The Ghoulish Plot: a doctor moves his family to a small town in Maine. Because it’s a Stephen King story, it’s always Maine. The dude LOVES Maine and shows that love by setting every spooky-ass story about ghosts and demons and intergalactic killer clowns in Maine. Maybe that’s how he keeps it beautiful and the lines short for brunch?

But anyway: the doctor and his young family get to Maine and move into their big rural farmhouse with a guy across the street who looks weirdly like Herman Munster, except he lives alone and drinks and smokes like people did in the 80s. Their house is also on a rural road that is unfortunately busy with semi traffic from a nearby company, with trucks hauling ass at all hours of the night and laying waste to anything that dares to cross without looking both ways.

They also find a path up to a remote and creepy cemetery that their new neighbor informs them is the “Pet Cemetery,” except spelled with an “S” because the sign was made by kids and kids are stupid/cute.

Before long, while the family is away, the family cat wanders into the street and gets kerblooeyed by a truck. The doc’s new neighbor shows him the way up to another level of the pet cemetery on old Indian burial grounds, where he buries his cat. The next morning, he discovers that the cat has returned…but is an even meaner and shittier version of the cat. Which, for cat owners, automatically means you assume they’re going to spend up to 99% of their day barfing on your stuff.

One afternoon while the family is outside enjoying a sunny day, their young toddler son runs into the road and meets the same fate as the cat. Despondent and angry, the doctor decides to do the unthinkable and bury him in the same cemetery as the cat, despite warnings from his neighbor that people that go in the ground are not the same ones that come back. Gosh, I wonder what will happen?

I saw this one when I was a kid, and I remember it spooking me but now as a middle-aged adult it’s mostly hilarious. Although now that I’ve been around toddlers, the thought of a toddler loose with a scalpel in the house is potentially the most terrifying thing I could imagine.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: that they don’t immediately put up a goddamn fence after they move in. JUST BUILD A FENCE, DUMMY.

Spookiness Factor: the movie looks autumn-y and good for Halloween, the gore is good and the sister Zelda still made me jump at a specific section.

Rating: 6 out of 10 Nerds

The Ghoulish Plot: gather round kiddos and let me tell you a tale of a state so comfortable and rich and white, that the most common terrifying issues you may face while in that state are that your tee time is pushed back due to rain, or that the Republican you quietly supported gave you slightly less of an upper-crust tax cut than you were expecting. Looks like the Beamer is gonna have to last another season, mumzy!

This is Connecticut, home mostly to people who want to be close to NYC but would prefer to not have to say they live in Jersey. We join Sara in 1987 as she is driving her son to and from chemo treatments on long, difficult drives from their current home. They decide to simplify their problems by renting a place closer to the hospital and find a location that looks great, can fit their whole family, and whoopsie-doodles! Just happens to be the former site of a funeral home run by an insane man who enjoyed doing satanic experiments and rituals on corpses to bind their souls to the house. But on the plus side, the water pressure in the house is pretty solid.

The family moves in, including Sara’s husband who begins commuting back and forth regularly and we discover is a recovering alcoholic, which in movie terms means we automatically start the countdown until he falls off the wagon. As a fellow “friend of Bill,” this is among the most annoying tropes in all scriptwriting (and this movie features plenty of straight-from-“Save The Cat”-trope screenwriting) and just once it would be nice to see a character be introduced as a recovering drunk, and then at the end of the movie do what many of us would do: say, “man, I wish I could have a drink after that! Welp, time to celebrate with a Diet Coke!” and fade to black.

Matt, the son, starts seeing visions of the spirits trapped in the house as well as a young boy who initially appears to have been collaborating with the undertaker…until we realize he may have been trying to free the spirits from his clutches.

This flick was released a few years before “The Conjuring” but features some of the same jumpy-scary tricks, combined with some more outright nasty visual gore and torture aspects a la the “Saw” franchise, which was still running strong at this point. It’s not necessarily a good mixture of either, and is a fairly straightforward paint-by-numbers fictional retelling of a story based in fact that ends with corpses coming out of the walls and a giant fire and a knowing ghost nod that even the writers of Scooby Doo would call “unearned.”

The Scariest Part of the Movie: the house in the story is apparently still standing and being rented to families and never actually burnt down. So if you wanted, you could go live in the former funeral home of Satan!

Spookiness Factor: some jumps and grossout stuff, including bodies carved with symbols. But just like The Conjuring flicks, if you’re familiar at all with the formula you’ll see it all coming.

