaimer: I absolutely hate torture porn-style movies, body horror, anything that’s graphically gory for the sake of it - or any weird stuff that involves sexual violence. This is a personal preference but a heads up that you’re unlikely to find any of that sort of thing here. Take your sordid interests somewhere else you freak!

🧹Hocus Pocus

Let’s start with something light, but also glaringly obvious. You cannot do Halloween without Hocus Pocus - if you do, YOU should be put on trial for witchcraft. It’s a movie for all ages. I’m not even sure what people did before this movie existed… Actually talked to each other?

Let’s cut to the chase. Why is it great? If you were anything like me, living in American suburbia during the holidays was the stuff that British kids on dreary estates in North East England dreamed of. It’s the perfect blend of spooky, but not too scary - even though the first time I saw it I cried when Billy Butcherson rises from the dead (omg spoilers🫢). In my defence I was four. Those New England builds, the high camp musical number, the talking cat (so very ‘90s), and a young Omri Katz (put Eerie Indiana on Netflix you cowards!) - what more could you ask for while you’re carving pumpkins and shovelling fun size Snickers’ into your disgusting gob?!

If you love this, you might also like…

The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Addams Family & Addams Family Values
Beetlejuice
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Little Shop of Horrors
Casper
Sleepy Hollow
The Mummy (1999)

🔮 Suspiria (1977)

Dario Argento’s Suspiria is a must-see for any cinephile or horror fan, both due to its infamously striking visuals, genre defining composition, and creepy as hell storyline. The good news is that the 2018 remake, while visually very different and with added backstory is just as good. The premise is this - American student Suzie Bannion arrives in Germany to attend a presigious dance school. But things are not all as they seem... Of course, the school is only being ran by a coven of witches who worship mysterious higher powers and are plotting to use a student in their human sacrifice. Standard.

Obviously my views of this as some kind of ‘girl power’ movie are somewhat misguided, but it’s rare we get to see women being powerful, so we’ll take all the vengeful murderous witches we can get.

If you love this, you might also like…

Practical Magic
Heathers
Death Becomes Her
The Craft
Suspiria (2018)
The Love Witch
Jennifer‘s Body

🤘🏻Dethgasm

A personal favourite of mine. I saw this a few years back at FilmFour Frightfest and would describe it as Evil Dead + Zombieland meets Flight of the Concords. Director Jason Lei Howden did a small talk at the screening and explained that he’d always wanted to make a metal zombie movie - and he succeeded on every level. A fun fact is that they were also shooting the Evil Dead remake in New Zealand around the same time so the cast benefited from a surplus of fake blood and dismembered limbs.

Friends Brodie and Zakk accidentally summon a demon when their metal band plays the notes from a stolen music sheet. The two outsiders are left with little choice but to save the day from the satanic forces gripping their small town. I won’t spoil it completely (unless you’re tempted to click the link) but one of the best fight scenes of all time is in this movie, and proves that when it comes to the apocalypse, anything can be a weapon.

If you love this, you might also like…

Evil Dead 2 (1987)
Zombieland
What we do in the shadows
Cabin in the Woods
Ghostbusters
Army of Darkness
The Babysitter

🌳Men

I mean, the clue is in the name, amaright ladies!? No. This is not about your shitty ex - it’s a very sinister arty farty movie which meets it’s very A24 brief of being both incredibly unsettling and weird as fuck. I have seen some pretty weird movies in my time (I studied modules in both European and Asian cinema after all..) but this one truly left me speechless. And like most A24 movies, there’s a lot of clever layers to unpack. A nice lady goes to a nice holiday home in a rural country village following the death of her husband. It’s giving Wicker Man meets The Vicar of Dibley - but with less women. THINGS happen.

I remember seeing the trailer for this and thinking ‘Yeah, that seems like the sort of horror I’d like to watch’. I was wrong. My friends, who are also fellow cinema nerds, have a group chat and when I told them we were watching Men, they gave us the ‘good luck with that’ salute. Two hours later, this was our exchange…

I rest my case.

If you love this (do you? really?) you might also like…

The Witch
Barbarian
Get Out
Saint Maud
Us
The Borderlands (2013)
Kill List

🎲Ready or Not

The perfect palate cleanse - the horror comedy. This is a fairly new favourite on my list but it’s well deserved for its combination of silliness, scares, and a very original concept. It’s Grace’s wedding day, and to celebrate her marriage to Daniel Le Domas, of the infamously rich and dysfunctional Le Domas family, they hold a private celebration at their stately home. It seems that to initiate new faces into their clan - and keep the family fortune secure - their tradition is to play a game. But if the game is Hide and Seek, the rules are not always fair. It’s not completely gore-free, and it’s delightfully daft in places, but the cat-and-mouse chase that ensues is enough to keep you hooked to see if our heroine Grace survives until dawn.

If you love this, you might also like…

The Menu
Drag Me to Hell
Happy Deathday
Fear Street Trilogy
Crimson Peak
The Strangers
Don’t Breathe

🪓X & Pearl

“I’m a starrrrrrrrr!” I scream, as no one replies to my tweets. Or X’s. Whatever.

