Every October I tell myself I’m going to watch a bunch of new Halloween movies, and every October I end up rewatching the same three. So this year I actually did the homework.
Quick confession first: I scare easily. I watch scary movies with a blanket I can pull over my face, I’ve paused more than one just to turn on a lamp, and I will absolutely check behind the shower curtain afterward. So this isn’t a list from a hardcore gore fan. It’s a list from a regular person who likes a good scare, likes a story that means something, and wants that cozy Halloween feeling when the credits roll.
You’ll find two kinds of Halloween movies here. Half of them are spooky but not scary: the kind of movie you put on with your little brother, your roommate who hates horror, or a bowl of candy you swore you were saving for trick-or-treaters. The other half are real horror movies that actually got to me. Almost none of them get talked about as much as they should, and that’s kind of the whole point.
How I scored them
Every movie gets a score out of 10, based on four things I actually care about:
- Is it scary in a fun way? (3 points) Scared enough to grab the blanket, not so scared I turn it off.
- Does it stick with me? (3 points) Did I think about it the next day?
- Does it feel like Halloween? (2 points) Would I put it on for October 31?
- Is it easy to get into? (2 points) Can a regular person follow it without a film degree?
I also added a Cover-Your-Eyes Meter from 🙈 to 🙈🙈🙈🙈🙈. One means you can watch it with a snack in your hand. Five means you will not be eating anything.
They’re in no particular order. Pick whatever matches your mood.
The 10 Halloween movies, in no particular order
1. Girl vs. Monster (2012)
I’m starting soft, because I want you to keep reading.
Skylar Lewis (Olivia Holt) is a normal high school girl with one big Halloween plan: she’s going to sing at a party with her crush, Ryan. Her parents have other ideas. They ground her, lock the house down with a weirdly intense alarm system, and act like Halloween night is some kind of emergency. Which, to be fair, it is. Skylar just doesn’t know that yet.
She cuts the power to sneak out, and that’s the mistake that kicks everything off. Turns out her parents are monster hunters, Skylar is the fifth generation in the family business, and the basement has been holding a monster called Deimata. Cutting the power sets her free. And Deimata doesn’t just want out. She wants to mess with Skylar’s whole family.
Here’s the part I actually love. In this movie, everybody has their own personal monster, and it feeds on whatever you’re most scared of. So Skylar, plus her best friends Sadie and Henry, head to the party armed with her parents’ monster-hunting gear, and every one of them has to face the exact fear they’ve been dodging. For Henry it shows up as a creepy scarecrow. For Skylar, it’s tied to the one thing she wants most: getting up and singing in front of everyone.
There’s possession, there’s a mean-girl rival named Myra who gets taken over by Deimata, there’s a goofy family friend named Cobb, and there are a lot of songs. It’s a Disney Channel movie, so you know the vibe.
I watched this one on a night when I just could not handle anything scary, and it was perfect. The monsters look a little cheesy now, but the idea that “your fear is literally what makes the monster stronger” kind of snuck up on me. I’ve been thinking about it more than I expected to for a movie with a pop song finale.
The character I liked most was Sadie. She’s the anxious best friend who’s scared of basically everything, and watching her finally stand up to her own monster was honestly the most satisfying moment in the movie. She felt like me at a haunted house.
Why don’t people talk about it? It aired on Disney Channel in October 2012 and never got the big rewatch culture that Halloweentown has. If you were a teenager or an adult at the time, it just wasn’t on your radar.
Who it’s for: younger siblings, kids, friends who hate horror, or anyone who wants Halloween movies with zero nightmares.
My score: 8/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈 (1/5) Where to watch: Disney+
2. His House (2020)
Okay, now a real scary one. This movie wasn’t even on my radar until it popped up on Netflix, and the thumbnail looked like every other haunted house movie. I almost scrolled right past it. I’m really glad I didn’t.
