October 10, 2025
For those of you who are demented horror movie fans like me, this is the most wonderful time of the year. With Halloween coming at the end of the month, October is a perfect excuse to watch some of your favorite scary movies, or some classics that you never got around to seeing. It’s also a good opportunity to watch a recent horror film that you might have missed. This year, in particular, has been very good with Sinners, Weapons, and Bring Her Back among my favorites of 2025, and all available to watch from home.
With that in mind, I thought I would devote this week’s blog post to some recommendations from one of my favorite genres. Now, you can Google “Best Scary Movies” and get a thousand hits of various lists published over the years. You will get some of the obvious franchises like Halloween, Scream, Friday the 13th, or A Nightmare on Elm Street. You might even get some of the high quality recent horror movies like Talk to Me or It Follows, both of which I have previously covered. I decided to try to recommend some older selections that might not come to mind immediately, but are worth watching if you like this genre of film. I also previously covered some Halloween recommendations four years ago here, including The Exorcist and The Shining, two all-time classics, if you are looking for more suggestions.
So, let’s dive in and start with one that I remember fondly from my high-school days.
A Vampire Flick for The MTV Generation – The Lost Boys (1987)
A teenage vampire comedy-horror movie? Yes, please! The 1980s were a glorious time for teen comedies. It was the apex of John Hughes movies, and other films that fit into that genre. Ooh, did I just come up with a blog idea? Best 1980s comedies? Have to file that one away.
Anyway, while we were all basking in the glow of The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Some Kind of Wonderful, director Joel Schumacher decided to follow up his successful Brat Pack movie St. Elmo’s Fire with a different slant on a teen film. The Lost Boys is set in Southern California and tells the story of teenagers Michael and Sam (Jason Patric and Corey Haim) who move to a new town with their recently divorced mom (Dianne Wiest). Michael meets up with a group of bikers who have some secrets. They are led by David (Kiefer Sutherland, having a grand old time playing a vampire) and his girlfriend Star (Jamie Gertz), who falls for Michael. When David gets wind of this, he decides to initiate Michael into their little group.
The Lost Boys features a lot of the tropes you expect in a vampire movie – scary kills, bloody chomping of necks, and the terror of someone realizing they are about to turn into a vampire. But there are two aspects of Schumacher’s film that stood out for me when I rewatched this for the first time in at least twenty years. The first is that it’s pretty funny. Sam partners up with comic nerds and self-taught vampire hunters (played by Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to try to save his older brother, leading to some funny moments. The second is the way that Schumacher moves the camera in a way that lets us feel like the vampire soaring through the sky and zeroing in on his victim. Pretty cool feature done before directors were regularly using drones in their films. Sure, it’s a little dated at times, but most 1980s movies feel that way forty years later. Bonus points for The Lost Boys is a very good soundtrack featuring INXS, Lou Gramm of Foreigner and a great cover of The Doors’ People Are Strange by Echo & the Bunnymen.
A House of Horrors – The Amityville Horror (1979)
As a diehard movie fan growing up as part of the MTV generation, there were two key ingredients to a happy life at home. A VCR and a subscription to HBO. I can’t tell you how many films I fell in love with because they ran over and over again on HBO, or because I was able to rent a videocassette at my local video store.
One of the movies I recall seeing in the early 80s (mostly because it scared the shit out of me) was 1979’s The Amityville Horror. This was my first exposure to the genre of “Holy shit, this really happened!” type of horror movie. Now, is everything in this film true? That’s up for a lot of debate. In fact, the story was investigated by Ed and Lorraine Warren (of The Conjuring fame) before the best-selling novel and hit movie terrified audiences. Speaking of The Conjuring, the newest entry in the franchise (Last Rites) is pretty good, but still a notch below the first two entries in that series.
As The Amityville Horror opens, we see the terrifying murder of a family by a disturbed young man. Years later, a young couple (James Brolin and Margot Kidder) decide that the low asking price is too good of a deal to pass up. Despite the tragic events of the previous owners, they decide they can make this their dream home. Soon, some mysterious events begin to occur and Brolin’s character starts to transform into a disturbing possessed man. Needless to say, the family just needs to get the fuck out of this house. Which brings me to something funny.
