Every major holiday has its own movies, and every year on these occasions our families and friends gather around the electric glow of their TV sets to watch the classics. On Christmas we watch It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and on Halloween we watch Halloween, Hocus Pocus and… well, The Nightmare Before Christmas. (It’s kind of a great movie that way.)
And there is nothing wrong with those movies, just as there’s nothing wrong with Hocus Pocus or Trick ‘r Treat or Ernest Scared Stupid. But they aren’t the only great movies set during Halloween so this year, Crave would like to present you with our picks for seven great Halloween movies – new and old, fun and frightening – that haven’t been getting nearly enough attention this year.
Related: The 50 Best Horror Movies of the Century (So Far)
We’ve all seen plenty of articles about why Halloween III: The Season of the Witch deserves a bigger audience. If that film can develop a huge cult following, then the time has come to celebrate these seven wonderful Halloween movies as well.
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Warner Bros.
A ghoulish screwball comedy from iconic filmmaker Frank Capra (who also made one of the best Christmas movies, It’s a Wonderful Life). Cary Grant stars as Mortimer Brewster, a man having an unusual eventful Halloween. In the course of a day he gets married, finds out his beloved aunts are serial killers and runs afoul of his monstrous long-lost brother, who has been surgically altered to look like Boris Karloff. (Raymond Massey plays the murderous Brewster brother, but Karloff played the character himself on the stage.)
It’s a frantic comedy of deadly errors, and watching poor Cary Grant go completely mad from the stress of this, the worst Halloween ever, is one of the cinema’s greatest joys. Arsenic and Old Lace is already considered a comedy classic, but many younger audience members haven’t seen it yet, and they probably don’t know that it’s also one of the best Halloween movies ever.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)
CBS
One of the scariest TV movies ever (see also: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark). Directed by Frank De Felitta, who also wrote the classic horror novel Audrey Rose, this creepy small town thriller stars Larry Drake (Darkman) as a mentally-challenged man who saves a little girl’s life, but is accused of attacking her in the first place. He runs away, tries to hide in plain sight as a scarecrow, and is horrifyingly lynched, eve. The murderers go free, of course, but soon they find themselves dispatched one by one by a mysterious figure in a truly disturbing scarecrow costume.
It sounds like a standard slasher movie, and in some respects it is. But Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a very good one, in part because it has to stay classy and creepy due to the restrictions of television. Charles Durning carries most of the film as the leader of the lynch mob, who turns out to be even scarier than we originally assumed, and Drake is a sympathetic and scary monster.
Night of the Demons (1988)
MGM
Halloween parties rarely go more horribly wrong than they do in Night of the Demons. This energetic, funny and violent cult classic from director Kevin S. Tenney (Witchboard) finds a group of oversexed teens breaking into a local mortuary, holding a seance and accidentally awakening evil spirits that trap them in the house, turn their sexual fantasies into nightmares and transform some of them into those demons we were promised from the title.
It’s an usually entertaining film, but as with many low budget scary movies of the 1980s, the real star here is Linnea Quigley, who manages to be both the film’s token sex object and the best actor of the bunch, going beautifully insane as the evil takes hold of her body.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
20th Century Fox
As we’ve already mentioned, John Carpenter’s original Halloween is an established horror classic, and after years and years of scorn, even Halloween III has finally earned its place in the canon of Halloween movies. But it’s not often that anyone goes to bat for the 1988 sequel Halloween 4, which saw the triumphant return of serial killer Michael Myers to the hit horror series and is generally better than general audiences give it credit for.
Michael Myers escapes from a mental institution, again, and proceeds to stalk his only living relative, again, but this is more than just a rehash. Alan B. McElroy’s screenplay plays a lot like the original Halloween except the potential victims know Michael is coming and do a lot of things right, like hide out with the police, enlist a local posse to protect the town and when all else fails drive like hell out of the whole community. None of it works terribly well of course, and mayhem ensues anyway, but this fresh take on otherwise familiar events elevates a standard slasher into a seriously underrated one.
Rockula (1990)
Cannon Films
Every 22 years, the girlfriend of a 400-year-old virgin vampire is killed on Halloween, with a hambone, by a pirate with a rhinestone peg leg. Centuries later it’s getting a little ridiculous and sure enough, all of Rockula is delightfully absurd. Dean Cameron stars as the title hero, who forms a supernatural-themed rock band to woo the latest reincarnation of his lady love in the late 1980s, with hilariously catchy music that rhymes “vampire” with political essayist “William Safire.”
Rockula is a camp classic, utterly absurd but not really talked about by the public at large. (Although our weekly column about soundtracks, SoundTreks, also featured Rockula in this week’s installment.) Amazing and bonkers performances from new wave icons Toni Basil (“Hey Mickey”), Thomas Dolby (“She Blinded Me With Science”) and blues legend B.B. King, who wins the good sport award by performing in a bumblebee costume, make Rockula the kind of unbelievable WTF movie everyone should watch every Halloween.
Hellions (2015)
IFC Midnight
The first of two unexpectedly great Halloween movies to emerge in the last month. Hellions stars Chloe Rose as Dora, a teenager who learns she’s pregnant on Halloween, and as her mind reels from the news she falls prey to a small army of trick ‘r treaters who want to kill everyone she knows and steal her baby.
It’s a creepy concept, and it might have made for a great straight-up supernatural siege movie, but director Bruce McDonald (Pontypool) has something more surreal and cerebral in mind. As the horror unfolds in the middle of the hauntingly womblike glow of an eclipse, Dora seems to lose her mind with fright, and the understandable inner turmoil of becoming pregnant in the first place builds to powerful, external violence.
Tales of Halloween (2015)
Epic Pictures
Most horror anthology movies are a mixed bag. Even if some of the short films are classics, there’s usually at least one that totally sucks. Not so with the impressive Tales of Halloween, which was just released a few weeks ago and already seems destined for classic status. Some of the shorts are more clever than others, but the overall quality of these ten sick and creepy vignettes is unusually high.
Picking a favorite may be difficult, but the opening installment “Sweet Tooth” could very well turn into a new “Hookhand” type of urban legend on its own. “Trick,” another story of Halloween partiers attacked by homicidal trick ‘r treaters, is ruthlessly efficient and builds to a disturbingly satisfying finale. “Friday the 31st” starts out like a standard slasher, but veers into hilarious splatstick directions. And the finale, “Bad Seed,” brings all the segments together – kind of – with an ambitious and hardboiled story about a badass cop doing battle with a man-eating jack o’lantern.
Top Image: Shout! Factory
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
