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Halloween
(1978)Stream it on Crackle.
When people ask me what my favorite horror movie is, John Carpenter’s groundbreaking shocker comes out on top. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a high schooler who gets stalked on Halloween night by an escaped lunatic named Michael Myers. Today it sounds like any old horror movie. But Carpenter was prophetic with narrative choices that horror now takes for granted: a masked killing-machine villain, a strong-willed final girl next door, creatively depicted deaths, touches of dark comedy. (And a score that sounds like a chase.) Together they make “Halloween” my top Halloween treat.
The Exorcist
(1973)Stream it on Max.
American filmgoers’ heads spun when the director William Friedkin unleashed his shocking film in theaters the day after Christmas. Based on William Peter Blatty’s novel, it’s about a woman (Ellen Burstyn) who’s so desperate to save her possessed 12‐year‐old daughter (Linda Blair) that she enlists priests (Jason Miller and Max von Sydow) to perform an exorcism. It’s not just any demon they’re up against, but a potty-mouthed, vomit-spewing, blasphemy-happy entity that repulsed audiences. (A theater guard told this newspaper that the film had caused heart attacks and perhaps a miscarriage.) “The Exorcist” was a hit that defined the modern possession movie.
Friday the 13th
(1980)
While “Halloween” paved the way for the slasher’s golden age in the 1980s, it was Sean S. Cunningham’s “Friday the 13th” that made summer camp one of horror’s most abiding deadly destinations. (It also helped Hollywood realize that building a slasher franchise around a masked killer could lead to box office gold.) Gory and darkly comical, the film is about a killer who knocks off counselors (including one played by a young Kevin Bacon) at a summer camp where a boy named Jason Voorhees died in the 1950s. With 12 films (so far), the franchise has turned a hockey mask into a singular brand.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
(1985)Stream it on Max.
The original “Nightmare on Elm Street” is an important modern horror film, and one of the best of the 1980s. But Jack Sholder’s sequel is my favorite because it’s a forthrightly queer film in a genre with a shamefully homophobic past. Robert Englund returns to play the nightmare-stalking, sweater-wearing Freddy Krueger, only this time he haunts the suburbs’ queer spaces: what in the ’80s we called an “alternative” bar; a high school shower room; and the body of a sexually anxious final boy, tenderly played by Mark Patton, the subject of the eye-opening documentary “Scream, Queen!” Blessedly, the gayness here is text, not subtext.
Get Out
(2017)Stream it on Tubi.
Jordan Peele’s ingeniously written, intensely unnerving thriller follows in the footsteps of “White Dog,” “The People Under the Stairs” and other horror films about that old devil next door: American racism. What’s singular about Peele’s film is how it skewers the lie of a post-racial America that the Obama presidency supposedly ushered in. Daniel Kaluuya is unforgettable as a Black man who travels with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to her family’s suburban estate where, through a series of creepy microaggressions and forced hypnotic states, white people are revealed “as insatiable predators of Blackness,” as The Times’s Wesley Morris put it.
The Blair Witch Project
(1999)Stream it on Freevee.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I watched this film alone at a sold-out theater. Social media wasn’t a thing then, and for days I couldn’t figure out if it was a documentary or not. What it turned out to be was a game-changing film that popularized a new form of horror: found footage. (It wasn’t a totally novel concept; “Cannibal Holocaust” tried it in 1980.) Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s fictional film is made up of the supposed footage that three young documentarians took in the Maryland woods before mysteriously disappearing. The final minutes get my vote for the scariest horror movie ending.
Ringu
(1998)Stream it on Tubi.
The urban legend goes like this: You watch a videotape. You get a phone call. A week later you die. Be on the lookout for the long black-haired girl in a white dress who walks funny. Hideo Nakata’s bleak, barely gory slow-burn haunting film was a hit in Asia, and spawned several other movies that helped usher in the cinematic movement that became known as J-horror. Hollywood noticed, greenlighting J-horror remakes that, in the case of “The Ring” (2002), were actually good.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
(1922)Stream it on Tubi.
If you’re curious to experience silent-era horror, F.W. Murnau’s enduring vampire story is a knockout. The bloodsucker here is the lanky, rodent-looking Transylvanian Count Orlok (played with radiant evil by the German actor Max Schreck), whose nightly quests for blood are told via ravishingly expressionistic touches, including some of the most sinister shadow play you’ll ever see onscreen. Good luck getting to sleep after watching Orlok rise straight up out of his coffin or climb tall stairs, his claw-like fingers outstretched in silhouette against the wall.
Candyman
(1992)Stream it on Peacock.
I didn’t watch Bernard Rose’s horror film until the Covid lockdown months, and I kicked myself for not sooner experiencing this macabre film’s timely and timeless message about racism and class injustices. Set mostly at a Chicago housing complex, it’s about a white doctoral student (Virginia Madsen) who encounters supernatural evils as she explores the legend of Candyman (Tony Todd, magnetic), a Black man who can be summoned by saying his name five times into a mirror. Anthony B. Richmond’s cinematography and Philip Glass’s score artfully and elegantly emphasize the film’s message about Black pain.
Jennifer’s Body
(2009)Stream it on Max.
The trailer for Karyn Kusama’s film makes it look like a made-for-CW monster comedy. Don’t be fooled. It’s a feminist, renegade and unsettling (and at times very funny) story about sexual assault and emotional trauma, masquerading as a high school possession killer-thriller. Guided by Diablo Cody’s take-no-prisoners script, Megan Fox shines as a beautiful young woman whose supernatural powers come with heartbreakingly human consequences. Her sexual relationship with her best friend, played by Amanda Seyfried, queers the terror. I can’t remember a horror film that made me laugh and cry with equal intensity.
Suspiria
(1977)Stream it on Tubi.
Dario Argento’s breathless supernatural fever dream is the perfect place to start if you’ve never seen a giallo, the extravagantly macabre and impossibly chic Italian horror genre that had its heyday in the 1970s. Jessica Harper plays an American ballet student at a prestigious European dance academy, where she’s tortured by phantasmic occurrences rendered in giallo’s signature visual style: speedy zooms, jewel-toned lights, grisly deaths involving glass. The score, a collaboration between the group Goblin and Argento himself, sounds like what demons would dance to as flames engulf an Italian disco.
Messiah of Evil
(1973)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
Next to the final minutes of “The Blair Witch Project,” this visually stunning zombie film, written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, features one of my favorite scary scenes. It takes place inside a movie theater, where over the course of several brilliantly directed minutes a young woman is devoured in front of the screen by a slowly creeping hoard of demons. The film melds a “California Girls” sensibility (the Beach Boys song, to be clear) with boho fashion and depraved supernatural horror in a way that’s feminine, mesmerizing and lurid. There’s no other horror film quite like it.
Night of the Living Dead
(1968)Stream it on Max.
The maverick director George A. Romero said it was an accident that his low-budget black-and-white zombie film, shot mostly at a farm in rural Pennsylvania, was about racism in America. But it’s hard to see this still very scary film as anything but about race and white supremacy. Duane Jones gives a powerful performance as what was then a horror movie rarity — a Black leading man — who tries to save a barricaded farmhouse full of scared white people from the undead clawing their way inside. The nerve-tingling opening scene is an excellent example of how to scare a lot by doing little.
Psycho
(1960)Stream it on Peacock.
Janet Leigh’s shower scene. Anthony Perkins’s creepy stare. One character’s early exit. The final reveal. For the five of