My SO and I are always looking for good movies, shows, etc. to fill the month of October. We like things that are atmospheric, cerebral, or just fun. But a lot of the standard recommendations are your typical slasher movies and the like, disgusting body horror, kids movies that we have no interest in, and things that are just plain miserable.
Here’s some things we’ve liked to one degree or another from previous years.
Action Horror / Horror That’s Actually Enjoyable
- Aliens
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula
- Fright Night
- Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
- The Mummy (1999)
- Silence of the Lambs
- Sleepy Hollow (Great? No. Fun? Yes.)
- Termors 1 & 2
- Various Stephen King Mini series (IT, The Stand, Rose Red)
Funny and Spooky
- Army of Darkness
- BeetleJuice
- Bubba Ho-Tep
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie)
- The Burbs (didn’t love it, but a good fit)
- Death Becomes Her
- The Frighteners
- Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace
- Ghostbusters 1 & 2
- Gremlins 1 & 2
- High Anxiety
- Little Shop of Horrors (not really into musicals, but still a good fit)
- Shaun of the Dead
- What We Do in the Shadows (movie)
- Various MST3K horror movie episodes
- Young Frankenstein
Anthology Shows (inherently hit or miss)
- The Twilight Zone (60s)
- The Outer Limits (90s)
- Tales From the Crypt
Old Timey Classics
- Dracula
- Frankenstein (actually underwhelming, but it was a good fit)
- The Haunting (1963)
- The Haunting of Hill House (with Rifftrax, but still counts)
- The Last Man on Earth
- Psycho
- The Invisible Man
Barely Qualifies as spooky but still good:
- Dark Man
- The Dead Zone (movie)
- Men in Black
- Pacific Rim
- The Shadow
- They Live
I don’t watch a lot of creepy/spooky stuff, so my recommendations come from a fairly limited breadth. That said, I recommend a few things that many might lump under “kid movies” (I prefer the more accurate label “family entertainment”) since they tend to be perilous and unsettling without being outright violent, gory, or generally miserable.
Coraline (2009) - A young girl, dissatisfied with her home life after moving to a new town, stumbles upon a dark, parallel world. Therein, she finds solace in a parallel version of her mother who is not what she seems.
Paranorman (2012) - A young boy who can speak with the dead learns that a witch who was executed by the townspeople hundreds of years ago will soon return to seek vengeance upon them.
Over the Garden Wall (2014) - A mini-series focusing on two brothers who find themselves inexplicably lost in a forest teeming with fell beasts, witches, undead, and unlikely allies. I watch this one every year around this time. Cozy yet spooky at the same time.
I don’t completely object to family entertainment, as the good stuff is usually fun for adults too. But there’s also a big difference between the really good stuff and well, everything else. I mostly just wanted to avoid the Hocus Pocus, Hotel Transylvania, and “some random Disney channel crap from the 90s/2000s” that tend to pad out lists of non-horror Halloween movies.
My SO loves Coraline, I thought it was enjoyable enough. Although we watched it not long after watching They Live, which also has Keith David, which lead to a lot of joking about a scene mirroring the famous alley fight, but with buttons instead of sunglasses.
We watched Over the Garden Wall, liked the spooky parts, but wished the little brother would have been MIA for the entire series.
I know of Paranorman, I’ve had it on the list for a while, added when we felt like we were running out of options. Neither of us have seen it and we don’t know much about it, so it’s been a lower priority, but not ruled out.