With Halloween fast approaching, it’s about time for one of my favorite activities: watching Halloween movies. When it comes to Halloween movies, there are a lot of different options, so much so that it can be hard to make a decision on what to watch and what to skip. Here’s a list of the movies I’ve watched that I think are most worth watching and the ones that I think you could definitely pass on. 

Comedies

The best: the 1988 “Beetlejuice” takes the cake when it comes to Halloween comedies. The movie is funny and raunchy while still developing characters that I genuinely cared about. Visually, the movie is striking; it combines bold costuming with wonky special effects that create an otherworldly ambience in a uniquely silly way. This is a must watch for me.

The worst: 2000’s “Scary Movie” definitely has its funny moments, but ultimately, it fell flat for me. Too often, the jokes felt less like a critique of the movie it was parodying, the 1996 horror film “Scream,” and more like an opening for the writers to make fun of marginalized groups with the safety net of satire. I, personally, would recommend watching something else.

Horror Movies

I don’t watch a ton of horror movies, but of the ones I have seen, here are my picks.

The best: “Obsession” came out earlier this year, and it surprised me. Where a lot of horror movies center around psychotic or openly maniacal villains terrorizing the masses, this one gets a bit more relatable to everyday life. Instead, it centers around a villain who makes a series of choices that a scary number of people in real life might be inclined to make, themselves. This one is gloomy, uncomfortable, and sad, and I think everyone should watch it.

The worst: the 2023 “Cocaine Bear” is a definite skip for me. The movie was way less about the bear than I thought it was gonna be. Instead, it focused on a series of characters stuck in the woods with the bear, none of which I found likable or interesting. I don’t think you would miss out on anything by passing on this movie.

Animated Movies

The best: 2005’s “The Corpse Bride” has been my favorite since the day I laid eyes on it. As a huge fan of claymation movies, this movie was beautiful; the story is full of both joy and melancholy, and I find it just as entertaining now as I did when I was a kid.

Honorable mention: the 2009 “Coraline” (another claymation movie, sue me) is beautiful, suspenseful, and a little creepy. The story definitely gave me a deeper appreciation for my family as a kid, and it made me want a cat. While this isn’t a top priority on my Halloween movie list, I would definitely recommend watching it.

The worst: the 2006 “Monster House” creeped me out, and not in the fun Halloween way. The animation was freaky to look at, even considering it was made in 2006, and the story has never been compelling enough for me to get past that. In my opinion, your time and attention is better directed elsewhere.

Halloween Dramas

The best: 1998’s “Practical Magic” is a story of sisterhood that includes murder, laughter, grief, romance, and magic. It highlights the importance of women coming together and supporting each other, both within their family and within their community. This movie definitely made me cry when I watched it, which is a sparkling recommendation in my book.

The worst: “Practical Magic 2” came out this year and, in my opinion, fell very short of the precedent set by the first movie. It leaned more heavily into the comedic elements of the first movie, which could have been an improvement if not for the lack of emotional depth. The daughters of the witches from the original film felt more like plot devices than characters, and it seemed the joys of sisterhood explored in the first movie simply weren’t applied to them. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over skipping this one.

With that, I hope you’ve considered adding a few more movies to your list this season. Happy movie watching!

Horror movies are often associated with creepy creatures, haunted houses, masked killers and jump scares, but beneath the fear and suspense, many horror films reflect the political and social issues of their time. Filmmakers have used horror to explore subjects such as racism, economic inequality, gender roles, government distrust and class conflict. From the social anxieties reflected in 1970s horror to the racial commentary of Get Out (2017), the genre demonstrates how real-world political tensions can become sources of fictional terror. Horror is more than blood and gore; it can challenge audiences to examine the problems and power structures that shape society.

The 1970s marked an important period in American horror, as filmmakers increasingly portrayed ordinary people confronting violent, unpredictable worlds. Economic uncertainty, changing social values, and declining trust in traditional institutions provided a context for stories in which familiar sources of safety could no longer be trusted. Instead of relying exclusively on supernatural monsters, filmmakers began presenting human beings, families and communities as sources of terror. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) offers an example of how horror can reflect economic and class tensions. The film follows a group of young people who encounter a violent family in rural Texas. These antagonists include characters whose lives are connected to the decline of traditional slaughterhouse work as automation becomes more common. Their circumstances can be interpreted as reflecting anxieties about economic displacement, industrial change, and the loss of social stability. Rather than presenting the countryside as a peaceful escape from modern life, the film turns it into a place where violence and desperation threaten outsiders. These films helped establish a recurring horror trope: collapse of the systems people depend on for security. When family structures, economic stability, or trusted institutions fail, characters are left vulnerable to dangers they cannot easily control. The political significance of this trope lies in its suggestion that terror does not always come from an unfamiliar monster; sometimes, it emerges from the breakdown of the social structures that are supposed to protect us. 

