Face it, folks, we’re all gonna die. Whether it’s via natural causes or the business end of Michael Myers’ kitchen knife landing in your head, death is inevitable.
Michael Myers is back to his bloody shenanigans in ‘Halloween Kills’
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Because that clock is ticking, why not revisit some scary classics or – if you’re a horror virgin – check them out for the very first time? (And perhaps last, because, you know. See above. Hey, we don’t make the rules.)
We put together a tried-and-true list of 25 old-school favorites, influential giants and hidden gems worth a watch before that creepy Japanese girl who crawled out of the TV kills you. Or, if you’re not really in the dying mood, to embrace Halloween as you avoid a looming doom. (No, not COVID-19: Those horrendous mini dark-chocolate bars that return every October. They’re worse than a Freddy Krueger dream seminar.)
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Though modern eyes might not initially understand the appeal of the silent film – one of the first horror flicks ever – spend some time with the tale of a sleepwalker (Conrad Veidt) hypnotized into murder, immerse yourself in the striking German expressionist imagery and get wowed by an early twist ending.
You can’t go wrong with any of the classic Universal monsters (Dracula, Wolf Man, Mummy) but this is a two-for-one extravaganza in which Boris Karloff reprises his role as Frankenstein’s Monster and Elsa Lanchester is the bride with the lightning-zapped hair.
3. ‘Horror of Dracula’ (1958)
Hollywood has given us many Draculas over the years, from Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman, though it’s Britain’s Hammer Horror banner that gave us the most fearsome take in a ferociously fanged Christopher Lee and pitted him against Peter Cushing’s famed vampire hunter Van Helsing.
4. ‘The Birds’ (1963)
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” featured a cross-dressing killer with a thing for showers. At least you can avoid seedy motels to steer clear of that guy. Squadrons of seemingly innocent feathered fiends turning sinister and pecking at your face is a next-level threat.
If you’re going to watch one zombie movie, George Romero’s original chiller is the granddaddy of them all. Even a half-century later, the undead ghouls that descend upon survivors in a Pennsylvania farm house are timeless and the gut-punch ending couldn’t be more timely.
6. ‘The Exorcist’ (1973)
William Friedkin’s movie about innocence lost and the power of faith has unnerved several generations, and it’s Linda Blair’s harrowing portrayal of a possessed girl and the deeper meanings about good and evil that’ll stick with you more than the infamous images of a spinning head or inappropriately used crucifix.
7. ‘Jaws’ (1975)
Hey, it’s a throwback to when people opened up the beaches too soon not because of a contagious disease but because of a killer shark. Steven Spielberg’s original summer blockbuster unleashed a great white that put a dangerous edge on the waterlogged adventure.
John Carpenter’s slash-terpiece introduced an iconic masked maniac to babysitting Jamie Lee Curtis and an unsuspecting Illinois suburbia. Pick your villainous poison from the likes of Freddy, Jason and Leatherface, but Michael Myers’ mythology and an all-too-realistic streak makes “Halloween” a cut above.
9. ‘Alien’ (1979)
Whether you think it’s a sci-fi film, horror movie, haunted house flick in space or a darn good argument for chest plates, Ridley Scott’s cosmic trip gone very wrong is bursting with goodness. The terror is real, y’all, and the killer extraterrestrial goes perfectly with the galactic claustrophobia.
10. ‘The Shining’ (1980)
If Jack Nicholson running around an empty and isolated hotel out of his mind, talking to dead barkeeps and carrying an ax isn’t scary enough for you, an elevator flowing blood, the creepiest twins of all time and an old decrepit naked lady in a bathtub should do the trick.
11. ‘An American Werewolf in London’ (1981)
American dudes backpacking in England get attacked by a werewolf, one of them becomes a beastly nuisance on the full moon, and things get bloody freaky in old London Town. All that plus undead buddies, fantastic special effects, an unreal transformation scene and it’s pretty funny!
