Horror movie recommendations for Halloween

Halloween (and Fall in general) is one of my favorite times of year. Being up in New England I take the opportunity to get out and enjoy the season before the cold ass winter forces most of us indoors for months on end. It's not uncommon to hit up haunted hayrides, corn-mazes, go to cider mills, apple orchards etc...Plus I get to consume all sorts of pumpkin flavored products (pancakes, coffee, pie, muffins and of course BEER)! All in all its a fun few months.

One of my favorite things about October is hanging out with friends and watching a few scary movies. I'm not sure how many horror fans are here, but I was curious as to what are some of your favorite films for the Halloween season?

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Paranormal Activity was the last really creepy/scary movie I saw. It's done the pseudo documentary style as Blair Witch and is also a slow build. I don't like many horror films but this one was good.

In no particular order:

1)Return of The Living Dead
2)Shawn of the Dead
3)Dawn of the Dead
4)Zombi (Fulci)
5)REC

Horror movies are a year-round thing for me because it's my favorite genre so it's always kind of weirdly disappointing when Halloween comes around and I'm just kind of like "oh, look, horror is on TV now."

But there are a couple of movies that for me capture a certain feeling of Halloween, mostly because I remember watching them around this time of year when I was a kid.

- Halloween- Duh. They used to show this on a local channel every year at Halloween a couple of times, and this was before DVD and on demand everything so it wasn't overplayed back then and it was always a treat. It's still a great, albeit quaint, slasher pic with some really nice terror beats and of course that soundtrack is THE soundtrack for the season.

- Salem's Lot- Other than The Shining, this is actually my favorite Stephen King movie. It's super creepy, atmospheric, and has a good ghoulish vibe. James Mason is awesome in it, and the vampires look really good. And they're MONSTER vampires, not androgynous teenagers.

- Phantasm- this is not only one of my favorite movies, but it was also the biggest WTF of Halloween '86 or '87, not quite sure which it was. I had no idea what the movie was, but it showed on one of those horror movie rallies that broadcast stations used to run. An unbelievable mixture of meditations on death, Jawas, dirtbikes, blood sprays, boobs, 1970s car culture, impromptu jam sessions, mutant flies, Dune references, ice cream men, and of course, The Tall Man.

- Eyes of Fire- good luck finding it, but this is a _great_ Halloween film. I saw it on a Halloween night rental probably around 1988 or 1989. It's got an amazing, pre-colonial setting and it's about a tree witch that steals children. Old school and super spooky.

- The Haunting- the 1963 Robert Wise film, not the remake. This is still the definite haunted house film, and only The Shining compares in terms of the "epic" horror film. ANother one that seems like it was an annual fixture on Halloween TV when I was a kid.

Finally, I'd recommend any of the British Amicus anthology horror films- Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Tales that Witness Madness, The House that Dripped Blood, The Torture Garden, Asylum, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, and so forth. All have two or three good to great horror stories and all usually have at least one light-hearted (and very English) one. Some good actors turn up in them too,including two Doctor Whos (Tom Baker and Patrick Troughton) and Hammer alumni including Lee, Cushing, and others. They're realy fun, and the short formats make for easy viewing if you're busy carving a jack-o-lantern or handing out candy.

-Near Dark(1987) w/Adrian Pasdar and Bill Paxton. Probably the best Vampire movie ever made.

My favorite scare movies from the past 10 years:

The Orphanage ( www.imdb.com/title/tt0464141/ )
The Others ( www.imdb.com/title/tt0230600/ )
28 Days Later ( www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/ )

(Let The Right One In [Sweden] was awesome too, but it's more of a coming-of-age drama to me)

In the campy fun slasher dept, an underrated recent release is Identity ( www.imdb.com/title/tt0309698/ ).

The Others is hugely underrated. It's an elegant, understated ghost story very much in the vein of The Innocents. I think it's something of an anomaly among today's horror films- it's gentle rather than jarring, more focused on supernatural "otherness" than in terror and fear of death.

Near Dark is a great one too- again, lots of really great understated elements, like Lance Henriksen's rather off-handed remark about fighting in the Civil War ("we lost"). The scene in the vampire-wagon where it's getting shot to pieces is still one of my favorites in any vampire picture.

I've still not seen The Orphanage...it's on queue.

Hey, Nightbreed is another good Halloween picture...all those great monsters and freakin' David Cronenberg is the bad guy.

Other anthologies that shouldn't be missed include Creepshow and Trick 'R Treat. Even as predictable as I found a couple of the Trick 'R Treat stories, that movie nails the atmosphere of Halloween in the autumn.

I was also a big fan of episodes of A Haunting that aired on the Discovery Channel for 3 or 4 seasons. Yeah, the re-enactments were cheesy at times, but the cheapness and simplicity of the effects (doors opening and closing of their own volition, whispering voices, etc.) were more "realistic" and more effective than the swirly light CGI crap that movies often use to indicate ghosts and the paranormal. That's why I liked the recent Insidious so much. It used "traditional" haunted house phenomena and it creeped me the hell out. The last 1/4 was kinda crappy but most movies with a mystery involved don't survive the mystery-unraveling portion of the plot unscathed, anyway.

