By the time this lands in your inbox, we will be frolicking in NYC (our happy place) and gearing up to see Paris Paloma in concert for Sara’s belated birthday celebration!!

(Have you seen her music video for Pre-Raphaelite yet??? Omg.)

But we simply cannot squander the magic of October. So today we thought we’d share an updated list of some of our favorite, more obscure Halloween media – the movies that seem to fly under the radar and that we rarely hear people talk about.

(First, real quick: have you voted yet? GO VOTE. It’s your own teeny, tiny, very crucial magic spell. Want to make sure you have your whole ballot on lockdown? Check out the insanely useful https://branch.vote/ to see everything on your ballot before you go to the polls. So helpful!)

Now, on with the pumpkin spice, giant skeletons, and adorable bats:

1) Warm Bodies – We do not understand why this utterly delightful zombie romance is not widely known and adored. A mashup of Romeo and Juliet and Beauty and the Beast, but set in a post-zombie apocalypse New York City, Warm Bodies is WAY better than it has any right to be. The screenplay is witty, the soundtrack is absurdly on point, and it’s perfectly cast. We’re not usually super into zombies (we’re generally Team Vampire), but this one has so much – dare we say it – heart? We saw this together in a movie theater when it first came out, and we were laughing so hard we were crying, and we were worried we’d get kicked out. Fun fact: the film is based on a book that’s also quite good, but this is one of those rare instances where we actually prefer the movie!

2) A Monster in Paris – We cannot overstate how incredibly charming and creative this French animated film is. It’s also clearly inspired by “Beauty and the Beast,” but it takes the themes and then just runs away with them. In a nutshell, A Monster in Paris tells the story of a flea who, in a mad scientist accident, grows to the size of a man and takes the Paris music scene by storm, with the help of a nightclub singer, two cinema employees, an inventor, and a monkey. The music is so energetic and atmospheric (Sara actually played “La Seine” at her wedding!), and the flea is voiced by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s son!

3) Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust – So there’s actually another Vampire Hunter D from 1985 that was super formative for the genre, but our hearts are with Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust from 2000. This movie has so much style. The visuals remain stunning and compelling, and it’s one of the most intensely Gothic films we’ve ever seen. It also has a surprising amount of plot that holds together quite well. Characterization for D, the main character, is pretty thin, but it also helped popularize the vampire hunter trope as we know it today, especially in anime. If you want a gorgeous, Gothic, Halloween-y vampire anime, this will not disappoint.

4) Beautiful Creatures – We actually like the book it’s based on very much, too, but the film has Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson, so it wins. The whole cast is actually pretty fantastic. The story? Teen girl witch and teen normal boy fall in love in the south, but teen girl witch might go super evil at any moment because of a generational curse. The costumes are absolutely stunning, and the actors are clearly living their best lives and enjoying every moment of filming. It’s super delightful and surprisingly sweet.

5) Corpse Bride – Obviously we love Nightmare Before Christmas infinitely and forever, but Corpse Bride deserves more love. In this adorably macabre stop-motion animated film, Victor and Victoria are thrown into an arranged engagement, only to 1) realize they’re actually perfect for each other and 2) have Victor accidentally marry a ghost girl called the Corpse Bride, who drags him down into the land of the dead. The music is fun, albeit not as epic as in Nightmare, and the visuals are eerie, Gothic, and sometimes really beautiful. We love that the land of the living is all in black and white while the land of the dead is in bright, chaotic colors!

6) The Invisible Man – We only got around to watching this classic 1933 film for the first time this year, but, like many Universal horror movies of that era, it still holds up surprisingly well! In many ways, it’s in the same vein as Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – scientist goes too far, chaos and violence ensue. It’s, of course, based on H.G. Well’s novel of the same name, which is a great read. We found parts of it legitimately eerie and unsettling, much like one of our other favorite old horror movies, Nosferatu. 

7) Phantom of the Opera – Another old Universal horror movie that wildly surpassed our expectations is the 1943 Phantom of the Opera, the only Universal horror film with the distinction of winning an Oscar. (This should have clued us in that it was going to be something special.) It is, of course, loosely based on Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel of the same name, but it really has its own distinct vision. We liked that Christine has an on-screen, significant pre-existing connection with the Phantom, that Liszt is a character in the film, and that the story ends…very much not in the way we would expect, especially for 1943!  

8) Over the Garden Wall – We honestly can’t gauge how obscure this is because we’re SO obsessed with it and have literally told everyone we know about it, but we felt like it just had to be on this list. It’s actually a mini series, but it adds up to about movie-length (and we almost always watch the whole thing at once), so we think it counts! In Over the Garden Wall, a pair of brothers gets lost in a strange, wooded, Halloween-land, and it’s SO WEIRD and SO FUNNY and intensely atmospheric. 

There you have it! We hope you enjoy curling up with some popcorn (or candy corn, if you’re a candy corn person) and checking some of these out.

Happy Halloween!

P.S. Seriously, go vote.