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

The Ghoulish Plot: I was already a young adult when the first “Blair Witch Project” came out in 1999, and the internet was still new enough that I saw the movie in the theater with a person who had been convinced that it was actually all real. The movie was already pretty effectively scary, but seeing it with somebody who thought it actually happened took it to another level. The rest of us who knew it was fake were also super kind and spent the rest of the night confirming for him that, yup, that was totally real, there are witches in the woods, dude! And we just let him keep getting increasingly more freaked out. Luckily, in 2024 we’ve all become very smart and discerning media consumers and nobody falls for insane nonsense online anymore and it hasn’t permeated everything in our lives and even affected our Democracy!

This movie was released in 2016 and is meant as a more direct follow-up to the original film than the sequel that followed. One of the original trio’s siblings is still haunted by their sudden disappearance and wants to take a new, younger and more technically-equipped crew into the same forest to see if they can figure out what happened. This is the same found-footage scenario, but instead of just two cameras they now have phones, drones, GoPros and are hauling around memory cards instead of film.

The crew pairs up with two local weirdos who claim to know where the witch’s cabin is located, and off they go into the woods. Before long, they find themselves lost, seeing weird stick-men in the trees, hearing cackling and then get lured into a creepy cabin in the middle of nowhere by the promise of a reunion that goes predictably awry, including being chased by something that is either a demon or a weird inbred redneck creature that has NOT been getting the right nutrition for bone growth.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: Just like the 1999 original, it’s the woods. I grew up near the woods. I have spent a lot of time in the woods. The woods are scary. Give me Compton in 1995 any day of the week over being stranded in the woods. In fact, I have been to Compton multiple times and it has always been welcoming and fun; drive around in some super-rural areas and see the shanties covered in Trump flags and “No Trespassing” signs and you know that place is filled with untreated mental health problems carrying loaded shotguns.

Spookiness Factor: we all know it’s fake and the whole “found footage” thing is fairly played out, but by the end of the movie I was jumping and nervous, even though the characters in this one are nowhere near as endearing as the original.

Rating: 6 out of 10 Twix Bars

The Ghoulish Plot: A wanderer obsessed with the supernatural finds his way to a small town and takes up residence at the inn. After his first creepy night, a man enters his room and declares that “she must not die.” The wanderer discovers that the man’s daughter has been bitten by something and is steadily declining in health, and clues indicate that the town may be home to a vampire and to save her, they’ll have to find the vampire and kill it.

Shot in Germany in 1932 between two World Wars and without the special effects of today, this thing is a surreal and spooky-ass film that relies on using lights and shadows and misdirection in order to make every frame just a little…off. There is dialogue but it’s sparse and the whole film creates a very, very spooky atmosphere without having to show anything gruesome or bloody.

Will the hero find the vampire and save the girl, or will yet another soul be captured by the prince of darkness? True to its German roots, our hero may succeed at his goal but the movie ends on a colossal bummer. Gott im Himmel!

The Scariest Part of the Movie: As somebody who has stayed in some pretty cheap-ass motels for comedy and had cleaning staff just barge into the room at 7:30am even with the “do not disturb” sign on, the guy entering his room made me VERY uneasy, as though I was right back in that highway La Quinta in Sacramento.

Spookiness Factor: it’s black and white, it’s German from 1932, it’s shadowy and creepy from start to finish. I’d never seen this and could not believe how effectively weirded out it made me.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Fun-Size Snickers

The Ghoulish Plot: yes, this is a video game. I know this list is mostly movies but hey, it’s my list and I’ll add what I want. And what better game for October than Resident Evil 4, which is available to play on pretty much every platform ever. Got a PS3, 4 or 5? It’s on there. Got an old Wii sitting around? You can play it there, too. Got a phone made in the last four years? Download these shits! RE4 has been a classic ever since it was released over a decade ago. So get with the times, grandma. Put down the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and savor the simple pleasures of blasting a shotgun into a giant man wielding a chainsaw while wearing a pig’s head.

Anyway: you play as Leon Kennedy, who is sent to a weird rural Spanish village to…rescue the President’s daughter? Yes, this seems like a job for one person, and one person only. This is the future those “defund the police” liberals want! Luckily, Leon has experience dealing with crazy situations, as this game is called “Resident Evil 4” and not “Leon Kennedy’s Weird-Ass Spanish Vacation Part 1: No Time for Tapas.”

As soon as you enter the village you start to get the sense that things are not quite right…possibly aided in this assumption by the person you witness burning on a crucifix as soon as you walk in. Within seconds you’re swarmed by brainwashed villagers and it’s a mad dash to survive without getting chainsawed, until something happens and you realize there’s a more powerful and sinister thing in control.

Over the course of the game you dig deeper into the mystery, get infected with a weird entity, rescue the daughter, lose the daughter, rescue her again, lose her again, and eventually have to fight some giant bug/crab creatures armed only with a few guns and knives. Can you make it through? Clear your calendar, quit your job, tell your family goodbye and dive in to find out.

The Scariest Part of the Game: the bear traps. About the time you think you know what you’re doing and can handle anything, another goddamn hidden bear trap pops up as you’re trying to run from something. Bastards. Oh, and the weird creatures you need a special scope to shoot at who sneak up on you are pretty terrifying.

Spookiness Factor: on the lower side for the Resident Evil games as this is more action than horror, but there’s some gross-out body stuff and some pretty gruesome deaths, and enough stuff jumps out at you suddenly to shock the system. The Resident Evil games are the series I’ve played the most of in my entire life and hold a special place in my heart.

Rating: 9 out of 10 Hundred Grand bars