Halloween is right around the corner, when all the neighborhood kiddies dress up as ghosts and goblins demanding candy to fill their sacks.
Halloween is also a great night to park yourself on the sofa next to your significant other and with a huge bowl of popcorn to enjoy some of the scariest productions Hollywood has to offer.
There’s only one problem with that plan.
When the doorbell rings, you may wonder if it’s the next group of trick-or-treaters or the bad guy that you’re watching on TV.
Should you open the door or not?
Here are Newsmax’s top 10, in alphabetical order. Click the film title to watch the trailer. Let us know how our list compares with your own!
"The Conjuring" (2013)
Shortly after a couple and their five daughters move into a secluded farmhouse, they begin experiencing strange events and call for the help of a paranormal investigator and a demonologist.
Although fairly tame at first, the sightings become progressively more horrific and sinister. They later learn that the property was the site of numerous murders and suicides.
"Every hand that reaches into a wardrobe, every nervous trip into that basement just gets on your nerves," said Wesley Morris, reviewing for Grantland.
"Satan needs to get over himself."
"The Exorcist" (1973)
Called "the scariest movie ever made" by Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Richard Roeper, it’s all the more frightening knowing that it was loosely based on actual events.
After a single mother moves into a townhouse in the Georgetowm section of Washington, D,C., she begins noticing strange behavior in her daughter. A local Catholic priest steps in after medical professionals fail, and he asks for permission to perform an exorcism. The Vatican sends in an expert to assist.
"The Exorcist' has dated little, and its essential premise makes it still one of the most modern of horror films," Susan Wloszczyna wrote for USA Today. "The monster isn't lurking out there. It resides in us, even in the most banal vessel imaginable, a sweet schoolgirl."
"Halloween" (1978)
Six-year-old Michael Myers is locked away after brutally murdering his teen-aged sister on the evening of Oct. 31, 1963. Fifteen years later, on the day before Halloween, the-now 21-year-old Myers manages to escape while being transferred for a court date.
He steals a car, returns to his old quiet neighborhood, and looks for more victims.
"[Director John] Carpenter’s 1978 slasher classic has inspired a million imitations as well as sequels, but few that demonstrate so clearly that a disreputable genre movie can also be a pure, rigorous work of art," said Jake Wilson, reviewing for The Age, and included "Halloween" in his list of top five films.
"Hereditary" (2018)
When a woman’e secretive mother dies, she’s surprised by the large number of mourners at her mother’s funeral. After she begins unravelling cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets, she, her husband and children are tormented by a demonic entity.
Keith Garlington, reviewing for Keith & the Movies, said, "Fine performances, a strong directorial debut, and soaked in the strategically menacing score by Colin Stetson, 'Hereditary' slowly pulls you in before giving your nerves and your senses a good working over."
"Jaws" (1975)
Granted, this 1975 classic isn’t a horror film, but it’s nonetheless scary. Scary enough to keep beachgoers out of the water for at least one summer season.
The fright begins right from the beginning, when we see a young skinny-dipper get pulled under the surface. We don’t actually see the monster Great White Shark pull her to her death, but we know.
Wrote Derek Malcolm, reviewing for The Guardian, "'Jaws' is a splendidly shrewd cinematic equation which not only gives you one or two very nasty turns when you least expect them but, possibly more important, knows when to make you think another's coming without actually providing it."
"Night of the Living Dead" (1968)
This is the George A. Romero classic that introduced filmgoers to zombies — walking corpses. And it was the precursor to the notion of a Zombie Apocalypse.
The film places an unlikely group of people with a single purpose: To find shelter from a massive group of corpses who’ve risen from their graves with a special craving: living human flesh.
"'Night of the Living Dead’ is taut and uncompromising, ending on a note of bitter irony,” wrote Kevin Thomas, reviewing for the Los Angeles Times. “Performances are adequate and often better, especially in the case of Jones, who clearly has what it takes to go on to bigger things."
"Psycho" (1960)
Start with a high-strung owner-operator of a rundown motel with a talent for taxidermy and a strange relationship with his mother.
Add to the mix a young woman on the lam for having stolen tens of thousands of dollars from her employer.
Add the woman’s boyfriend, her sister, and a detective hot on the trail and you have the recipe for an Alfred Hitchcock classic, the soundtrack of which is enough to scare the living daylights out of you.
"'Psycho' comes nearer to attaining an exhilarating balance between content and style than anything Hitchcock has done in years," said Peter John Dyer, for Sight & Sound. "Of course, it is a very minor work. But its virtues of tension, surprise, virtuosity and control are all major ones."
"The Shining" (1980)
Twenty years after "Psycho" we move from an off-the-beaten-track motel to am out-of-the-way hotel, and from king of suspense Alfred Hitchcock to master of horror Stephen King.
In this one a budding writer accepts a lonely job as a hotel caretaker during a season when it’s closed, and moves in with his wife and young son.
He believes that the quiet and solitude will cure his writer’s block. Instead he turns into an axe-wielding homicidal maniac while his son is beset with psychic premonitions.
"The Shining might be one of the most accessible classics to new viewers of today to understand why it is, in fact, one of the greatest and most influential horror films of all time," wrote Manuel Sao Bento of MSB Reviews.
He adds, "The ending is still mind-blowing after all these years."
"The Silence of the Lambs" (1991)
In this one a recent top FBI academy graduate is asked to interview Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lector, who’s serving time for his own grisly crimes. FBI brass believe Lecter nay hold the key to apprehending another gruesome murderer — Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb.
"Most books, plays or films never give us even this much," wrote Terry Francis for Southern Voice. "Yet 'The Silence of the Lambs’ gives us so much that it's a shame the film doesn't find ways to deepen its concentration on the colossal aberrance of the minds of its complementary terrors."
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974)
Sheer terror: You asked for it; you got it.
Based on actual events, the film follows a young woman who receives word that her grandfather’s grave may have been vandalized. So she and her paraplegic brother, along with a group of their friends, set out to investigate. What they get is far more than what they bargained for, as the film’s title suggests.
Warning: Avoid the 2003 remake.
"Morally retrograde it may be, but then so are nightmares," wrote Derek Malcolm for The Guardian. "The point is that this one, though often crude and raw, really leads the imagination. What also works in its favour is that it doesn't pretend to do anything more than scare the pants off you."
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.
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