Rating: 3 out of 10 Swedish Fish

The Ghoulish Plot: after two successful (and classic) “Halloween” entries featuring Michael Myers, it was decided that the third movie would do the most logical thing possible: get rid of the notorious killer everybody knew, and attempt to transform the series into an anthology series instead. I’m not gonna argue that the Michael Myers character never got stale, but by the end of this movie you’re wishing he’d show up and dance a jig or something.

Set with just a few days before Halloween in the early 80s, a doctor in northern California takes in a patient who is suddenly killed by a weird intruder in a suit, who then retreats to his car and lights himself on fire. As they investigate they discover a weird Halloween mask the man was carrying and his daughter shows up looking for more information into why her dad was killed.

They soon realize the mask is part of a line of masks being marketed heavily to kids all over the country and they’re being made by a weird company run by a strange man in a factory filled with more weird dudes in suits who look like the one who committed the hospital murder. The doctor and the woman investigating her father’s death also shack up in a motel because hey, baby, all this weird witchy stuff ain’t gotta get in the way of us making looooove, right?

Turns out the whole thing is a weird tribute to Samhain rituals that includes part of stone henge being stolen to give the masks a mystical power so when the right signal is sent, everybody wearing the masks is sacrificed to pagan gods. Will our heroes escape the creepy business man and save the country’s kids from having their brains fried?

This entry in the “Halloween” series is a mediocre Twilight Zone episode stretched to 90 minutes, featuring some characters you don’t care about played by actors who aren’t very good. It ends with a dumb cliffhanger that you’ll never have resolved. The only real positive part is the cool synthy soundtrack which was actually written and performed by John Carpenter, the cowriter/director of the first two movies. He was apparently very cool with them screwing up his franchise as long as he got to drop some dope-ass synth vibes.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: that it exists, I guess? I’d heard of it and knew a bit of the backstory about why they made it this way, but I’d never watched it until now and I envy the part of me that existed before I clicked “play” to stream this.

Spookiness Factor: almost none. I would rate this movie as somewhere between “mild traffic” and “oh no I forgot to grab milk when I was at the store.”

Rating: 1 out of 10 Red Vines

The Ghoulish Plot: Set in a not-too-distant future America, society is thriving with a strong economy, low unemployment, and a steep drop in crime and violence, and everybody attributes it to the addition of creating a single night each year in which all crime, including murder, is legal. It’s ref

Businessman James sells home security systems intended to enable the rich to survive nights like The Purge safely locked away in their mansions while those without security systems opt to spend the night murdering and looting or running for their lives. He’s done very well for himself and has managed to talk all of his rich neighbors into splurging on the latest and greatest security so they can also spend the night safe and sound.

The night of the purge James and his family tuck themselves in and trigger their steel doors and prepare to enjoy a quiet night watching society destroy itself from their 1080p cameras mounted outside. But then a lone man runs in front of their house asking for help and James’ son lets him in, only to discover that he’s being chased by some really cool Nazis, ahem I mean Young Republican types, who insist that James send out the man or they’re coming in.

Until this I’d never seen a single second of any Purge movie, but had read that they were dumb, mean-spirited and general shock-driven gross-out movies. This one is certainly mean-spirited and a pretty thinly-veiled metaphor for racial and social issues in America, but some fairly strong performances take it a couple notches above schlocky gimmicks. I finished this one with no desire to ever see it again or watch any of the huge number of sequels, but it’s nowhere near the worst movie I’ve watched this month so far (looking at you, Hocus Pocus 2).

The Scariest Part of the Movie: with the country having adopted The Purge, everybody quickly adapts to saying it’s a great thing and good for society and it has led to really valuable outcomes, which is like saying “at least the trains ran on time” or “gas was cheaper” when supporting a shitty politician and you can feel how quietly things shift into being pretty awful.

Spookiness Factor: This movie isn’t really scary…it’s shocking and violent. Watch it with your grandma at Christmas!

Rating: 4 out of 10 Twix

The Ghoulish Plot: many years ago, Disney made a silly witch movie that starts with child murder and a triple hanging and then features a plot in which a trio of evil sisters tries to steal the souls of children while forcing the parents who are watching the movie to explain what a virgin is to their kids.

Eventually that silly movie became an annual favorite and spawned a lot of chintzy memorabilia and decorations at Spirit Halloween stores and even drag queen interpretations. And so, once again the most devilish and sinister entity rose again from the dead in order to suck the lifeblood from a population: the never-ending hunger for profit by the Disney corporation.

The sequel to Hocus Pocus was released to streaming in 2022, and once again an unknowing teen accidentally releases the Sanderson sisters and they immediately seek out a way to return to life forever by consuming something from the town’s children. Featuring a few very game costars and a “sure, why not” set of performances from the three leads, this movie is indeed a thing you can watch if you have Disney+. Whether you think it’s good or not may depend entirely on if you classify yourself as a “Disney adult.” If you are, pull on your newest $180 Minnie Mouse onesie and strap on Walt’s feedbag for a nice helping of mediocre slop!

