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31 Incredibly Entertaining Horror Movies

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Editor’s Note: This post is a cross-promotion between Fandango and Bloody-Disgusting to celebrate October and Halloween.

Shut up Christmas, Halloween is the most wonderful time of the year!

Watching horror movies is supposed to be fun. Yeah, I know that it’s meant to be a scary experience but why watch anything unless you get some sort of thrill out of it, right? Maybe you enjoy watching people get butchered by some crazed villain. Maybe you like seeing people fight for their lives, their will to live overriding nearly every other instinct in their body. Whatever the reason, you watch it because you enjoy it!

By now, you’ve probably watched a ton of horror movies to celebrate it being October and, therefore, Halloween season. But for those of you who are running out of ideas on what to watch, we thought we’d jump in and put together a list for you that features some horror films that are so entertaining, you’re bound to have a blast!

Now, we know that sifting through the vast ocean of released horror films can be rather daunting, so Brad and I have curated a list of films that we think are incredibly entertaining for this season, all of which can be rented on FandangoNOW!

In no particular order, here we go!

The Conjuring 2

Renowned demonologists Lorraine and Ed Warren travel to north London to help a single mother raising four children alone in a house plagued by malicious spirits.

The Conjuring 2 Review


The Visit

When Becca and Tyler are sent to their grandparents’ secluded Pennsylvania farm for a week-long stay, they quickly discover something is not right with the elderly couple. Faced with strange rules and increasingly frightening behavior, the children soon realize it will take all their wits to make it home alive.

The Visit (image source: Universal)


Krampus

When his dysfunctional family clashes over the holidays, young Max is disillusioned and turns his back on Christmas. Little does he know, this lack of festive spirit has unleashed the wrath of Krampus: a demonic force of ancient evil intent on punishing non-believers. All hell breaks loose as beloved holiday icons take on a monstrous life of their own, laying siege to the fractured family’s home and forcing them to fight for each other if they hope to survive.

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It Follows

After a seemingly innocent sexual encounter, 19-year-old Jay becomes trapped by a vicious curse – “it” is following her, and the only way to save herself is to put others in harm’s way.

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Creep

Looking for work, Aaron (Patrick Brice) comes across a cryptic online ad: “$1,000 for the day. Filming service. Discretion is appreciated.” Low on cash and full of naivete, he decides to go for it. He drives to a cabin in a remote mountain town where he meets Josef (Mark Duplass), his cinematic subject for the day. Josef is sincere and the project seems heartfelt, so Aaron begins to film. But as the day goes on, it becomes clear that Josef is not who he says, and his intentions are not at all pure.

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What We Do in the Shadows

 

Viago, Deacon, and Vladislav are vampires who are finding that modern life has them struggling with the mundane – like paying rent, keeping up with the chore wheel, trying to get into nightclubs, and overcoming flatmate conflicts.

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As Above So Below

Miles of twisting catacombs lie beneath the streets of Paris, the eternal home to countless souls. When a team of explorers ventures into the uncharted maze of bones, they uncover the dark secret that lies within this city of the dead. A journey into madness and terror, As Above, So Below reaches deep into the human psyche to reveal the personal demons that come back to haunt us all.

As Above So Below


You’re Next

 

Aubrey and Paul Davison decide to celebrate their wedding anniversary by inviting their four children and their significant others to a family reunion at their remote and slightly rundown weekend estate. But the family reunion goes awry when their home comes under siege by a mask-wearing team of crossbow-bearing assailants. The family has no idea who’s attacking them, why they’re under attack, or if the attackers are inside or outside the cavernous, creaking house. All they know for certain is that nobody is safe.

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Evil Dead (2013)

 

A secluded cabin. An ancient curse. An unrelenting evil. The original producers reunite to present a genuinely terrifying re-imagining of their original horror masterpiece. Five young friends have found the mysterious and fiercely powerful Book of the Dead. Unable to resist its temptation, they release a violent demon on a bloodthirsty quest to possess them all. Who will be left to fight for their survival and defeat this unearthly force of murderous carnage?

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World War Z

 

Former United Nations employee Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is called upon to help stop the chaotic pandemic that has gripped populations around the world. Lane fights to keep his family safe, while searching for an answer to the outbreak before it destroys all of civilization.

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Insidious

 

A family looks to prevent evil spirits from trapping their comatose child in a realm called The Further.

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Drag Me To Hell

Enter a new level of Hell in this chilling Unrated version with footage too extreme for theaters… Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is on her way to having it all: a devoted boyfriend (Justin Long), a hard-earned job promotion, and a bright future. But when she’s forced to make a tough decision that evicts an elderly woman from her house, Christine becomes the victim of an evil curse. Now she has only three days to dissuade a dark spirit from stealing her soul before she is dragged to hell for an eternity of unthinkable torment. Director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man and The Evil Dead trilogy) returns to the horror genre with a vengeance in this crazy and terrifying film.

