It’s almost Halloween!  Yours portly couldn’t be more excited for this fun holiday.

Unfortunately, yours portly has been extremely busy lately, and I simply haven’t had the time to write proper posts over the weekend.  I was planning on reviewing the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic The Birds today (I saw it on the big screen the weekend before this past one), but I’m holding off on that for another week.

Instead, here are some films I’d recommend to get you into the Halloween mood:

• John Carpenter‘s Halloween (1978) – no explanation needed.  The holiday is the name of the film—and it’s a classic of the slasher genre.
• John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) – a personal favorite of mine, combining ancient curses and local boosterism with a creeping, ghostly fog.
• John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) – I prefer this flick when it’s a bit colder, on an extremely dark and frosty night.  It enhances the feeling of paranoid desperation that runs throughout the flick and its Antarctic setting.
• The Exorcist (1973) – an extremely creepy and thought-provoking horror film that also scares and entertains.
• Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – a truly unsettling film in which seemingly well-meaning neighbors and an ambitious husband trade a young bride’s womb for fame, power, and the Devil.
• Any Hammer films (various dates) – Hammer brought babes, boobs, and Biedermeier to horror, and somehow turned splashy, brightly-colored settings and characters into horror gold.

It’s a short and skewed list—all that John Carpenter!—but I’m not claiming it’s exhaustive.  Please, leave your recommendations below.

Happy Halloween!

—TPP