Happy Spooky Day, bookworms! This is the time of year when I love to make extra time for all things creepy, so today I wanted to share some favorite books and movies that are perfect for Halloween! Whether you're looking for creepy laughs, creature features, or something extra weird, there are books and movies here to fit whatever spooky mood you happen to find yourself in.
Wilder Girls | Mexican Gothic | The Year of the Witching
The Ritual | It Comes At Night | A Cure For Wellness
The Ritual | It Comes At Night | A Cure For Wellness
I love a good slow burn, atmospheric horror story. Wilder Girls got some mixed reviews, but I loved how weird and atmospherically creepy it was. The Year of the Witching is another book that instantly transported me to another place where I felt a constant sense of wrongness. A Cure For Wellness sucked me in with its feelings of dread and ended up becoming one of my slow burn favorites!
My favorite movie genre of all time, there are also some pretty decent books in found footage or documentary style! Devolution is the newest book from the author of World War Z and was super tense and dread-inducing. Grave Encounters and Hell House LLC are two of the most underrated low budget found footage movies out there, in my opinion. I've watched both several times and they always freak me out!
Ghost stories are not my favorite kind of spooky story, but I've found some amazing ones over the years anyway. No ghosty list is complete without The Shining, of course. This book is one of the few King works I've really enjoyed and it's definitely terrifying. To absolutely no one's surprise, I found a way to include Crimson Peak on this list, which is one of my all-time favorites for a variety of reasons. And if you've made it all the way to 2020 without seeing The Sixth Sense, you need to stop what you're doing right now and go watch it!
I often feel that people as the monsters are so much worse than any of the supernatural variety, because they can actually happen. You is a story that most of us know from the TV series, but the book is equally terrifying. Don't Breathe took me totally off guard and had me glued to the edge of my seat, hoping that at least someone would be okay. Midsommar is in a class all it's own, but I will never not be disturbed by the people in the film and their actions.
This kind of story is a horror classic - the terrifyingly possessed house or person. The Merciless is a book I have been raving about for years! I was as shocked as anyone to find a YA horror story that was actually pretty scary. Insidious, on the other hand, I absolutely expected to be terrifying and it was. Paranormal Activity is the only movie I've ever walked out of, but I've seen it many times since then and can testify that it's super scary until the very end! I'm sure we've all seen it by now though, right?
No horror list is complete without monsters and no monster list is complete without Tremors. Seriously, the ONLY movie that absolutely needs to be on every single monster list ever. If you've never seen this masterpiece, why not? Sweetheart is definitely a hidden gem of a monster movie that's fairly new and deserves your attention. The Shuddering was one of the first books I read as a new blogger and it has lingered with me all these years. It is truly frightening!
This is 100% my jam. I am always on the hunt for weird, mind-bending horror books and movies and luckily I've found some favorites over the years. A House at the Bottom of of a Lake is slow, but super weird and amazing. Pines will always be a favorite! It has a Shyamalan twist I did not see coming! The Endless and Coherence are two mind-bending horror movies that play with the time and Color Out of Space is an amazingly strange Lovecraftian horror.
Another kind of monster, aliens are a horror genre all their own. The Last Astronaut was panic-inducing and claustrophobic with its alien spaceship setting. Cloverfield is one of my all-time favorite alien monster movies, also on the found footage list. Of course, Pitch Black had to be on this list because it's another masterpiece of modern cinema. I think Pitch Black was my first Vin Diesel film and teenage me was HERE for it!
What is your favorite kind of horror story?
What will you be reading or watching tonight?
Let me know in the comments!
Let me know in the comments!