Drag Me to Hell (image source: Universal)


The Crazies

 

In a terrifying tale of the American Dream gone horribly wrong, residents of a picture-perfect Midwestern town begin to succumb to an uncontrollable urge for violence when a mysterious toxin in the water supply turns everyone exposed to it into mindless killers. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), his pregnant wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), Becca (Danielle Panabaker), an assistant at the medical center, and Russell (Joe Anderson), Dutton’s deputy and right-hand man, find themselves trapped in a once idyllic town they can no longer recognize. Unable to trust former neighbors and friends, deserted by the authorities and terrified of contracting the illness themselves, they are forced to band together in a nightmarish struggle for survival in this reinvention of the George Romero classic.

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Zombieland

Nerdy college student Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has survived the plague that has turned mankind into flesh-devouring zombies because he’s scared of just about everything. Gun-toting, Twinkie-loving Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) has no fears. Together, they are about to stare down their most horrifying challenge yet: each other’s company.

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Trick r Treat

 

It is said that Halloween is the night when the dead rise to walk among us and other unspeakable things roam free. The rituals of All Hallows Eve were devised to protect us from their evil mischief, and one small town is about to be taught a terrifying lesson that some traditions are best not forgotten. Nothing is what it seems when a suburban couple learns the dangers of blowing out a Jack-o-Lantern before midnight; four women cross paths with a costumed stalker at a local festival; a group of pranksters goes too far and discovers the horrifying truth buried in a local legend; and a cantankerous old hermit is visited by a strange trick-or-treater with a few bones to pick. Costumes and candy, ghouls and goblins, monsters and mayhem…the tricks and treats of Halloween turn deadly as strange creatures of every varietyhuman and otherwisetry to survive the scariest night of the year.

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The Strangers

Explore your worst fears imaginable with this shocking suspense thriller inspired by disturbing true events. After a 4 a.m. knock at the door and a haunting voice, Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt’s (Scott Speedman) remote getaway becomes a psychological night of terror as three masked strangers invade. Now they must go far beyond what they thought themselves capable of if they hope to survive.

The Strangers


Dead Silence

You Scream. You Die. Dare to unlock the deadly curse of Mary Shaw. From the writers and director of Saw comes a new thriller of relentless terror! Ever since Mary Shaw was hunted down and killed, the small town of Ravens Fair has been haunted by horrific deaths. When a local’s wife is brutally murdered, he returns home to unravel the terrifying legend of Mary Shaw and the reason why when you see her, you should never, ever scream.

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The Hills Have Eyes

 

Based on Wes Craven’s 1977 suspenseful cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes is the story of a family road trip that goes terrifyingly awry when the travelers become stranded in a government atomic zone. Miles from nowhere, the Carter family soon realizes the seemingly uninhabited wasteland is actually the breeding ground of a blood-thirsty mutant family…and they are the prey.

The Hills Have Eyes 10th Anniversary


Saw

 

Obsessed with teaching his victims the value of life, a sadistic serial killer abducts the morally wayward and forces them to play a horrific game in order to survive. The victims must fight or die trying…

SAW via Lionsgate


Dawn of the Dead (remake)

Heart-pounding action and bone-chilling thrills power this edgy, electrifying fright-fest where a handful of human survivors wage a desperate, last-stand battle against flesh-eating zombies.

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28 Days Later

In director Danny Boyle’s zombie-horror update, a powerful virus has escaped from a British research facility and it locks those infected into a permanent state of zombie rage. Jim wakes up alone in a hospital 28 days after the virus has spread throughout the world. Walking through the empty streets, he is attacked by a group of zombies, but he is quickly saved by two human survivors. Jim soon joins with the rest of the survivors, including a band of soldiers, and together they begin their attempts to salvage a future. But will the plague that has infected mankind claim the last human beings?

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Freddy vs Jason

The two biggest icons of the slasher genre finally meet in Freddy Vs. Jason in a frightening showdown in hell! Banished there for eternity, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) devises a plan to manipulate Jason into continuing his work, hacking up the teenagers of Elm Street. All goes well at first until Jason realizes he’s been duped by the dream master, and is none too pleased. Coaxed by surviving teenagers Will (Jason Ritter), Lori (Monica Keena), and Kia (Kelly Rowland), Jason and Freddy descend up Crystal Lake for a battle royale!

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Sleepy Hollow

Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean 1 & 2) is Ichabod Crane, an eccentric investigator determined to stop the murderous Headless Horseman. Christina Ricci ( Monster) is Katrina Van Tassel, the beautiful and mysterious girl with secret ties to the supernatural terror.

