31 Classic Horror Movies To Watch Before Halloween

Horror.

It is an ancient art form. We've terrified each other with tales that trigger the less logical parts of our imaginations for as long as we've told stories. What we’ve learned is that audiences willingly offer themselves up to sadistic storytellers to be scared witless. Perhaps we are engrossed with these tales of terror because we get a basic thrill from it all. Or maybe, horror stories serve a wider moral purpose. 

But when it comes to horror movies, they deliver thrills as well as exploring the dark, forbidden side of life and death. They also provide a compelling mirror image of the anxieties of their time. Nosferatu for example, isn't just a tale of vampirism, but offers heart-rending images of a town beleaguered by premature and random deaths; echoing the Great War and the Great Flu Epidemic fatalities. 

Each generation gets the horror films it deserves, and one of the more fascinating aspects of the genre is the changing nature of the monsters who present a threat. Through the 1920s came from Germany's expressionist movement, with films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu influencing the next generation of American cinema. And then 10 years later, Universal Studios becomes the epicenter of all horror movies. 

So you wanna see how the horror genre evolved?

Here are 31 classic horror movies that changed the genre of horror forever. 

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Hailed as the world’s first full-length horror movie, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is an instant classic. With an insane jangle of crooked angles and unbalanced teetering images, this film remains as one of the most influential pictures ever released, leaving an indelible mark across a surprising spectrum of genres. The story centers around two young friends, Francis and Alan, while jockeying for the affections of Jane, visit a local traveling carnival. There they take in the act of the mysterious, top-hatted and wild-haired Dr. Caligari. As they watch, Caligari awakens his somnambulist subject, Cesare, who under hypnosis answers questions from the audience. When Alan jokingly asks when he will die, Cesare responds “Before dawn.” Chilling. After Alan and a couple other people are found stabbed to death, Francis decides to do a little detective work of his own, which brings him back to Caligari. For a silent film, what is notable isn’t the so much the storyline, but rather the visuals that makes this movie so haunting. The painted townscape is filled with curved and pointed buildings teetering at dangerous angles, almost as if they were alive and shrieking. Roads twist and spiral to nowhere. The perspectives are deliberately mismatched and inconsistent, with the props and sets sometimes being too large for the characters, and others too small. When watching, it almost makes you feel like you’re stuck inside an Edvard Munch painting.  

2. Nosferatu (1922)

Perhaps the most terrifying thing about Nosferatu is how close this masterpiece of a film came to being lost forever. But thankfully, copies survived. Loosely adapted from Bram Stoker’s legendary Dracula novel, the vampire here is not actually named Dracula, but Count Orlok. Also, instead of Jonathan Harker we get a Thomas Hutter. But little does Hutter know as he travels to Transylvania to meet Orlok for the first time, that he is crossing into the boundary between the real world and a nightmare. After glimpsing at Hutter's portrait of his wife, Ellen, Orlok makes his way, with a stash of earth-filled coffins by sea to north Germany to seek Ellen out with his macabre ways. Nosferatu is still haunting and ethereal to this day. Vampires are such familiar screen figures to us now it's hard to appreciate that Nosferatu was the first vampire movie of its time. The film centers on the monster, Count Orlok, but it's so much more than a monster movie. It's a melting pot of early Weimar Republic anxieties, the rise of women into political power (female suffrage was granted in 1919), and theories about the cause of the recent Spanish Flu epidemic (contagion from overseas). Visually, it's a blend of trick photography and documentary. One that will definitely stay with you. 

