Spooky Season Film Recommendations

It's Never Too Late for Lists of Scary Movies

Do You Want to See Something Really Scary?

It’s the spooky season and while the major entertainment outlets like Variety and IndieWire have released “Top 100” lists. This is where they rank the “best horror films of all-time” in a manner that always demonstrates some degree presentism and more than a little influence from the “films you are supposed to like” list. I’ve spoken out against the supposed to like list before, so I won’t do so here, but I will say that we won’t be providing a ranking of our Top 100 Horror films. As much as I like

Nick Hornby

as a writer, I typically cringe at “Top X” lists and prefer “just some things I like” lists.

To that end, I asked two of my infrequent contributors to give me a list of horror films that they think are “Must See” movies. These are films that they believe belong in a canon of great horror movies, but without any particular ranking. Given that such rankings often have what we in political science might call “low reliability” due to the changes in responses from one ranking to the next, I prefer must see recommendations. Such recommendations don’t imply a ranking and thus inconsistency from one list to another is a feature and not a flaw.

Luke and Kevin agreed to provide their lists and I’ve added my own to provide a bit of mortar that connects the two lists. We each approached it from a different perspective, though all of us tried to avoid the “core” of the horror repertoire. The only thing that links the lists is a love for the genre and a passion to share what we love with you and that we each provided one kid friendly film. Kevin and I chose to provide somewhat random selections, while Luke grouped his choices by theme.

So, without further ado “Do you want to see something really scary?”

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Luke’s Picks

I'm going to assume a baseline of horror film knowledge amongst the Geekerati readership, and try to go slightly off the grand canon path – it seems highly likely to me that if you haven't yet seen The Shining or Rosemary's Baby, for example, they are either on your to-do list, or a black one.

It also seems likely that within the general horror field, different subgenres hit different moods. I've tried to recommend accordingly.

If you are in the mood for...

Cool Creepiness

Go for Carnival of Souls. A hugely influential film now in the public domain, it has been massively ripped off by far more famous films that I won't name so as not to spoil the things they all have in common. Like a perfect Twilight Zone episode, it's a black-and-white slow burn that gradually ratchets up the disorientation factor, when a young woman emerges from a car crash only to be haunted by visions of creepy ghouls, luring her to an abandoned carnival site. Director Herk Harvey, whose background was in industrial and government films, never made another feature. It would have been hard to follow such perfection, of course.

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Social Satire Slashers

Check out Rob Zombie's 31, perhaps the most underrated title in his filmography. Zombie's more of an aesthetic director than an intellectual one, but it's hard not to see real-world parallels in this battle of carnival workers against racist and sexist killer clowns, while the rich 1% feast and place bets on the result. It's especially damning that even when the wealthy are done with the game, both of the battling sides would rather continue to try to kill each other than team up against the folks who forced them to fight. Whatever side of  the political divide you're on, that feels all too relatable. It's also the rare Rob Zombie film in which wife Sheri Moon is allowed to play sympathetic, which seems to come much more naturally to her than some of the crazier roles.

Family Fun

Assuming yours isn't the kind of hardcore evangelical family that thinks the mere existence of ghosts or witches in a movie is abhorrent, dig into ParaNorman, the Laika movie that frequently gets overlooked in favor of the (also very good) Coraline. Featuring the kinds of stylized, animated zombies who might be seen fighting plants in video games, it's a spooky metaphor for bullying, as told in stop-motion  through the eyes of an 11 year-old who sees dead people, but doesn't have Bruce Willis to help him through it. Though the witch-girl antagonist is genuinely frightening, the way the tables turn at the end to show her sympathetic side should defuse the scares a little for younger kids, and the anti-vengeance message is one the whole clan could stand to hear.

Bonus family fun, courtesy of my wife: for the really young and the extreme scaredy cats, Wishbone: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow dresses up a dog as Ichabod Crane to encounter a pumpkin-headed horseman, while his owners do a Halloween-themed scavenger hunt. Only one moment even comes close to a jump scare, and the dog has a little hat.

Gore for Gore’s Sake

The original movie is acclaimed to a degree that I think exceeds its actual (though not insignificant) quality, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 is the masterpiece of the franchise, pitting Dennis Hopper against the Leatherface clan, which now includes the deranged veteran Chop Top (Bill Moseley). It's the weirdest, funniest, and goriest of the series, mocking the phallic overcompensation of its signature weapons, the whole concept of the revenge western, and the nuclear family ideals painted by the Reagan era. But you don't have to get it on any of those levels; if all you want is a movie full of graphic chainsaw kills, it has those too.

