20 Best Movies Set On Halloween, Celebrating The Spookiest Day Of The Year

Lots of people start thinking about firing up horror movies as Spooky Season settles in, but Halloween doesn't just lend itself to the right vibe for watching something scary. The particular nature of the holiday and the seasonal shift in much of the world that surrounds it means that movies set during Halloween can often use its particular feel to great effect in everything from aesthetics to plot. That total Halloween vibe--colder days, darker nights, bare and scraggly trees, glowing jack-o-lanterns lighting up streets, and marauding bands of children or other things up to no good--is often a perfect backdrop not just for horror films, but for all kinds of stories.

Halloween is, realistically, a really weird time--when kids dress up and go wandering through their neighborhoods, when darkness falls earlier and more harshly than it has for months, and when everything feels just that little bit more ominous. Below, you'll find 20 of the best Halloween movies--those set in and around Halloween, and drawing from different elements of that time of year when the veil is said to be thinnest. Some movies use Halloween for its inherent frights to lean into the spooks, but others find the inherent comedy in the idea of wandering around your town, begging for candy, and trying to scare each other. No matter which particular facet of the Halloween feeling you're going for, there are movies here to accommodate.

Then again, if you're looking for strictly scary flicks, make sure to check out our collection of GameSpot's picks for best horror movies.

It's right there in the name. John Carpenter's slasher classic helped create a whole genre of movies like it, starring an unkillable serial killer hunting and murdering teens for seemingly no reason. It all started with child Michael Myers wrapping up a night of trick-or-treating by murdering his teenage sister, and 15 years later, he returns to his home town of Haddonfield, Illinois, to kill again. Halloween spawned a ton of sequels, most of which are just about Michael going on various murder rampages on October 31. Don't forget to check out Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, though, which made an attempt at turning Halloween into an anthology series and is all about killer masks and the people who make them.

Though it's much more about learning self-discipline and giving your bullies a taste of their own medicine, The Karate Kid hinges on Halloween. The story of teenager Daniel LaRusso learning karate from his neighbor, Mr. Miyagi, really only begins when Daniel goes to a Halloween party. There, he blasts local karate dude Johnny Lawrence with water, getting back at him for an earlier sleight at school, and beginning a rivalry between the two. We know from the excellent sequel series Cobra Kai that this Halloween party was a pivotal moment that would define the lives of both Daniel and Johnny. Things worked out pretty well for Daniel, but in a pretty real sense, this Halloween party ruined Johnny's life.

A bunch of monster movie-obsessed kids in the 1980s find themselves battling a bunch of actual movie monsters in The Monster Squad. Assembled into a sort of anti-Avengers force by Count Dracula, the creatures include all the Universal Studios heavy hitters--the Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, and the Gill-man. The ludicrous premise is a lot of fun in practice, even if it gets a bit weird when emphasizing magic rituals that need to be performed by virgins. The Monster Squad isn't explicitly about Halloween but takes place around the right time, but it's hard to imagine a more Halloween fantasy than fighting a bunch of actual movie monsters with all your friends.

In the 1800s, the town of Briarville is terrorized by a demonic troll that steals its children, until the townspeople manage to bind it in a tree with a magic ritual. A couple hundred years later, though, the troll is released--by Ernest, Briarsville's dumbest resident. Aided by his friends, a bunch of children, his dog Rimshot, and an endless parade of terrible inventions, the implacable but clueless Ernest wages an epic battle on Halloween against the grossest, snot-covered-est troll possibly ever.

Sometimes, you need to sneak a child-sized alien around your hometown so they can build a machine out of various toys and kitchenware to signal their people for a rescue mission. When that happens, a Halloween costume can help. Trick-or-treating with an alien leads to a few of the funniest moments in Steven Spielberg's classic, as E.T. plays an incredibly unconvincing ghost and the kids do their best to keep him from wandering off or harassing kids dressed like Yoda.