12. ‘The Thing’ (1982)
Carpenter’s snowbound remake features a glorious Kurt Russell beard and a shapeshifting alien organism that assimilates other organisms and grows more frighteningly hideous over the course of the movie. Both are beautiful in their own ways.
For real, everybody needs to see national treasure Jeff Goldblum getting turned into a monstrous insectoid, courtesy of body horror guru David Cronenberg, and Geena Davis absolutely freaking out after dreaming she birthed a giant maggot. Good times.
14. ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ (1986)
Use the musical as a palate cleanser of sorts from some of these other fright fests. The Alan Menken songs will get your head bopping amid the retro narrative about a nerdy flower guy (Rich Moranis) who has a crush on a co-worker (Ellen Greene) and develops a co-dependent friendship with a man-eating plant.
15. ‘Candyman’ (1992)
Nia DaCosta’s recent sequel is pretty good, too, but it’s worth it to go back to the original starring Tony Todd as the hook-handed title antagonist, a vengeful spirit of a slave’s son murdered in post-Civil War America. The first movie remains relevant in its tackling of gentrification and the cyclical nature of violence.
16. ‘Scream’ (1996)
Wes Craven’s slasher movie reinvention holds up so well. Ghostface gave us the definitive horror villain of the ’90s, the opening sequence with Drew Barrymore and a telephone remains an all-timer, plus its cleverness hasn’t waned since horror tropes never die.
17. ‘American Psycho’ (2000)
It really shouldn’t be this enjoyable to watch Christian Bale hack a dude to death in Mary Harron’s 1980s-set bloody satire about a cold, calculating and murderous New York investment banker with unusual proclivities. If nothing else, you’ll never hear “Hip to Be Square” the same way ever again.
18. ‘May’ (2003)
More and more folks have found this underrated Frankenstein-esque tale over the years, starring Angela Bettis as an awkward yet hypnotic vet’s assistant who not only keeps a creepy doll around but also puts together her own special friend from spare body parts.
19. ’28 Days Later’ (2003)
If you’re going to watch two zombie movies, have “Night of the Living Dead” be the shot and this the chaser. A rage-inducing virus breaks out in England and leaves London eerily empty while speedy zombies are out for flesh in a story steeped in metaphor that speaks to our pandemic era.
20. ‘Tucker & Dale vs. Evil’ (2010)
The backwoods horror comedy explodes tropes and is just pretty darn fun and clever. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are good-hearted West Virginia hillbillies who, thanks to increasingly nutty circumstances, are seen as homicidal rednecks by a group of campers.
21. ‘Kill List’ (2011)
A British soldier (Neil Maskell) comes home, reconnects with his family and gets work as a hitman. Ben Wheatley’s genre-mashing masterpiece sticks to being a crime thriller until it takes a turn toward the sinister and transforms into something way more terrifying.
22. ‘It Follows’ (2015)
Teens and sex go with horror like hockey masks and summer camps. David Robert Mitchell ingeniously makes a sexually transmitted disease his villain, and Maika Monroe is the girl who’s cursed after intercourse and is pursued by a dogged dark force until she can pass it on to someone.
23. ‘The Witch’ (2016)
Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Um, yes, please and thank you. The freaky period piece and tragic family drama features Anja Taylor-Joy as a troubled 17th-century teen on the cusp of adulthood who goes down a dark path and Black Phillip as the G.O.A.T. of hellish goats.
24. ‘Get Out’ (2017)
If you can’t empathize with Daniel Kaluuya’s victimized protagonist and his shocked, tear-stained face as he’s taken to the Sunken Place, you might just be a soulless demon. Jordan Peele’s social horror insta-classic is an impressively crafted take on race that changed the scary movie game.
25. ‘Hereditary’ (2018)
Hail Paimon? Hail Toni Collette! She tears it up in Ari Aster’s supernaturally absorbing, demonic dissolution of a family whose grand matriarch was into some seriously weird stuff. “Hereditary” is full of shock and awe, with absolutely brutal deaths and an unshakable sense of doom.
