Ranking the top 5 best movies to watch this Halloween season.

With Halloween being less than 2 weeks away, it is a great time to sit down and watch a scary movie or two. Here is your guide to the 5 best scary movies, in no particular order, to watch during the long-desired spooky season. 

1. Scream 

Scream combines the classic life of a carefree American teen with the type of horror that they choose to cinematically indulge in themselves. Slash, a fictional movie series based on the previous film takes center stage multiple times throughout the movies, inspiring the killers in the current Scream iteration. Each movie progresses with the lives of the characters as they go all the way through college and careers alike up to the most recent movie Scream VI.

This branch off the Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson tree of cinematic brilliance reiterates the role horror and stereotypes play in making an exceptional classic horror film. One reason these movies are so adored is due to their constant shift in not only victimology but character development as well. As such, many movies may start out with a clear suspect that the viewer can pinpoint as the one who done it, but a few more kills into the movie has the whole plot shaken up. This mind-boggling plot will typically stick around to the very end of each movie when eventually the viewers are revealed to the true culprits, and let in on how they were able to evade even your suspicions for the duration of the film. 

2. Halloween

Whether you know it as Halloween, Halloween the story of Michael Myers, or just simply Michael Myers, the movie series has left its mark on the large category of horror films that it is so grouped with. The main character Michael Myers is featured in over 10+ movies that are all watched annually during this time of year. To lay the groundwork, Myers is often described as pure evil, murderous, and even akin to a supernatural force at times. The first cinematic inclusion of Michael begins with him murdering his elder sister Judith Myers in John Carpenter’s Halloween. Later in his life and in that movie Michael will go on to murder multiple more teenagers in his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. For Michael, this was only the beginning of his cinematic spotlight that has seemed to captivate viewers now for decades. Now, Michael has done his fair share of prison time in solitary confinement, but nothing seems to stop him. Michael always seems to find a way back to the joyous streets of children trick-or-treating on Halloween night as he causes mass hysteria. Unlike many movies such as the Scream series, it is not an unknown individual causing the mess, it is Michael. All of the characters in the story know this but the problem comes with stopping him. This is where the movie gains its following and viewership. 

3. It 

Although not directly centered around the theme of Halloween, one thing many people can agree on is their fear, or as some would rather put it, distaste of clowns. The film It embodies this fear and creates a gut-wrenching film centered around a clown that eats children.  The main character in the movie is Pennywise. Pennywise is a killer clown brought to life in the great Stephen King’s novel It, a direct inspiration for the movie. During the time of the release of the movie, nations such as the United States and Great Britain were actually dealing with clown issues of their own, as Killer Clowns had decided to take over and strike fear into the public, causing many people’s coulrophobia, the condition of being afraid of clowns, to be heightened. This, combined with the horror and fear that Pennywise instilled into millions of people has caused for It to be a fantastic watch during this time of the year. 

4. Ghostbusters 

For those who are not the biggest fans of horror movies, a great, though less scary watch for this time of year is the Ghostbusters. Again, the movie is not directly centered around the theme of Halloween, but the plot is all too spooky to not include. When a mass breakout of Ghosts takes place in New York City, it is up to 4 less than qualified, but all that we have, men to save the day. So they embark on their mission to essentially save the world from a catastrophic meeting with another realm, and it is nothing short of brilliant comedy. When imagining 4 grown men saving the world, most do not envision them packed into a small station wagon, dressed in oversized “CWU-27p Flight suits” with a battery pack attached to their back and a vacuum connected to that, but in this film, that is how our “heroes” present.

Though, to give them credit, these underqualified and overutilized men do eventually live up to their wacky goal and save the city, but not without one or two missteps.  Overall, the movie still contains an element of spook in it, while not making those with a low tolerance for horror close their eyes every couple of minutes. 

5.  Nightmare on Elm Street

Just when you thought you couldn’t get enough of the slasher films, Freddy Krueger had something to say about it! In this movie, sweet dreams are a thing of the past. In this movie kids only die when asleep, but it is not how you would think. When authorities are quick to point fingers at romantic partners or other people with apparent motives for the murder, the killings keep happening. No matter who is in the house it seems it does not matter. Wes Craven does a fantastic job of incorporating the underlying motif of false security to pigeonhole the characters as to how they can escape the killer. 

In the case of scary movies for this Halloween season, there are so many to choose from, and aside from the 5 mentioned in this list, there are many more phenomenal ones I have yet to watch. So make sure to give all of these a try and don’t forget to never watch alone!