The Ghoulish Plot: In the halcyon days of the 1980s, things were different. You could smoke cigarettes literally everywhere, sugary cereals were a part of “a complete breakfast,” and people everywhere looked to a big fat cat who hated Mondays and loved eating lasagna to help us celebrate holidays.

Garfield wakes up on Halloween day to realize it’s Halloween and he can go get candy that night, so he puts together a pirate costume and heads out in the evening to fill up a sack of goodies…only to encounter ghouls and ghosts. Greedy for as much candy as possible, Garfield finds a rowboat and tries to take it to another neighborhood for even more treats, only to find the boat floating to a tiny island with a creepy house on it.

Once he arrives, they find a weird old man who tells them that the island is the location of a buried pirate treasure, and at Midnight the ghosts of those pirates will return. Then the old guy bails and leaves them stuck at the island, and then the ghosts show up and Garfield and his pal Odie have to make a run for it. Will they get home and get to enjoy their candy and catch the latest episode of Dynasty? It’s an animated special from the 80s, so probably!

This animated special somehow made it into the annual rotation for my sister and I growing up, and while it’s no longer a Halloween staple and it’s generally pretty corny and silly and literally every kid I’ve ever tried to show it to since thinks it’s dumb and slow, it’s a fun nostalgia watch every few years. If you grew up when Garfield was at his peak and somehow even inspiring Heathcliffe-era copycats and you’re up for some pretty mediocre jazz songs about finding a costume, then this one is your jam.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: the old man on the island is way scarier than he needed to be. Everything else in this is pretty lame, but some animator must have decided, “fuck it, let’s give some kids nightmares.”

Spookiness Factor: almost zilch, except for the old man.

Rating: 5 out of 10 lasagnas

The Ghoulish Plot: right off the bat, this movie features the first acting role for Paul Reubens after his porn theater scandal, and I love that in 2024 he’s literally the least problematic person involved with this movie as the writer and several of the stars have gone on to prove themselves sex pests, predators and/or right-wing nut jobs. Not Luke Perry, though. Luke is still cool.

Anyway: valley girl discovers she’s “The Slayer,” one of a long tradition of women who have a preternatural disposition to hunt and kill vampires. She also happens to live in a town and go to school at a spot destined for invasion by a superpowered ancient vampire and his gaggle of vampires, so she undergoes training and begins to kill off all the vamps on her way to the big baddie to save her town.

This movie was a precursor to the far superior TV show, which was also created and executive produced by Joss Whedon, who has created and director some very cool stuff while also turning out to be a gigantic scumbag. And star Kristy Swanson later fell down the conservative rabbit hole and became an election denying anti vaxxer who now just makes movies with James Woods and Dean Cain and Kevin Sorbo that are strongly endorsed by The Heritage Foundation.

This is mostly a horror-comedy that leans heavily on the comedy side, and in a turn that I never thought my brain would think or my fingers would type, the whole California Valley Kid shtick was done much better in the Pauly Shore/Brendan Fraser movie “Encino Man.” Just typing those words out hurt me in ways I can never fully articulate.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: I have no idea how somebody goes from “I starred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “hey, maybe the Earth IS flat” but 2024 is fucking weird, dude.

Spookiness Factor: Almost none

Rating: 2 out of 10 Red Vines

The Ghoulish Plot: A couple moves into a big old house with their family sometime in the late 70s. Turns out, the house was the location of some pretty awful witchy murders many years ago and the spirit of that very bad person still haunts the house, seeking to possess mothers and kill their children.

The family finds Lorraine and Ed Warren, who in the movie are very good people who help people deal with supernatural bad things and who in real life were complete and total scumbags who played on people’s emotions and religious beliefs to make a buck. But in the movie, they’re played by attractive movie stars and are not shysters with an Ouija board.

If you’ve somehow never seen one of these before, the first flick in this ever-expanding Conjuringverse of demon nuns and demon dolls is still by far the most effective and entertaining of the whole bunch, and (arguably) the only one with enough solid acting talent to raise it above the spook-house-in-movie-form the rest of the jumpy-scary movies have devolved into.

This is also the horror movie James Wan opted to make after his success with the “Saw” franchise, which devolved into dumber and dumber plot lines and inane traps and morality nonsense. This is a well-made modern haunted house movie with some fun jumps and surprises, and after it’s done you can just skip pretty much the whole rest of the Conjuring universe movies. And also do not look up Ed and Lorraine’s Wikipedia before you watch this; they were HUGE pieces of shit in real life.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: this movie can still make me jump in multiple spots. This time it was a specific scene involving hide-and-seek/clap, but there’s nothing particularly gory or gross.

Rating: 7 out of 10 Chick Tracts

The Ghoulish Plot: two witchy sisters are born into a family of witches with a curse that any man they love is doomed to die. Their dad meets this fate and their mother dies “of a broken heart” (nobody ever dies of this anymore, right?) so they go live with their even more witchy aunts who teach them about being super witchy as the girls both look ahead to how they want to live their lives romantically to try and avoid having to go through the same problems as their mom.

Eventually they get older and the girls take very different paths: one leaves and becomes a party girl, and the other stays and gets married and has a family and opens a store selling fancy shampoos and soaps and lotions at extravagant prices, a precursor to all the “natural” Etsy concoctions and treatments. The only thing missing from the equation is if it were made in 2024 she’d probably be anti-vaxx and homeschool her kids.