3. The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

This film, the first adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s novel from 1908, remains one of the definitive masterpieces of silent horror. Released by horror giant Universal in 1925, this film emphatically established a formula that Universal would rework into the thirties and forties, which proposed the important idea that those who look beastly will inevitably act beastly. Shocking for its time, this timeless classic features one of the most memorable scare scenes of the silent era: the sudden unmasking of Erik – the opera ghost of the title. The story concerns Erik, a much-feared fiend who haunts the Paris Opera House. Lurking around the damp, dank passages deep in the cellars of the theater, he secretly coaches understudy Christine Daae to be an opera star. Through a startling sequence of terrors, including sending a giant chandelier crashing down on the opera patrons, the Phantom forces the lead soprano to withdraw from the opera, permitting Christine to step in. Luring Christine into his subterranean lair below the opera house, the Phantom confesses his love. But Christine is in love with Raoul de Chagny. The Phantom demands that Christine break off her relationship with Raoul before he'll allow her to return to the opera house stage. She agrees, but immediately upon her release from the Phantom's lair, she runs into the arms of Raoul and they plan to flee to England after her performance that night. The Phantom overhears their conversation and, during her performance, the Phantom kidnaps Christine, taking her to the depths of his dungeon. It is left to Raoul to track down the Phantom and rescue Christine. There have been over ten other adaptations of the myth but none can match this original film for it’s atmospheric dread and stunning direction.

4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

Considered to be the best film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel by the same name, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most sophisticated and frightening films in 1930s cinema. It explicitly explores sexuality and repression in ways that most films of that era merely hinted at or disguised in allegory. When London physician, Dr. Henry Jekyll –  who is impatient to marry his fiancée, Muriel – gets rejected by Muriel's father for an early wedding, the tormented Jekyll heads to his laboratory, where he has been developing a potion to separate the benevolent from the malevolent sides of human nature. After he drinks the concoction, the doctor’s evil impulses are unleashed as he is transformed into the monstrous Mr. Hyde. Using extended point-of-view shots, audiences are forced to experience the world through the eyes of Dr. Jekyll. The film begins exclusively from this unique perspective, so much in fact that the first time we actually see the good doctor is through a mirror. We see a young patient looking at him, and thereby us, with admiration and almost religious awe. The viewers, essentially, become Dr. Jekyll, making us sympathize with him. More significantly, it also prepares viewers for the breathtaking transformation scenes.

5. Dracula (1931)

Considered the first in the cycle of Universal Studios classic monsters, the movie Dracula starred famed actor Bela Lugosi and was noted as being the first horror movie with sound. Plus, it was thanks to this movie that helped create the American supernatural cinema. The movie is an atmospheric, haunting film that offered one of the most imitable performances in the history of cinema. The electric tension between the elegant Dracula and the vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing is chilling.  And it's hard to forget such moments as the lustful gleam in the eyes of Mina Harker as she succumbs to the will of Dracula, or the omnipresent insane giggle of the fly-eating Renfield. Despite the static nature of the final scenes, Dracula is a classic among horror films, with Bela Lugosi giving the performance of a lifetime as the erudite Count. 

6. Frankenstein (1931)

Loosely based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley, ​Frankenstein is a film about a mad, obsessed scientist, Dr. Henry Frankenstein, who creates a monster, by taking body parts from dead people. Upon placing a brain inside the head of the monster, Henry and his assistant Fritz are amazed that the experiment is alive. When the monster mistakenly kills Maria, a young girl he meets down by the river, the town is up in arms and aims to bring the monster to justice. Thanks to Jack Pierce – the makeup artist at Universal Studios – he was able to a create a grotesque, other-worldly makeup design for the Monster that proved to be instantly iconic, creating a brand image for the character that’s still widely recognizable almost a century later.

7. Freaks (1932)

A carnival barker tells his audience the story behind the sideshow attraction they have come to see: Once a beautiful trapeze artist, Cleopatra weds sideshow midget Hans to get her hands on his inheritance. She and her lover, the strong man Hercules, plot to poison Hans. But when the other sideshow attractions realize their plan, they take revenge. Todd Browning's film is a masterpiece of audience manipulation, years ahead of itself in presenting characters who are both sympathetic and terrifying. Early scenes showing the performers going about their lives create a tremendous empathy that gradually overpowers any revulsion audiences feel toward their physical conditions. There are even moments of gentle, very human humor. In some cases, the performers are presented as innocents functioning perfectly within a world they have built for themselves. Yet the final revenge scenes twist those feelings, displaying the monstrous behavior of which they are capable in response to a threat from someone outside their group. It's a searing portrait of the humanity within all of us at its best and its worst.

