Fall Faves and Halloween Horrors: What to Watch This Season

It’s not like many of us need an excuse to watch scary or autumn-themed movies – I’m all about watching Christmas movies in July – but if there is ever a time to watch something that creeps you out or makes you feel like you need a pumpkin spice latte, it’s now.

With Halloween right around the corner, The Writer’s Bloc staff has some picks for movies and shows you should get into.

Hocus Pocus

Not really a scary movie but Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy playing witches gets me in fall mode without fail. It’s probably because ABC Family plays it multiple times every Halloween season. There are several airings of the classic movie as part of the network’s 13 Nights of Halloween.

Other movies in the lineup are The Addams Family, Dark Shadows, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Poltergeist – all worth putting homework aside, grabbing some popcorn and sitting down to watch.

Halloweentown

Another quality throwback that ‘90s babies can appreciate. Oh, the nostalgia that this movie inspires. Can we all agree that having a witch for a grandma would be so dope, and having powers all our own would be twice as awesome? My first spell would probably be one designed to help me get A’s on all my midterms and finals, or an early graduation, or maybe it would be going to Halloweentown myself.

Over The Garden Wall

This Emmy-winning 10 part mini-series premiered on Cartoon Network last year. The main characters, brothers named Wirt and Gregory, deal with harvest festivals, ghosts and strange forests which just scream autumn. And given that each episode is only about 12 minutes long, there’s no harm in binge watching!

Two on a Guillotine

While you’ve probably never heard of this 1965 horror film, it has a lot going for it. Crazed Magician: check. Large creepy house: check. Pretty damsel: check. This and many other classic and/or black and white thrillers are just waiting to keep you up at night. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds, The Blob, and House on Haunted Hill are only a few of the many films promising good scares. And of course we can’t forget the 1931 classic Dracula.

If these movies don’t make you want your parents after watching, you should certainly be able to talk to them (or your grandparents) about their own experiences with these flicks – although family conversations can be scarier than the scariest of movies.

Oh my Netflix.

The number of horrors and thrillers is overwhelming and the number of ghoulish, ghostly or supernatural shows is too many to count, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dive into the streaming service’s vast ocean and waste a weekend becoming too many episodes deep into the highly rated Supernatural, the U.S. version of Being Human, American Horror Story or The Walking Dead.

And while it seems very difficult to find a highly rated horror film on Netflix, some that break the 3 star threshold and have the potential to keep your mind off midterm grades and on monsters under your bed are Silence of the Lambs, Let the Right One In, Dark Skies and Housebound.

If you want to be frightened in a place outside of your room or favorite chill spot on campus, you can always go to the actual movie theater – gasp – to watch one of the cool and creepy flicks out this month.

These include: