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Boo! With Halloween around the corner, I wanted to provide a list of horror movies to really make it start feeling like spooky season. Trigger warnings/mild spoilers will be given for each movie, so read carefully. There will not be trigger warnings for things like general scariness, blood, jumpscares, etc. But more of the graphic-slasher or disturbing-shock factor movies will be trigger-warning’d and categorized efficiently. This list will also feature more horror-y movies, compared to halloween movies. So you won’t find movies like Hocus Pocus, Coraline, IT, etc. This is for the real scares.

***If you are someone with some sort of “niche” trigger, something like drug abuse, bed-wetting, bugs, etc. I recommend checking out DoesTheDogDie.com for anything trigger-related that isn’t listed below. It covers basically anything you can find in the movie, but can tend to be kind of spoiler-y so be warned. It also has great timestamps for epilepsy warnings!***

GOAT Horror Movies

Of course, we have to start out with some of the greatest horror movies of all time, or the classics if you will. These will be mostly mild-horror movies, with more lore & plot than most other horror movies, but obviously still huge halloween vibes. I personally like to call these “The Big 5”, as they are five of the biggest horror movies out there, and probably the 5 most well-known.

Halloween

TW: Nudity & drug abuse involving underage characters.

Starting out with a classic, Halloween features everyone’s favorite killer Micheal Myers. Micheal Myers is a child-killer (someone who murdered someone when he was a child, not someone who murders children) who has been locked away for decades. But during a prison-transfer, he escapes and goes back to his hometown to seek revenge on his old neighbors and family members. Laurie Strode is the main “survivor” in the movie. If you want to watch a movie with an awesome “final girl”, this is one for you. There’s also tens of sequels and more on the way, so there is hundreds of minutes of screen time for you to binge.

Scream

TW: Teenage alcohol/drug abuse, stalking, excessive gore (intestines), hanging.

Another huge classic, and honestly my favorite classic horror movie. I’d say Scream is one of the big 5 classic movies, and there’s a reason for it. It’s very teenager-y and easy to watch compared to some other horror movies where it’s mostly just jumpscare-blood-jumpscare-kill. It’s actually a really interesting movie to watch, and has pretty suspenseful plot outside of just jumpscare-suspense. The movie feels very Scooby-Doo-y, and I love it. Not to mention, the main characters are all super hot and it has some of the most iconic lines of any horror movie ever. It’s genre-bending, especially for its time and the kills are super cool. 

Friday the 13th

TW: Real animal death (snake), throat slitting, decapitation.

This movie features the hockey mask-wearing killer, Jason. The movie follows a group of teenagers/camp counselors who revisit an abandoned summer camp, which is said to be haunted after a murder happened there over a decade ago. One by one, Jason slowly hunts them all down. I personally think this movie was kind of boring, but definitely has some creative kills. Regardless, it’s still a classic which carries over a lot of tropes and iconic lines into many other genres. 

Nightmare On Elm Street

TW: Pretty tame, nothing major besides a very brief scene of a hanging.

This is actually the only movie of “The Big 5” that I haven’t fully finished. I’ve watched like half of it, and I obviously know how it ends and everything that happens, but I haven’t finished it. This movie’s killer is I’d say the creepiest looking out of all of the Big 5 killers, with a really disturbing face and huge sharp knives for fingers, Freddy Krueger. Though technically considered a slasher, I’d say it’s definitely more tame on the brutal-blood-side of things, compared to the other 4 listed here. Freddy is a “dream-demon” killer, torturing children in their sleep until it eventually seeps into real life and begins killing them there as well. The whole movie is based around the adults ignoring their children’s pleas for help as they don’t believe them, and the police’s incompetence to help these children. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

TW: Real taxidermy of animals, real on-screen cutting of someone’s finger.

My favorite out of the bunch, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the weirdest out of all of these. It centers around a group of hippie teenagers who travel into the countryside to visit their friend’s grandpa’s grave which has rumored to have been vandalized. On the way there they pick up a hitch-hiker who tries to cut them all, and after they break down at what appears to be a gas station, they run into an abandoned house just to be hunted down by a family of cannibals. This one is kind of more disturbing because it hinted at a real life cannibal & serial killer that did most of his killing in the early 70’s, named Elmer Henley. I think this movie is kind of goofy and weird, and I enjoy watching it every time. Plus, this is the only classic horror movie where I can confidently say that the remakes are actually pretty good.

That’s it for this list! I will also be doing other lists including disturbing horror movies, most popular slashers, found-footage movies, halloween movies, etc. If you think one of your favorite classic movies should’ve been here and it didn’t make the cut, there might be a couple reasons why. I either think it’s a bad movie (Blair Witch, The Exorcist, etc), or I don’t think it’s very “scary-halloween-y” (The Shining, Silence of the Lambs). Not going to apologize, I think these 5 movies represent pure Halloween horror binging in its greatest form.