8. The Mummy (1932)

When Howard Carter uncovered Tutankhamun’s long-buried tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in November 1922, he sparked a global press frenzy and triggered a new craze — Egyptology (or, “Tutmania”). But when rumors began to swirl around the sudden, unexplained deaths of key individuals involved with Carter’s expedition, the concept of the famed theory that it was caused by the "Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb" rapidly became part of the zeitgeist. The 1932 movie, The Mummy taps into the horror centered around Tutmania that may people feared. The main action takes place in Cairo, and revolves around a mummy who is brought to life by the accidental reading of a spell. He then hunts down the reincarnation of his lost love. This movie sealed Universal Studio’s fate, as helming the horror genre and successfully executing the monster movie drama for its viewers.  

9. The Invisible Man (1933)

The film opens with a mysterious stranger, his face swathed in bandages and his eyes obscured by dark spectacles, taking a room at an inn at the English village of Iping, in Sussex. Never leaving his quarters, the stranger demands that the staff leave him completely alone. However, his dark secret is slowly revealed to his suspicious landlady and the villagers: he is an invisible man. When the innkeeper and his semi-hysterical wife tell him to leave after he makes a huge mess in the parlor and drives away the other patrons, he tears off the bandages, laughing maniacally, and throws the innkeeper down the stairs. He takes off the rest of his clothes, rendering himself completely invisible, and tries to strangle a police officer. Among the many vintage horror films released by Universal Studios in the 1930’s, The Invisible Man ​still packs a punch today. It is a shining example of fantastic thrills with quotable dialogue and unexpected humor and shocks, all delivered with great mood and economy. 

10. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

In 1931, when James Whale's Frankenstein was breaking all kinds of box office records and establishing Universal Studios as a major force, the rules weren't so clearly laid out. And, as Whale was clearly on a roll following his hit with The Invisible Man, the studio pretty much allowed him creative license to put together a sequel for one of his movies. And thus, Bride of Frankenstein was born. The macabre, satirical film is generally considered one of the greatest horror sequels of all time - a spectacular, bizarre, high-camp, excessive, humorous, farcical and surrealistic film. The film opens with Mary Shelley saying, to a recumbent Lord Byron and her husband, that she's not quite done with the whole monster deal after all—there's more to tell! What the audience wouldn't or couldn't have anticipated was Elsa Lanchester in her vertical hairdo, complete with bleached lightning bolts. Whale definitely gave audiences what they wanted in Bride of Frankenstein, even if they didn't know it themselves.

11. Son of Frankenstein (1939)

After the 1931 successes of both Frankenstein and Dracula, the studio stumbled a bit with their horror film output over the next few years. Son of Frankenstein was the last to feature Boris Karloff as The Monster, and also included Bela Lugosi as Ygor, alongside Basil Rathbone as the title character, Baron Wolf von Frankenstein. The plot centers around Wolf Von Frankenstein, returning to his ancestral home with his wife Elsa and their young son Peter. However, they are greeted on arrival with a suspicious crowd at the train station. Wolf is the son of Victor Frankenstein, who created the monster in the previous 1931 James Whale film. Wolf soon meets Ygor, who has survived the villagers' attempt to hang him despite having a broken neck. Ygor brings Wolf to a family crypt, where he reveals the comatose monster laying near the tombs of his father and grandfather. Ygor demands Wolf revive the monster. Wolf examines the monster's body decides that the extreme abnormalities causing the monster to be nearly immortal warrants scientific investigation. Once the monster is revived, Ygor uses a flute type instrument to control him, committing multiple murders. While the third film in a series sometimes isn’t on par with its predecessors, Son of Frankenstein remains one of the most solidly entertaining movies in the Universal horror canon.