Bol and Rial are a married couple who escape the war in South Sudan. They get on a truck, then a boat that’s way too full, and they lose their little girl, Nyagak, somewhere in the water on the way to Europe. The movie doesn’t throw this at you all at once. You get it in pieces, and every piece hurts a little more.
They end up in England as asylum seekers, and they’re “lucky” enough to be given a house. I put lucky in quotes on purpose, because this house is grim. The wallpaper is peeling off, there’s trash everywhere, and it’s out on the edge of town where nobody knows them. Their caseworker (Matt Smith, who is weirdly perfect at being polite and cold at the same time) gives them the rules: no working, no moving, a small allowance every week, and if they mess up, they go back. He basically tells them they seem like the good ones, so don’t ruin it.
Bol takes this really seriously. He wants to fit in so badly. He buys new clothes, he goes to the local pub, and he gets annoyed when Rial keeps doing things “the old way.” Rial is not into it. She doesn’t trust the house, the neighbors, or the system, and pretty quickly she doesn’t trust the walls either. Because there’s something in them. You hear scratching at night. You see shapes in the hallway. Bol starts ripping holes in the walls to find out what’s going on, and every time he leans in to look through one of those holes I wanted to yell at the screen.
Rial thinks she knows what it is. She grew up hearing stories about an apeth, a kind of night witch that follows people who took something that wasn’t theirs. Bol won’t hear it. And he definitely won’t tell the caseworker, because complaining could get them kicked out. So they’re stuck. Outside is a country that doesn’t really want them, and inside is something that won’t leave them alone.
I’m not going to say more about the plot, because the second half has a reveal that completely changed how I saw the whole movie. Just trust me.
What I keep coming back to is how lonely it feels. Bol and Rial whisper to each other even when nobody’s around, like they’re scared of being overheard. And honestly, the scene that stuck with me most has no ghost in it at all. Rial goes out to find a doctor, gets lost in the housing estate, and walks in circles while some local teenagers yell at her to go back to Africa. No spooky music, nothing jumps out. It was just so uncomfortable and sad that I had to pause it for a minute.
The scary parts are scary too, don’t get me wrong. There’s one face in the dark that made me pull my feet up onto the couch like the floor was lava. But it never felt cheap.
And Rial. Wunmi Mosaku is incredible here. Rial is the one who senses the danger first, and she’s the one nobody listens to, which drove me crazy in the best way. She’s not the “scared wife” you see in a lot of these movies. She’s tired, smart, and done pretending to be grateful all the time.
So why haven’t more people seen it? Timing, mostly. It dropped straight onto Netflix in the fall of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, with almost no marketing, and got buried under everything else that October. Which is a shame, because critics loved it, and director Remi Weekes won a BAFTA for it. It was his first feature!
Who it’s for: watch it with one other person, not a whole group. It’s a “lights off, sit close, talk about it afterward” kind of movie.
My score: 8.5/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈🙈🙈 (3/5) Where to watch: Netflix
3. Fun Size (2012)
This one isn’t scary at all. It’s a Halloween night comedy, and I will defend it forever.
Wren (Victoria Justice) is a high school senior in Cleveland, and she has exactly one goal for Halloween: get to the party where her crush, Aaron, is going to be. Her best friend April (Jane Levy) is fully on board. Then Wren’s mom (Chelsea Handler), who’s been a bit of a mess since Wren’s dad died, decides to go out with her much younger boyfriend and hands Wren a job. Take your little brother Albert trick-or-treating.
Albert is eight. He doesn’t talk, he dresses like Spider-Man, and he has a very specific talent for causing chaos. Within about five minutes, Wren loses him in the crowd.
So the night turns into a frantic search across the city. Wren drags in two classmates who are not exactly part of the cool crowd: Roosevelt (Thomas Mann), who has had a crush on her forever, and Peng, who is way too confident about his chances with April. Roosevelt “borrows” his moms’ car without asking, and the four of them drive around Cleveland chasing every possible Albert sighting. Meanwhile, Albert is having the best night of his life, getting into trouble with a guy who works at a convenience store and ending up somewhere he absolutely should not be.
It’s messy, it’s dumb in places, and some of the jokes are way more grown-up than you’d expect from a Nickelodeon movie. But I laughed out loud more than once, and there’s a sweetness under all the chaos. The whole movie is really about Wren not wanting to deal with the fact that her family changed, and Halloween night forcing her to.
My favorite character is Roosevelt. He’s awkward, he overthinks everything, and he’s trying so hard. There’s a moment where he finally just says what he feels, and it’s so painfully relatable I had to cover my face, which is the only time this movie made me do that.
Why is it forgotten? Honestly, because critics hated it and it flopped. It barely made back half its budget in theaters. But it has quietly become one of those Halloween movies people find years later and go “wait, why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”
Who it’s for: a group of friends, a sleepover, or anyone who wants a laugh instead of a scare.
My score: 6.5/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈 (1/5) Where to watch: rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV or Fandango at Home
4. The Barn (2016)
If you miss the days of renting a horror movie just because the VHS cover looked cool, this is your movie.
It’s Halloween night, 1989. Sam and Josh are high school seniors and best friends, and they want one last wild Halloween before graduation. The plan is to hit a rock concert with a group of friends: Michelle, Chris, Nikki and Russell. Easy, right? Except they take a detour, and the detour leads them to an old, abandoned barn that the locals definitely do not mess with.
There’s a legend about that barn, and of course somebody ends up doing exactly what you’re not supposed to do. The curse wakes up, and out come three monsters that feel like they were designed by a kid who drew on his notebook during math class (I mean that as a compliment). There’s Hollow Jack, a pumpkin-headed killer. There’s the Candy Corn Scarecrow. And there’s the Boogeyman. From there, it’s a full-on Halloween night slasher, with the group trying to survive until morning while the monsters pick them off one by one.
I’m not going to pretend this is a fancy movie. It was made on a tiny budget, some of the acting is stiff, and the dialogue is pure 80s cheese. But that’s the fun of it. The practical effects are gross in a gooey, handmade way, the synth music is great, and it looks and feels like something you’d find in the back of a video store in 1990. I watched it with snacks and a friend, and we spent half the time screaming and the other half laughing.
My favorite character is Hollow Jack, hands down. A pumpkin-headed monster on Halloween night is exactly what I want from Halloween movies. He’s creepy, he’s iconic, and honestly I’d buy the T-shirt.
Fun detail for horror nerds: the cast includes Linnea Quigley, a real 80s scream queen, and Ari Lehman, who played young Jason in the original Friday the 13th. Director Justin M. Seaman wrote it, edited it, and even played the Boogeyman himself.
So why haven’t you heard of it? It was a true indie. It played small horror festivals in 2016 and went straight to home video. It got enough of a cult following to earn a sequel in 2022, but it never made it anywhere near the mainstream.
Who it’s for: a group of friends who love retro horror and don’t take it too seriously.
My score: 7/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈🙈 (2/5) Where to watch: free with ads on Plex and Tubi
5. Mostly Ghostly (2008)
If you grew up reading R.L. Stine books under the covers with a flashlight, this one is going to hit right in the nostalgia.
Max Doyle (Sterling Beaumon) is a kid who wants to be a magician more than anything. The problem is, he’s not very good at it. His tricks keep failing, he gets picked on at school, and he has a crush on Traci (Ali Lohan), an older girl who seems way out of his league. His big chance to prove himself is a Halloween magic show, and he really, really needs it to go well.
Then things get weird in his basement. Two ghosts come right through the wall: a brother and sister named Nicky and Tara (Luke Benward and Madison Pettis). They’re not scary at all. They’re actually kind of funny, and they need Max’s help. Because there’s a demon named Phears who has a plan for Halloween night, and it involves opening a tunnel that would let a whole army of ghosts through, right in Max’s house.
So Max ends up juggling three things at once: helping his ghost friends, dealing with bullies at school, and trying not to completely embarrass himself at the magic show. Spoiler-free hint: the ghosts turn out to be a pretty great magic act.
This movie is very much a kid’s movie, and I knew that going in. But it made me smile the whole way through. It has that early 2000s, direct-to-DVD Halloween feeling that I didn’t realize I missed. There are a couple of creepy moments with Phears, but they always turn into a joke before they get too scary.
The character I loved most was Tara. She’s the little ghost sister who’s way smarter than everyone around her, and she has the best lines. Madison Pettis was so good at playing a kid who acts like she’s 40.
Why is it forgotten? It had only a tiny theater release in 2008 and mostly lived on DVD shelves. Most people who saw it were kids at the time, so it never became a big “Halloween classic” like Hocus Pocus.
Who it’s for: kids, families, and anyone who grew up on Goosebumps.
My score: 7/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈 (1/5) Where to watch: rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube or Fandango at Home
6. Fresh (2022)
I’ll be honest. I went into this one thinking it was a romantic comedy. It is not.
Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is exhausted by dating apps. Every guy she matches with is either rude, boring, or both, and she’s about ready to give up. Then she meets Steve (Sebastian Stan) the old-fashioned way, in the produce aisle of a grocery store. He’s funny, he’s charming, he’s a plastic surgeon, and he actually seems to listen to her. It feels like the meet-cute she’s been waiting for.
Her best friend Mollie is happy for her, but also a little suspicious. Steve doesn’t have social media. He’s vague about his family. And things move fast. Before long, he invites Noa away for a weekend trip. She says yes. Her phone barely gets a signal out there.
And that’s all I’m going to say about the story, because the less you know, the better this movie is. What I will tell you is this: the title card doesn’t even show up until about 30 minutes in. That’s how long the movie spends lulling you into thinking you’re watching a rom-com. When the word Fresh finally hits the screen, it’s like the movie is winking at you and saying, “Okay, now we start.”
This one scared me in a different way than the others. There are no ghosts or monsters. It’s the kind of scary that makes you think about every first date you’ve ever gone on. I spent the second half yelling at Noa through the TV and texting my friends “please never go on a weekend trip with a guy you just met.” Under all the twists, it’s a sharp, darkly funny movie about how women get treated in the dating world.
Sebastian Stan is unsettling in this. He’s so charming that you almost want to trust him, even when you know you shouldn’t. There’s a scene of him dancing around the house that is somehow fun and horrifying at the same time. But my favorite character is actually Mollie. She’s the friend who notices something’s off and doesn’t let it go, and we all need a Mollie.
Why didn’t more people see it? It skipped theaters and went straight to Hulu in March 2022, months before spooky season, so it got lost in the streaming shuffle. It was also the first feature from director Mimi Cave, so there wasn’t a big name pushing it.
Who it’s for: a girls’ night, or anyone who’s ever been on a weird first date.
My score: 8/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈🙈🙈 (3/5) Where to watch: Hulu
7. The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (2010)
Victoria Justice, a creepy castle in Romania, and a werewolf transformation that is 100% early 2010s Nickelodeon. Yes, I’m putting her on this list twice, and no, I’m not sorry.
Jordan Sands (Victoria Justice) is a little awkward, has a ton of allergies, and has had to grow up fast since her mom passed away. Her dad is struggling with money, and her little brother Hunter is obsessed with monsters and loves gross pranks. Then out of nowhere, the family inherits a castle from a distant relative named Dragomir, in a tiny Romanian town called Wolfsberg.
So they fly out to see it, and the place is exactly as spooky as you’re imagining. There’s a stern housekeeper named Madame Varcolac (played by Brooke Shields, which I did not see coming). There’s a cute guy in town who works at the butcher shop. There’s a local legend about the “Wolfsberg Beast.” And there’s a very glamorous real estate agent named Paulina who wants to help them sell the castle, but who, for some reason, only ever shows up at night.
