A few weeks ago, John Hodgman put out a call for movie recommendations for Halloween; his plan was to program a scary film every day for the month of October.
Since people have been asking me for scary movie recommendations, here’s the list I curated for him, in chronological order. Pick a couple. Or try to barrel through all 31 before midnight on the 31st. If nothing else, you’ll have some really esoteric nightmares when you’re done.
1. Cat People (Lewton, 1942)
2. Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
3. Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960)
4. The Innocents (Clayton, 1961)
5. The Haunting (Wise, 1963)
6. Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)
7. Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968)
8. Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968)
9. The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
10. Don’t Look Now (Roeg, 1973)
11. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
12. Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
13. Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
14. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman, 1978)
15. Alien (Scott, 1979)
16. The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)
17. The Thing (Carpenter, 1982)
18. The Dead Zone (Cronenberg, 1983)
19. The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)
20. Cure (Kurosawa, 1997)
21. The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan, 1999)
22. The Blair Witch Project (Myrick/Sanchez, 1999)
23. Pulse/Kairo (Kurosawa, 2001)
24. The Devil’s Backbone (del Toro, 2001)
25. The Ring (Verbinski, 2002)
26. 28 Days Later … (Boyle, 2003)
27. Dawn of the Dead (Snyder, 2004)
28. Let the Right One In (Alfredson, 2008)
29. The Woman in Black (Watkins, 2012)
30. Mama (Muschietti, 2013)
31. Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013)
BONUS TV-MOVIES
Trilogy of Terror (Curtis, 1975)
Ghostwatch (Manning, 1992)
There you go! If you can’t find something worth watching in there, think about something worth rewatching. I’m leaning heavily towards Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now, myself.
I would have thrown in ‘The Descent’, ‘The Shining’ and ‘Eraserhead’, but that’s just me. ‘Eraserhead’ would also fit in a list of 31 great comedies, depending on one’s mood.
Of the three, “The Descent” is the one I’m most irritated with myself for leaving out. But yeah, all good choices.