10 Best Halloween Movies

Get yourself in the mood for a fright night with these scary film classics.

-Neil Turitz

Cauldron full of candy? Check! Dog wearing devil horns? Check! Fake blood and plastic fangs? Check! The only other thing you need for a perfect Halloween is one of these frightening flicks. Here’s our list of the top 10 Halloween movies — for adults. Check back next week for our rundown of the top Halloween movies for kids.

 10. Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy Kruger, meet America. America? Meet your biggest freakin’ nightmare. That clawed glove still gives us the willies. Yikes!

9. The Shining. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. It also scares the bejeezus out of us. The third-to-last film by the amazing Stanley Kubrick, and very possibly his most popular. Certainly his scariest.

8. Psycho. Maybe the last truly great film of the truly great Alfred Hitchcock’s career. Every single part of this movie is fantastic (except for maybe the psychiatrist’s description of Norman Bates’ psychosis at the end, which dates the film more than a bit).

7. Last House on the Left/Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We admit this is a cop out, but we wanted to include eleven films on this list and pairing these two — perhaps the beginning of the 1970s low-budget horror movement that spawned so many other films, both on this list and missing from it — does the trick, especially because the former was director Wes Craven’s first flick and the second introduced Leatherface, and without him, there’s no Freddy, Jason or Michael Myers.