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Scream

 

After a series of mysterious deaths befalls their small town, an offbeat group of friends led by Sidney Prescott (Campbell) become the target of a masked killer in this smash-hit that launched the Scream franchise.

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Idle Hands

The devil will find work for idle hands to do… but what happens when he chooses the laziest teen slacker in the world to do his dirty work? Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa, Wild America) is a channel-surfing, junk-food munching, couch potato burn-out who can’t control the murderous impulses of his recently possessed hand. With the help of his zombiefied buddies, Mick (Seth Green, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) and Pnub (Elden Henson, The Mighty), Anton’s got to stop the rampaging devil appendage before it takes total control of his life and ruins any chance he has with class hottie Molly (Jessica Alba, Never Been Kissed). Vivica A. Fox (Independence Day) and Jack Noseworthy (The Brady Bunch Movie) co-star in this wickedly funny horror comedy.

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The Frighteners

In the sleepy little town of Fairwater, a monstrous evil has awakened…an evil so powerful, its reach extends beyond the grave. Director Peter Jackson and Executive Producer Robert Zemeckis unleash a riveting thriller with the most spectacular special effects this side of the hereafter. For Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox), death is a great way to make a living: ridding haunted houses of their “unwelcome” guests. But he’s in cahoots with the very ghosts he promises to evict! It’s the perfect scam…until Frank finds himself at the center of a dark mystery. A diabolical spirit is on a murderous rampage, and the whole town believes Frank is behind it. Boasting music by Danny Elfman and co-starring Trini Alvarado, Jeffrey Combs and John Astin, this supernatural chiller is so fiendishly entertaining, it’s scary!

The Frighteners


Bram Stoker’s Dracula

 

From Academy Award®-winning director Francis Ford Coppola comes the remake of the classic and chilling tale about the devastatingly seductive Transylvanian prince (Gary Oldman) who travels from Eastern Europe to 19th century London in search of human love. After centuries alone in his crumbling castle, Dracula’s taste for humanity has grown bold with desire, drawing him out of seclusion. When the charismatic Dracula meets Mina (Winona Ryder), a young woman who appears as the reincarnation of his lost love, the two embark on a journey of romantic passion and horror. Using “illusionary” special effects and the considerable talents of his cast, Coppola has orchestrated a fresh and provocative presentation of the story, while remaining uncommonly true to the source material.

Gary Oldman in Dracula


A Nightmare on Elm Street

Can your nightmares be fatal? In this classic of the horror film genre that launched a movie franchise, a hideously scarred pedophile who was murdered by a lynch mob returns years later in the terrifying nightmares of his killers’ teenage children — and the dreaming teenagers are starting to die in their sleep. Starring Academy Award-nominee and Golden Globe-winner Johnny Depp (“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”, “Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy”), Golden Globe-winner John Saxon (“Enter the Dragon”, “The Appaloosa”), Heather Langenkamp (TV’s “Just the Ten of Us”) and Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger (“Urban Legend”, “The Mangler”).

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The Thing

John Carpenter delivers the ultimate in alien terror in this chilling story about an Antarctic research team that discovers a form-changing alien buried in the snow for over 100,000 years.

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The Final Girls

 

When Max (Taissa Farmiga) and her friends reluctantly attend an anniversary screening of “Camp Bloodbath”, the infamous ‘80s horror film that starred Max’s late mother (Malin Akerman), they are mysteriously sucked into the silver screen. They soon realize they are trapped inside the cult classic movie and must team up with the fictional and ill-fated camp counselors, including Max’s mom as the scream queen, to battle the film’s machete-wielding killer. With the body count rising in scene after iconic scene, who will be the final girls left standing and live to escape this film?

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Oculus

 

Ten years ago, a horrifying family incident left two young children orphans. Although authorities charged the brother with murder, his sister believed that the true culprit was a haunted antique mirror. Now completely rehabilitated and in his 20s, the brother is ready to move on but his sister is determined to prove that the haunted mirror was responsible for destroying their family.

Oculus


Editorials

‘The Company of Wolves’ at 40: One of the Most Underrated Werewolf Movies Ever Made

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There’s a compelling idea in anthropology that many ancient werewolf legends are derived from our species’ need to rationalize the more animalistic side of humanity – which is why lycanthropy has historically been used to explain everything from medieval serial killers to cannibalism. While I personally think there’s a lot more to unpack when it comes to tales of wolfmen and women, this is still a great example of why so many of our most enduring fairy tales involve big bad wolves.