It's the unassuming look and feel of Ghostwatch that makes it so scary. It's presented as a TV news segment aired on Halloween night in the early '90s, where a journalist and a camera crew head to a haunted house to do a fun and spooky segment. The movie's local TV presentation (and the fact that it was made for TV by the BBC) is so perfect that it gives Ghostwatch an intense sense of reality--it's like watching TV and seeing your local weatherman getting attacked by a poltergeist. Ghostwatch is an early entry into what would become known as found footage, and it still stands as a perfect use of focus on realism that can make the genre particularly terrifying.

Halloween is traditionally a night of power for magic-users and veil-shifters, so for the Sanderson sisters, it's the perfect time to drain a bunch of unsuspecting children of their life forces in order to maintain the witches' youth for another lifetime. Though the witches are hanged for their child-murdering crimes, a magical curse resurrects them 300 years later in the '90s so they can get right back to using magic to steal the lives of others. Disney's hilarious (and sometimes weirdly adult) witch-fighting Halloween movie gets most of its power from incredible casting in the Sanderson sisters, with an unhinged Bette Midler backed up by the perfectly clueless Sarah-Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimi.

It's not Halloween, in fact, but the night before--Devil's Night--that The Crow is set. In Detroit, where the movie takes place, Devil's Night was a big deal for years, seeing a rash of arson fires throughout the city. The Crow uses that backdrop for its story of murder and vengeance, in which a man, Eric, is returned from the dead in order to exact revenge on the men who killed him and his girlfriend. The dark and surreal Detroit makes for an intense setting for Eric's immortal quest for brutal vengeance, giving The Crow a dreamlike feel that has helped make it a cult hit.

Tim Burton's adaptation of Washington Irving's spooky short story is wall-to-wall with Halloween vibes. The movie alters the original short story, recasting school teacher Ichabod Crane as a cowardly and superstitious police constable who ventures to the eponymous town to solve the mystery of murders supposedly being committed by the ghost of a Headless Horseman. Burton's spooky aesthetic is in full effect in Sleepy Hollow, and with its Halloween setting and the famous Jack-o-lantern head for the Headless Horseman, this is an extremely Halloween movie.

In Donnie Darko, the end of the world falls on Halloween. Richard Kelly's trippy time-travel-ish story centers on Donnie, whose penchant for sleepwalking helps him avoid dying when a jet engine that seemed to appear from nowhere crashes into his house. Donnie's world starts to unravel into surrealism and madness as he flirts with the new girl in town, tries to resist the influences of a local self-help guru, and struggles with visions of a man in a horrific bunny suit warning him about the apocalypse. It gets weird.

A combination of spooky and hilarious, Trick 'r Treat tends to focus on the "trick" part of that binary as it tells four stories set in the same small town on Halloween night. The common thread between them is Sam, a cute trick-or-treater with a costume that consists mostly of a burlap sack over his head, and a razor-sharp piece of candy he uses to carve people up. Trick 'r Treat is a fun and inventive horror anthology, but it secretly sports a great cast, including Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, and Dylan Baker, and that has helped cement it as a cult classic.

The first stop-motion feature film by studio Laika sees the precocious kid Coraline moving to a strange new home and struggling with parents who are too busy for her. That's when she discovers another world and the Other Mother, who seems poised to give her whatever she wants. Things get sinister as Halloween approaches and Coraline realizes the Other Mother isn't quite the perfect mom she appears to be, nor is Coraline the first kid she's tried to entice with everything they've ever wanted. Coraline gets legitimately spooky and surreal, and its phenomenal stop-motion animation style is perfect for evoking the Other Mother's strange and frightening realm.

ParaNorman is an exceptionally Fall-coded movie, taking place in a town that centers its identity on a legendary witch that its colonial settlers burned at the stake some 300 years earlier. Norman is a kid living in the town who can speak to the dead, and while that makes him feel ostracized and isolated, it pulls him and his friends into a frightening adventure as they start to learn about the continued danger the ghosts of the town's past still pose. ParaNorman is another of Laika's gorgeous stop-motion films, and its animation style, kid-friendly (but still pretty spooky) ghost story, and overall aesthetic make it an excellent Halloween watch.