Krysten Ritter stars as a high-maintenance witch who kidnaps kids to serve her various needs in Netflix’s “Nightbooks.” We’re ranking every horror movie that comes out in 2021, and here’s where the film stacks up against the rest of this year’s fright fests:
67. “Dreamcatcher”: Bodies and beats drop in the EDM-themed mystery thriller with Travis Burns as a DJ on the cusp of superstardom who headlines an underground music festival and Niki Koss is one of a group of friends who have to avoid a masked killer on the loose.
66. “Funhouse”: Valter Skarsgård plays a C-list celebrity ex-husband participating in a “Big Brother”-style reality show with a twisted cartoon panda and bloody death challenges in this film resembling an overlong, very mediocre “Black Mirror” episode.
65. “Escape Room: Tournament of Champions”: The forgettable sequel to the 2019 hit features Taylor Russell (left) and Logan Miller as survivors from the first film forced to survive a whole new host of puzzle rooms and high-tech death traps.
64. “Fear of Rain”: The psychological thriller casts Madison Iseman as a troubled teenager diagnosed with schizophrenia who thinks she saw a missing girl but doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not.
63. “Shook”: A social-media beauty influencer (Daisye Tutor) begs off a livestream with friends to dogsit her sister’s pooch, and it proves to be a bad decision when she’s tormented all night by a mysterious caller who knows her every move and Internet post.
62. “Phobias”: An ex-SWAT team operative (Martina Garcia), scared of weapons after a raid gone wrong, is one of five subjects who has their fears weaponized by a mad scientist in the anthology thriller.
61. “Stay Out of the Attic”: A crew of ex-con movers (Ryan Francis, far left, and Bryce Fernelius) are hired to pack up the house of a mysterious elderly German (Michael Flynn) and discover the place’s monstrous secrets, including Nazi experiments and diabolical science.
60. “A Nightmare Wakes”: The moody gothic drama tackles the history of “Frankenstein” writer Mary Shelley (Alix Wilton Regan), her affair with poet Percy Shelley (Giullian Yao Gioiello), the creation of her masterpiece and the birth of a monster.
59. “The Seventh Day”: “Training Day” meets “The Exorcist” in this religious thriller starring Vadhir Derbez as a rookie holy man who teams with a renowned demon-buster to take on a case involving a young boy who’s murdered his entire family.
58. “Dementia Part II”: An ex-con handyman (Matt Mercer) has a heck of a day helping a strange older woman (Suzanne Voss), who gives him increasingly oddball tasks revealing disturbing secrets in an irreverent B-movie that’s not to be taken too seriously.
57. “Demonic”: Carly Pope stars as a woman who enters a simulation to interact with her estranged comatose mother and disturbs a supernatural force in the digital space in director Neill Blomkamp’s ambitious sci-fi possession film.
56. “Boys From County Hell”: A young Irishman (Jack Rowan) and his pals punk tourists by taking them to the grave of Abhartach, the legendary vampire that inspired Dracula, but then have to figure out the best way to take him down in the horror comedy.
55. “The Sinners”: In a religious town, the devout Aubrey (Brenna Llewellyn, left) is a member of a high school group nicknamed after the seven deadly sins and becomes the target of hazing by her predatory BFFs approach in writer/director Courtney Paige’s feature debut.
54. “The Unholy”: Cricket Brown stars as a deaf teen girl who can hear and heal the sick after seeing a heavenly vision, though her miracles give way to freaky occurrences in director Evan Spiliotopoulos’ creepy flick.
53. “Mosquito State”: Wall Street and body horror come together in a B-movie conceit when a shy financial math whiz (Beau Knapp) is bitten by a mosquito and soon after finds his money-making algorithms failing as his penthouse becomes ground zero for a horde of skeeters.
52. “Held”: On an anniversary getaway to save her marriage, a wife (Jill Awbrey) fights back when she and her husband are taken hostage in a strange high-tech house in a home-invasion horror flick that doubles as a feminist spin on “Get Out.”