Then Jordan goes snooping in Dragomir’s old lab, cuts her foot on a broken vial, and starts changing. She’s hungry all the time. Her senses go crazy. She’s growing hair in places she would rather not discuss. Her little brother figures out what’s happening before anyone else, and the two of them have to work together to stop her from going full werewolf, while figuring out who in this town is actually dangerous.
This movie is pure comfort food. It’s silly and cheesy, and the effects are very “made for TV,” but it’s genuinely funny, and the brother-sister relationship is sweeter than I expected. There’s even a karaoke number at the end that made me laugh out loud.
My favorite character is Hunter, the little brother. He spends the whole movie being the monster expert nobody takes seriously, and then he turns out to be right about basically everything. Every family has a Hunter.
Why is it forgotten? It premiered on Nickelodeon in October 2010 and was mostly a “you had to be there” moment. It never got the long rewatch life that Disney Channel movies got, so a lot of people who were too old or too young at the time missed it.
Who it’s for: siblings, families, or a cozy night when you want a little monster action with zero stress.
My score: 7/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈 (1/5) Where to watch: Paramount+, or rent on Prime Video, Apple TV or Fandango at Home
8. The Houses October Built (2014)
This is the one I’d show to anyone who says haunted houses don’t scare them anymore.
Five friends rent an RV and spend October driving across the country with a camera, looking for the most extreme haunted attractions in America. Not the family-friendly kind with teenagers in rubber masks. The other kind. The ones you only hear about through rumors, where the actors are allowed to touch you and nobody will tell you exactly what goes on inside.
At first it’s a fun road trip. They visit real haunted attractions, joke around, and rate each one. But the more they ask around, the more they hear about one underground haunt that’s supposedly the scariest of all, the kind that moves around and can only be found if it decides to find you. And slowly, the masked actors from the haunts they’ve already visited start showing up in places they shouldn’t be. At a gas station. Outside the RV at night. A girl in a creepy porcelain-doll mask who just stands there and stares.
The whole movie is shot like found footage, and some of it really was filmed at actual haunted attractions. That’s what makes it work. Half the time I genuinely couldn’t tell which parts were “real” and which parts were the movie, and that blur made everything ten times creepier.
I’ll admit the friends are not the most likable group, and the ending splits people. But the atmosphere in this movie is incredible. It feels like October: corn mazes, fog machines, cheap costumes and that feeling that something is a little off.
The character that stuck with me is the porcelain-doll girl. She barely does anything, and that’s the scariest part. I still think about her every time I see a mask in a Halloween store.
Why is it overlooked? It had only a small release in 2014, and found footage was already getting a bad reputation by then. People wrote it off as “another shaky-cam movie” without giving it a shot. It still did well enough to get a sequel in 2017.
Who it’s for: anyone who loves haunted attractions, or a group that wants something creepy to talk over.
My score: 7/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈🙈🙈 (3/5) Where to watch: free on Plex and Hoopla; also on AMC+ and Philo
9. Monsterville: Cabinet of Souls (2015)
Another R.L. Stine one, but aimed a little older than Mostly Ghostly, and with a creepy carnival, which is one of my favorite Halloween settings ever.
In the small town of Danville, Halloween is a big deal, and this year the town’s Halloween festival brings in a traveling carnival. Beth (Dove Cameron) heads to the carnival with her friends, ready for a fun night out. It’s all bright lights, rides and spooky attractions, and at first it looks like the best night of the year.
But the carnival is run by a showman called Dr. Hysteria, and there’s something very wrong with his attractions. There’s a theater that shows people their deepest wishes, and the teens who step inside don’t really come back out the same. Some of them don’t come back at all. Their souls get trapped in a cabinet, and the carnival feeds on them. When Beth and her friends start noticing that kids are disappearing, they have to figure out who they can trust, including the mysterious new teens in town who seem very interested in Beth’s group.