12. The Wolf Man (1940)

Although there is a well established werewolf mythology extending back to the ancient world, there was no single established story (as with Dracula and the vampire myth) ripe for easy adaptation. The Wolf Man is a mishmash of several wolf legends, with added ingredients. Putting together, pentagrams, silver bullets and the full moon to create a robust myth to establish a new set of cinematic rules which Hollywood lycanthropes would adhere to for decades. When Larry Talbot attempts to rescue Jenny Williams from a nocturnal attack by a wolf, he winds up injured. However, by Jenny’s side isn’t the body of a wolf, but that of man. Now bitten, Talbot is cursed to suffer the torments of the beast whenever the moon is full. Arguably the best of the "original" Universal horrors, The Wolf Man boasts one of the most stellar casts ever to grace a "B” picture.

13. The Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954)

Unfortunately, the poor Creature from the Black Lagoon was never able to shuffle his way into the expanded universe shared by Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, and, if briefly, The Invisible Man. Nevertheless, because of Universal Studios’ success with Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolfman (and their numerous sequels), the original Universal monsters had been overexposed and just didn’t have the scare appeal they had had a decade earlier. So Universal rose to the occasion and produced some of the best Sci-fi/ Horror films of the period, and thus entered The Creature of the Black Lagoon. The story involves the members of a fossil-hunting expedition down a dark tributary of the mist-shrouded Amazon, where they enter the domain of a prehistoric, amphibious "Gill Man” – possibly the last of a species of fanged, clawed humanoids who may have evolved entirely underwater. Tranquilized, captured, and brought aboard, the creature still manages to revive and escape – slaughtering several members of the team – and abducts their sole female member, spiriting her off to his mist-shrouded lair. Director Jack Arnold makes excellent use of the tropical location, employing heavy mists and eerie jungle noises to create an atmosphere of nearly constant menace. The film's most effective element is certainly the monster itself, with his pulsating gills and fearsome webbed talons. 

14. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The film begins with doctor Miles Bennell returning to his small Californian town after attending a medical convention, and noticing that a lot of the townspeople have “changed” in some way while he was gone. After resuming a relationship with his one-time fiancée Becky Driscoll he learns that she too is aware of something wrong in the town. Later, during a visit to friends Jack and Theodora Belicec, a seedpod-shaped object is found growing in the Belicec’s greenhouse. When it opens it reveals a half-formed human figure in the exact likeness of Jack himself. Eventually it is found that there are many of these pods around town and that they represent an alien invasion of Earth. The pods adopt the appearance of people, then replace or incorporate them while the victims are asleep. In an era characterized by the Red Scare, this film was part of the sweeping mass hysteria of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Suffice to say, that it left an unsettling impression amongst viewers at the time of its release. 

15. Eyes Without A Face (1960)

French director Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face isn't just cinema's most shocking mad doctor flick of all time, it's also one of cinema's most overlooked horror gems. In it, Doctor Genessier lures innocent young women to his mansion in an effort to cut off the current victim's face and fasten it onto that of his daughter, who suffered face-ruining burns from a car accident. Without a new, scar-free face, the doctor’s daughter, Christiane, wears an all-white, featureless mask that makes her look like a bloodless walking corpse, a lasting image that gives Eyes Without a Face a haunting quality that's tough to shake. And one scene in particular, a grisly and methodical face-removal sequence uncommon for its time, is one of horror's great try-not-to-look-away moments. The film is done in a sober, muted style, with stark black and whites and the bizarre camera angles much loved by film noir. 

16. Psycho (1960)

It’s safe to say that no movie has ever had the same sheer bloody, jaw-dropping terror, than Alfred Hitchcock’s game-changing masterpiece, Psycho. Here, Hitchcock breaks every single rule of horror cinema, and reshapes the film in his own image. In Psycho, murder makes no sense at all. In the famous shower scene, not only was Hitchcock signing Marion Crane’s death certificate, but also slicing through years of audience expectation that the hero or heroine of a fictional work would be shielded and protected. But when it comes to Hitchcock, horror and suspense, everything is left up in the air. Exhausted after leaving Phoenix with $40,000 in cash to start a new life for herself, Marion Crane decides to stop for the night at the Bates Motel, where nervous but personable innkeeper Norman Bates cheerfully mentions that she's the first guest in weeks, before he regales her with curious stories about his mother. There's hardly a film fan alive who doesn't know what happens next, but while the shower scene is justifiably the film's most famous sequence, there are dozens of memorable bits throughout this movie. 

