Let this be the year—if you haven’t already done so—to finally work up the courage to see Tobe Hooper’s criminally underrated classic, a top-rank satire of American class warfare (survival of the hungriest), teenage misadventure in the backwoods and one of the darkest masterpieces of the ’70s. Though shrouded in a gruesome reputation generated by that title, Texas isn’t particularly gory. It is, however, the scariest movie ever made.
Let’s address the obvious question right off the (vampire) bat: what’s the difference between a horror movie and a Halloween movie? For us – and presumably, the folks for whom spooky season isn’t a holiday or even a month, but a whole lifestyle – there is a fine distinction, perhaps best summed up as: all Halloween movies are scary, but not all scary movies are Halloween movies.
In other words, there are horror flicks worth watching basically any time of the year, but only a specific subcategory of those are ideal for viewing in October. A movie like, say, Don’t Look Now, is certainly disturbing, and a triumph of the horror genre. But its scares are perhaps a bit too cerebral for the time of year when everyone has smiling pumpkins on their porches and 12-foot Home Depot skeletons on their front lawns. You want your frights to be visceral, hard-hitting and, most of all, fun. In that spirit, here are 45 great movies to drop in your queue in the lead up to All Hallow’s Eve.
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