What exactly is Halloween for adults? When it comes down to it, in our continued celebration of the holiday most of us are fruitlessly hearkening back to Power Ranger onesies and candy corn. Is it about being scared? Hardly — the haunted house is strictly passé, small-town stuff (or else a seasonal bonus at Six Flags), and most of us are scared enough already.
Halloween may as well be about movies, horror or otherwise, that touch on the darker, bloodier, or more supernatural side of the human experience. Halloweekend may be a time for parties, but Halloween itself is on a Thursday, so don’t get overambitious.
We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The first (and to date only) horror film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs is a showcase for two indelible performances by Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, both of whom won Oscars as well. Hopkins is chilling as Hannibal Lecter, an imprisoned cannibalistic serial killer recruited to aid in a murder investigation by FBI cadet Clarice Starling (Foster).
Hopkins’ lilting, nasal monologues about his culinary creations (“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti”) are especially appropriate given that Hopkins is one of those rare actors whose momentary presence on the screen alone gives you more nutrition than entire other movies; he is a thespian meal.
The Silence of the Lambs is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Psycho (1960)
Contemporary horror cinema relies almost exclusively on psychoanalysis (Leatherface was abused as a child, Billy Loomis couldn’t handle his parents’ divorce), and that starts with Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of the pop-psychology novel of the same name.
The titular villain, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), kills largely as an expression of curdled mother-love, and the most important character in terms of the evolution of slasher films may not be Bates at all but his psychiatrist, Dr. Richmond (Simon Oakland), who conveniently appears in the final scene to explain Bates’ psychosis to his intended victims.
Psycho is streaming on Netflix.
The Witch (2016)
The directorial debut of horror maven Robert Eggers, The Witch was stylized in its promotional material as The VVitch to mimic 17th-century printing techniques, and at the time of its release I was fond of referring to it as “The Va-Vitch.” But that was largely to attempt, unsuccessfully, to shrug off the disturbing staying power of this resolutely mysterious tale of 1630s New England, in which oppressed femininity finds an outlet in the dark power of the uncharted American landscape.
Black Phillip, a demonic goat who could be called secondary antagonist to the forces of paranoia, gives us an imperishable addition to the horror lexicon: “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”
The Witch is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Alien (1979)
Alien, like its titular creature, seems nigh-unkillable; this year the seventh film in the franchise, the prequel Alien: Romulus, was released to mixed reception, and next year brings the more promising Alien: Earth, a TV series run by the able Noah Hawley (Fargo).
The secret to the Alien-verse’s longevity is the still-electric original film, directed by Ridley Scott, an exercise in interstellar claustrophobia and skittering bumps-in-the-night anchored by Sigourney Weaver’s defining performance as starship warrant officer Ellen Ripley.
Alien is streaming on Hulu.
American Psycho (2000)
His name is Patrick Bateman. He’s 27 years old. He believes in taking care of himself, and, secondarily, axe murder. Mary Harron’s film American Psycho, and the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel on which it’s based, observe the bygone 1980s with a cool remove that lays bare the decade’s soullessness more effectively than any impassioned tirade.
As Bateman, Christian Bale is so enthrallingly sociopathic that he’s become a semi-ironic role model for a surface-obsessed contemporary world that mirrors the ’80s more than we like to acknowledge. News of Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming unnecessary remake is a distraction from Harron’s sterling work.
American Psycho is streaming on Netflix.
The Addams Family (1991)
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One of the final screen roles of the inimitable Raúl Julia, Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family is a pitch-perfect big-screen translation of the 1960s television series, itself based on a series of cartoons by Charles Addams, about a cheerily eerie clan that turns the American family paradigm on its head.
The script, by frequent Tim Burton collaborators Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson, displays a masterful understanding of the dynamics of the Addamses’ universe, in which the family represent a kind of “ethical evil” (largely fun and games), designed to counter the traditional morality of the outside world (which is portrayed as repugnant but gilded by appearances).
The Addams Family is streaming on Pluto TV.
Ghostbusters (1984)
Ivan Reitman’s decade-defining horror comedy is in many ways the opposite of the contemporary blockbuster. Defiantly uninterested in lore (who the hell is Zuul?) and explaining plot developments after the fact or not at all (usually through Dan Aykroyd’s exposition-dumping Raymond Stantz), it’s a thematic mishmash, not easy to digest, which is to say not boring.
How does it work so well? Largely because of Bill Murray, mugging out in front of the action like a man not particularly interested in being there (which he wasn’t). There’s a looseness to Ghostbusters that its sequels and reboots have struggled to re-create; it isn’t so much an action comedy as a hangout movie with genre trappings.
Ghostbusters is streaming on Starz.
The Batman (2022)
How quickly we forget that Matt Reeves’ The Batman, the innovative new approach to a franchise that could easily have started out already tired and dull, was a Halloween flick!
Based in part on the legendary Batman comics limited series The Long Halloween (published in 1996 and 1997) and set on and around the 31st of October, The Batman fakes us out with a series of murders committed in the comics by the serial killer Holiday – in the Reeves-verse, a pathetic online “influencer” version of the Riddler (Paul Dano in his strongest man-child mode) is responsible.
The Batman is streaming on Max.
Get Out (2017)
Horror cinema has always been a vehicle for social commentary (Night of the Living Dead, They Live, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), but it was Jordan Peele’s debut feature that established the 21st-century model for the socially conscious frightfest.
Featuring an instantly iconic central turn by Daniel Kaluuya (who hasn’t had a script worthy of him since then) and a take on white liberalism that made Americans uncomfortable in all the right ways, Get Out eminently deserved its screenplay Oscar (and would have made a far better Best Picture than the visually gorgeous but tonally confused The Shape of Water).
Get Out is streaming on Peacock.
Blow Out (1981)
A brutal and unforgiving indictment of cinema as an art form, Brian de Palma’s horror thriller is a variation on — and entirely superior to — Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 Blow-Up.
Here, instead of a fashion photographer, our protagonist Jack Terry (John Travolta) is a sound technician for slasher B-movies who accidentally records the sound of an assassination in progress and is subsequently stalked by the assassin (John Lithgow). In Blow Out, there are no heroes, and no hope, and the worst of human behavior is ultimately just material for the movies.
Blow Out is streaming on Tubi.
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