51. “Hunted”: Lucie Debay stars as a woman chased by a predatory villain who transforms from damsel in distress to absolute rage machine in the survival thriller, a violent and modern take on the Little Red Riding Hood story.
50. “Reunion”: A pregnant academic (Emma Draper) is haunted by ghosts from the past when she returns to the family mansion, and doesn’t find much help in her domineering mom (Julia Ormond) in the twisty thriller.
49. “The Banishing”: A family relocates to a new English town and their manor is an unholy place with dark secrets hat begin to take hold of a young girl (Anya McKenna-Bruce) in a 1930s-set haunted-house flick with time loops, terrifying hooded monks and Nazis.
48. “Sator”: A mysterious forest demon stalks and manipulates a family whose various members experience strange voices and visions over the years in the slow-burn chiller written and directed by Jordan Graham.
47. “Things Heard & Seen”: The Gothic supernatural drama stars James Norton and Amanda Seyfried as a couple who moves into a rural home in upstate New York with a strange history, and dark forces and relationship issues complicate their lives to a freaky degree.
46. “Vicious Fun”: The horror comedy stars Evan Marsh (right) as a hapless, awkward horror journalist who accidentally crashes a meeting of vicious serial killers, including the murderous Bob (Ari Millen).
45. “Son”: An escapee from a dangerous cult, single mother Laura (Andi Matichak) flees town with her son (Luke David Blumm) following a failed kidnapping, but the aftermath leads to the kid becoming sick and mom engaging in horrifying acts to keep him well.
44. “The Amusement Park”: George Romero’s long-lost 1973 educational program about the plight of the elderly is an affecting allegory about growing old, with an aging man (Lincoln Maazel) facing nightmarish rides and horrendous treatment by fellow human beings.
43. “Bloodthirsty”: An indie singer/songwriter (Lauren Beatty) is haunted by visions of herself tearing apart and wolfing down an animal in the werewolf thriller that puts a furry twist on the familiar Faustian bargain for success.
42. “Caveat”: A troubled young woman named Olga (Leila Sykes) has a drum-playing toy rabbit that detects the supernatural in an Irish mystery thriller that interestingly tackles memory loss.
41. “Initiation”: Isabella Gomez (far left) and Lindsay LaVanchy star as college students avoiding a masked killer who fouls up fictional Whiton University’s homecoming week in a campus slasher flick with clever moments and surprisingly emotional touches.
40. “Old”: Thomasin McKenzie and Alex Wolff play members of a family on holiday who visit a secluded beach that ages people extremely rapidly in M. Night Shyamalan’s middling supernatural thriller about mortality.
39. “Slaxx”: The clever and horror satire stars Romane Denis as the newest employee of an annoyingly hip, Gap-style clothing store ramping up the grand reveal of high-end unisex jeans that happen to be possessed and murderous.
38. “Spiral”: Max Minghella (left) and Chris Rock star as detectives investigating a series of murders marked by an eerie symbol in the ninth “Saw” installment, which turns down the extreme gore to take the franchise in a more conventional cop-thriller direction.
37. “We Need to Do Something”: Vinessa Shaw (far left), John James Cronin, Pat Healy and Sierra McCormick star as a family trapped for days in their bathroom as a nasty storm gives way to something far more sinister in the claustrophobic narrative.
36. “Let Us In”: A spirited 12-year-old girl (Makenzie Moss) and her best friend (O’Neill Monahan) are on the case and look for clues when several teens suddenly disappear in their small town in a scrappy sci-fi adventure that’s also a good entry into scary movies for kids.
35. “The Night”: Niousha Noor plays half of an Iranian couple trapped in a freaky L.A. hotel with their baby and haunted by strange visions and odd noises in this sinister Farsi-language thriller with “The Shining” vibes.
34. “Seance”: A group of girls (including, from left, Stephanie Sy, Inanna Sarkis and Djouliet Amara) at a prestigious boarding school try to call forth the spirit of a deceased former student, but one of the them is dead by the next morning in the sinister teen chiller.