This movie is cheesy in the best Halloween way. There are monsters, carnival games that go wrong, and a villain who is having way too much fun. It’s not scary for adults, but it has a couple of moments that would definitely spook a 12-year-old.
My favorite character is Beth. Dove Cameron plays her as a regular girl who just wants a fun Halloween, but she’s also the one who refuses to fall for the carnival’s tricks. When everyone else is getting lured in by what they want most, she’s the one who keeps her head. I kind of loved that.
Why didn’t anyone talk about it? It skipped theaters and went straight to DVD and digital in fall 2015. No big premiere, no big marketing push, so it lived and died on the bottom shelf of the Halloween section.
Who it’s for: tweens and teens, or anyone who wants a spooky carnival night without real nightmares.
My score: 6.5/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈🙈 (2/5) Where to watch: rent or buy on Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play or Fandango at Home
10. The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
I saved the hardest one to watch for last. Fair warning: this is the one where I watched most of it through my fingers.
You know Cinderella. Now forget everything you think you know, because this version is told from the point of view of the “ugly” stepsister, Elvira. She’s a shy, bookish girl who moves into a new home with her mother, a widow who is desperate for money and status. Her new stepsister, Agnes, is gorgeous, and everyone notices. Elvira, with her braces and awkward smile, gets noticed for all the wrong reasons.
Then the prince announces a ball, and it’s basically a competition for who gets to marry into royalty. Elvira’s mother sees it as the family’s only way out, and she decides that Elvira needs to be fixed. What follows is a series of “beauty treatments” from a fairy-tale world with no rules and no anesthesia. A nose gets reshaped. Eyelashes get sewn on. There’s a trick for losing weight that I will not describe while you might be eating. Elvira goes along with all of it, because she believes, really believes, that if she can just look good enough, her life will finally start.
This movie is gross. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. There were at least three moments where I had to look away completely. But what kept me watching was how sad it is. Elvira isn’t a villain. She’s a teenage girl who has been told her whole life that she isn’t enough, and she’s willing to destroy herself to change that. As someone who grew up with filters and beauty trends everywhere, that hit me harder than I expected.
Elvira is the character who stayed with me, obviously. I spent the whole movie wanting to shake her and hug her at the same time. And Agnes, the “Cinderella” of the story, is not the sweet angel you expect, which makes the whole thing even more interesting.
Why hasn’t it blown up? It’s a Norwegian film, the first feature from director Emilie Blichfeldt, and it premiered at Sundance before landing on Shudder in the US. A lot of people skip anything with subtitles, and Shudder is a smaller streamer, so it mostly stayed in horror-fan circles.
Who it’s for: horror fans with strong stomachs, or anyone who wants a fairy tale that actually says something. Not for a date night, and definitely not for dinner time.
My score: 7.5/10 Cover-Your-Eyes Meter: 🙈🙈🙈🙈 (4/5) Where to watch: Shudder (also through AMC+)
FAQ
What are some good Halloween movies that aren’t scary? From this list, Girl vs. Monster, Mostly Ghostly, The Boy Who Cried Werewolf and Fun Size all score a single 🙈. They’re spooky, fun, and safe for kids and anyone who hates jump scares.
What’s the scariest movie on this list? The Ugly Stepsister is the hardest to watch because of its body horror. For pure creepiness, His House and The Houses October Built are the ones that stayed with me the longest.
Can I watch any of these Halloween movies for free? Yes. The Barn is free with ads on Plex and Tubi, and The Houses October Built is free on Plex and Hoopla. Streaming catalogs change often, so check before movie night.
Which Halloween movies are best for families? Girl vs. Monster (Disney+) and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (Paramount+) are the easiest picks for a family night. Mostly Ghostly works great for younger kids too.
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