Picture this: You’re settling down on the sofa with some friends and a big bowl of spooky treats. Your house is all dressed up to the nines for Halloween (which you did last minute, using our handy last minute Halloween guide!). You’ve hit play on one of many scary movies, and the it’s started. It’s Halloween night and everyone’s ready for a good scare. And for over an hour, people are huffing in boredom. You get to the end of the movie and your friends are peacefully snoring away.
AHHHH! Ever heard anything that scary?
Picking a bad movie is like wasting 2 hours of your life you’re never getting back. Right, now you’re feeling the pressure, but you think you’ve got this because you know your zombies from your walkers and your vampires from your sparkly imposters. But what if your guests hate horror movies? What if you’ve got to cater for children? What if you actually don’t know the first thing about current or classic horror movies?
Well, take a look down our ultimate scary movie list for Halloween 2014 and you’ll be sorted no matter what you pick!
Contents
The 10 Scariest Horror Movies
Our Top Scary Movie Picks:
1/ Rec (The Spanish original of Quarantine)
What Happens: A reporter and her cameraman follow some emergency workers into a quarantined building. It goes as badly as you’d expect that to.
How Scary Is It: Imagine being locked into an apartment building with people you think are ‘sick’ with a deadly virus. Then if that’s not bad enough, imagine only seeing bits and pieces of what’s happening, through a camera, knowing that something a little more horrific is happening. And to top it all off, you have to read subtitles.
Who Can I Watch It With: Someone who doesn’t mind subtitled movies, jump-scares galore, and shaky camera angles.
2 / 28 Days Later
What Happens: Animal activists try to free a bunch of monkeys that’ve been infected by a rage-inducing virus. 28 days later, a guy wakes up from a coma to a ‘zombie’ filled UK. These zombies aren’t so much undead, they’re just really angry people. Similar, but maybe they just need a good hug?
How Scary Is It: Not at all, unless watching a movie that makes you feel like you could realistically be stuck in the same situation as the main character scares you.
Who Can I Watch It With: A large group of friends – So you can all plan how you’d act in the same situation. Spoiler: You’d probably all die.
3/ The Descent
What Happens: Six friends decide to go for a nice trip into a dark and horrifying cave. They suffer a cave-in early on and are forced deeper and deeper into the depths; but they’re not alone.
How Scary Is It: How scary are cavemen? Well, these aren’t like the Flinstones, they’re more like Gollum from Lord of The Rings if he was more violent and had a taste for human flesh. So pretty damn scary.
Who Can I Watch It With: Someone who won’t mind helping you make a pillow fort to hide behind because this movie is tense.
Other Good Scary Movies:
- The Grudge (Ju-On, the Japanese version, is much scarier than the American remake)
- Event Horizon
- Dawn of The Dead
- The Ring (The original Japanese version is again better than it’s American counterpart)
- The Sixth Sense
- 1408
- Insidious
The Best Scary Movies If You Hate Horror
Top Funny Horror Movies Picks:
1/ Zombieland
What Happens: America becomes a zombie wasteland and one guy is still obsessed with getting the girl.
How Scary Is It: As scary as something that makes you laugh out loud every two minutes can be.
Who Can I Watch It With: A big Shaun of the Dead fan.
2/ Shaun of the Dead
What Happens: You haven’t seen this movie yet?
How Scary Is It: No, seriously, you haven’t?
Who Can I Watch It With: Someone with a better taste in movies than you.
3/ All the Scary Movies
What Happens: All the horror movies you’re too scared to see are made fun of in a couple of ridiculous hours.
How Scary Is It: On a scale of serial killer – rabbit, this movie’s a baby bunny.
Who Can I Watch It With: Your date.
Other Funny ‘Scary’ Films:
- Final Destinations
- The Phantom of the Opera
- The Labyrinth
- Have you seen the kids list? Baby.
- Hot Fuzz
- The World’s End
- Ghostbusters
- Beetlejuice
The Best Child-Friendly Horror Films
The 3 Top Scary Movies For Kids
1/ The Nightmare Before Christmas
What Happens: The skeleton king of a Halloween town gets bored, wanders off into the woods and finds a Christmas town. He doesn’t quite get the concept.
How Scary Is It: Not even on a scary scale for you; for the little ones it has just the right amount of scare and laughter.
Who Can I Watch It With: A party full of kids who want a tiny scare.
2/ Harry Potter
What Happens: A boy with a scar is told by a funny looking guy that he’s a wizard – proceeds to secret wizard school, breaks all the rules to save people from the most powerful (and evil) wizard of all time and is loved anyway. Oh, and somehow beats this powerful wizard every time even though he’s only 11?
How Scary Is It: It’s not – but it has witches and wizards.
Who Can I Watch It With: Little kids that don’t want a scare at all, but want to get into the Halloween spirit.
Thanks to Little Miss Katy and her blogpost for the heads up on this one! I didn’t even consider Harry Potter Halloweeny at first.
3/ Monster’s Inc
What Happens: A world of monsters get their power from scaring children and bottling their screams, but are terrified of humans themselves. Cue a movie where one tiny little girl manages to scare every stereotypical monster you can think of.
How Scary Is It: Not.
Who Can I Watch It With: Any little kids that say they want to watch a scary movie in front of their friends, but actually don’t want to risk the nightmares.
Other Child-Friendly Horror Movies
- Toy Story Of Terror (Sky 1, everyday at 6:30pm)
- Edward Scissorhands
- The Adam’s Family
- Coraline
- Corpse Bride
- Casper (ITV 2 – 7pm on Halloween)
- Monster House (Sky Movies Family, everyday 8pm)
- Haunter Mansion
The Best Old-School Horror Movies
Best Old-School Scary Movies
1/ Psycho
What Happens: A woman steals $40,000 from work, and while on the run she spends a night at a motel run by a man completely controlled by his mother.
How Scary Is It: You probably already know what happens but it’ll still make you look behind your shoulder the next time you’re showering in a hotel.
Who Can I Watch It With: Avoid any guys with mummy issues – You don’t want to give them any ideas.
2/ The Evil Dead
What Happens: A group of friends stay in a cabin in the woods. They find the Necronomicon (book of the dead) and a tape with a translation of the text. They play it, and unsurprisingly everything goes wrong. Flesh possessing demons begin to take them out one by one…
How Scary Is It: The original cabin in the woods – and no other scary films can hold a candle in the wind to it.
Who Can I Watch It With: A group of friends. So you can teach them never to be as stupid as the group in this movie.
3/ The Exorcist
What Happens: A little girl walks backwards on her hands and feet up and down stairs and starts twisting her head around like an owl. Her mum thinks it’s probably for the best to call in two Priest’s before things get even more freaky (but they still totally do.).
How Scary Is It: At the time it was released, people threw up in the cinema, left crying and there was even a miscarriage linked to it. You probably won’t find it that scary now though.
Who Can I Watch It With: Not your parents.
Other Top Scary Movies From Back In The Day
- The Thing
- The Candyman
- Nightmare On Elm Street
- The Blair Witch Project
- The Omen
- American Psycho
- Friday The 13th
Well, I don’t want to overload you with choice, so this list is capped at 41! Hopefully you’ve found something for you and your friends to enjoy. If you think that there’s a movie more deserving of a place in this list, give me a compelling argument in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter, and I might just consider it. Happy Halloween!
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