The Best Movies That Take Place On Halloween

Holidays are excellent settings for fiction, and Halloween might be the best of the lot. Plenty of horror movies use the devil’s night as their focus, but other genres also enjoy setting the action on October 31st. If you want to do an all-day film festival while you greet trick or treaters, here are our picks for the 11 best movies that take place on Halloween. We’re going very strict with this: no movies that have just a Halloween scene, or take place “in autumn,” so if your favorite isn’t here that’s probably why.

Night Of The Demons

When two teen burnouts decide to throw a Halloween party at an abandoned mortuary, it’s not fair to say that the grisly results are unexpected. When they decide to hold a seance in there, well, that’s just pushing their luck. Occult rituals lead to the titular demons possessing our two female leads, who then go on to murder the rest of the cast in gleeful and gruesome ways. There’s not much particularly original about Night Of The Demons, but that might be part of its charm. It’s like the dictionary definition of 80s horror – no stars, low budget, but absolutely committed to the bit.

Hocus Pocus

A commercial flop when it was released, time has been kind to Hocus Pocus. When a trio of malevolent witches are sealed away from humanity for 300 years, it takes a virgin lighting a black candle on Halloween to release them. Once freed in 1993, they have until sunrise on November 1st to accomplish their mission of sucking out all the souls of the children of Salem. Bette Midler chews scenery left and right as lead witch Winifred Sanderson, and there are plenty of ridiculous set pieces throughout the evening that still hold up. A long-delayed sequel has been in the works for years, with the latest rumors having it debut on Disney+.

Boys In The Trees

Sometimes you can be more honest with yourself when you’re wearing a mask. That’s the premise of Aussie indie Boys In The Trees, which follows a pair of young Aussies as they wander the woods on Halloween night. Corey and Jango are getting ready to graduate high school, and the future is leading them on different paths. Although there’s a pervasive atmosphere of horror throughout, it’s not really a scary film per se. Instead, it’s a deep and fascinating dive into the mentality of teenagers as they form bonds, break them and reckon with their actions. Gorgeous cinematography make this one a pleasure to watch.

Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch

Yes, it’s sort of cheating because all of the Halloween movies take place on October 31st. But the third, much-reviled entry in the franchise (you know, the one without Michael Myers) actually takes the holiday as its inspiration to tell a uniquely weird story of its very own. When a novelty company harnesses the dark powers of Stonehenge to murder children wearing its masks while they watch their TV commercials, a doctor and a young woman must stop their plot before faces melt off across the U.S.A. The dementedly goofy Silver Shamrock jingle (sung to the tune of London Bridge) will get lodged in your head for weeks, a fate worse than death.

Murder Party

This underrated 2007 horror comedy is a lot of fun. Made by a group of childhood friends, it stars Chris Sharp as a lonely New Yorker who gets invited to a “Murder Party” on Halloween. Clad in a cardboard knight’s costume, he quickly learns that the event is to be taken literally. It’s a trap set by a group of art students who want an actual corpse to impress their mentor. Our bold knight manages by dumb luck and good intentions to avoid being killed as things spiral wildly out of control. People get set on fire, there are truth serum hijinks, and a chainsaw murder figures into the climax. What more could you want for a fun Halloween?

The Hollywood Knights

While it’s generally considered a rip-off of American Graffiti, 1980’s The Hollywood Knights has some other stuff going for it. Great character names – Robert Wuhl plays a teenage prankster named Newbomb Turk, for example – and some solid gags elevate it. Set on Halloween Night in 1965, the titular Knights wage a night-long campaign of tricks against the people responsible for buying up Tubby’s Drive-In and slating it for demolition. Throw in some seriously sweet classic cars and a great soundtrack with many of the era’s greatest hits and you have a Halloween with few scares but lots of laughs.

Neon Maniacs

When teenagers discover a dozen homicidal monster-men living inside the Golden Gate Bridge, the authorities don’t believe them even as the kills rack up. Neon Maniacs is an archetypal slice of 80s horror sleaze that ends with a confrontation at a school Halloween dance / battle of the bands. The holiday setting is a great excuse for the Maniacs, who can regenerate injury but are hurt by water, to blend in with their prey. Watching a gymnasium full of horrified teens try to fend off mutated psychopaths with squirtguns is one of the odder things you’ll see on this list, and even though the flick doesn’t 100% hold together it’s still worth watching.

Ernest: Scared Stupid

We stan Ernest P. Worrell here at Geek.com and we’re not ashamed of it. The second to last theatrical Ernest film, Scared Stupid features the idiotic redneck hero contending with a malevolent troll trapped in a forest centuries ago by his ancestor. When the monster is released the night before Halloween, it uses its mystic powers to raise an army of other trolls and transform unwitting kids into wooden statues. When Ernest gets into a fistfight with one while his hands are covered with soft serve ice cream, he realizes that their weakness is milk. Yeah, this isn’t a good movie by any real metric, but it’s fun and charming and totally unique.

31

One of Rob Zombie’s lesser-known efforts, 31 is notable for its constrained timeframe – the entire movie takes place over 12 horrific hours. When a gaggle of carnies is kidnapped by a mysterious group on Halloween and forced to fight for their life against murderous clowns, it’s equal parts Battle Royale and The Running Man. While the holiday doesn’t figure too much into the movie’s narrative, it provides a fun little framing device for why nobody looks askance at horrific violence clowns wandering around. It took three tries for Zombie to bargain this down to an R from an NC-17, so you know it’s not messing around.

Gravy

James Roday’s demented Halloween horror-comedy Gravy taps into some of humanity’s greatest fears with verve and aplomb. The 2015 flick follows three cannibals as they take the employees of a Mexican restaurant hostage after hours and torture and eat them in a variety of ways. When the cook fights back by putting allergens in one of the dishes, it kicks off a bizarre and claustrophobic battle for survival that goes to some very unexpected places. This is one flick that doesn’t lean too hard on the holiday aspect – the cast being in absurd costumes is just window dressing for the blood and guts that follows.

The Crow

The events in Alex Proyas’s late-90s goth action classic The Crow take place on both Devil’s Night and Halloween two years running, but we make the rules here. Brandon Lee stars in his final role as rock musician Eric Draven, who watched his fiancee raped and murdered in front of him before being killed himself. One year later, he rises from the grave a spectral ass-kicker bent on revenge. What follows is a series of supernatural ass-whoopings that culminate in a brawl against the villainous Top Dollar in the bell tower of a church. It’s an atmospheric and violent film that still holds up today. When and if the long-rumored remake ever happens, we’ll see if it deserves a spot here.

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