17. The Innocents (1961)

Adapted from Henry James's novella, The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents is a story about possession. When Miss Giddens, is hired as a governess to look after little Flora and Miles by their uncle, the two children initially seem sweet and fun. But – as is the way with creepy horror-film kids – they soon turn demonic and troubled. The first intimation of this arrives when it transpires that Miles has been expelled from school; this is compounded by the children's odd behavior, apparent secrets and reports of strange visions. Miss Giddens eventually connects all this to two previous employees of the house, both dead: governess Miss Jessel, and valet Peter Quint, who were locked in an abusive relationship. So now the question is: Are Jessel and Quint using the children as vehicles to continue it from beyond the grave? This film has a great spooky atmosphere, infusing the drama with a certain sense of the weird and supernatural. Even the camera shots of the apparitions (or "ghosts") in the open air and broad daylight have a startling and chilling quality.

18. Carnival of Souls (1962)

When a young woman survives a drag race accident, she agrees to take a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she is haunted by a bizarre apparition that compels her toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion. The film as a whole is a strange, atmospheric and unforgettable low-budget horror film. Yet, the movie continues to exert a strange fascination for many viewers. Even though it’s not a conventional horror or ghost story, Carnival of Souls raises a number of perplexing questions that relate to our own existence here on earth. You can thank the cinematography, which provides an unsettling surreal and otherworldly feeling for viewers alike – one-part dream, one part nightmare. 
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19. The Birds (1963)

The master of suspense reigns supreme once more. The story begins after wealthy Melanie Daniels purchases some lovebirds in a pet shop in San Francisco, only for her to notice the curious behavior of the birds in the Northern California area. At first, it's no more than a sea gull swooping down and pecking at Melanie's head. But things take a truly ugly turn when hundreds of birds converge on a children's party. There is never an explanation as to why the birds have run amok, but once the onslaught begins, there's virtually no letup. Only three years after shaking and reshaping the rules of horror cinema with Psycho, Hitchcock gave us the equally entertaining and sub-textually subversive avian thriller, The Birds. Each scene is better than the next until the ultimate crescendo when poor Melanie Daniels is getting picked and pecked to near death. To this day, that scene ranks as one of the most horrifying sequences in cinematic history. 

20. The Haunting (1963)

Though at first it might seem like a cliche-filled premise of a spooky house, but not everything is exactly as it seems. The Haunting is essentially the story of Eleanor Lance – a lonely middle-aged woman being slowly devoured by her groaning, undulating surroundings. Although it's technically a ghost story, ghosts aren't what will spook you within this movie. The fear, instead, can be found amongst the details of the film. The suspense is amped up, with creeping psychological terrors rather than gore that would later define horror films in years to come.

21. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Roman Polanski's first American Hollywood feature was an adaptation of Ira Levin's bestseller, and its success launched a trend for devil-baby, evil-kiddy and satanic pregnancy movies that extended well into the 70s. When a young wife, Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor husband, Guy, move into the Bramford, neighbors Roman and Minnie Castevet soon come nosing around to welcome the Woodhouses to the building. Despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, Guy starts spending time with the Castevets. Shortly after Guy lands a Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant and the Castevets take a special interest in her welfare. As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to suspect that the Castevets' circle is not what it seems. The best thing about this movie, is that Polanski builds the terror by degrees. Like the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water, you don't know it's too late until you're already doomed. For every city-dweller who's ever wondered about his or her neighbors, there's something terrifying waiting in Rosemary's Baby.

22. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Well, just as Johnny said they would, they definitely got Barbara. In George A. Romero's horror classic, Night of the Living Dead the story concerns a group of people trapped in a remote farmhouse surrounded by cannibalistic undead ghouls. The film effectively invented the modern zombie movie, inspiring countless imitations and five Romero-directed sequels. While the movie – when watched – instantly makes you feel claustrophobic, it also ushers in a sense of originality. 