The party girl gets mixed up with a bad guy and calls her sister for help, and they accidentally kill him, then try to resurrect him with their witchy powers. It goes awry, and then a cop from Arizona starts sniffing around for the dead ex-boyfriend while also sniffing around the other sister.

Can they stay out of jail? Can they exorcise the demon of the bad ex-boyfriend from their lives? Will people really spend $88 on a tube of lotion if you say it has herbs that reduce facial lines? How many songs from Stevie Nicks can we fit on a soundtrack? All these questions will be answered.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: at one point, Aidan Quinn was considered a romantic lead. Now, he is only allowed to act when we need somebody to portray a Founding Father in something. Oh hey, a Sam Adams biopic on Starz? Thaw out Aidan Quinn!

The Spookiness Factor: pretty minimal on the scares for this one. We watched it as a palette cleanser after “Terrifier” and boy, did it do the trick.

Rating: 6 out of 10 5th Avenue bars

The Ghoulish Plot: two regular 20-something women go out for Halloween, and at the end of the night encounter a sadistic evil clown who proceeds to brutally maim and murder everybody he comes across. Literally, that’s the WHOLE plot.

I’d seen and heard things about these movies, and the third one was just released so I figured I may as well check this out. I was big into horror movies from the late 90s into the 00s but dropped out of it when new movies began moving towards the “Saw” franchise, which was just gore and torture porn with some elements designed to make really, really dumb people feel smart while they mostly watched to see people get murdered in more and more ornate ways.

This has literally nothing in it attempting to be anything more than it is: gory murders by a clown for 90 minutes. And it accomplishes this remarkably well; the special effects and makeup and gore are top-notch. They spent so much money making these elements perfect that they clearly had to reduce their budget for “actors” who are good at “acting” but hey, you’re not watching for Shakespeare.

If you like horror that is mostly just gruesome kills one after the other with no rhyme or reason or logic or justification, and then at the end a twist which makes it all supernatural in order to ensure endless sequels, here you go! It’s a theme park ride made as a movie, and it knows exactly what it is and isn’t trying to be more than that. If you’re into it you’ll love it, but I will never watch another of these in my life.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: there’s a moment with a hacksaw that people who have seen the movie will certainly know very, very well that is beyond gruesome. It’s also a ringing endorsement of that hacksaw brand, ‘cuz that thing must be crazy sharp.

Spookiness Factor: it’s a clown killing people in a creepy old warehouse building, but I wasn’t really spooked out whatsoever.

Rating: 3 out of 10 Three Musketeers

The Ghoulish Plot: a writer (because the story was written by Stephen King) returns to his home in Maine (again, Stephen King) at the same time that an ancient vampire has arrived to set up shop in the same creepy old house the writer remembers being old and creepy when he was a kid.

Well, you know how vampires are – soon enough they’re eating people and turning them into the walking undead who crave human blood and end up floating around outside people’s houses at all hours of the night. As the town succumbs to this terrifying creature, the writer and a small band of friends tries to stop them from destroying everything and everybody they’ve ever loved.

This book was turned into a TV miniseries in the 80s and that is now available as a 3-hour movie, but it’s also wooden and slow so this version was made with the idea of taking out most of the character development and sense of dread and foreboding and just make it a fast-paced kick-ass vampire flick with some funny quips mixed in. It was also apparently shot a couple years ago and held back to be dumped onto streaming close to Halloween for a sugary-sweet harmless flick that you will start forgetting minutes after you’re done watching it.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: there’s a moment where one of the main group who had been turned into a vampire is staked to the heart and falls and one lone tear falls down their face, and in that brief moment you see the regret as they accept their fate. A brief glimpse into a deeper beating heart in a movie that has almost none to begin with.

Spookiness Factor: it’s a Stephen King story about vampires in a creepy little town, but this feels mostly like a Marvel movie.

Rating: 4 out of 10 Tropical Nerds

The Ghoulish Plot: Tess is in Detroit for a job interview and has rented an AirBNB for her stay. She arrives late at night to discover that somebody else is already in the rental and appears to have also booked the place. Initially creeped out, they arrange for Tess to sleep in the bedroom and he’ll stay on the couch. Then she realizes that somebody opened her door at night…then she finds a secret passage in the basement. THEN they find even more secrets and find out who…or what…is coming out of the passageways.

The house is owned by a scumbag actor who bought it as an investment property, but his inability to stop being a sex pest to costars has left him in need of money, so he flies to Detroit to inspect the place before selling it, and then finds himself being sucked into the situation.

This one is fairly new (released in 2022) and I’d heard good things, and if I say much more about the plot it may ruin the experience for those who haven’t seen it yet. Once this one cranks into full gear it’s a freight train with a combination of intense dread and jump scares, and it still manages to pack in a little bit of a social message (like all great horror flicks) even when you’re watching somebody’s head go kerblooey. A surprise for me, this one may find its way into the regular rotation of horror flicks for October in the future.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: are we STILL portraying Detroit as a rundown blighted town? I know this was released in 2022, so it was probably shot in 2021 and conceived of pre-Covid, but it’s getting silly to see downtown Detroit portrayed in media (and by Presidential candidates) as this rotting hellhole, then you go to downtown Detroit for real and it’s packed stadiums and bars and people in those stupid pedaly-bars and hip restaurants. Catch up, gang.

Spookiness factor: you think the movie is gonna be one thing and then it goes in a completely different direction. Then it goes in yet ANOTHER direction and forces you to reckon with a shitbag character played by somebody who is typically nice, and then it changes directions again. It keeps you guessing, a great combo for horror.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Laffy Taffys

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