We all know that Halloween is around the corner. If you're like me, the spooky spirit starts just about as soon as September does. To help get me in the mood for the best time of the year, a scary movie marathon is always in order. Don't miss these 10 films this year during your own marathon!
10. "Get Out"
"Get Out" is about a black man and a white woman in a relationship where the woman is taking her boyfriend back to meet her family. Although his friend is skeptical about the main guy meeting her white family, he goes anyway and things start getting weird nearly right off the bat. This was an incredible film, but wasn't quite spooky enough to make it lower on the list. Spooky or not, this is still a movie you should watch at some point.
9. "The Babadook"
A gay icon and a stellar meme, "The Babadook" is about a widowed mother who lives with her young son who is terrified of monsters lurking around the house. She brushes him off as just a scared kid until a book called "The Babadook" starts to become all too real. I know this movie was taken as a huge joke, but for real it was actually pretty spooky. I was Babashook.
8. "Mama"
This movie tells the story of two young sisters who were abandoned by their father when they were incredibly young in the forest. For years, they survived in the wild under the care of "mama." When they're discovered and taken in years later, it seems that their "mama" isn't quite ready to let them go just yet. This movie came out a while ago, but I remember it vividly as being so creepy. I just saw it again recently on TV and it was just as good as the first one.
7. "The Conjuring"
"The Conjuring" is about a family that moves into a new home and starts to notice some spooky things happening around the house. This was also the introduction of Ed and Lorraine Warren, paranormal investigator gods, into the current horror movie universe. This is like the pinnacle of recent scary movies. It was the start of an era of scary movies that's been pretty dang hard to beat. While it's not my favorite of the era, it's quite the classic and gives a good haunted house story.
6. "It" (2017)
"It" is a movie based on a Stephen King novel that basically instilled the world's fear of clowns. 'It' is about a killer clown that lives in the sewers and feeds off fear and children. He scares the living daylights out of kids and then lures them in and eats them. This is probably the best scary clown movie I've ever seen. It was also an even better movie in the recent remake. Pennywise was a million times scarier and I was shook for a vast majority of the remake, whereas in the original, there was a lot of dead time (ba dum tss) that dragged on a little too long.
5. The Insidious series
The Insidious movies follow various characters through their journey into realizing that they can explore a different realm that lives in the same plane as your own. It's kind of hard to explain, but worth watching. It was pretty cool as a series too because there were strange things that happened in the first movie that was clearly explained in the second movie. It was pretty cool to see the two movies come together so perfectly. It was a sequel that improved the original and that's really rare, especially in horror films.
4. Saw movies
The Saw movies all have different individual storylines, but center around Jigsaw who sets intricate traps for people to enforce his own set of jurisdiction. This is intensely psychologically screwy and has some of the most creative traps and challenges that I've ever seen. These movies keep you on your toes and thinking and this series is definitely worth a binge watch.
3. "Sinister 2"
This movie follows the same premise of the first, but with some new families that add a fairly gruesome element to the mix. Definitely a quality sequel.
2. "Sinister"
"Sinister" follows the story of a family that moves into a house and finds a bin of tapes that show detailed tapings of a child in the family murdering their family before miraculously disappearing. When strange things start happening within the family that moved in, it's only a matter of time before history tries to repeat itself. This is by far my favorite newer scary movie. It has a pretty cool pattern to it and it was pretty intense once you figured out the pattern.
1. "Hocus Pocus"
"Hocus Pocus" tells the story of the Sanderson sisters who used to rule the land by luring in children to feast on back in the day until they were vanished indefinitely to only be resurrected by a virgin lighting the black flame candle in their old house. On a particular Halloween, a few kids light the candle and set the sisters free to roam the world for a Halloween. This is THAT movie. There is no Halloween movie that will ever compare to "Hocus Pocus." It's only terribly scary if you're younger, but it's a classic for people of all ages.
