The 40 Best Halloween Movies for People Who Hate Horror Movies

"It can't rain all the time." This grunge classic from 1994, based on the comics by James O'Barr, stars Bruce Lee's son Brandon Lee in his final film role. Lee plays Eric Draven, a rock star who is murdered on Halloween night along with his fiancée. One year later Eric returns to the world of the living, now imbued with supernatural powers, to carry out his revenge.

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Roddy Piper is here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and he's all out of bubblegum. The pro wrestling legend stars in this brilliant 1980s sci-fi horror satire from John Carpenter, in which a man sees through some special sunglasses how the world is actually ruled by aliens. Imagined by Carpenter as a commentary on Reagan-era America, They Live is only scary in how timeless it remains.

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Ever see a zombie movie with yakuza hitmen and samurai warriors? In 2000, underground auteur Ryuhei Kitamura made his feature directing debut with Versus, which combines zombie horror with badass martial arts action and John Woo-like gunplay. Set in a haunted forest, a runaway prisoner clashes with gangsters whilst they all fight to survive an endless horde of zombies.

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In this hypnotic and seductive French New Wave thriller by Alan Resnais, the guests of a lavish château include a man who is convinced that he has previously met a gorgeous woman. An exploration of truth and memory, Last Year in Marienbad will not scare you, but it'll undoubtedly leave you shaken and stirred.

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Pop music video director Joseph Kahn gets behind the camera for his black comedy slasher Detention, released in 2011. The seniors of Grizzly Lake High—including hotshot Clapton Davis, played by Josh Hutcherson--find themselves in the crosshairs of a serial killer wreaking havoc on their sleepy suburban town. A rip-roaring fusion of '80s and '90s teen movies and slasher flicks, Detention now exists as a time capsule to early 2010s millennial culture.

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When Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak bombed in theaters in 2015, one of the most cited reasons for its demise was that it simply wasn't scary enough. For our purposes now, this is a great thing. Mistakenly advertised as a haunted house horror movie, Crimson Peak is in fact a tragic gothic romance, with Mia Wasikowska playing an aspiring author who moves into a dilapidated English mansion with her husband (Tom Hiddleston) and her sister (Jessica Chastain).

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Vin Diesel goes D&D in this action-horror film from 2015. Immortal rogue Kaulder, played by Diesel, survives into the modern day as he continues his fight against the forces of darkness. When his archenemy returns after a long millennia, Kaulder seeks a rematch for the ages. The Last Witch Hunter may be dumb and loud, but when the whole point is to watch Vin Diesel fight witches with swords, it's hard to ask for much more.

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In this acclaimed documentary from 2009, director Andrew Monument surveys the history of American horror films with Lance Henriksen as the narrator. Tracing its subject from the early days of the silent vampires to what was then the current era of handheld horrors and torture porn freaks, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue is a fun and enlightening crash course in horror that even scaredy cats will find fascinating. And for genre veterans, the movie's star-studded experts like Wes Craven, George Romero, and John Carpenter make it essential.

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Sure, Días de Muertos (also called the Day of the Dead) is celebrated on November 1. But what's a 24-hour difference when the movie is too good to pass up? Released to tremendous acclaim in 2017, Coco is Disney's Oscar-winning animated classic about a young boy who accidentally enters the mystical Land of the Dead. He goes on a search for his late musical idol, believing him to be his distant grandfather. Gorgeous, hilarious, and powerful enough to move you to tears, Coco is simply unforgettable.

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A love letter to the slasher genre with a surprisingly warm emotional core, The Final Girls really knows how to get you in the heart. Featuring Taissa Farmiga as Max, the young daughter of a deceased "scream queen" (Malin Akerman). On the anniversary of her mom's passing, Max joins her friends for a screening of Camp Bloodbath—starring Max's mother—only for all of them to wind up in the world of the film. While the gang uses their expertise of horror movies to stay alive, Max takes the opportunity to say goodbye to her mother for the final time.