23. The Wicker Man (1973)

When a righteous police officer investigates the disappearance of a young girl, he comes into conflict with the unusual residents of a secluded Scottish isle. Brought to the island of Summerisle by an anonymous letter, the constable is surprised to discover that the island's population suspiciously denies the missing girl's very existence. Even more shocking, the island is ruled by a libertarian society organized around pagan rituals. The officer's unease intensifies as he continues his investigation, slowly coming to fear that the girl's disappearance may be linked in a particularly horrifying manner to an upcoming public festival. Built upon a foundation of both mystery and horror, the climax at the end of The Wicker Man is indeed a masterstroke of horror. 

24. Don’t Look Now (1973)

The singularly haunting Don’t Look Now tells the story of a pair of bereaved parents whose mourning process tilts out of proportion. When the grieving couple, John and Laura Baxter, go on a business trip to Venice after the sudden death of their child, their turmoil increases after meeting with two sisters at a restaurant. One of the sisters claims to be a psychic and says that she foresees their child talking to them from beyond the grave. The two then begin to see strange images throughout the twisty streets of Venice. Don’t Look Now emphasizes the tortured state of its characters. There are many flashbacks and flash-forwards, along with nightmarish inter-cut sequences. The film consistently asks its viewers to double-check their reality, and forces them to  recognize the horror through the eyes of grief-addled characters.

25. The Exorcist (1973)

Rarely do movies affect us so deeply, but it’s another thing when they scare the living daylights out of us. The Exorcist is probably the scariest movie ever to be brought to the screen. Upon its initial release in 1973, the film caused quite a scathing response. Reports of fainting, heart attacks, miscarriages, and no end of vomiting was fulled by the hysteria of this movie. Some viewers were submitted to psychiatric care after their screenings, while deaths or suicides near to a screening of the film were attributed to its unholy influence over the viewer. Murderers blamed the film for taking them over, and West Germany propelled the hysteria further when they banned the picture from cinemas. All in all, as scary as this movie is, it’s a horror masterpiece. When sweet young Regan MacNeil suddenly takes ill, her sickness progresses to the point where her mother, Chris becomes convinced that her daughter has been possessed by evil spirits. Perhaps the fact that daughter Regan does the backwards spider walk down the stairs was her first clue. The film assaults the viewer’s senses and faith, leaving the audience subject to devilish, claustrophobic torment. All the worse, it will make you believe that possession could happen to anyone at anytime. 

26. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

You can thank The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for being the staple for homicidal maniacs. Probably second to The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is either equally or more terrifying than it’s predecessor. And that’s most likely because of the lack of gore in this film. Yup, that’s correct. What makes watching this movie so unsettling is the film’s atmosphere of unrelenting terror. That terror is so immersive that it suddenly shifts into the power of assumption, supplemented by shrewdly-chosen camera angles and movement, that make viewers think they’re seeing more violence than they actually are. In other words, the camerawork for this movie is genius. When a sister and her brother take a group of friends to visit the farmhouse of their deceased grandfather, they discover that just next door lives a whole family of repugnant psycho killers. Most noteworthy is “Leatherface,” who wields a chainsaw and has a taste for human flesh. And while there are some shots in the film that are hard to watch, it is hands down one of the few horror movies that has the best cinematography. Especially that final scene.

27. Jaws (1975)

Young director Steven Spielberg took what was classic B-movie fare (big shark chews up skinny-dipping teenagers who scream a lot) and turned out a masterclass in suspense. Jaws built on the mainstream appetite for horror created by films such as The Exorcist, gave viewers a monster that was, uniquely, neither human nor supernatural nor the result of mutation. Sharks are real. They're out there, swimming around, snacking on swimmers, right now. On an early summer night, Chrissie decides to take a moonlight skinny dip while her friends party on the beach. Yanked suddenly below the ocean surface, she never returns. When pieces of her wash ashore, Police Chief Brody suspects the worst, but Mayor Vaughn, mindful of the lucrative tourist trade and the approaching July 4th holiday, refuses to put the island on a business-killing shark alert. After the shark dines on a few more victims, Brody and a rusty local fishermen decide to take matters into their own hands to catch the culprit. But it’s while they’re out at sea when they realize that they might “need a bigger boat” to catch the deadly great white shark. 