Full disclosure: I was not much of a Disney kid and am far and away not a Disney adult. I had never seen the first of these movies until introduced to it by my wife who watched it when it first came out and loves it. Because I love her and she has watched some of the weirder stuff coming later this month with me, we have seen the first Hocus Pocus numerous times. And even SHE got done watching this sequel and declared it awful.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: they had fantastic actors like Hannah Waddingham, Tony Hale and Sam Richardson in this cast, and it’s still boring.

Spookiness Factor: no matter how hard you work or successful you become in an HBO series about white ladies doing a lot of boning, you too could find yourself pulling on a 30-year-old corset to satisfy the undead hunger of Walt Disney.

Wife’s Commentary: “Well, THAT sucked.”

Rating: 2 out of 10 Milky Way bars

The Ghoulish Plot: it’s the 70s, and a mysterious killer starts murdering people randomly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not only is he committing murders, but he begins sending letters and coded messages to the media in the area claiming the puzzles will lead to his identity.

Over the course of years, multiple people become obsessed with identifying the killer and in the course of the investigation lose spouses, careers and their sanity. Based on a true story, you already know they never really figure out who the killer is…but in the meantime find some creepy and foreboding potential suspects (one of whom is played by a notable cartoon voice actor) and find themselves busting into a double wide trailer filled with squirrels. Y’know, that old cop story chestnut.

While not technically a ghost story, this movie is creepy from start to finish and you can feel the fatigue and stress in every frame. Director David Fincher reportedly had the actors do dozens and dozens of takes in order to get that exhaustion to show up on the screen while still making a fast-paced intriguing flick. While I hadn’t seen most of the movies on this year’s list so far, this one is currently in my collection as a 4K Blu-Ray and I’d recommend it at almost any time of the year if you’ve never seen it…so why not watch it during spooky season?

This movie was also made prior to the height of the whole serial killer/murder podcast trend, and the film also shows the awful outcomes that follow these sprees that the podcasts never seem to: ruined lives and families and people who end up feeling unsafe for the rest of their lives as a result of what happened.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: you mean, OTHER than how they never figured out who Zodiac was? The next scariest part is how a cartoonist could afford a car, kids and multi-bedroom home in San Francisco proper in the 1970s, meanwhile when we lived there we were making tech money and sitting with our cats in 500 square feet.

Spookiness Factor: from the start, you can feel the hopelessness and dread and the smartest people involved in the case realize their only hope is to run away from it as fast as possible. There’s no magical solution to this one, it’s a realistic nightmare.

Rating: 10 out of 10 Ghirardelli Chocolates

The Ghoulish Plot: A group of six criminals is hired to kidnap a rich man’s young ballet dancing daughter. They snag her and take her to a remote mansion, where they’re told to watch her for 24 hours as the ransom is acquired. One of the criminals is Joey, a recovering drug addict woman who is tasked with watching/managing the girl while in captivity.

It doesn’t take long for them to realize something else is going on, and at first they think somebody else is in the house…then they realize the young girl isn’t what they thought she was, and is instead a merciless bloodsucking vampire and the whole situation was crafted so that she’s not stuck in a house with them…they’re stuck in a house with her.

Over time Joey comes to understand that the most feared killer in the underworld might just be this little vampire girl, and that she did all of it to try and earn the love of her vampire dad without much success. She also learns that one of the crooks in the house with her might be worse than the slippered devil’s concubine she’s stuck in the house with.

This movie is drenched in blood; once people start dying heads go flying and it paints the walls. The initial concept was fun, but once you know what’s happening all the intrigue seeps out of it and you’re basically watching a cat toy with a mouse it’s already mauled. The cast features some great supporting actors and the girl playing Abigail is very game and puts in a good performance. But the whole thing ends up being a fairly mediocre trapped-in-a-house-of-horrors tale by the end.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: realizing that even when you’re an undead killer around for centuries, all your mental shit still goes back to childhood.

The Spookiness Factor: The mansion is nice and creepy and the first few kills are fairly shocking. By the time it becomes clear who’s hunting who it becomes more of a horror-comedy.

Rating: 5 out of 10 Dark Chocolate Hershey’s

The Ghoulish Plot: In the 2000s, teenagers still listened to what the oldsters used to call “rock music.” One night Jennifer drags her nerdy friend with her to go see a new band at a nearby club/bar. During the show a fire starts, and in the confusion the band gets Jennifer to join them in their gross rock guy van, and they take her to the woods to sacrifice her soul to Satan in order to get success in the music business. This was very typical of 00s Indie Rock music – the lyrics would be very emo and feminist, then backstage they’d try to seduce teenage girls and sacrifice them to the Devil. Looking at you, Bright Eyes!

