The house is quiet at dawn; you wake with coffee, the world outside still bruised with fog. A film starts and you realize the holiday is not about costumes tonight but about a slow, deliberate unease. You sit up straighter, because you remember every shadow in the frame.
I asked the io9 staff what they’re actually rewatching this Halloween, and they sent back a short list of habits and comforts you can steal for the night. Read this like a playlist: pick one that fits your tolerance for gore, paranoia, or nostalgia—and watch how it shifts the room.
What should I watch on Halloween?
I watched it at dawn on a snowed-in airstrip — The Thing
I’m picky about holiday watches, but John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing is my cheat code. The practical effects are a taxidermist’s fever dream, Ennio Morricone’s score freezes every footstep, and Kurt Russell and Keith David sell suspicion like currency. If you want isolation horror that makes a group feel fragile, queue this and watch the group dynamics fall apart.
I found it under a stack of late-80s VHS tapes — Alien 2: On Earth
Cheryl Eddy admits her house turns into “horror month” every October, which is how she discovered the sleazy joy of 1980’s Italian shocker often called Alien Terror or Alien 2: On Earth. It shamelessly leans on a borrowed title to snag attention, and it rewards that bait with crude cavern sets, absurd monster logic, and gloriously terrible dubbing. If your Halloween mood is trashy and gleeful, this one is a guilty-pleasure territory you’ll want to share on Letterboxd.
Is The Blair Witch Project still scary?
I watched it in a dorm common room when the internet was a rumor — The Blair Witch Project
Germain Lussier remembers a moment when marketing didn’t tell you whether the footage was real. That ambiguity is the film’s power, and it still pricks nerves in a way polished CGI often cannot. The movie cost roughly $27,000 (€25,100) to make, which feels almost obscene given how it reshaped internet-era hype and indie filmmaking. Rewatch it if you want to talk about influence, marketing, or how a tiny production can create a cultural weather pattern.
I added it to a projector night because friends had gaps on Letterboxd — Pulse
Isaiah Colbert used a projector investment as an excuse to program Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 Pulse for his friends—because some scares land only in a dark room with a big image. Pulse is a cold vault of dread: it marries tech-paranoia and unsettlement the way online rumors metastasize, and there’s one silhouette shot in the finale that will sit in your head for days. If you favor atmospheric, lingering horror over jump scares, this is the film to slow your breathing with.
Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.
These picks are not a ranked list so much as a set of invitations: you can test your nerve with Carpenter’s practical mayhem, revel in trashy Italian gore, revisit a viral puzzle that changed indie film economics, or sit with the slow, internet-shaped unease of Kurosawa. I’ll be the one pausing the movie and asking you whether that sound came from the speakers or the house—what are you going to rewatch this Halloween?