I decided to publish this article in the section of horror cult classics because even if this is a very eclectic article, it’s definitely biased towards cult classics, and this sub-genre of horror is over-represented in the two lists of movies.

I curated the horror movies in these two lists to watch them marathon-style during the whole month of October up to Halloween day for more than one year. The greater part of them isn’t available on streamers.

That is why I wanted to watch these horror movies but I didn’t focus on doing it, because 98-99% of the horror movies and TV series I watched in the last two years were on streamers.

This list may have odd choices. I didn’t pretend to make a list that I would call a must-watch or make a prototypical list of horror movies to watch up to 62 horror movies during October.

It’s nothing like that, is just me sharing with you the actual program for horror watching I have for October 2020 so you can benefit from it. I hope you can benefit from it, in any way.

If the choice of movies doesn’t help you, I hope the outro after the lists will at least entertain you.

My October 2020 Horror Movie Watch-a-thon Lists

I decided to make two lists because the build-up to Halloween is a special month and I can definitely, positively bear the time investment. The choice of classification was to include all the types of movies I was missing due to making-do with VoD streaming services for almost two years.

Feature A

Feature B

GRAND FINALE 
or
the third horror movie
I’ll watch on Saturday 31

28 Days Later

Thoughts on Non-Streamed Horror Movies

In this outro some personal thoughts about how I feel about horror movies.

Horror Cult Classics

To create a list of 62 horror movies for accelerated self-actualization gave me a great opportunity to focus on horror cult classics, which is one of my favorite types of horror movies.

It’s relatively easy to continually find cult classics on streamers, but they aren’t the norm. Besides, you can’t follow any horror cult classic trail when you have to make do with what’s given. In my personal case, in most of the cases, I had already watched most of the cult classics they offer ages ago.

I chose to publish this article in the section of horror cult classics of the website because, without taking into account genres, cult classics are for me the most interesting movies to follow trails, and these lists have a few that are very obscure.

What I mean is, let’s suppose you watch one of the most known cult classics, “Night of The Living Dead”. It’s pretty much of a gateway to one of the leading horror cult movie directors. If you follow the George A. Romero trail, it will take you a long way and will branch your knowledge of cult horror movies, like for instance into Tom Savini and who knows how many other genre trails.

Retro Horror Movies

Let’s call retro horror to any horror movies manufactured from the 1930s up to say, around 1995.

I feel that to love retro horror movies is easy because there are many things to like about them.

Depending on the person each quality and element of a certain movie can make for an item that could be listed as the reason for the love for a certain kind of movie.

If I should attempt a personal list I would say, I love retro horror movies because

• They are time-capsules, transporting you to long-gone moments in time
• How different people did look and talk, reflected in how actors play
• They were made in simpler times = have more original plots
• Have scripts that were typed analogically by real, talented screenwriters
• Their analog film technology
• Their primitive post-processing technology
• They were the movies that inspired everything that came after
• They enrich you because you can’t let out any period in horror cinema if you want to have a well-rounded knowledge of it

Still, there may be more than a few movies in this list that many would consider duds, and I wouldn’t do anything to defend them. I have gathered all these together for so long, that I forgot the reason why I wanted to watch many of them.

You’ll notice that I didn’t sequence them based on popularity or theme or in any other way to tell something with the order or to produce any kind of effect.

I just sequenced them based on a few different classifications of horror movies that I feel is what I’m missing from my previous horror movie watching lifestyle when I wasn’t all about VoD streamers like I’m now.

Relatively New Horror Movies

In this category, I decided to group movies that premiered 36 months or less ago. After two years and a half of using online video-on-demand services to watch movies, I was becoming rusty in the latest horror stuff.

Psychotronic Horror Movies

I’m still not a connoisseur of psychotronic horror, other than knowing movies everybody knows that are classified by that term. Like for instance “Plan Nine from Outer Space” and one or two dozens of similar movies.

Movies that otherwise are called “So bad that it’s good”. I need to learn more about this subject, but as I wrote on the gateway page of this section, is not exactly a glorified way to classify a trash movie, as many would think.

Non-American Horror Movies

I had seasons of going ballistic over British, Japanese, and Indian horror movies. I watched a lot of them. It was hard for me to get into them, and it still is, but sometimes I got from them the things that I wasn’t getting from Western ones.

