Not planning on throwing an outrageous costume party this Halloween? Well, the least you can do is spend your night watching some horror movie gems. If you need a few suggestions, look no further than the eight films below. Just make sure you have someone to watch them with, so you can actually sleep at night.
1. The Amityville Horror
Watch in terror as the Lutz family moves into their new home only to flee in less than a month after being terrorized by paranormal phenomena. The only thing worse than the events that occurred in this movie is that they were all based on a true story. Yikes.
2. The Babadook
The only thing more terrifying than children are the things children can see that adults can’t. Like Sam, a six-year-old boy who becomes obsessed with a murderous monster named Mister Babadook and even crafts a few weapons just in case he ever has to fight it. Sam’s mom reads him a pop-up story about Mister Babadook and cue a series of nope, nope, nope events occurring shortly thereafter.
3. Children of the Corn
So, to reiterate, children are terrifying. Less at times when they let their imaginations and fear of the boogeyman get the best of them, but more so when they all agree that you should be brutally killed if you happen to be over the age of 18. Seriously, if you can’t trust a pre-teen who can you trust?!
4. It Follows
After she has sex with a strange man, a young girl is pursued by a supernatural entity that only she can see. In order to get rid of the curse or pass it on to a new person, she must have sex with someone else before the curse kills her. Yeah, this is probably enough to make you never want to have sex again.
5. The Descent
Three of your worst nightmares–darkness, claustrophobia, and flesh-eating humanoids–come out to play in this film. Sarah goes on a spelunking expedition with a group of her friends when one of those friends, Juno, waits until after the group gets trapped underground before admitting that she lead them into an unmapped cave system. Conveniently after realizing that they’re kind of screwed, they’re all hunted down by the “crawlers” that live in said cave. Way to go, Juno.
6. Lights Out
Sophie has an “imaginary” friend named Diana, who had a skin condition that made her sensitive to light as a child. After being killed by doctors who overexposed her to light during an experiment, Diana, comes back as a vengeful ghost who only appears in the dark because how else is a story like this supposed to play out? Prepare to spend a few nights sleeping with your lights on.
7. May
Making friends as an adult is hard, amirite? May is a veterinarian-slash-surgeon whose only real friend is a creepy looking doll named Suzie, because social interaction just isn’t her forte. So, instead of just buying a pet like the rest of us when we want to expand our social circles, she decides to go all Frankenstein on everyone and make a friend out of human body parts, proving that she paid way more attention in her human anatomy classes than any of us ever did.
8. The Exorcist
But what would a scary movie compilation be without the scariest to ever do it? Enter: the sole cause of your nightmares (and the reason you have a general disinclination toward split pea soup), The Exorcist. Just in case you have yet to be pop cultured and still don’t know the plot of what’s been named the most terrifying film ever made, The Exorcist tells the story of the demonic possession of a 12-year-old girl and the exorcism performed as an attempt to save her.