28. The Omen (1976)

Much like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen also explores the possibility of a demon-child and antichrist. When American diplomat Robert Thorn learns that his infant son didn’t survive the birth, Robert can’t bear to inform his wife of the tragedy. There at the hospital, he agrees to take a different newborn child whose mother allegedly died from childbirth. The couple raise the child as their own, who they name Damien. As time elapses, the family returns to London only to encounter many strange and often disturbing events – mostly unfolded around Damien. One of which is when his nanny spontaneously commits suicide at his birthday party. When Robert is told his son is the spawn of Satan he’s initially dismissive until bodies start piling up and other strange occurrences causes Robert to ask himself, who’s child is he raising? And could Damien possibly be the Antichrist after all? It’s an engaging and well-acted film. And the little boy who plays Damien, is cute and chubby with a smile that can simultaneously frighten and endear him to you. 

29. Carrie (1976)

This classic horror movie based on Stephen King's first novel tells the story of Carrie White, a shy teenager who is the butt of practical jokes at her small-town high school. Her blind panic at her first menstruation – a result of ignorance and religious guilt drummed into her by her fanatical mother, Margaret – only causes her classmates' vicious cruelty to escalate. Finally, when the venomous Chris Hargenson engineers a reprehensible prank at the school prom, Carrie lashes out in a horrifying display of her heretofore minor telekinetic powers. In the beginning, Carrie makes you swoon, until you realize that at the same time you’re swooning to all of the freaking stuff that begins happening to poor Carrie White. It’s a romantic teen-dream-turned-nightmare. But what makes Carrie ​such an unforgettable film is that it’s a movie filled with many different things. Yes, its a high school horror movie. Yes, it’s a tale of telekinesis. And yes, it’s also a familiar Cinderella-goes-to-the-prom fairy tale story. But the movie mocks it all. And isn’t that what Carrie felt from her classmates from the get-go? But it is the ending of Carrie that is the template for every horror movie that ever went out with a final: “Fooled ya! The horror continues!"

30. Halloween (1978)

One of the most influential horror films of its era, Halloween – upon its release – was a nerve-frying thriller. Shot in just 20 days on a $325,000 budget in Southern California, the scare-fest about white-mask-sporting 23-year-old psychopath Michael Myers, who stalks and terrorizes three young babysitters on Halloween night, continues to play to sold-out audiences at midnight showings across the country. But what makes Halloween stand out is Jamie Lee Curtis’s character, Laurie. It’s no secret that the horror genre’s – especially in slasher films – depiction of women can often be spotty (i.e. unsympathetic, underwritten and objectified). Except for Laurie in Halloween. Her character is recognizable and relatable. She’s also strong and resourceful. So it’s kind of a pleasant surprise when the mild-mannered babysitter fights back against the murderous Michael Myers. It’s one the many reasons this movie is so absurdly fun to watch.

31. Alien (1979)

What is great about Alien is that it is a perfect haunted house movie set in space. Of course, Alien sets itself apart from many other haunted house films in that the “house” is a spacecraft they consider home during their missions. The “house” is already there from the beginning. The crew knows it, they feel comfortable in it, they are intimately aware of how it works and how to navigate it. This isn’t a situation where people are thrust into a new environment where they have no idea what is around each corner, such as The Haunting. It’s only after the alien bursts from one of the crew member’s chests that this cold yet strangely secure environment becomes a labyrinthine maze of potential terror. Directed by Ridley Scott, Alien is about a seven-crew commercial hauling ship that, on its return trip to Earth, is required to respond to a distress signal from a strange and dark planet. From there, a monster begins hunting the crew members down one by one. 

So grab some candy and pop in one of these instant Halloween classics for a spooky night in.