Nightmares Forever

However much of a horror hardass you think you are, watch Threads. The infamous '80s nuclear war movie from the UK has hardly dated, thanks to its focus on lower classes and unknown, unglamorous actors – it feels real, and it paints an end-of-the-world scenario that's still entirely plausible. There are no heroes here, and certainly no happy ending; just the collapse of society and the entire human race. It begins with the conception of a child, and ends with that child's child being stillborn. If you think that's a spoiler, trust me – you might want spoilers on this one just to prepare you for the very worst. If you really want to instill existential dread in yourself, this is the one to do it. Whatever other nuclear war movies you've seen, I promise this one is grimmer.

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Kevin’s Selections

Night of the Demons (1988)

It's Halloween night as Judy is invited to a party at the local haunted mortuary where a group of teens are planning on drinking and hijinks gone awry. Once the group comes together and begins to party, the boombox dies, and with no music or form of entertainment the goth persuades the group to hold a séance which brings a demon into the crematorium and has the group go up against a bloodthirsty demon and try to survive the night in H. H. Holmes-esque haunted house. 

While a bit full of tropes within the friend group, the goth, the blonde ditz, the bully jock, and the innocent main girl, the film is a tight 89 minutes that revels in what makes horror B movies great. A simple premise of a demon hellbent to end the teens for unleashing it as they are unaware of the possessed all the while having low budget horror set pieces, makeup, and special effects, it's still a charming film. Overall, while a bit cliche for the time, it is an underrated classic from the time that I can help but enjoy unironically, and make a yearly ritual to watch alone or show anyone I can. 

V/H/S (2012)

We find some hooligans running wild and committing all the while filming themselves in the act and just being bad people. They then break into a house and look for a VHS tape that they were paid to steal, and thus have to play the tapes from a pile of VHS tapes near a dead body to find the one they were paid to retrieve. Each tape reveals a different short that the leader sit through as the rest of the group investigates the house, without realizing that with each tape they watch something is awry in the house they're in.

An anthology movie directed by Simon Barrett, Joe Swanberg, Adam Wingard, Radio Silence and David Bruckner, V/H/S is now a franchise with 7 anthology films and 2 spin-offs, one coming from a short in this movie. It’s a good movie to watch with a group of friends, or alone, since it has something for everyone. If even one short from the movie entertains you, I would highly recommend going down the rabbit hole of the V/H/S franchise. 

Rec (2007)

What was supposed to begin as a normal news segment on what firefighters in Barcelona do during the night, devolves into a small news crew capturing what happens as a disease makes the infected aggressive and the apartment building they were called to is quarantined. The camera crew and firefighters must then figure a way out of the apartment complex and survive the infection.

The movie is filmed in a found footage style with a lot of practical effects throughout the film. It’s a movie that has great pacing along with the reveals of what is happening in the building being 

Dumplings (2004)

What happens when a marriage is on the rocks as the rich womanizing husband begins to wander away from his aging actress wife? Well you get Dumplings. Directed by Fruit Chan, it's a Hong Kong horror movie with a heavy twist that is shocking and all even more shocking once our protagonist Ching learns the truth but what she does afterwards is even more shocking. 

This is a movie that I can't praise enough, but also one where the reveals and twists are best kept secret until watched. It's a movie I can't recommend enough.

Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

Jacob's Ladder is a film that encapsulates the saying, “It’s not the destination, it's the journey.” We follow Jacob’s return back from the Vietnam war as he tries to acclimate back to his civilian life while struggling with PTSD and hallucinations that become more and more frequent as time passes. This is another film where the ending is a big reveal and thus lends itself similarly to movies such as the 6th Sense or Shutter Island, but even so is an enjoyable thriller. The catharsis and introspection that Jacob goes throughout the film shows the beauty of life while also illustrating that even with Jacob experiencing that beauty, he has also seen the horrors of humanity.

Fire In The Sky (1993)

Alien abduction is one of those phenomenons that are insanely interesting, yet hard to prove or investigate without any actual evidence. This was not the case for Travis Walton, who along with his friends and coworkers leaving a logging site, saw strange lights nearby and went to investigate. They get more than what they bargain with when Travis goes missing from their encounter with a strange aircraft and the group is left to pick up the pieces as law enforcement, the community, and the world has their eyes on the group and trying to figure out what really happened.

