What's better to do on Halloween, other than to binge out on candy and pumpkin-flavored beer, than to binge watch every horror movie you've ever heard of (and some you haven't). You could phone up your obscure Japanese film buff friend for some recommendations on films involving businessmen having their eyeballs ripped out by innocent-seeming nubiles. Or you could tune in to virtually any basic cable channel and watch a back-to-back marathon of horror classics. If you go for the latter, here are a few movies you must catch.
10 - Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock was a master of the psychological thriller, and many a filmmaker, horror or otherwise, owes a lot of dues to Hitchcock's visionary lens-work. Psycho is in a league of its own, and all its uses of mood, style, and pacing have lost no traction or poignancy in time. Also, few films can boil their terror down to simple mundane associations as Psycho does to the word 'shower.'
9 - Fright Night.
This vampire flick merges late night horror with feelgood 80s, as we experience terror through the eyes of an angsty teenager entrusted with more than just the ability to die. Think Marty McFly meets Dracula (if Dracula were a castmember on 21 Jump Street), and you have the tone of this film. The 'frights' are mostly tongue-in-cheek, as is the rest of this film which is too enjoyable to be written off for its campiness.
8- Puppet Master
You always see this one on TV, featuring the little puppets you somehow can't kick out of the way, that have been granted life through some Egyptian spell, and with random other moments loosely tied to how this movie is about killer marionettes.
7 - Nightmare on Elm Street
Okay any guy with a knife or chainsaw can terrorize their respective communities late at night during moments of situational vulnerability. But few can murder you from inside your dreams, during your purest of vulnerable states, like Freddy Kreuger can. As the film logic goes, "you die in your dreams, you die in real life." Okay granted, but Johnny Depp's bed literally just swallowed him whole like a hearthrob casserole.
6 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Who says a sci-fi/horror film can't have subliminal socio-political commentary in addition to purely frightening concepts. The concept in this film is physical identity theft, wherein a plant-based pod hijacks and replicates loved ones in their sleep, leaving behind a crude impersonation and an unshakeable notion of complete unfamiliarity. The allegory employed by these pods is of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, and the government-fueled paranoia that anyone could be an evil Communist spy, even friends and family. Of course, in actuality, the only nefarious presence was Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon's House of UnAmerican Activities Committee, which made the Salem Witch Trials not seem so far and peculiar in hindsight.
5 - Child's Play
Chucky is a foul-mouthed plaything with a penchant for murder. What on the outside is seemingly safe around your kids is actually the equivalent of a Ferguson police officer and Casey Anthony distilled and reduced to the shape and size of a My Buddy doll. Whatever you do, don't be the guy in the film who gets all tough guy in front of Chucky's frozen grin. Dolls have feelings too, and as Chucky proves, they're mostly homicidal ones.
4 - Dracula
Pick a Dracula, any Dracula. There have been many interpretations of Bram Stoker's seminal, definitively-gothic vampire novel over the last century--from Nosferatu, to the 1931 Bela Lugosi Univeral Studios classic, to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film. The aforementioned three, however, are perhaps the best of their respective generations. But in the name of sheer terror, what's Halloween without the chief vampire of them all.
3 - The Exorcist
What Psycho does to showering, the Exorcist does to church, and moreover Catholicism. The idea that religion isn't just a bunch of people singing hymns out of the backs of their bibles, but might have a clandestine area beneath the pews devoted to the physical combat of body-hijacking demonic spirits. This film tugs at an idea that feels like a wake up call to some of the catholic church's other secretive practices, which have taken on various forms over the years from the inquisition, to the crusades, to child abuse coverups.
2 - The Omen
Who hasn't encountered a child for which Damien serves as the perfect metaphor for precocious evil. In the film, we see the son of the devil inspiring his nanny to commit suicide, terminating his mother's pregnancy, and carrying an air of ancient evil which his natural father sees no other solution but to slay him with a dozen knives at a church altar. Of course, you hope things never get that bad in the case of that kid on the playground who elicits genuine pleasure from picking on his docile fellows. Might be worth shaving his head just to be sure.
1 - Halloween
Remember the first time you heard about this slasher flick about Michael Myers, and you were like "You mean that guy from Wayne's World is a homicidal maniac?" Well, not unless you're talking about the Shrek franchise. This film, instead, is about a pale mask-wearing serial killer who targets babysitters. The film has been rebooted and remade several times, but the original was a genre classic written directed by the horror auteur John Carpenter himself.
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