During the 1980s, slasher films became a defining part of popular American horror. Movies such as Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) popularized stories in which groups of young people faced unpredictable threats. These films frequently used familiar settings, including summer camps, suburban neighborhoods, and schools to turn ordinary environments into places of danger. The slasher genre also developed a recognizable pattern in which characters’ choices, relationships, and behavior could appear connected to their survival. Some films seemed to punish characters who broke social rules, reflecting contemporary debates about teenage independence, sexuality, and changing cultural values. This pattern can be connected to broader conservative concerns about morality and social order during the decade. Under President Ronald Reagan, American political discourse placed renewed emphasis on traditional family values and personal responsibility. Slasher films did not necessarily promote these political positions, but their recurring conflicts sometimes reflected the cultural tensions surrounding them. The masked killer became especially significant within this context. When the killer hides their identity, they often represent an unpredictable threat that cannot be understood through ordinary social categories. The familiar community becomes unsafe, and characters struggle to identify where danger is coming from. 

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror significantly changed American political culture. Public discussion increasingly focused on national security, terrorism, surveillance, and the balance between personal freedom and government authority. These concerns also provide a useful context for understanding horror films that depict institutions as threatening or unreliable. One example is The Mist (2007), directed by Frank Darabont. The film follows a group of people trapped inside a supermarket while dangerous creatures surround them. As fear spreads, the survivors begin to turn against one another. The creatures outside are frightening, but the growing divisions inside the supermarket become equally dangerous. The film can be interpreted as a commentary on how fear changes normal, rational behavior. When people believe their lives are in danger, they may turn toward extreme leaders, accept claims without evidence, or blame other groups for their problems. In The Mist, the inability to understand the threat outside creates an environment in which manipulation and conflict flourish. This is a recurring horror trope: the danger is not limited to an external enemy. Fear itself can weaken a community, making people more willing to surrender their judgment to someone who promises certainty or protection. Its portrayal of panic, authority, and social division illustrates how horror can explore questions that become especially relevant during periods of political uncertainty. When someone feels powerless against a large entity, it’s easier to attack their neighbors than accept their powerlessness.

The 2010s saw a rise in horror films that directly addressed contemporary political and social issues. Rather than simply using social conflict as background, filmmakers increasingly placed inequality, racism, and institutional power at the center of their stories. Jordan Peele’s debut film Get Out (2017) is one of the clearest examples. The film follows Chris, a Black man who visits the family of his white girlfriend and gradually discovers that their apparent friendliness conceals horrifying intentions. At first, the family seems welcoming and progressive, if prone to seemingly accidental microaggressions. As the story develops, their behavior reveals a desire to control and exploit Black bodies. The film challenges the idea that racism only exists through open hostility or obvious prejudice. The family members often present themselves as accepting and enlightened, yet their actions reveal a deeper form of racial domination. This makes the horror especially unsettling since the threat comes from people who claim to respect the protagonist rather than from people who openly identify themselves as his enemies. The film transforms social experiences that are sometimes dismissed or overlooked into an unmistakable source of terror. One of the film’s most memorable concepts is the Sunken Place, a state in which Chris loses control while remaining conscious of what is happening to him. Politically, it can be interpreted as a symbol of powerlessness: a person can understand the forces controlling their life while still struggling to resist them. The concept makes an abstract issue, the denial of individual autonomy, into something audiences can experience through the language of horror.

Peele continued exploring social inequality in Us (2019). The film follows a family confronted by mysterious doubles of themselves. These doubles can be interpreted as representing the people society leaves behind while others enjoy comfort and security. The film’s underground population raises questions about class divisions, exclusion, and the hidden costs of prosperity. Although the meaning of Us remains open to interpretation, ts use of doubles and underground spaces can be interpreted as an allegory for inequality and injustice in American society. Together, Get Out and Us demonstrate how horror can transform political structures into physical threats. Racism becomes a form of bodily control, and class inequality becomes a conflict between people whose lives are connected but whose experiences are radically different.