I hadn’t seen The Amityville Horror in a very long time, but it’s been on my list to rewatch for the last few years. This was a perfect opportunity to see if it held up to my memory of it (Newsflash: It did) and laugh at one of the film’s iconic lines. When the local priest arrives to bless the house, he becomes trapped in a room and is attacked by a swarm of flies. He then hears a demonic voice say, “Get out.” Well, actually, the subtitles (yes, I watch almost everything with subtitles these days – it sucks to get old) read “Disembodied voice: ‘Get out!’” I just had to chuckle at “disembodied” showing up on my screen – it was a perfect description. Is it an iconic line? Well, Eddie Murphy told a fantastic joke about it during his 1983 concert film Delirious, and it became the title of another masterful horror movie from 2018, so I think that answers the question. If it’s been a few years since you’ve seen this classic, I highly recommend it, but you might want to watch it with a light on in your living room.
And while we are on the topic of haunted houses, when is the last time you watched Poltergeist? Yet another movie that scared the shit out of me growing up, I recently watched this one again and found it just as scary. Maybe the childhood memories of seeing that tree coming through the window, that creepy-ass clown terrorizing the kids, or that dude ripping his face off of his skull, is what led me to recall the terror I felt after first seeing this in the 1980s. The special effects are a little lacking compared to today’s technology, but damn, this movie still rocks.
Three Picks from the Mind of Stephen King
Doctor Sleep (2019)
I’m not quite sure why I missed this one when it came out in 2019. That was the first movie year that I covered in my blog, and I watched and wrote about a number of new releases that year. Perhaps it was because it didn’t receive the best reception upon its release, although the director’s cut (about ½ hour longer) received great reviews when it was released on home video a few months later. That’s the version I watched for this blog post.
Doctor Sleep is based on the 2013 novel by King, and is a sequel to The Shining. Ewan McGregor plays Dan Torrance (the little boy in the original) who is a recovering alcoholic, still dealing with the demons from his experience at the Overlook Hotel as a child. He connects (through his ability to shine) with a young girl who also shares his ability, and together they aim to stop a group of psychic vampires (led by the marvelous Rebecca Ferguson) who hunt down and kill those with their abilities to steal their energy.
Director Mike Flanagan (who adapted King’s novella The Life of Chuck earlier this year) does a terrific job of bringing us back into the world of The Shining, but delivering a fresh story. There are a number of callbacks to the first film, including new actors playing characters from the original, that are just good enough to be effective without feeling like a carbon copy. I was worried when I first saw young Danny and his mom in a scene, but I was pleasantly surprised by how good the actors were. And this one has some terrific scares that fit perfectly for the Halloween theme. If you are a fan of The Shining, be sure to give this one a try.
IT (2017)
This one is complicated for a few reasons. King’s mammoth bestseller about a killer clown (Pennywise) terrorizing a group of residents in Derry, Maine was adapted into a very good television movie in 1990. Tim Curry played Pennywise in a performance that was as scary as you could expect for a movie on broadcast television. The story bounces between when the main characters were children and when they were adults, recruited back to Derry to defeat Pennywise again.
When a theatrical adaptation was considered for IT twenty years later, the decision was made to split the story into two parts. The first film focused on when the characters were children, each dealing with their own childhood trauma, all while being terrorized by Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård, in a brilliant performance.) This film is outstanding and features some truly terrifying moments and very good performances by the child actors, some of whom have gone onto successful careers since this movie’s debut in 2017.
The complicated part with IT, is that the second part (released in 2019) was a bit of a letdown. Despite strong actors playing the adult characters (including James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, and an outstanding performance by Bill Hader), the story is bloated with a runtime that pushes three hours, and an ending that was a bit baffling. Although, it was a preferred choice to the ending from the book – Google that one if you dare. King certainly had some deranged thoughts while writing his early novels.
So, if you are a completist and want to watch both parts, recognize that the second part may be a little disappointing, although Skarsgård’s performance is worth the price of admission. Speaking of which, HBO is launching a prequel limited series later this month called IT: Welcome to Derry, with Skarsgård returning as the terrifying Pennywise. I will be watching, fingers crossed that it’s a good companion to these films.
Carrie (1976)
King’s debut novel was a massive hit with readers of the horror genre, setting the course for his (still-going) career that has spanned over fifty years. It seemed like a natural choice for a film adaptation, although the director chosen to helm the project was not yet a household name. Brian De Palma had directed a few deranged (but underseen) horror movies and was given the reins to adapt King’s novel about a teenage girl with telekinetic powers who avenges the bullies in her school.