In 2009, when the world was smitten with Twilight's sparkling vampires, Korean auteur Chan-wook Park unearthed richer ground in the genre with his erotic horror, Thirst. Song Kang-ho stars as a Catholic priest who is turned into a vampire, and slowly begins to fall in lust for the wife of his childhood best friend. A vampire romance like nothing you've seen before, Thirst bites in places where it counts.

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A figure in a creepy bunny costume named Frank tells Donnie, an unstable teenager played by a breakout Jake Gyllenhaal, that the world will end in 28 days. Things get... weird. Over twenty years later, Donnie Darko remains a celebrated millennial classic thanks to its portrayal of teenage disillusionment and the darkness that dwells even in idyllic suburbia.

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The familiar werewolf story gets a hip makeover in this '80s horror-comedy classic, with Michael J. Fox as a high school basketball player whose transformation into a werewolf ends in surprising results. An elaborate coming-of-age metaphor, Teen Wolf is a slam dunk as a young adult genre classic that found new life as a TV show from 2011 to 2017 on MTV.

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Freddy Krueger. Jason Voorhees. Individually, they are titans of the slasher genre, the unrivaled masters of picking off horny teenagers one by one. But together, Freddy and Jason collide in Freddy vs. Jason, a cinematic smackdown that pits the two horror icons against one another in a non-canonical spin-off. Sure, Freddy vs. Jason has yet more teenagers running for their lives. But it's hard to be scared when there's nu metal needledrops and fight scenes that resemble a WWE brawl.

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If you've seen the TV show (and who hasn't?), you've got to see the movie that started it all. Released in 1992, Buffy the Vampire Slayer stars Kristy Swanson as an all-American Valley Girl cheerleader who reluctantly accepts her destiny to become a vampire hunter. Also starring Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens, Rutger Hauer, and Luke Perry, along with the film debut of Hillary Swank, Buffy the Vampire Slayer may not be as era-defining as the TV show it later inspired, but it's still a killer good time.

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When Adam Sandler failed to win an Oscar for his performance in Uncut Gems, he vowed to make a movie so bad that the Academy Awards voting body would regret it. Oddly, the movie he delivered isn't bad at all. Hubie Halloween, released on Netflix in 2020, stars Sandler as an awkward but well-meaning resident of Salem, Massachusetts. While the rest of the town only tolerates Hubie, Hubie becomes a real hero when the town is threatened by a runaway patient from a mental institution. As sweet as a handful of candy corn, Hubie Halloween has all the cozy and carefree October vibes you're looking for.

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Gonzo and Pepe decide to do something different for Halloween. Rather than attending the Muppets’ annual celebration, they take on the challenge of staying at the haunted mansion where Gonzo’s favorite magician went missing a century ago.

Disney+

At the height of her Transformers fame, Megan Fox subverts expectations and the male gaze in this millennial genre classic from director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody. Fox stars as a demonically possessed high school student, Jennifer, who uses her sex appeal to draw in and kill her male classmates. Jennifer's bookish best friend (Amanda Seyfried) takes it upon herself to stop her reign of terror.

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Before the acclaimed television series on AMC, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire was a gorgeous piece of gothic cinema from director Neil Jordan. Based on Rice's 1976 novel, the movie version stars Brad Pitt as a plantation owner turned vampire in 1791 by the charismatic Lestat (Tom Cruise). Pitt's Louis recounts his many years as a bloodsucker to a journalist in contemporary San Francisco. Hence, the title. Though the movie deviates from the book quite a bit, the movie still found acclaim and helped reignite the appeal of vampies until a certain other author, Stephanie Meyer, came along.

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Nothing says classic cinema quite like a Mel Brooks comedy starring Gene Wilder. The actor plays the grandson of Victor Frankenstein, who receives word that he has inherited his grandfather’s estate in Transylvania. He travels there to inspect the property, and nonstop parody and hilarity quickly follow.

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