John Carpenter nailed it in one and ruined it, simultaneously. His 1978 slasher movie Halloween isn’t just one of the best Halloween movies—it’s the first and potentially last word when it comes to films set around that holiday, so perfectly capturing both the lovely autumnal ambience of All Hallow’s Eve and the thrum of suburban-legend menace underneath that he and creative partner Debra Hill actually earned the directness of the film’s title. Not only that, Halloween spawned a series that repeated the trick in different ways: The Carpenter-and-Hill-penned Halloween II is a perfectly serviceable slasher sequel that goes deeper into the holiday’s wee hours; the Carpenter-and-Hill-produced Halloween III: Season of the Witch makes trick-or-treating costumes the centerpiece of its Twilight Zone-ish holiday terror. And I don’t know if you’ve heard the good news, but the recent David Gordon Green sequel trilogy is also terrifically evocative of the season. (For that matter, Rob Zombie’s version of Halloween II is pretty good, too.)
But if you’re in the mood for a real Halloween movie… what, we’re going to recommend six or seven movies all from the Halloween series? We could, but what’s the fun or the challenge in that? Instead, in an attempt to separate the Halloween-specific movies (of which there are relatively few) from the merely Halloween-appropriate movies (of which there are legion), we’ve compiled a list of the best non-Halloween movies that have some kind of genuine holiday component to them, whether in setting, staging, or theme, spanning decades of film history. This is trickier than it appears; Halloween as we currently celebrate it in North America only started to really take shape in the 1930s, and was simply not a major part of many movies for the first bunch of decades of the medium, when horror movies were often period pieces and/or monster pictures. Like Thanksgiving, the holiday itself is more often the subject a single scene or sequence, like the Halloween section of Meet Me in St. Louis. (Wonderful, but not a Halloween movie.)
Once Halloween does become more commonly depicted in film, those depictions tend to be understandably kid-skewing. After all, there’s nothing particularly conducive to a great horror movie about a holiday where a bunch of moppets go out and have fun, especially after the Carpenter film staked its claim. But a deeper dive into horror (and other genres!) reveals some particularly Halloween-ready movies; even without a single classic Universal Monster movie set on the holiday, for example, we have alternate versions of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolf Man represented here—plus some truly haunted houses. So grab a pillowcase, fill it with fun-sized candy bars, and go to town with these lucky-thirteen Halloween movies.
The Return of Dracula (1958)
