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The 18 Best Scary Movies to Watch This Halloween
Grab the popcorn (and your best viewing buddy) for these classic spine-tingling films, old and new
10-minute read
In the mood for a scary movie tonight? Our Halloween-inspired watchlist includes “Hokum,” “Sinners,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Hereditary.”
Courtesy Everett Collection, 4
October is scream season, and while scary films draw fans to the theaters year-round, there’s something really fun about streaming a spooky movie around Halloween on your cozy couch (with the doors locked and some lights on, of course). Whether you’re in the mood for a black-and-white classic like Bride of Frankenstein, slasher staples like Halloween and Scream, taut thrillers like Silence of the Lambs and Get Out or new takes on the supernatural like Hokum, Sinners and Hereditary, this Halloween movie watch list is sure to get your pulse pounding.
Hokum (2026, R)
At last, a modern horror film that relies on creepy atmosphere instead of over-the-top gore. Severance star Adam Scott, 53, plays a misanthropic best-selling author of historical thrillers who heads to a remote Irish hotel where his long-dead parents honeymooned, planning to scatter their ashes and bury memories of childhood trauma. The place is suitably unsettling, as the locals share folklore about witches and a haunted honeymoon suite that’s kept locked up. Director Damian McCarthy strikes a delicate, dread-inducing balance between apparently supernatural thrills and the shock of humans doing very bad things. And that includes Scott, who’s a jerk for much of the film but ultimately elicits our sympathy as things go from bumpy in the night to downright deadly.
Watch it: Hokum
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Sinners (2025, R)
The most original vampire flick ever is also an Oscar best picture contender, thanks to director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan. Jordan plays two roles, twins who rob some Chicago gangs and return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi — the birthplace of the blues and home of the notorious crossroads where the devil hung out — to invest the money in a new juke joint that summons the spirits of Black musical geniuses past and future. The plan is a rip-roaring success, but Ku Klux Klansmen plan to kill them all, and a pack of clever KKK vampires who can sing Irish folk songs incredibly well want to chomp them. It’s an action film, an art film, a deep meditation on Jim Crow America and the Great Migration — and a superbly scary movie.
Watch it: Sinners
Heretic, (2024, R)
For those of you who have been waiting for Hugh Grant, 66, to play a character who’s as unsettling as all get out, your wait is over. In this horror flick from indie powerhouse A24, Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and The Fabelmans’ Chloe East play a pair of Christian missionaries who go door to door to spread the good news, only to ring the doorbell of someone who is decidedly bad news (a mild-mannered Grant in nerdy serial killer glasses). Trapped inside the house, the women have to think fast in a series of cat-and-mouse games to stay alive.
Watch it: Heretic
Hereditary (2018, R)
Between this and 2019’s Midsommar, writer-director Ari Aster may be the most innovative (and deeply disturbing) new voice in American horror. Hereditary is the more traditionally effective of the two when it comes to pure joy-buzzer scares. Gabriel Byrne and Toni Collette star as a couple whose family starts to experience a bizarre string of terrifying cautions and curses. Hereditary works its way through a checklist of tried-and-true scary-movie ingredients — séances, shock scares, supernatural weirdness — but it’s the performances that get under your skin and raise goose bumps, especially Collette’s.
Watch it: Hereditary
Get Out (2017, R)
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is obviously more than just a horror movie. It’s a meditation on white privilege and race in America. But yes, it’s also deeply unsettling and scary as all get out. Daniel Kaluuya’s performance as Chris, a Black photographer who’s brought to the swanky suburbs to meet his white girlfriend’s liberal parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener, both perfection) is harrowing and layered. The rare horror show that doubles as stinging satire, Get Out never lets you off the hook for a second.
Watch it: Get Out
The Descent (2005, R)
Horror movies are often (rightly) accused of being misogynistic. But in director Neil Marshall’s tense subterranean thriller, an ensemble of fierce female leads refuse to play the role of victims. On an all-girls weekend getaway, a group of adventure-junkie friends set out to explore a network of underground caves only to find that they’re not alone. Marshall plays a nail-biting game of peek-a-boo with the audience, giving only brief glimpses of the pasty, slimy, and ravenous demons who crouch in wait down there, ready to spring like gotcha ghouls with a jones for human blood. The Descent is a lesser-known buried treasure just waiting to be unearthed.
Watch it: The Descent
Scream (1996, R)
After the ‘80s slasher-movie gold rush, the horror genre seemed about as dead as a promiscuous camp counselor. Then screenwriter Kevin Williamson came along with one of the smartest and most meta scary-movie scripts in ages. A lot is made about how this Wes Craven teen bodycount flick about a girl (Neve Campbell, 53) being stalked by a ghost-faced maniac was a commentary on wheezy slasher tropes, but it also works beautifully as horror workout on its own. The pre-credits sequence with Drew Barrymore, 51, receiving a fateful (and fatal) call from the killer is an opener for the ages.
Watch it: Scream
The Silence of the Lambs (1991, R)
Scary movies rarely get a date with Oscar, but Jonathan Demme’s serial-killer thriller virtually swept the Academy Awards in 1992. It’s not just a great horror film, it’s a great film, period. Jodie Foster absolutely soars as the determined FBI novice Clarice Starling, and Anthony Hopkins is an unshakable waking nightmare of seductive depravity as Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. It’s also a corker of a police procedural, too, peppered with macabre details and twists that all snap together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Plus, if you’re so inclined, we hear it pairs well with a nice Chianti.