And in the world of film, I think there’s only one feature that really nails the folkloric origins of werewolf stories, namely Neil Jordan’s 1984 fairy-tale horror classic, The Company of Wolves. Even four decades later, there’s no other genre flick that comes close to capturing the dreamlike ambience behind this strange anthology, and that’s why I’d like to take this opportunity to look back on one of the most underrated werewolf flicks ever made.

The Company of Wolves was originally a short story contained in the 1979 anthology The Bloody Chamber, a collection of deconstructed fairy-tales intended for mature readers penned by English author Angela Carter. With the book quickly becoming a hit as readers became fascinated with its subversion of classic folk stories and (then) controversial feminist undertones, it was soon transformed into a duology of BBC radio-dramas which adapted both The Company of Wolves and Carter’s reimagining of Puss-in-Boots.

These radio-dramas soon attracted the attention of then up-and-coming Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, who decided to meet with Carter to discuss expanding on her stories and bringing them to life on the big screen. The duo soon realized that a single short story wasn’t enough material for a feature-length film, so they decided to adapt all of Carter’s werewolf tales into a single anthology.

With a completed script and a $2.3 million budget, Jordan decided to tackle the project like a hybrid between a theatrical period drama and a schlocky monster movie. Effects-heavy creature features were a hot commodity back in the ’80s, with films like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London proving that there was an audience for horrific lycanthrope transformations, so the director soon recruited a team that could turn this odd collection of feminist folk stories into something commercially viable.

Not exactly a great pick for family movie night.

Shooting would eventually take place almost entirely within the England-based Shepperton Studios, with notable production designer Anton Furst (who would later be known for his work on Tim Burton’s Batman films) helping to bring Jordan’s vision of a darkly romantic fairy-tale world to life. Appropriately enough, production would also involve a real pack of trained wolves (as well as a collection of dyed dogs), though extensive puppetry and animatronics were also used to flesh out the more gruesome parts of the flick.

After a grueling nine-week shoot where budgetary constraints led to corners being cut on props and costumes, The Company of Wolves was finally released in September of 1984 – just in time for spooky season. In the finished film, we follow the strange dreams of a sulky teenage girl named Rosaleen (first-time actress Sarah Patterson) as the film unravels an Arabian-Nights-inspired tapestry of both familiar and not-so-familiar stories about big bad wolves.

From sexually charged cautionary tales to parables about female empowerment, this surreal collection of deranged bedtime stories is much more than the creature feature that the marketing initially suggested. Like a more horror-oriented version of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, The Company of Wolves exudes that same kind of hormonal teenage energy that transports us back to a time when the world was both scary and exciting in equal measure.

That’s not to say that this is an entirely pleasant experience, however, and I’m not just talking about the film’s horror elements. A big portion of the flick’s overtly sexual moments involve the then 13-year-old Patterson coming to grips with her blossoming womanhood and the dangers of predatory men (usually marked with a humorous unibrow), something that naturally makes for some intentionally uncomfortable viewing – especially in the year of our lord 2024.

Obviously, I don’t think it’s my place to dissect (or even judge) the effectiveness of the film’s commentaries on being a young woman, but even as a man I can still appreciate the thought and care that went into crafting this Jungian cocktail of serious themes in a genre-movie package that almost certainly went on to inspire future werewolf movies like Ginger Snaps.

Not the worst wedding I’ve been to.

That being said, what really keeps me coming back to the film is the absurd amount of memorable imagery. From a wedding party being taken over by canines to lonely treks through snowy groves, this is exactly the gloomy world I imagined as a child when reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales – and the dreamy atmosphere is only enhanced by the movie’s overall theatricality.

This also extends to the effects, as it’s easy to forgive decapitated dummy heads and ripped rubber skin when everything is happening in a magical hyper-reality, with a great example of this is being the scene where Grandma’s head unexpectedly explodes like a porcelain doll when it’s knocked off by a wolfman. That’s not to say that the effects are bad, as several of these transformations are downright grisly and likely influenced future lycanthrope effects like those in Underworld and even Trick ‘r Treat (even if the wolf-dogs here often look more cute than scary).

Of course, these aren’t the only things that The Company of Wolves has going for it, as the main trio of Patterson, Micha Bergese and the late, great Angela Lansbury exceptionally bring these exaggerated caricatures to life and the orchestral score is an absolute delight. I also really get a kick out of that bizarre ending implying that the dangers of adult life have literally come crashing into Rosaleen’s bedroom.

The Company of Wolves may not be a perfect film, suffering from some wonky pacing and the classic anthology problem where some stories are clearly much more enjoyable than others, but I’d argue that the flick’s iconic visuals and powerful thematic throughline more than make up for any minor flaws. And while we’ve seen bigger and better werewolf films since then, when it comes to adult-oriented fairy-tales, this is one psycho-sexual journey that is still worth revisiting 40 years down the line.

The Company of Wolves

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