Say it’s four days before Halloween, and you want to cue up some Halloween happiness, kind of sample across the subgenres, try out two or three different tones. Here’s what I rec:

Murder Party

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI_DqgxNR7U

My favorite horror is always closed-door horror, And Then There Were None style. This isn’t quite as twisty as Agatha Christie, but it’s eighty minutes of hilarious gore, set on Halloween night.

Ginger Snaps

Of course I’ve got a werewolf movie shuffled in, here. My favorite of them all. And when Ginger’s partway wolfed out, and walking in what feels like slow-motion through that Halloween party? I want to be her so bad, right there.

Trick ‘r Treat

The trick with anthologies is getting the wraparound right. Trick ‘r Treat, it connects its segments in a completely different way, such that this hardly feels like an anthology anymore. So, so satisfying. Each segment lands perfectly.

Halloween 1 & 2

I mean, this is where the whole slasher boom starts, right? And this slasher, it always works. I like to run the first and the second back to back when I can, since the second starts right where the first stops doesn’t stop.

And? That’s five films. It’s not the most you could watch between now and the night, but, if you’re trying to pack in cruising all the Halloween stores, making all the haunted houses, stockpiling all the candy, that’s maybe a goodly amount.

And, if everybody’s standing around your kitchen trying to eat last-minute pizza without messing up their cool make-up, it never hurts to pop this VHS in, let it play in the background:

Have a spooky Halloween. Make it last as long as you possibly can.