Anyone can watch a hearse-load of scary movies at Halloween—and lots of us do—but how many of those people try and seek out the films most indebted to, or representative of, the holiday itself? Let me ask another question: What makes a film register as emblematically Halloween-esque fare?
Halloween, like the best horror, offers us an opportunity for an immersive experience. That doesn’t mean we’re required to don a costume and make like we’re 7 years old again, but it can involve sitting down with a film and saying, “Okay, imagination, let’s do our thing!” Essential Halloween movies work with our imaginations by making sure they’re involved. These movies don’t have this need to hammer home all of their points like nails in a coffin. They’re cool—enough so to lower your blood temperature—with suggesting rather than showing, and we take it from there, heading off for darker—albeit pleasing—places than if we’d been passive in our viewing. We’re on active horror-watching duty, ready to receive incoming thrills.
I have my own… let’s call them preferred particulars rather than incantatory decrees… for what makes a Halloween film. Slasher stuff doesn’t cut it—ironically. Gothic works well. Give me graveyards—not cemeteries—abbeys, earth boxes, dungeons, angry villagers, torchlight, full moons with clouds passing over their faces, fangs, silhouetted witches, mad scientists, hunchbacks, crunching leaves, wind that all but warns you to go back, trees like woody skeletons, abandoned watchtowers, gibbets, the American northeast, English villages, folk tales rather than urban legends, puncture marks, lycanthropy, electrodes, indeterminate points in time, religious iconography, stories told in taverns before the uneasy walk home, belfries and the bats in them, spades, and stakes. Black and white is often better. So is bloodless. I’m less interested in opened veins than the opening of cobweb-bedecked passageways to Halloween’s imaginative essence.
Halloween is perfect for watching movies where we live. Alone. Or nearly alone. Movie theaters bring us together for that communal feeling of sharing a viewing experience, but there’s something about being off on your own, curled up in the dark, ghosts and monsters on the TV, that fairly screams Halloween. Have you ever noticed in modern Halloween films how many people are watching movies in this very manner? A character will have on The Thing from Another World and we think, “There’s a film that hits the spot this time of year! I need to watch it again!”
So how about some Halloween spot-hitters, then, which you can locate online and partake of in your own private watchtower by yourself or with your resident ghosts and ghouls?
First, we need some fun. Halloween deals in death, but it’s not meant to be a dirge, is it? Anytime I watch a film by producer/director William Castle, I think, “This man had himself a blast making this movie.” His films sported gimmicks, but the gimmick wasn’t the thrust, as gimmicks too often are. The gimmick was garnish. Castle’s pictures have a warmth that blends with the scares—they remind me of E.F. Benson’s ghost stories in that capacity. A certain coziness. Monsters are huge for Halloween, but ghosts are the holiday’s quintessential supernatural characters. The former are a step removed—just a step—but ghosts are right on the spot. Halloween Central.
13 Ghosts (1960) is prime ghostly Castle. It features a haunted house, a Ouija board, a likable family, the always pleasing Martin Milner, simple but effective special effects (the best kind), Margaret Hamilton in witchy mode, a secret chamber, a séance, ghost-viewing goggles, and, of course, that baker’s dozen of our titular friends. I’m always impressed by how Castle’s films stand up now. Okay, so he wasn’t Val Lewton, but he made solid horror fare, and it works for people of all ages. I don’t like the idea of leaving people behind with Halloween and Castle made sure there was room for everyone under his spooky roof.
Short works well for Halloween and so does organic. We don’t want a Halloween epic. Edgar Allan Poe opined that if you can’t read a story in one sitting, it’s unlikely worth your time, and what he meant is that concentrated beats diffuse. The same goes for Halloween-suited films. They get in and get out, and it’s on to the next house, so to speak. We’re also not desirous of anything over-processed. Save the CGI gadgetry for elsewhere and tap into the imagination instead.
Halloween movies don’t have to involve spirits, but it is paramount that they be spirited. Few ghost stories are more effective than M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” which appeared in his 1904 collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Michael Hordern starred in the 1968 adaptation for British television, but there was also a fascinating, earlier undertaking from 1956 made by the folks of what was known as the North Downs Cinematograph Society. In other words, a movie club.
Taking to an Essex beach inhabited almost solely by the wind, as well as a hotel and its barroom, these amateurs fashioned a 10-minute take on James’s tale that hits you where Halloween lives. The story is about a man who finds an ancient whistle and blows it, summoning a figure who trails him across the groynes and later turns up in his bedroom linen. It’s actually about more than that, but action-wise, that’s the gist, which is the focus here. The film is silent save for the sound of wind and sea added in what we’ll call post-production. To watch this short is to be transfixed by it. We’re put under a craggy coast of a spell, where all is sea birds and specters and a horror that is immemorial, pass though it does.
How about a Halloween film that features some costume-donning? Namely, a couple of people who decide to outfit themselves as vampires? I could be describing you and a buddy from when you were kids, but instead I’m referring to Tod Browning’s 1935 film Mark of the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi and Carroll Borland as the aforementioned duo. Admittedly, I gave away the “catch” at the end, but most lovers of this movie elect to treat the film as if that catch wasn’t in it, and plot is almost beside the point with such a film. What’s the plot to Halloween? Exactly. I guess you could say that Mark of the Vampire is a Halloween vibe, if you were of a 21st-century mind to do so.