In the 2020s, horror continued to explore political questions surrounding race, inequality, institutional power, and the historical consequences of discrimination. These themes have become particularly visible in films that revisit familiar horror stories from new perspectives. Candyman (2021), for example, revisits the mythology of the original 1992 film through a contemporary story about art, racial history, and violence in Chicago. The film connects its supernatural elements to the continuing legacy of racial injustice and challenges the idea that a community can simply move beyond its traumatic past without confronting it. This approach reflects a broader horror trope: the return of something that society has tried to bury. A ghost, monster, or curse can represent unresolved historical violence. The supernatural threat becomes a reminder that past injustices continue to shape the present, even when people would rather forget them.

Another example is the continuing Purge franchise, which began with The Purge in 2013 and developed further throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s. The series imagines a fictional United States in which most crimes are temporarily permitted during an annual period of violence. The government presents the event as a way to strengthen society, but the films repeatedly raise questions about who benefits from the system and who is left vulnerable. The premise turns political inequality into a literal survival scenario; wealthier characters can purchase security, while poorer and marginalized people are left exposed. Political authority is not simply absent; it actively creates the conditions that allow some people to indulge their darkest urges. The franchise demonstrates how horror can question the assumption that laws and government institutions always protect the public equally. By imagining an extreme political system, the films encourage audiences to consider how access to safety, resources, and protection can be distributed unequally in the real world.

Over the past fifty years, horror has developed into a genre capable of exploring some of society’s most difficult political questions. The economic anxiety reflected in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the racial and urban tensions explored in Candyman, the social panic of The Mist, and the critiques of racism and inequality in Get Out, Us, and The Purge demonstrate how horror tropes change alongside cultural concerns. The monster, the haunted house, the masked killer, and the invasion of a seemingly safe home are not simply tools for frightening audiences. Depending on the film, they can represent economic insecurity, racial oppression, institutional failure, or the fear of losing control over one’s own life. These meanings are not always intentional or universally agreed upon, and horror films can reflect the prejudices of their time as well as challenge them. Politics influences horror because the genre gives filmmakers a way to turn invisible social problems into visible threats. Inequality becomes a monster, prejudice becomes a trap, and distrust becomes a physical, tangible threat. By exaggerating the dangers that exist within society, horror encourages audiences to question what they consider normal, whom they trust, and which problems they have learned to ignore. The genre’s greatest source of fear is not the supernatural world itself, but the possibility that the real world already contains the conditions that make its nightmares believable.

The pilot episode of “Yellowjackets” begins with a hunt. A teenage girl runs barefoot through a barren forest covered in snow. She is dressed in a thin, dirty nightgown and wearing a necklace with a gold, heart-shaped charm. We never see her face, but her abject terror is clear through her sharp breaths and trembling sobs. Unnerving whoops, caws and howls can be heard coming from behind her. Suddenly, the dark-haired girl falls through a hidden pit of spikes. Dead. Another young girl appears, wearing a long coat made of animal pelt, a face mask fashioned out of an old sweater and bright pink converse, looking over her body from above. 

When “Yellowjackets” first premiered on streaming platform Showtime in 2021, it quickly garnered rave reviews and a large fanbase. The show, which finished airing its second season in May of 2023, boasts a star-studded cast and a spine-chilling premise. “Yellowjackets” is told from two points in time: the first being New Jersey 1996, where the Wiskayok High School girl’s soccer team is going to nationals. Tragedy strikes when their plane crashes on the way, leaving the Yellowjackets stranded deep in the Canadian wilderness, hundreds of miles off-course, for a total of 19 months before miraculously being found. Cut off from civilization and subject to two brutal winters, the team forms into a cannibalistic cult to survive. In the second timeline, it is 2021, and the survivors of the horrific disaster are trying (and failing) to move on with their lives. In the first season, we know of five confirmed survivors of the plane crash: bored housewife Shauna Sadecki (Melanie Lynskey), high-powered lawyer turned New Jersey Senator candidate Taissa Turner (Tawny Cypress), Travis Martinez (Kevin Alves), reclusive son of the Yellowjackets’ head coach, strange, generally off-putting nurse Misty Quigley (Christina Ricci), and Natalie Scatorccio (Juliette Lewis), who is freshly sober and has recently moved back to Wiskayok. 

To me, what makes Yellowjackets one of the best shows of 2023 is not the cast or premise – though they are both incredible. Instead, it is the way the show discusses the lingering impact horrific trauma has on a person, as well as the struggles of girlhood in general. Out in the wilderness, the team eventually finds an old abandoned cabin in which to take shelter, and slowly become convinced that something supernatural is happening to them. They find the skeletal remains of a man in the cabin’s attic, and a strange symbol carved into its floor and on several trees. Taissa begins sleepwalking in some sort of fugue state where someone or something else seems to be in control. Charlotte “Lottie” Matthews, whose fate remains unknown in season one, starts having strange visions and prophetic dreams. Thus, Lottie quickly becomes the de facto spiritual leader of the group and personifies this supposed supernatural force as “the Wilderness.”

