10 Films for Halloween That Won't Frighten You
Halloween films divide into two kinds. There are the ones built to frighten you, and there are the ones that only want the season - the low light, the house with too many rooms, the sense that something in the corridor has been there longer than you have. These are the second kind. Some of them are funny. One of them is stop-motion. None will cost you a night's sleep.
1. Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)
Kim Novak is a witch with a gallery of African art on MacDougal Street and a Siamese cat called Pyewacket, who does most of the spellwork. James Stewart is the publisher upstairs. The plot is thin and the apartment is not - deep reds, a spiral stair, a fireplace lit in nearly every scene. Bewitched borrowed from it wholesale a few years later. Watch it for the set dressing and stay for Elsa Lanchester.
2. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
Val Lewton was given a lurid title, a small budget, and no monster, so he built the film out of shadow instead. A Serbian émigré in New York believes she will turn into a panther if she is touched. There are two famous sequences: one in a swimming pool, one on a dark street, and neither shows you anything. The second invented a technique still named after the producer. Seventy-three minutes.
3. The Ghost and Mrs Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
A widow rents a cottage on the English coast that comes with a dead sea captain. He is rude and she does not mind. Bernard Herrmann considered the score his best, and the whole thing is built on wind, gulls and a fire in the grate. The last ten minutes are devastating in a way the first ninety do not prepare you for. A ghost story with nothing to be afraid of.
4. Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)
Made for around thirty thousand dollars by a man who otherwise shot industrial training films, and it shows in the best way - flat daylight, amateur line readings, an organ score that will not stop. A woman survives a crash and drifts through a Utah town toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion. Eerie rather than frightening. Lynch and Romero both took notes.
5. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
Valentine's Day, 1900. Three schoolgirls and a teacher walk up a volcanic outcrop in Victoria and are not seen again. Weir offers no explanation and the film is stronger for it. Russell Boyd shot much of it through a bridal veil stretched over the lens, which is why the light looks the way it does. Dread without threat.
6. Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988)
The joke is an interiors joke. A dead couple haunt their own Connecticut farmhouse in an effort to stop the new owners installing Catherine O'Hara's idea of taste - which is, it should be said, quite good. Bo Welch's production design does the heavy lifting; the makeup won the Oscar. Ninety-two minutes, and the sandworms have aged better than most 1988 effects.
7. Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009)
Laika's first feature, and still the one that justifies the studio. A girl finds a small door in a new house and, behind it, a better version of her life with one condition attached. Every set was built and lit by hand; the sweaters were knitted on needles the width of a human hair. The button eyes will bother children and no adult. Neil Gaiman wrote the book.
8. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)
Two vampires, married for centuries, keeping houses in Detroit and Tangier. He collects guitars and analogue equipment and refuses to go out. She reads, in several dead languages, very fast. Almost nothing happens for two hours and the two hours pass easily. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play it as a portrait of a long marriage, which is what it is.
9. What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, 2014)
Four vampires share a house in Wellington and cannot agree on the washing-up rota. One is 379 and irons his own tablecloths. One lives in the basement and is 8,000. A documentary crew films all of it. Eighty-six minutes, shot for very little, and the funniest thing on this list by some distance. The television series followed; the film is tighter.
10. Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025)
Guillermo del Toro finally gets to make Frankenstein. Oscar Isaac is Victor, Jacob Elordi is the Creature, and Mia Goth is his fiancée. The laboratory is the main event: a vast set inside an old water tower, with marble floors, a spiral staircase and enough machinery to suggest someone has been very busy. Del Toro has been talking about making the film since he was a teenager. The Creature is played by Elordi mostly under prosthetics. Two hours and thirty-two minutes.