33. “The Evil Next Door”: A 5-year-old (Eddie Eriksson Dominguez) makes a creepy new “friend” when his dad takes a job that keeps him out of town in the slow-burn Swedish ghost story with an unnervingly freaky monster.
32. “The Forever Purge”: Josh Lucas is a Texas rancher taken captive by masked outlaws when an underground movement decides to kill immigrants and the wealthy in the latest timely installment in the long-running dystopian “Purge” franchise.
31. “The Last Matinee”: An audience members attending the last showing of a scary movie in a cinema are murdered one by one by a mystery killer, and the only person who notices is the projectionist’s daughter (Luciana Grasso) in the extremely gory Uruguayan slasher flick.
30. “Wrong Turn”: Jen (Charlotte Vega) and her dad (Matthew Modine) run afoul of an enigmatic group of Appalachian mountain people who get violent when it comes to trespassers in a surprisingly good reboot of the 2000s backwoods-slasher franchise.
29. “The Power”: A young nurse (Rose Williams) gets stuck on the night shift on her first day at a creepy East London infirmary during the blackouts of 1974 in the ghostly period thriller, which explores male abuse of power and sexual abuse in a horror setting.
28. “My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To”: Patrick Fugit (far left) and Ingrid Sophie Schram play devoted siblings who go to murderously extreme lengths to keep their brother (Owen Campbell) healthy in a gripping and touching spin on the vampire film.
27. “The Reckoning”: Charlotte Kirk stars as a widowed 17th-century mom imprisoned, accused of being a witch and seduced by none other than the devil himself in director Neil Marshall’s gory, spooky, slightly nutty and even adventurous horror fantasy.
26. “Army of the Dead”: Dave Bautista and Nora Arnezeder play members of a mercenary crew sent into Las Vegas – quarantined after a zombie outbreak – to steal $200 million out of a casino vault in the genre-mashing action flick.
25. “The Night House”: A widow (Rebecca Hall, right, with Sarah Goldberg) is beset by nightmarish visions and creepy goings-on after her husband’s suicide in the psychological thriller, an unnerving haunted-house ghost story that juggles the occult with affairs of the heart.
24. “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It”: Julian Hilliard plays a boy from a cursed family tormented by something seriously creepy coming out of his waterbed in the eighth and latest chapter of the “Conjuring” horror universe.
23. “Nightbooks”: Based on the J.A. White book, the solid family-friendly chiller – and a good first horror film for youngsters – stars Winslow Fegley as a New York boy imprisoned by an evil witch (Krysten Ritter) and forced to tell her a new scary story every night to survive.
22. “False Positive”: The very dark psychological horror stars Justin Theroux and Ilana Glazer as a married couple desperate to get pregnant, but she begins to think their renowned and charming fertility doctor is too good to be true.
21. “Fear Street Part 2: 1978”: The Netflix trilogy’s second chapter pays homage to ’70s and ’80s slashers, with Emily Rudd (left) and Sadie Sink starring as sisters dealing with a masked maniac on the loose at their summer camp.
20. “Jakob’s Wife”: In a throwback chiller with an absurdist bite, Barbara Crampton stars as the spouse of a small-town minister who feels stuck in her 30-year marriage when a run-in with a vampire gives her a new sense of power and ownership over her life.
19. “Lucky”: A self-help author (Brea Grant, who also wrote the film) has to kill the same masked slasher before he kills her day after day, a situation that turns maddening for her in a feminist home-invasion thriller that cleverly explores the trauma of male violence.
18. “In the Earth”: During a global pandemic, a curious scientist (Joel Fry) and the coolest park ranger ever (Ellora Torchia) go deep intp a forest to find a research site and discover some serious craziness afoot in a mythology-rich folk horror that’s ripe for interpretation.
17. “Malignant”: Annabelle Wallis stars as a Seattle woman attacked by a dark figure and then begins seeing strange visions of a killer hunting down victims that become all too real in James Wan’s gleefully cheesy yet still clever thriller.