Despite all of this, the show is careful to never definitively confirm whether Something was out there with the team, or if it was all something they created to justify their violent rituals and eventual cannibalism. The symbols could have been carved by the dead man in the attic. Taissa’s sleepwalking could just be her mind trying to cope with the life-altering trauma she just experienced. Lottie had been on antipsychotic medication for most of her childhood, and only began seeing things after her medication ran out. Haunted by the things they did in the name of a supposed “God,” the surviving Yellowjackets are stuck in an indefinite limbo, neither able to absolve themselves of all guilt, or able to face the past and move on. And when the five of them are inextricably drawn back together in the present and get tangled up in each other’s increasingly bad decisions, we are again forced to wonder whether Something is bringing them together, or if their unprocessed group trauma is severely impacting their judgment skills.

Another thing that I find refreshing about Yellowjackets is that in spite of all the horrific things the girls go through and do, this is still a show about scared, complicated teenagers. No one in the wilderness is truly painted as a villain, because they are all young, vulnerable people forced to make impossible choices that most adults would also struggle with. Lottie is not portrayed as some evil mastermind lost in her madness, she actually believes that the Wilderness is trying to protect them at first. She tries to use her newfound “gift” to hold the group together and bring them comfort, even as winter sets in and the bonds of friendship are truly tested. Even when the team does turn to cannibalism to survive, it is as a last resort. They create rules and rituals that seem fair to them, and attempt to find order in inherently volatile circumstances.

While “Yellowjackets” can be gory and hard to watch sometimes due to its setting in the harsh, unforgiving wilderness, after a few episodes it starts to feel like a framework for the true focus of the show: the relationships between the survivors, in both the current and past timelines. The violence may feel shocking at times, but it’s never gratuitous – there’s always a purpose, a deeper meaning. For example, when the group first engages in cannibalism it is not borne of frenzied, desperate starvation (though that does eventually transpire); it is borne from grief, of love and shame. Even in the present timeline, when the survivors are estranged and have decades of unspoken secrets and anger between them, that fierce loyalty is still there, even if all it does is make them worse. In the end, “Yellowjackets” is a show that questions whether the past comes back to haunt us, or if we haunt ourselves.

Before we start digging into the current season, let’s get the definitive order of seasons straight. Season 1, “Murder House,” is the best season of American Horror Story (AHS) thus far. Then it’s season 2, “Asylum,” regardless of all the arbitrary and extra plot lines. Then Season 3, “Coven,” because it was so campy. And to be honest, I sometimes forget that Season 4, “Freak Show,” even happened.

So if you are frustrated by my order, that’s okay, but now you know what frame of mind I’m in before we continue.

Season 5, “Hotel,” started gathering interest with hints about the theme, which were primarily generated by fan theories, and surprises that Ryan Murphy, the creative mind and director of “Scream Queens” and “Glee,” had in store for viewers.

And then, BAM, enter Lady Gaga.

I won’t lie to you, reader. I was skeptical about her acting in general and acting in one of my favorite shows, specifically. But after watching the first episode, I was drinking the Koolaid. “Checking In,” the first episode of Season 5, felt like a long Lady Gaga music video, and I was more than okay with that.

Right now, I’m not as invested in the plot as I am in the return of my favorite AHS actors. I love Kathy Bates’s character, but we’ve seen her play the overly doting mother before. We are familiar with the disintegration of a family that is primarily blamed on the father. We’ve seen angsty teenagers in Season 1, a trope that is now embodied in the male model character and addict played by Finn Witrock, whose performance in “Freak Show” was impressive and unsettling. However, Witrock’s character this season seems to have the simple purpose of adding angst to the show.

Sarah Paulson, playing an addict named Sally, has added so much depth already to a character that had plenty of opportunities to fall flat. Even though Evan Peters didn’t show up until the second episode, his debut was phenomenal; and with his ’20s inspired character and accent, there were some pretty high odds that he wouldn’t be able to deliver.

Many see a connection between the movie “Se7en“ and this season of AHS. The strongest claim for this is the title sequence of the show, which flashes the Ten Commandments in between images and clips of gore and horror. For the viewers who haven’t seen the movie, this connection may go unnoticed, but if anything, you now have a great rationale for watching “Se7en.”

I may not be overly impressed with the plot or sure of where this season will fit into my ranking, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t still watch every single episode with a level of fascination that I just don’t get with other shows.

WARNING: This season contains sexual assault that could be triggering.