Halloween may not have the same spooky shenanigans and hijinks as it has in previous thanks to COVID-19. However, you can still make the night more memorable by experience by watching a handful of horror movies brought to you by Netflix.
Here are some movies we hand-picked for you to watch while you chow down on a bucket full of Halloween candy.
ParaNorman
ParaNorman, a touchstone stop-motion film from Laika (of Coraline fame) surrounds an 11-year-old medium who has the ability to talk to ghosts and gets ridiculed for it in school and at home, although Norman’s mother is more supportive of his gift than his father is.
Unbeknownst to them, Norman is tasked with ending a 300-year-old witch’s curse placed on his small town of Blithe Hollow, Massachusetts when an army of zombies rise from their grave on the anniversary of the witch’s execution.
The script for ParaNorman was written with a dash of charm and a touch of whimsy so as to make viewers reflect on things that happened during their childhood that made them different from others, and it gives children something to relate to as adults around them may not believe everything they see.
Hubie Halloween
Adam Sandler’s fifth Netflix outing has him playing a delicatessen employee named Hubie, an eccentric community volunteer who is the butt of everyone’s jokes and pranks, especially on Halloween when he tasked with monitoring the town of Salem as the official Halloween Helper.
In the midst of Halloween festivities, Hubie has his work cut out for him as he is being chased around by former school bullies, a neighbor who turns out to be a 400-year-old werewolf, and is thrown into a kidnapping investigation.
Before Hubie Halloween‘s debut, Sandler threatened to make the worst movie ever simply for being snubbed by the Academy for his role in Uncut Gems, but this movie might not be that, as it has a star-studded cast list.
The Silence of the Lambs
A classic horror film of the 1990s, The Silence of the Lambs follows an FBI trainee (Jodie Foster) seeking advice from infamous psychiatrist and serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) on how to catch a serial killer named Buffalo Bill, who skins the corpses of his female victims.
Those who saw Silence of the Lambs at the time of its release might remember that the movie robbed Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast of its Academy Award for Best Picture in 1992.
Silence of the Lambs is one of true classics in the psychological thriller genre with both its ominous atmosphere and a stellar performance by Hopkins as one of the greatest criminal masterminds in fiction.
The Evil Dead
Known for the follow-up TV series Ash vs. the Evil Dead and scores of comic books and video games, the 1981 film surrounds five Michigan State University students, Ash Williams among them, vacationing in an isolated cabin in the woods. When the kids play a tape recorder found in the cabin, legions of demons and spirits come out to possess four of them, leaving Ash to fend off the rest of the demonic forces.
Sam Raimi made The Evil Dead such a gory and violent splatterfest with no fear of censorship, the movie is still impressively bloody even by today’s standards. At the time of its release, it was dubbed a “video nasty” and given an X-rating, which is normally reserved for pornographic films, thereby banning it in some countries.
The Babysitter
If you thought Vicky from The Fairly OddParents was the evilest babysitter you’ve ever seen on TV, Netflix begs to differ with its original horror-comedy flick The Babysitter.
Here, middle schooler Cole sees his titular babysitter Bee as one of his best friends, but when his parents leave for a night at a hotel, he spies on her at the behest of his neighboring friend and discovers that she’s the leader of a demonic cult, resulting in an all-night chase to kill him and sacrifice him to the Devil. If that’s not a harsh punishment to dole out to a kid for staying up past their bedtime, I don’t know what is.
The Babysitter proves that Netflix originals don’t have to be just prestige TV but can be schlocky horror as well.
Pan’s Labyrinth
Considered to be Guillermo del Toro’s magnum opus among devout horror movie fans, Pan’s Labyrinth (the only foreign-language film on this list as the dialogue is in Spanish) takes place in Francoist-era Spain in 1944, where 10-year-old Ofelia travels to the Spanish countryside with ailing and pregnant mother to at the behest of her evil stepfather Vidal, who is an officer in the Spanish army. While there, she begins to see fairies and other creatures, including a faun.
While Ofelia is involved in a dark fairy, her stepfather is leading the effort to hunt down rebels.
The narratives of innocent Ofelia and power-hungry Vidal intertwine in a film that is both fairy tale and historical drama. Pan’s Labyrinth does an excellent job of blending the whimsical with the dark and the fantastical with the grounded.
Green Room
In the Green Room, a punk rock band goes on tour and stops at a bar which is, unbeknownst to them, run by neo-Nazis. After witnessing a murder, things swiftly go downhill as the band tries to defend themselves from the villains.
Unlike every other film on this list except for Silence of the Lambs, there’s no supernatural shenanigans to be found in the plot, only very shocking and brutal violence. The most notable performance in Green Room belongs to Patrick Stewart, who plays one of the film’s villains.
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