16. “The Djinn”: Ezra Dewey stars as a mute 12-year-old who, grieving the loss of his mother, discovers a book of magic spells, performs a ritual to finally have a voice and unleashes a sinister shapeshifting monster in a film more moving than your average chiller.
15. “A Quiet Place Part II:” After a tragic turn of events, a displaced family (from left, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe and Emily Blunt) ventures out and attempts to survive in a post-apocalyptic world full of blind dangerous creatures in a worthy followup to the 2018 hit.
14. “Candyman”: Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) dares his girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris) to say Candyman’s name five times and summon the hook-handed urban legend in director Nia DaCosta’s effective and sobering allegory of racial violence.
13. “Sound of Violence”: Jasmin Savoy Brown plays a woman enraptured by a euphoric sensation when she experiences horrific brutality in the thriller, a nifty, trippy take on a killer origin story full of self-discovery and “Saw”-level gore.
12. “Fear Street Part 3: 1666”: The Pastor (Michael Chandler) is a 17th-century church figure that’s one of the most disturbing parts of the Netflix horror trilogy closer, which borrows from period chillers like “The Witch.”
11. “Willy’s Wonderland”: Nicolas Cage (right) plays a silent drifter who has to stay alive through a night filled with murderous animatronic mascots – though he gets some help from a few rebellious youngsters – in the wonderfully absurd action horror comedy.
10. “The Queen of Black Magic”: Old ghosts and guilty consciences return to haunt three men who, with their families, revisit the orphanage where they grew up in the brutal and freaky Indonesian horror film.
9. “PG: Psycho Goreman”: A malevolent alien overlord (Matthew Ninaber, left) unwittingly makes friends with a couple of kids (Nita-Josee Hanna and Owen Myre) who hold the ancient crystal that controls him in the gory and hilarious sci-fi horror comedy.
8. “Violation”: With her marriage falling apart, Miriam (co-writer/co-director Madeleine Sims-Fewer, right) visits her sister (Anna Maguire) for a getaway. But a brutal betrayal of trust sends her down a dark, vengeful, bloody and very righteous path in the powerful movie.
7. “Fear Street Part I: 1994”: Shadyside friends Kate (Julia Rehwald, far left), Simon (Fred Hechinger) and Deena (Kiana Madeira) investigate a witch’s curse on their town in the first homage-filled, super-fun chapter of Netflix’s trilogy reinventing the teen slasher.
6. “Saint Maud”: There are plenty of disturbing goings-on when a deeply religious hospice nurse (Morfydd Clark) tries to save her client’s soul and deals with her own dark backstory in director Rose Glass’ unholy and twisted film.
5. “Werewolves Within”: Like “Clue” meets “The Howling.” Josh Ruben’s enjoyable whodunit features Sam Richardson as a naive but goodhearted forest ranger new to a small Vermont town who has to catch a killer among the various kooky residents.
4. “Honeydew”: When their car breaks down, Riley (Malin Barr) wonders about their strange host’s home cooking while her boyfriend Sam (Sawyer Spielberg) chows down in a rural thriller that crosses “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
3. “Come True”: The intriguingly freaky and very clever sci-fi thriller centers on a troubled teen (Julia Sarah Stone) who sees disturbing dreamscapes at night and enlists in a sleep-disorder study, when the darkness of her subconscious arrives in reality.
2. “The Boy Behind the Door”: Lonnie Chavis (“This Is Us”) stars as young boy who has to rescue his best pal (Ezra Dewey) when they’re kidnapped and taken to a strange house in the country in an excellent survival chiller with a cool twist.
1. “The Vigil”: Yakov (Dave Davis) is hired by his old rabbi to watch over the body of a recently deceased community member and has to survive a night tormented by a demon in a spectacular chiller steeped in Jewish lore and historical connections.
68/68 SLIDES
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Halloween 2021: From ‘The Shining’ to ‘The Birds,’ 25 horror movies to watch before you DIIIIIIIIIIIIE