The only caveat of the ritual is that the girl is supposed to be a virgin. Since Jennifer wasn’t when they sacrificed her to Satan, instead she becomes a succubus, and must feed on men in order to sustain her existence. That Beelzebub sure is a stickler! This film was written by Diablo Cody and turns out to be a sly take on horror and the “black widow” trope, but was instead marketed on its 2009 release primarily on the idea that Megan Fox was a smokeshow, hey-come-look-at-how-hot-she-is. Amanda Seyfried plays the nerdy best friend who finds herself as the only one who understands the danger and must destroy her former friend before she kills all their horny male classmates.

She finds the answers she needs in the school library’s occult section, since this movie was made before Moms For Liberty, and figures out how to destroy a succubus. But the only way to defeat the horrible spectre of faux-feminist indie rock is time. We start the movie kinda knowing how it ends, but as they say sometimes the whole point of the teen horror sex comedy isn’t the destination, but the journey.

This movie is funnier than expected with much more fleshed-out characters (especially the two leads) than you’d expect from a movie that was marketed primarily with the promise of big heaving jugs. I wouldn’t call it scary, but of the month so far this one has been among the bigger surprises in the roster of movies I’d never seen before.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: Literally every straight teenage boy could be lured to their horny doom the way Jennifer tricks them to willingly walk into places to eat them. Literally. Every. Single. One.

Spookiness Factor: Some good blood and gore but not really a jumpy/scary type of movie.

Rating: 7 out of 10 Three Musketeers

The Ghoulish (literally) Plot: A creepy old professor (played by Frankenstein/Grinch narrator Boris Karloff) thinks if he dies holding onto an ancient jewel, Egyptian gods will grant him powers for eternal life and health. Then, as soon as he croaks, literally everybody who ever heard of this jewel decides to rob his grave and take it, forgetting his promise that if he doesn’t possess it at the next full moon, he’ll come back to life and hunt down whoever took it and destroyed it.

This movie was considered one of Karloff’s “Lost” films, and based on the version available on Prime Video, it could have stayed lost and nobody would have missed out. It’s a long, drawn-out film that looks great (lots of creepy shadows and vibes) but it takes nearly 1/3 of the runtime to get to him dying with the jewel, and then the movie is nearly 80% done before Karloff rises from the grave. In the meantime, we get a lot of exposition and a guy yelling at a woman about how to make coffee, for some reason. I get that older movies move at a slower pace and not everything needs to be John Wick with heads ‘sploding within 8 seconds of the movie starting, but this entire flick was a slog to get through.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: before Karloff’s professor dies, his manservant accuses him of never trusting anybody. Then, literally everybody proves him right. For a weird old dude obsessed with Egyptian lore, he sure nailed human nature.

Spookiness Factor: The whole movie LOOKS like a classic old horror flick with lots of creepy lighting and moody music. And Karloff’s makeup looks great as the Ghoul. But keep in mind he’s only in about 15 minutes of the entire thing.

Rating: 3 out of 10 Dark Chocolate Raisinets

The Ghoulish Plot: Rose is a therapist treating a woman who recently saw somebody commit suicide, and she says an entity has been following and tormenting her ever since. Suddenly she begins to panic, and then shockingly becomes calm, smiles in a disturbing way, and kills herself in front of Rose.

The next day, Rose begins to see people in her life who smile at her in the same way and inform her that she will soon suffer the same fate. Rose begins to investigate further and sees a trail of suicides in which witnesses go on to kill themselves in gruesome ways…except for one person who committed a heinous murder and survived.

Rose tries to find a way to escape her fate while being haunted by people who smile like Evangelical Christians who are actively telling you you’re gonna burn in hell for not voting for Trump. As she approached the final moments she thinks she may have found a way to face and defeat her fate.

The Scariest Part: This whole movie is a huge and total bummer. Not to spoil anything, but the ending is so goddamn cynical that it left a bad taste in my mouth. I also think this is symptomatic of what horror movies often reflect in society: the film was written and moving towards production in the tail end of a pretty awful and inescapable political cycle in America where we were all watching a bunch of grinning jackals gleefully abuse power to take away people’s freedoms under the name of moral superiority and it felt like there was nothing we could do. It’s an effective horror movie but depressing as hell.

Spookiness Factor: every Midwest person has had an awful person smile in your face as they say the cruelest, most awful shit you’ve ever heard while you can just tell they don’t see anything wrong with it. That smile is ultra-creepy.

Rating: 7 out of 10 York Peppermint Patties