Fire in the Sky isn't a “classic” horror movie in the sense that there aren't scares every other minute, but the real horror for me is the real world that has to deal with the unknown. Travis' best friend Mike and coworkers have to answer what happened to Travis and the questions from the community as they begin to think the worst of them. The horror is not only losing their reputation in their own community but also having to grapple with what happened to their friend. It's a great watch with the last 25 or so minutes throwing the audience for loop in my opinion.

Pandorum (2009)

It's far into the future as a ship carrying thousands of people to populate a new earth is crossing through space as they get transmission from Earth and time passes. Bower and Payton, played by Dennis Quaid, are awakened from their cryo sleep as they assess their situation and Bower leaves the ship's bridge to investigate what has happened to the crew and ship. 

Pandorum is interesting, both in concept and the reception it received when it was released. I think the movie is a good science fiction horror movie with good bits of action and psychological thriller thrown in. A lot of the movie is filmed in dark and close quarters that lend well to the feeling of being restricted and claustrophobic as Bower meets people upon his travels and he tries to unravel what happened while he was in cryo sleep.

Overlord (2018)

It's D-Day as thousands of soldiers are dropped behind enemy lines to attack and sabotage the Nazis as the paratroopers we follow have orders to get inside a fortified church and destroy their radio transmitter. What the soldiers find in church and the dark experiments that the Nazis have been doing leads to the soldiers having to fight undead Nazis and destroy their lab and plans. 

Overlord is a great action movie that actually gets Nazi zombies right, by instead of making them similar to Romero zombies they act more like Boyle zombies in 28 Days Later. It does well to have great action set pieces and while the horror elements may be a bit tuned down when compared to the action, the film still blends both genres well.

Scooby Doo Zombie Island

The gang's back together after retiring from hunting fake ghouls and monsters as they have taken new endeavors, some more exciting than others. Once reunited the gang goes to investigate a haunted house in a remote island where they get more than what they bargain for with things in the island not being what they seem.

Zombie Island is an interesting movie in the Scooby Doo franchise, especially when it was released in 1998. It has a more saturated palette of colors, darker tone, and the monsters are real. This movie was the catalyst for the rise of Scooby-Doo direct to video movies and for good reason too, Zombie Island is just a great family horror movie.

Christian Lindke’s Horror Picks

I’m a huge fan of British horror films produced during the “Hammer Era,” so I’ll be making a couple of my recommendations along that theme. In part because the 1950s - 1970s were overlooked by my fellow contributors and in part because Hammer wasn’t the only studio making great horror films at the time. I’ll start with one that blew me away when I first saw it.

Nothing But the Night (1973)

Christopher Lee has starred in at least three iconic roles across many generations. For the Baby Boomers, he will always be known as Dracula, but he was also Saruman and Count Dooku. If you read up on his life, he’s definitely in the running for the most interesting man in the world during his lifetime. While he did a lot of work with Hammer Studios, he and fellow Hammer alum Anthony Nelson Keys teamed up to create Charlemagne Films where they produced one and only one film Nothing but the Night.

Nothing but the Night is an interesting horror film that touches on the fear of death that we all have and combines it with a bit of intergenerational hatred. Where Children of the Corn and The Children contained explicit “the kids are dangerous” messages, Nothing but the Night turns that on its head a bit. Given that there is a mystery at the core of the story, I will offer only one spoiler. The film was partially an inspiration for Get Out. The terror is different here, but…

The Asphyx (1973)

The Asphyx, ah, The Asphyx. I have such fond memories of this film. When I was a child I used to spend the night at my Oma and Opa’s house every other weekend. My Opa was a HUGE fan of genre fiction of all kinds and he introduced me to Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and The Asphyx.

Like Nothing but the Night, this film has as its central theme the battle against mortality, but in this case asks the question “what if we could kill (or at least capture) death and thus live forever?” What are the costs of such a life and is it worth living? The movie is wonderfully weird and while it was made in the 1970s, it perfectly captures the Victorian tone in both imagery and narrative. If you’re running a Victorian, or even modern, horror role playing game session for Halloween, this film is rich with ideas to inspire you.

The Beast Must Die (1974)

What do you get when you combine The Most Dangerous Game, The Wolfman, and the classic Cozy Mansion Mystery? The Beast Must Die is what you get. Amicus Productions, a competitor of Hammer Studios, produced this one and it is a tone of fun.