De Palma cast Sissy Spacek as Carrie White in a role that would elevate her to stardom. Before this role, Spacek had been in a few films, most notably alongside Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece Badlands. But Carrie is the movie that put her on the map, leading to an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, an award she would win four years later for The Coal Miner’s Daughter. Piper Laurie starred alongside Spacek as Carrie’s overbearing and religious fanatical mother in a performance that also received an Oscar nomination. Can we just talk about the fact that a batshit crazy movie like Carrie got two acting nominations in 1976? This was long before the Oscar love for another batshit crazy movie (The Substance) that we saw last year.
Spacek is terrific in the role of the meek Carrie who is afraid of everyone in her school, including the mean girls (led by Nancy Allen and Amy Irving) who terrorize her. When they hatch a plot to get her to the prom to subject her to the most infamous high-school prank of all-time, you are on the edge of your seat, waiting for the scene you have undoubtedly heard about to occur. And when Carrie decides to exact her revenge, there’s nowhere for her tormentors to run.
With the success of Carrie, De Palma basically had a blank check in Hollywood, leading to a career that had a lot of terrific projects (including Blow Out, The Untouchables, and Mission: Impossible), but unfortunately a number of misfires, most notably his adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the biggest bombs of the era. De Palma is an interesting director and one that I like a lot. His style is not for everyone, and he has been accused of ripping off Hitchcock (he calls it homage), which you can see in a number of his films, especially two of my favorites, Dressed to Kill (Psycho) and Body Double (Vertigo). If you want to see where he put his name on the map and have a bloody good time at the prom (see what I did there?), check out 1976’s Carrie this Scary Movie Season.
Creepy as Fuck – The Ring (2002) and Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Having seen so many horror movies over the years, I sometimes can see the plot points and jump scares coming a mile away. That’s why when I see something really original (like 2022’s Barbarian or this year’s Weapons, both directed by Zach Cregger), I get very excited. As I was contemplating this list, I thought back to movies that really resonated with me as offering the right mix of creative plot and truly scary moments. A film like It Follows, which freaked me the fuck out when I first watched it, and the original Saw, which had an ending that left audiences stunned, are ones that come to mind. As I was contemplating how to wrap up this post, one film immediately jumped to mind. And then I discovered another one earlier this week that I liked just as much.
First up is The Ring, a remake of a Japanese movie with a pretty simple premise. There is a mysterious videotape. If you watch it, you will die in seven days. Simple as that. In the film’s opening sequence, we meet two teenage girls, one of whom watched the tape one week earlier. As the evening progresses, she encounters supernatural forces and eventually succumbs to the curse. The jump scare of seeing her deformed face after she died qualifies as a “creepy as fuck moment,” of which we get many in The Ring.
After the girl’s death, her journalist aunt (Naomi Watts) decides to investigate her death, alongside her former boyfriend, all while caring for her young son. Some of the plot that unfolds about the true story behind the images on the tape are a little convoluted, but that’s not the main reason to watch The Ring. It’s for the creepy effects from director Gore Verbinski as we see how the images on the television come to life and terrorize the main characters. The Ring also features the classic horror movie trope of a false ending, but damn if I didn’t love the actual ending of this film. A wonderful selection for your Halloween viewing pleasure.
So, I thought I was done with my list for this post when I saw something online about the best “last images” of horror movies and I saw one that I didn’t recognize. The film was 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, which I had heard of, but had never seen. I still had time to watch it and write about it, and since we’re here, you can tell how I felt about it.
The premise of this one is also one we’ve seen before. Alison Lohman plays Christine, a loan officer at a bank who has to turn down a poor old woman looking for one last chance before the bank forecloses on her house. After an altercation, the woman puts a curse on Christine and she is soon visited by evil spirits looking to terrorize her in the most frightening ways. There are several times where I had to cover my eyes as some things that director Sam Raimi put on screen truly freaked me out.
Now, this one is not up to par with The Ring for me, probably because Lohman isn’t the same caliber of an actor as Watts, but she is still pretty good in Drag Me to Hell. Her boyfriend is played by Justin Long, who is his typical goofy self, trying to support his girlfriend who is experiencing the most unimaginable terror. There are a ton of jump scares in this movie and the cursed woman, who makes many appearances, is creepy as hell. And like The Ring, this one has an ending that left me gasping as the credits rolled. There you have it, your double feature for tonight – The Ring and Drag Me to Hell.
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed my look at some of my favorite horror movies and found some recommendations to watch during Spooky Movie Season. I’ll be back at the end of the month with reviews of some more new releases, including highlights from the Philadelphia Film Festival. Thanks for reading and if you’d like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe below.