The Best Halloween Movies: Which Is The Spookiest? (PHOTOS)

Well, it's about that time: You've got your costume, your candy bowl's full, your pumpkin's carved, you think that you're ready for Halloween.

But, you're not.

We've compiled a list of the best Halloween movies to truly, truly get you in the mood for the spookiest holiday of them all. Let us know what you think!

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Halloween Tribute: The Best Scary Movies

Comments

[catgirl666]

06:03 AM on 10/30/2011

My new favorite, "30 Days of Night" terrifying to think about being isolated like that.

[dutchman]

04:13 AM on 10/30/2011

Tie for first place: Coraline and Rosemary's Baby

[Roman1]

03:00 AM on 10/30/2011

Roger Corman's "The Pit And The Pengulem [sic]" starring Vincent Price. Why that is not on here, I'll never know.

[sara christy]

10:26 AM on 11/06/2011

My first intro into true horror! I agree! It needs to be right up there with Jaws!

[Roman1]

02:43 PM on 11/06/2011

A perfect suspense/horror film. No gore at all. That's what these young turks need to realize. Gore never scared me. JC's Halloween had very if any gore or blood, and it still remains the scariest film I've seen.

[grayplace]

06:06 PM on 10/29/2011

The Sixth Sense was boring. I fell asleep during it.

Forget The Blair Witch Project. It's the worst movie ever made.

[LMPE]

03:19 PM on 10/29/2011

"Ghostbusters" was the only one of those that actually scared me when I was young.

Probably the only movie that could truly qualify as frightening is "The Shining", since it could actually happen.

[panasonic52]

03:10 PM on 10/29/2011

Hocus pocus shouldn't be on the list if we're talknig about great scary movies...but it was definitely one of the most entertaining halloween-themed movies as a child

[Kimberly Colley]

02:19 PM on 10/29/2011

The Olsen twins? Are you flipping kidding me???

[jabster62]

04:52 PM on 10/29/2011

I think they may have been after a mix for all ages, Which I thought was pretty good.

Only change for me:
Rocky Horror Picture Show : Out
Original Dracula w/Bela Lugosi : In

Thumbs up for including Charlie Brown!

[tuffymama]

01:58 PM on 10/29/2011

Black Christmas (the original)

[LMPE]

03:20 PM on 10/29/2011

that one was cool

Did you know that it was directed by the same guy who did "Porky's" and "A Christmas Story"?

[stldjen]

01:01 PM on 10/29/2011

Nightmare before Christmas? The Haunting? Witches of Eastwich? All left out.

[LMPE]

03:21 PM on 10/29/2011

"A Nightmare before Christmas" was in the list. I always thought that it would have been better had it not been a musical.

[GaryNOVA]

10:48 PM on 10/29/2011

Actually the dingleberries who wrote this article wrote it as "the night before christmas" instead of 'nightmare. so in a way they did leave it out.

[Waterlooboy]

12:48 PM on 10/29/2011

The 1959 version of House on Haunted Hill with Vincent Price.

[sara christy]

10:29 AM on 11/06/2011

That's another GREAT one with Vincent in it! That door heaving in and out scared me enough.

[goldiggerrr]

12:31 PM on 10/29/2011

Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That scared me as a teen.

[BN2112]

12:29 PM on 10/29/2011

'Mary Shelley's Frankenstein' with DeNiro as the monster from the mid-90s. It was true to the original story with minor bits of artistic license.
And the classics with Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff.

[Shawn Arnold]

12:03 PM on 10/29/2011

Old school Halloween classic... "Arsenic and Old Lace"!

[BlueRoseofTexas]

11:54 AM on 10/29/2011

What about The Haunting, The Exorcist, Turn of the Screw and the original Frankenstein Dracula movies? All of these were horrifyingly scary but I guess only we Boomers and older folks remember. Pity. Also, the scale rating is flawed with "Scary" being the highest rating as many of these movies were comedies like Beetlejuice and Ghost Busters which were great movies but hardly scary.

[sociocanuck]

02:01 AM on 10/30/2011

Even as 'comedies' there are still elements of Ghostbusters and GB2 that still creep me the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out. Try watching the subway scene in GB2 after giving yourself a few years to forget exactly what happens.

The disembodied voice echo is bad enough, but there's a bit just before there that's even worse than your average YouTube "screamer" because it has exactly the same effect but the unease sticks with you for the rest of the scene while your average cheap startle fades almost immediately... Which is possibly what makes the voice that much more impactful.

You're probably right about the comment about older films, though. Most of my experience with Dracula films were the 'Hammer' output from the 70's, which were more intense (entirely due to Christopher Lee) than scary - and Nosferatu, which is a truly classic film but it's scariness was (I feel) probably more pronounced to its era - but I have to admit limited knowledge of the horror genre otherwise prior to 1980. It's something I had planned to somewhat rectify this weekend, but I'm running out of time, and Turner Classics hasn' been as helpful as it usually is with other genres.

[sara christy]

10:34 AM on 11/06/2011

That's what I thought, too. To mix comedy and terror is hardly a new idea but there should be a different way to rate those special genres. Any suggestions? And the older originals are always left out. Why? Because they're older. Film art is now old enough to be divided into "film eras": Silent, Pre-Color, 50's, Pre-Digital, Digital, etc. Am I right here?

[FrancisFredrick]

11:50 AM on 10/29/2011

I think Friday the 13th should have been number two.