To give an example, the Japanese Ringu movies. I never get scared by horror movies, but the Ringu saga was one of the few that scared me as an adult. The level of dread they produced in me, and sometimes the climaxing of said dread in an apotheosis of fear was something that lingered well into the next day, that I could never forget.

I’m talking about actually feeling fear at two in the morning, after watching the movie, when I had to go to the bedroom to sleep. And the next day getting a feeling of unhealthy depression when remembering the experience.

Horror Movies from This Generation (1997-2020)

I deem this classification of movies very important. A generation or 20-23 years is a sufficient measure to study the evolution of the genre up to the present state.

Pick a set of samples from the last 23 years, say 35 horror movies. Find the conspicuous differences and notice how and when things changed.

You can analyze the evolution of a genre, or sub-genre, in this way because as I see it, the differences are very obvious.

The time frame in which a movie was born gives it a lot of feeling that it may share with movies created around the same time.

Universal Monsters Movies

Only if you’re a hardcore fan of the Universal horror monsters cycle you know the exact count of how many Universal monster movies there are.

There’s a lot of false information on the Universal monster cycle and no articles on the web give a correct, sourced list including all the movies that can be classified like that.

If your sources of information don’t cite sources, then don’t buy whatever random articles on the web tell you about these movies. This is too big of a subject because the entire Universal monsters cycle amounts to more than fifty movies if I remember correctly

Vintage Horror Movies (non-Universal)

The similar horror movies of the 1930s and other gone decades, that are the responses of other studios to Universal’s invidious monster empire. Like for instance the movies by MGM, Fox, Warners, Columbia, PRC, Monogram, Republic, and similar studios were Universal’s competitors in horror.

I don’t have much to say about the horror movies of the 1930s of these studios (I didn’t watch a lot of them), other than sometimes I felt as thrilled and aesthetically pleased watching their movies as I felt watching anything by Universal.

Horror Movies from the 1950s

Very important decade for horror movies because it was a return to the craze about horror entertainment that Americans had abandoned due to the changes in tastes brought about by WWII.

In horror, the 1950s are pretty much the decade of Vampira. Even if she didn’t open the mind of Americans to horror for long, the seed was planted.

Then there was Roland/Zacherley, Malcolm The Butler, The Duke of Desmodas, Claude The Great, Clyde, Esmarelda, Ed McMahon, The Host, Rodney, M.T. Graves, and I guess many other horror hosts, in the 1950s.

In her short-lived horror host cycle at KABC-TV during 1954-55 Vampira created a culture that soon after was co-opted by individuals and corporations alike at the national level. Horror had returned and was there to stay.

The trend was happening in England, too. Evidence of it is the Hammer horror movies that were ten, averaging one a year.

From the 1950s onwards the Anglo-American public demanded horror and those in charge started delivering. They haven’t stopped ever since.

Horror Movies from the 1960s

As I see it, the 1960s for horror was the decade of Roger Corman, and of Hammer Films overseas.

Roger Corman released about twelve movies during the decade. On the other hand, Hammer Productions launched on average five horror movies per year, with an amazing grand total of 55 for the whole decade.

While Hammer, with about seventeen horror films, and Corman more or less dominated the horror movie market during the sixties, a director I love that released a not less considerable quantity was William Castle with half a dozen shockers during the sixties.

We mustn’t forget that the sixties are the decade that gave us at least three seminal horror movies “Psycho”, “Night of The Living Dead” and “Peeping Tom” that did set the stage for what was going to happen later in horror movies.

Finally, another of the horror-dispensing outfits of the decade was Amicus, even if their output was less than what they made later.

Horror Movies from the 1970s

I see the 1970s as very much the beginning of auteur horror film at the global level. Fulci, Romero, Cronenberg, Argento, Mojica Marins, Dan Curtis, Jess Franco, Scott, Lewis. All of these directors have a strong presence in the seventies horror and created movies everybody agrees are classics.

In the seventies, Hammer (twenty horror movies), and Amicus (nine) continued to dish out terrors at decent paces.

If you consult a complete Hammer filmography for the 1970s it will be evident to you that they pretty much cornered the 1970s market for vampire movies.

I wager a rough estimate of three-quarters of Hammer’s 1970s horrors being about vampires. A sight to behold for lovers of movies about blood-suckers.