Spooky Season Is Here: Here’s What You Should Watch To Celebrate

If you don’t love a scary spooky movie, I highly recommend Rocky Horror Picture Show to get into the spooky mood. It is an iconic Halloween movie with its existence basically being the definition of camp. It follows the straight-laced couple Brad and Janet as their car breaks down and they go into a strange mansion to ask for help. In this house, they find an interesting cast of characters that make them question their entire lives. Rocky Horror is revolutionary for its queer themes and the way that it presented gender and sexuality as normal. This movie is weird and nonsensical; if you like a good campy movie musical, this is definitely the movie for you.

I went through an intense phase with this movie in high school when it came out. It is an incredible horror story written by one of the most iconic horror writers of the past century. The movie adapts Stephen King’s work beautifully (cutting out some of the more disturbing, unnecessarily sexual aspects) in this two-part movie that still scares me today. The children’s performances charmingly tell the story with a good mixture of humor and horror. This movie is filled with jump-scares, genuinely terrifying entities, and a good-ol’ found family trope.

This is one of my favorite episodes of Community of all time. The mixture of horror and comedy is absolutely perfect. The study group is taken down by a weird military-ration-caused virus that turns the students into zombies. They are chased through the school by their classmates as they try to turn down the thermostat to break their fevers. The whole episode is accompanied by a soundtrack of ABBA’s greatest hits and as always Dean Pelton’s puns. 

If you’re just trying to get into the fall vibes, I highly recommend Over the Garden Wall. It’s a very strange children’s cartoon that’s ten incredibly short episodes that become spooky as it concludes its story. The two maincharacters, Greg and Wirt, are lost in a dark and eerie forest and as they try to find their way home, they meet a roaming cast of incredibly uncanny characters. These people range from a talking horse who wants to become a thief to a man who gets stuck in a gorilla costume. This strange story is the perfect way to get yourself into the Halloween and fall vibes as spooky season begins.

This is my favorite Halloween movie ever. I can never go a year without watching the original Scream.  The perfect mixture of satire and slasher, Scream highlights all of the best parts of a slasher film while expertly making fun of itself. It was the first movie to speak aloud the tropes of the characters and killer in a slasher, popularizing the phrase “Final Girl”. Even though I’ve watched this movie a million times, I still love the mystery and the killer reveal at the end. Scream is also one of the only horror franchises with incredible sequels that live up to the brand. I have said it to anyone who listens, but Sidney Prescott is THE Final Girl and for that reason alone you should watch the best slasher of all time.