I think the movie that will become my yearly Halloween tradition is Vampyr which I just watched a few days ago. It is a 1932 movie directed by Carl Dreyer. This was his first movie that used sound (previously it was all silent films) so the dialogue is sparse and there are the screens of text that are common during silent films to tell the story. So it isn't a movie for everyone. But if you do enjoy movies like this it is pretty creepy and unsettling.

Oh, Vampyr is _amazing_, the imagery in it is so haunting and beautiful...it has a genuine, dreamlike quality to it that is very, very rare in cinema. I have the Criterion Collection disc, it's one of the best discs in my collection with great packaging and a book.

Trick r' Treat was a disappointment. I like that it's actually about Halloween and all, but some of it was really kind of mean spirited and silly. I don't know, it's a Halloween film for a holiday that's more for adults in their "Sexy Little Red Riding Hood" costumes and getting trashed than for kids. I like the Halloween that's more about candy and is for kids.

Michael Barnes wrote: I like the Halloween that's more about candy and is for kids.

The true spirit of Halloween!

My favorite horror movie is probably the original Alien.

I'd have trouble picking a proper list of top horror films. There are too many. I have a particular thing for creepy, supernatural horrors. I don't like gore. My favourite ever is probably, tediously enough, The Blair Witch Project. It's the only film I've ever seen after which I really didn't want to get up in the night and go to the bathroom without the light on. Night of the Living Dead and Alien would make the top five. Not sure what I'd put in the other two slots though.

However for my Halloween piece this year I was considering doing a list of obscure horror films that I'd enjoyed. But I don't really want to do trash culture any more, so this thread gives me a perfect excuse to list it now and put another article up instead. So here's seven great horror films you might not have heard of.

Carnival of Souls is a creepy old black and white film that foreshadowed several modern horror plots by several decades. It has little dialogue or meaningful plot ... it's all about the atmosphere and boy does it deliver on that.

Nosferatu the Vampyre is not the black and White film you're thinking of but Werner Herzog's homage to it. A rather arty film but notable for it's endless succession of startling, evocative imagery, enabling a film low on dialogue to fully explore vampire mythology.

Halloween 3: The Season of the Witch has nothing to do with Michael Myres and has plot holes you could drive a bus through, but it is notable for a particularly grotesque plot involving the mass murder of children in a horrific manner that I found hugely disturbing.

Society does not, for the most part, appear to be a horror film, playing more like a murder mystery instead. Until the final sequence where the plot turns on its head and everything is transformed into a phantasmagoria of particular ickyness.

In The Mouth of Madness is not based on an HP Lovecraft film, but remains the only Lovecraft film worth watching. Enough said, really. If you want more its take on madness plays horrible tricks with the viewer and is genuinely creepy.

Dog Soldiers is only really a horror film if you count Aliens as a horror film. But it's relentlessly brutal and exciting from beginning to end. One of only a handful of independent UK action films that's worth watching.

Shadow of the Vampire is another Nosferatu homage but with a neat twist - it explores the idea that the film was actually a part documentary featuring a real vampire against unwitting actors, and asks the age old question of whether man is more monstrous than the monster with unusual style and aplomb.

Some more modern obscure horror films I've noted as being repeatedly recommended but have not seen include Kill List and The Silent House.

I'm going to be watching Paranormal Activity this year on the night, assuming the kids go to sleep early enough. I haven't seen it yet, I've managed to avoid all the spoilers and I'm *really* looking forward to it.

Paranormal Activity has an interesting thing going on in it where the anticipation of something happening is more interesting than what happens. Then it gets really, really stupid at the end.

Carnival of Souls is _great_. Very interesting picture, definitely ahead of its time.

The Herzog Nosferatu the Vampyre is a masterpiece of Teutonic dread. It has an _incredible_ atmosphere- the whole film looks bloodless and drained. It's actually kind of exhausting to watch, but the imagery is stunning and Kinski is an amazing Count Orlok.

I like Halloween 3. The Silver Shamrock song has been stuck in my head since about 1983. It's actually kind of underrated, I think. It's got a bad rap from being Halloween 3 and having nothing to do with Michael Myers. It's really kind of an old fashioned fairy tale story about witches trying to do bad things to children but in a modern setting. And there's ROBOTS.

In the Mouth of Madness is great, but it has a couple of things tha make it hard to watch. The costume, makeup, and hair in the movie is ATROCIOUS, as in literally the worst I've ever seen. The casting is uniformly awful too- "Charlton Heston as Jackson Harglow". But it's a great one, probably one of the best of the 1990s.

Dog Soldiers doesn't hold up very well for me. The first time I saw it, I loved it. After that, subsequent viewings haven't really intrigued me. I do love that the Werewolves are big ass Howling-style ones.

Society is an interesting picture...it's Brian Yuzna, one of Stuart Gordon's (Re-Animator) cronies. It's definitely a more high-minded film with a social message...but yeah, that ending is something else. Yuzna also helmed a little-seen anthology called The Necronomicon that's actually a decent collection of Lovecraft stories.

Shadow of the Vampire is cute...one thing I really love is how Murnau and his crew all wear labcoats and goggles to make their films.

Now, if we get into talking about SCARIEST movies...I still think the Japanese Ju-On is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen.

I like:

The Haunting -- as Michael mentioned, this is a great haunted house movie -- bet the original.

Poltergeist -- I just have a soft spot for it.

The Others -- best modern horror movie that I can remember

and probably my all time favorite,

The Changeling -- great, creepy movie with George C. Scott.