The Guest centers on an all-timer performance by Dan Stevens in the realm of being unsettlingly creepy. Playing a soldier named David, he shows up at the home of the grieving family of his Army buddy who died in Afghanistan. The family takes him in, where David proves friendly, helpful, and exceedingly violent. The younger children of the family start to get suspicious of David's past, intentions, and overall stability, and we get to see burgeoning horror veteran Maika Monroe in an early role where she's already excellent at being very afraid. The Guest goes to some great places as it ramps up to a Halloween dance that turns out, uh, poorly.

The Hell House series can be hit-or-miss, but the first film in the found footage series manages to be off-puttingly spooky in the exact low-budget, shaky handheld way that makes the genre fun. It's about a small company and its employees who set out to build a commercial haunted house in a hotel with a reputation for being haunted. Shocker--it is, in fact, haunted, a fact that comes to light with horrific and tragic results on Halloween when the haunted house opens to the public. Hell House LLC might not bring a ton that's new to the found footage formula, but it's a great example of the genre that knows that mannequins, clowns, and clown mannequins are inherently terrifying.

The Goosebumps movie adaptations are a surprisingly good time. They imagine the monsters of author R.L. Stein's books coming to life and then wreaking havoc on a small town, and they're surprisingly funny thanks to great casting, including Jack Black and Jillian Bell. The first movie is the better of the two but feels more like it takes place around Homecoming or during Fall generally than Halloween specifically, but it makes up the difference with a load of fun and funny monsters popping up all over the place. Goosebumps 2 is explicitly set at Halloween and plays with a similar premise, although the whole thing skews younger. Either way, seeing Goosebumps monsters flood into a movie is a lot of fun, whether you're a kid now, or read all these books as a kid decades ago.

If you were ever a fan of Adam Sandler's classic 1990s comedies, like Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, or The Waterboy, you should check out Hubie Halloween. It perfectly evokes what worked about those movies with Hubie, a safety obsessed coward terrorized by a town that constantly pulls pranks to try to scare him. On Halloween, as everybody tries to spook Hubie, he realizes that something sinister really is taking place when townspeople start to disappear. Hubie is a quintessential Adam Sandler dimwit, complete with the goofy voice, and it's surprising how well that affection--along with a bunch of goofy, low-brow humor--still really work with the right script and premise.

Matt Reeves' take on the Caped Crusader draws a lot of its inspiration from the 1996 comic storyline The Long Halloween, which sees Gotham slowly devolve from a den of corruption and organized crime into a place where supervillains thrive. The Batman tells a similar story and captures a similar Halloween vibe, beginning with a murder on Halloween that sets a young Batman on the hunt for the Riddler. Most modern Batman movies go for a dark and gritty presentation, but The Batman has a particularly black feel thanks to the combination of its moody protagonist, an extremely grimy Gotham, and an underlying All Hallow's Eve vibe pervading everything.

The essential idea of Totally Killer is Back to the Future, but instead of ensuring her parents meet, Kiernan Shipka has to make sure her mom isn't murdered by a serial killer. Equal parts scary and funny, Totally Killer has protagonist Jamie zapping back in time to the 1980s, where she has to protect her mean girl teenage mom and her friends as they're targeted by a slasher movie villain. It all culminates on Halloween, where Jamie has to use her future knowledge in an attempt to save her mom in the midst of a fun fair, a haunted house, and even more time travel shenanigans.

In 1977, failing late-night variety show host Jack Delroy tries to save his ailing show with an envelope-pushing Halloween episode. His guests include a man who claims to be a medium and a girl who survived a Satanic cult, along with her psychiatrist. As the night goes on, as one might expect, things start to take on a supernatural bent and despite warnings about the danger, Delroy pushes forward with the show. A great turn by David Dastmalchian as the host keeps Late Night with the Devil constantly compelling, as does the movie's 1970s late-night presentation and vibe.