Millionaire Tom Newcliffe is a monster hunter who has invited a group of people to his home in order to reveal that one of them is a werewolf who must be killed. The mystery portion of the film is directed in much the same manner as a typical Agatha Christie tale and includes a famous “Werewolf Break” where the film is paused so that viewers can make their final guess regarding which guest bears the curse of lycanthropy. It’s a ton of fun and you can see echoes of its influence in films like Ready or Not and Werewolf by Night as well as other mansion murder mayhem films. Calvin Lockhart is wonderful as Tom Newcliffe and is my personal mental model for Blade the Vampire Hunter. He’s cool, calm, collected, and on the prowl to kill a werewolf.

Day of the Triffids (1963)

John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids is a classic science fiction tale that has vast influence in both the science fiction and horror genre. Like many horrific science fiction stories, this film catalogs how the world shifts after an apocalyptic event and the decline of civilization is as much the story as the actual monsters. People are, as they say, the real monsters. You can see echoes of Day of the Triffids in 28 Days Later, It Comes at Night, The Walking Dead, Bird Box, and The Quiet Place. If the apocalyptic story is more about how society changes than it is about jump scares, it’s been inspired by Wyndham’s tale. In the cases of 28 Days Later, Bird Box, and The Quiet Place the connection is pretty explicit.

You’re Next (2011)

I have Luke to thank for this one. I’m not typically a big fan of home invasion horror, but based on Luke’s review on the Topless Robot site in 2013 I gave it a try. From relatively early in the film, I was riveted. It began in typical home invasion horror fashion and I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel, but then something happened that I didn’t expect. Sharni Vinson’s character Erin “realized she was in a horror movie” and acted accordingly.

It’s a frequent critique of scary movies that the protagonists act in ways that are foolish given the circumstances they are in. There’s many a stand up routine based on the “why did they walk down the dark stairs” joke. Those routines tend to miss the point. The characters in a horror film don’t know they are in a horror film and behave just like you and I would in “normal” circumstances. I often joke that the Winchester’s superpower in Supernatural was that they always knew they were in a horror story. Knowing gives you power and Erin has that power.

Watching her efficiently react to the dangerous circumstances transformed my viewing experience. I wasn’t watching Last House on the Left where the vulnerable manage to get some semblance of revenge, I was watching Rambo except her name was Erin Tiger, Sheep, and Wolf had no idea what they were getting into and it was a really fun ride. Sharni Vinson has had a bit of a career after You’re Next, but nowhere near the career I think she deserves. She is a talented actress and is my all-time favorite “Final Girl.”

Burn, Witch, Burn (1963)

I’m a huge fan of Fritz Leiber. After my introduction to fantasy fiction via Michael Moorcock, Leiber was my transition from deconstructive Sword & Sorcery into Sword & Sorcery proper. His Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are among my favorite tales, but Leiber’s writing extended beyond the narrow confines of Sword & Sorcery and into literary horror. His novel, Conjure Wife, is among my favorite modern urban fantasy tales. It tells the story of a University Professor and his wife, a story that pre-sages David Mamet’s play Oleanna with regards to campus politics and the lives of professors and which pre-sages Bewitched with the use of a supernatural wife. Like Bell, Book, and Candle this is a tale of a witch in love, but unlike that light hearted story this is one with dark undertones.

The film stars Peter Wyngarde as Norman Taylor, the naive university professor who is about to have his entire world disrupted. You may remember Peter Wyngarde as the actor who played sexy spy Jason King of Department S in two ITV series or as Klytus in Flash Gordon. He’s magnificent here. He manages to be sexy and charming while also seeming distant and academic. Janet Blair plays his wife, who begins innocent and complies with his requests, but in the end shows a ruthlessness in defending her family that hints at Leiber’s (and the film maker’s) critique of early 1960s patriarchy. It’s a fun film and a very different from the other tales that inspired Bewitched. As much as I like I Married a Witch (which is good enough to have a Criterion edition) and Bell, Book, and Candle it’s Burn, Witch, Burn that I make sure to watch every year.

Concluding Thoughts

I spent a bit too much time in the 1960s and 1970s, and not enough time in earlier eras, but there is often too much presentism in the horror films we recommend. I tried to reach outside the “movies you are supposed to like” list and into some real personal favorites, favorites that had a legacy but personal favorites none the less.

What are some of your favorite horror movies?