No, it’s not about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. Ti West’s X is a love letter to the popular 1970s slasher flicks that have become a staple of Halloween movie nights. Our collective obsession with serial killers hasn’t waned over the decades (especially with the rise of the ‘murder podcast’) and much like the bad guys in these movies, they just keep coming. X however is a brilliant, original twist on the genre - and Pearl is an even more twisted prequel that borders on satire.

Both starring Mia Goth, X sees a bunch of nubile adult movie stars and young filmmakers head out to a rural farmhouse to make their first dirty movie. As expected they end up being killed of in increasingly gruesome and unusual ways. Brace yourself for some truly bizarre stuff.

Pearl however is a very different movie. Set almost 70 years prior, it pays homage to the rising Golden Age of cinema but with a building, sinister sense of unease. It’s fairly obvious from the poster where things are going, but it doesn’t make it any less fun to watch with plenty of gleeful nods to the classics throughout…

If you love this, you might also like…

Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Nightmare on Elm Street
Seven
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Halloween (1978)
Friday the 13th
Final Destination

🤕Hereditary

Contemporary horrors are interesting because somewhere along the line we decided that we wanted our horrors to be served up with a real storyline again. If The Exorcist and The Shining could do it, why can’t the Millennials and Gen Z bring back a bit of intellectualism to the genre?

Hereditary is one of those movies that wrote the playbook on ‘elevated horror’ - a term coined in the latest Scream movie, of all places (though it is also often referred to as the ‘A24 horror’ because they seem to really like making these type of films). The elevated horror offers something more than just guts and gore. The plot points are tied to metaphors, David Lynch style imagery, and complex topics like trauma explored via the realm of supernatural intervention. ‘THIS IS THE THINKING MAN’S HORROR SUBGENRE’ I tell myself, as I lose sleep having watched too many.

Toni Colette gives the performance of a lifetime here. Shortly after the death of her mother, Annie loses her daughter in a freak accident - and her grief is unimaginable. But when her family are haunted by someone, or something, Annie and her son start to learn the disturbing truth about their family legacy…

If you loved this, you might also like…

Midsommar
It Follows
The Babadook
Mulholland Drive
The Exorcist
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Rosemary’s Baby

🎃Scream (2022) & Halloween (2018)

Nothing says Halloween like a double bill! The original Scream might be considered an ‘oldie’ nowadays but it’s still a goodie. It turned the sub-genre on its head completely, and is always a nice tonic compared to some of the heavier stuff. The expertly dubbed ‘requel’ (not quite a remake, not quite a sequel, but set in the same universe and timeline) released in 2022 captures all of the fun of the original but with a partly refurbished cast, a new storyline, and fresh killings to be solved.

Of course, this film followed hot on the heels of the newest Halloween movie, which looked over 40 years into the future of doomed babysitter Laurie Strode and her family - who still live with the emotional scars of Michael Myers’ murderous rampage in 1978.

Both movies aren’t afraid to switch up the gore and gags, but also to poke fun at themselves. They may play out like very expensive fan fiction, with some careful omission of the terrible sequels that followed the OG, but each movie will let you tick almost everything on your Halloween movie bingo card.

If you love these, you might like…. (For the ‘90s nostalgia and remake vibes)

Shaun of the Dead
Evil Dead (2012)
Candyman (2021)
Pet Semetary (2018)
The X Files (1998)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
IT 1 & 2 (2007)

📖Evil Dead Rises

Even though The Avengers made it incredibly annoying, I love a cinematic universe. Some concepts are too good to only be visited once and the Evil Dead mythos is one of them. Sam Raimi’s original is considered one of the greatest horrors of all time, and of course, the latter two entries of the trilogy illustrated just what Raimi is all about. Not to mention how great Bruce Campbell is - the 1980s really slept on this guy as a leading man….

(Fun fact: I once reviewed the trilogy and the remake for an article many years ago as a freelance journalist and it got re-shared on Twitter by GroovyBruce himself!)

Though this is not the first time the series has seen a remake or new adaptation (all of which I’d still heavily recommend), Evil Dead Rises is so incredibly visceral that it’s the first time I’ve actually felt genuine anxiety in a cinema for a looong time.

This time, the action takes place in a beautiful Art Deco apartment building in L.A. I swear the older I get, the more I find myself looking at the interiors of haunted houses and thinking ‘oooh what a lovely parquet flooring to hide under’ while something nasty is eating a woman’s brain…

After an earthquake unveils a secret tomb in the basement, unspeakable evils are awakened when the reading of demonic text is played aloud. Apparently the Necronomicon has a few editions available on Amazon and now come in audio format… Truly terrifying, dark humoured, and grisly AF - you know the chainsaws and viscera are gonna fly with this tense reimagining.

If you love this, you might also like…

Train to Busan
Brain Dead
Rec
Evil Dead (1981)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
28 Days Later & 28 Weeks Later
Re-Animator

Honourable mentions…

This year we’ll be watching Talk to Me, likely followed by something a bit more nostalgic, or a bit more fun. When you love a genre so much it’s so hard to pick one theme, letalone one film but if none of the above take your fancy, there might be something for you below…