Happy Halloween!

Since I kicked off October and the press for the release of Glowing in the Dark with a list of my 13 Favorite Horror Films, I thought it would be fun to end the month and commemorate the holiday with a list of 31 of my favorite horror films, 31 being both the reverse of 13 and the number of days in the month.

This list is, if anything, even more haphazard and recklessly constructed than the last one, with somehow even more glaring exclusions and baffling omissions, despite having nearly three times as many movies on it.

While I was able to incorporate several titles that it was literally painful not to include in the last list, it turns out that 31 still isn’t anywhere near enough, and several titles on this list are performing double duty, acting as stand-ins for a whole raft of other films. Night Creatures most notably is nowhere near the best of Hammer’s gothic chillers, but it was my first and is a sentimental favorite, so it represents my love for that whole category of pictures.

Similarly, this list could easily have half-a-dozen or more William Castle movies, and it currently contains exactly zero films from the production ouevre of Val Lewton, though Curse of the Demon nicely acts as a stand-in for such flicks as I Walked with a Zombie or Cat People.

I think John Carpenter is the only director with two movies on this list, and it could easily have been twice that number or more. Meanwhile, Guillermo del Toro doesn’t have a single flick in the running, in no small part because my favorites from his body of work are sufficiently fringe cases that I was able to justify excluding them.

(Is Pacific Rim a horror movie? It’s a monster movie, to be sure, but like King Kong, it sits enough in other categories that I felt okay not including it, even though both of those titles belong here every bit as much as anything else on this list. Maybe in November I’ll post “My X Favorite Movies That I Felt Okay Excluding from the Horror Lists on Some Grounds or Other.”)

All of which is to say that this list is incomplete, slapdash, and subject to change and, even to the extent that it is representative of my own true favorites, I mean just that and nothing more. I’m not suggesting that these are the best horror movies around (some of them are), or that they’re the most important (again, some are), but merely that they mean something special to me – joining the ranks of dozens and dozens of other movies that could have easily been here instead.

Hopefully, you’ll find this list fun, and maybe find a new favorite or two, especially if you’re looking for something to fill in your Halloween viewing.

As was the case in my list of 13, these are presented in order of release date, not preference. Because trying to stack them by preference is an even more doomed enterprise than listing them out in the first place.

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

2. The Cat and the Canary (1927)

3. The Old Dark House (1932)

4. Doctor X (1932)

5. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

6. Curse of the Demon (1957)

7. House on Haunted Hill (1959)

8. Mill of the Stone Women (1960)

9. The Ship of Monsters (1960)

10. Night Creatures (1962)

11. Matango (1963)

12. Blood and Black Lace (1964)

13. The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964)

14. Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

15. Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

16. Viy (1967)

17. The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

18. The Legend of Hell House (1973)

19. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

20. House (1977)

21. Suspiria (1977)

22. The Fog (1980)

23. The Thing (1982)

24. The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

25. Dolls (1986)

26. Gremlins 2 (1990)

27. Nightbreed (1990)

28. Tremors (1990)

29. Ghostwatch (1992)

30. Noroi: The Curse (2005)

31. Trick ‘r Treat (2007)