I’d contend that Bela Lugosi always wanted to be Dracula again after starring in Browning’s famous 1931 film about the count. Think of it like finding your Hall of Fame Halloween costume, the one that you look back on the most as that time you nailed it. I bet that’s a Dracula costume for many of us boys, so who’s to blame Lugosi, the man who was buried in a Dracula cape?
Mark of the Vampire has the look of a painting come to life. It’s a form of stylized atmosphere that’s never undercut by artifice. The staged aspect of a number of the movie’s compositions remain in service to its mood. When we close our eyes and imagine vampires enshrouded in fog at the edge of some copse, we’re near the mark of Mark of the Vampire’s imagistic essence. Lugosi is Dracula here in all but name, but a Dracula whose life is seen from B-roll footage rather than as the focus of the action. I certainly believe that in his mind he was Dracula. I’ll leave it up to you to work out the answer as to whether we can ever truly go home again, but Mark of the Vampire suggests there’s at least a coffin to return to for the thespian still seeking the lifeblood of his best part.
We idealize an internal, visual conception of Halloween, the same as we do with Christmas. Those “dream” versions then serve as perfective grist for outwardly manifested fabrications on the manufacturing front and now with AI-generated art. Who isn’t overly familiar with stock, over-egged depictions of Christmas featuring fully decorated trees on every street corner and two feet of snow atop the ground for all of those sleighs laden with wrapped gifts that the townsfolk are riding around in? We think, “Sure, if you say so,” knowing that nothing was ever like that, nor would you want it to be. Too much.
But the visual totems are the visual totems and we love to see them rendered honestly, if still a touch overdressed. For Halloween, our mind’s eyes summon the cherished symbols: broomsticks, jack-o’-lanterns, night clouds, a bright moon. Put them all together and what do you have? Halloween as it should be and still not overly busy. Walt Disney’s eight-minute cartoon Trick or Treat, from 1952, is as elementally Halloween—so far as the American holiday goes—as anything ever shown in a movie theater. If there was one film to screen for an alien on a break from warring against the world to show said alien what Halloween the out-of-doors-holiday was most about, you couldn’t do better than this charming spell-caster.
We have Huey, Dewey, and Louie as the trick-or-treaters, a witch, and Donald Duck, who, unsurprisingly, is up to the most tricks. Throw in one of those Halloween songs that is catchy in any era (I’m humming it as we speak), a town from out of a Halloween storybook, and smart touches for adults—such as a reference to Macbeth—who may have actually read a book or two like people used to do, and you get a work that no one could fail to like. Perhaps a Halloween Grinch. But I wouldn’t bet my last candy bar on it.
Sticking to the 1950s and the medium of color, there’s 1958’s The Blob. These kids are older (and not close to being a kid in Steve McQueen’s case, which doesn’t matter), but there’s a Halloween theme all the same. They’re out having fun, going from place to place—albeit in cars—and then they get a doozy of a scare in the night. The Blob itself is akin to some chewy candy center come to monstrous, building-sized life.
I love the idea of fun-horror. Bad stuff goes down, but we’re never depressed or all that disheartened. Tone has much to do with this, and tonally The Blob is what we might think of as a horror film in a major key. There’s an iconic movie theater scene—ideal for our purposes—and while we’re removed from the Gothic, the picture takes place in the night where things definitely go bump the same as they do in overt Gothic works like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk or Robert Wise’s The Haunting. Additionally, The Blob is a top film to watch while eating candy, which seems a worthy consideration to me. Have you ever noticed that color pictures make for better while-you-watch candy consumption? These colors pop. Has anything ever been the exact same color of the Blob? I’d say not. And let’s not forget the song. Horror hit. I’ll put it on the “Monster Mash” tier.
We’re fashioning quite the mini-marathon program, but we need a big finale. We’ve done ghosts, witches, vampires, and we’ll finish with a monster, that being the fellow created by a certain scientist who lights up the screen—after being brought to life by some lightning—in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. Think Halloween costumes and who is coming to mind first? It’s Dracula and the Frankenstein creation in a dead heat, right? Red marker for blood on the chin and wax fangs, green mask, and whatever you used for electrodes affixed to the neck. We’re talking chocolate or vanilla. It all comes back to one or the other.
I’d begun by mentioning touchstones of Halloween horror, and most of them are present in Frankenstein. This is the showroom model for Halloween pictures, the ultimate go-to. The movie gets less critical credit than it should because of all the praise historians like to throw at its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. Compare Frankenstein with the same year’s Dracula; it’s the difference between filmic folk art and commanding moviemaking. Whale was in total control. I’ll go so far as to say this is a perfect movie, and Halloween-wise it’s downright messianic, like Henry Frankenstein himself for a spell. If Halloween didn’t exist, you could invent the holiday from out of this picture. Take away all of the other films we might watch in late October and leave us with only Frankenstein, and that Halloween heart of dead tissue would continue to beat.
I love the scene when the Monster enters the house in time for the wedding and we hear his menacing growls in different places at once. Is this a monster or a ghost? Both? What in Hades is going on? What in Halloween is going on here, for that matter? I’ll tell you: we’re scared and we love it. The dead are out and about, but it’s our imaginations that are up and running and we’re so alive as a result. Fortunately for us, we don’t need a laboratory with a roof that opens and a loyal assistant down for a night of grave robbing. Choose the right movies to fire your imagination and you’ll hit a Halloween high that no other devilish combo of tricks and treats can match. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
Years ago, on Film Comment’s website, I introduced a column called Streaming Pile—one that, as its tagline stated, was “dedicated, though not exclusively, to the seedier side of VOD.”
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