Watch it: The Silence of the Lambs
Re-Animator (1985, R)
If you’re a fan of squirmy horror movies spiked with slapstick comedy, this ‘80s cult classic is just the ticket. Based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, Re-Animator is a delightfully twisted Frankenstein riff about a loony doctor (Jeffrey Combs) who experiments with resurrecting the dead (human and feline) with some very bizarre results. In one of her earliest roles, scream queen Barbara Crampton shows why she would become genre royalty, thanks to a performance loaded with white-knuckle terror and tongue-in-cheek humor. Low-budget indie director Stuart Gordon schools his fellow horror auteurs about how sometimes less can be more.
Watch it: Re-Animator
The Thing (1982, R)
John Carpenter scared a generation to death with his 1978 cult classic, Halloween. Here, the killer isn’t some lunatic in a mask. Scarier, still: It could be any one of us. A gripping sci-fi meditation on paranoia and subzero dread, The Thing (a loose remake of 1951’s The Thing from Another World) is the story of a group of scientists shut off from the rest of the world in an Antarctic research station where something alien is assuming the bodies of its victims in very messy ways. Kurt Russell, 74, heads up a stellar ensemble that will make you break out in cold sweats and shiver with fear.
Watch it: The Thing
The Shining (1980, R)
Jack Nicholson gives the most haunting — and haunted — performance of his career as a snowed-in writer who neither works nor plays but becomes anything but a dull boy as he descends into madness and terrorizes his family in an abandoned hotel. The Shining is wall-to-wall with hallucinogenic visual images that continue to plague our nightmares: ghostly butlers, creepy twins, blood elevators, whatever happens in Room 237, “Redrum.” It may be the closest thing we have to an encyclopedia of terror.
Watch it: The Shining
Halloween (1978, R)
No Halloween list of horror flicks would be complete without John Carpenter’s jump-scare masterpiece about a certain masked maniac named Michael Myers. Most of the sequels in the franchise are disposable junk food that you forget the moment the end credits roll, but the 1978 original is still a tensely paced, bloodcurdling exercise in pure terror, showcasing the breakout performance of future scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, as an innocent but quick-thinking babysitter battling the all-too-real bogeyman on Halloween night.
Watch it: Halloween
Carrie (1976, R)
If you didn’t fit in in high school, you’ll identify with Carrie White. Played by Sissy Spacek, Carrie is an outcast who’s hazed by the popular crowd at school and tormented by her religious fanatic mother (Piper Laurie) at home. Something’s gotta give. And when it does, at the prom, no less, hoo boy, the pig’s blood goes flying! Brian De Palma’s masterful adaptation of Stephen King’s horrific novel is a metaphor for puberty, teenage rebellion and what happens when you’re pushed too far. But it’s Spacek’s quiet vulnerability that grabs you like a hand reaching out from the grave.
Watch it: Carrie
The Exorcist (1973, R)
How on earth did this movie ever get an R rating? William Friedkin’s The Exorcist goes beyond scary, messing with the sacred and profane in ways that popular entertainment normally isn’t allowed to. This is a transgressive masterpiece that messes with your head by putting Satan inside the body of a sweet and innocent 12-year-old girl (Linda Blair). There is no taboo line that The Exorcist doesn’t walk up to and defiantly step across. It should be objectionable and offensive and awful. Yet it remains one of the most powerful and viscerally bloodcurdling movies ever made.
Watch it: The Exorcist
Night of the Living Dead (1968, NR)
From out of nowhere — well, Pittsburgh — George A. Romero scraped together a few bucks and a handful of friends to make what has since become the alpha and omega of zombie movies. Released during the height of Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, the movie has more on its mind than just the walking dead terrorizing the living. The presence of a Black hero (Duane Jones) was downright revolutionary. But even if you glaze over all of the political subtext, this is a suffocatingly claustrophobic nail-biter whose black-and-white cinematography only seems to heighten its unrelenting mood of dread.
Watch it: Night of the Living Dead
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, R)
“What have you done to its eyes?!” Roman Polanski’s deal-with-the-devil thriller has aged impeccably well thanks to its eerie score, vise-tightening pacing and the performances of Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes and then-70-year-old Ruth Gordon as the quintessential nosy neighbor from hell. Pregnant and increasingly paranoid (or is she?), Farrow’s Rosemary is haunted by the suspicion that she’s the victim of a conspiracy of devil worshippers coming for her unborn child. A master class in hysteria that, in the end, proves to be all too justified.
Watch it: Rosemary’s Baby
Psycho (1960, R)
This is the movie that reinvented all of the rules of horror by breaking them. When that knife came swooping at the showering and vulnerable Janet Leigh, Alfred Hitchcock was announcing that absolutely no one was safe. Even the main star of a movie could be butchered before the film was half over. Add Anthony Perkins as the essence of creepiness as mama’s boy Norman Bates, and what you’re left with is the movie that officially launched the modern age of horror.
Watch it: Psycho
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, NR)
Overshadowed by Dracula, The Wolf Man and the original Frankenstein in the pantheon of classic Universal monster movies, director James Whale’s dark, tongue-in-cheek horror comedy may actually be the best film in the bunch. The bolt-necked Boris Karloff returns as Colin Clive’s lumbering reanimated giant, but it’s Elsa Lanchester (and her shocking-locks hairdo) who steals this wildly entertaining monster mash. This is the rare horror sequel that not only lives up to its predecessor but actually surpasses it.
Watch it: The Bride of Frankenstein
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