Halloween on the brain

I know it’s not October yet, but I’ve definitely got Halloween on the brain. Last weekend, I was checking out some Halloween-themed recipes to make for the special day. And last week, Jen and I went shopping for Halloween decorations. (Of course, I already have a crate full of Halloween decorations, but I’m always up for checking out the new stuff every year. Plus, it’s fun to see the neat and scary stuff on display in stores.) We usually don’t start decorating for Halloween until it’s officially October, and since we wait for the first weekend in October to do the honors, that means we’ll be decorating the day after Jennifer’s 13th birthday!

Jennifer is excited about her birthday coming up, and not just because she’ll be turning 13. She is a HUGE horror movie buff, so she was thrilled to learn that a horror movie, Annabelle, will be out in theaters on her big day. She is holding out hope that one of her friends and their mom will take her to see the movie on that day – what a great birthday gift THAT would be! (I can’t take her myself because my husband will be working and there isn’t someone else to watch our young son, who is of course not old enough to see such a scary movie!)  She is especially excited because it’s about the haunted doll we were introduced to in the movie, The Conjuring. (Great movie, by the way! And Annabelle was a real haunted doll! Check out this link)(And if haunted dolls are your thing, check out what I wrote about Robert the Doll, a real haunted doll, in the Key West, Florida chapter of my new book, A Ghost on Every Corner.)

So, yeah, I went from talking about Halloween to talking about horror movies. Heh. But, actually, how could we let the Halloween month pass us by without a good dose of scary flicks? Every year, I try to watch a horror movie for every day of October. Unfortunately, we have not succeeded yet. Sigh. But we’re going to try again this year! So Jennifer and I spent some time yesterday putting together a list of horror movies to watch next month. We were aiming for 31 movies, but ended up with a little more than that.

I already had a list of Halloween movies to watch for October up here on the blog at this link. One list was for adults and the other is for kids. Jen checked out both lists and thought they were good selections, but with the new horror flicks that have come out since the adult list was put together, that particular list got a bit of revising this time around. We also included movies that weren’t particularly as scary but still fun to watch for a horror movie month.

This is our new list for adults:

1. The Amityville Horror
2. The Omen
3. The Grudge
4. Nightmare on Elm Street
5. The Woman in Black
6. Poltergeist
7. Saw
8. Saw II
9. The Others
10. Freddy Vs. Jason
11. It
12. The Shining
13. Pumpkinhead
14. The Conjuring
15. The Messengers
16. Insidious
17. Psycho
18. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
19. Creepshow
20. The Changeling
21. 13 Ghosts
22. Puppetmaster
23. Hellraiser
24. The Exorcist
25. World War Z
26. One Missed Call
27. Scream
28. The Ring
29. Night of the Living Dead
30. Carrie
31. Halloween
32. Gothika
33. Scary Movie
34. Children of the Corn
35. A Haunting in Connecticut
36. The Walking Dead
37. Zombie Town
38. Shaun of the Dead
39. Child’s Play
40. Interview with the Vampire

Of course, there are a whole lot of other horror movies we could add to that list. I have plenty more on my Netflix queue. In fact, I spent some time on Netflix yesterday and today arranging my queue to where I had almost all of the horror movies lined up to be sent next – well, with the exception of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, because Jesse REALLY wants to see that movie! (He just saw, and loved, the first one.) Some of those other horror movies are:

Children of the Corn 666
Devil’s Due
Devil’s Knot
Gallowwalkers
Murder Party
Bride of Chucky (Jennifer LOVED Child’s Play)
Seed of Chucky
Sinister
30 Days of Night
Dark Night of the Scarecrow
Intruders
The Innkeepers
The Howling: Reborn

And of course, there are always the sequels to some of the above-mentioned movies.

So it would seem we’re definitely ready for Halloween to get here. Jennifer even has her costume. Jesse doesn’t have a costume YET – he is still undecided – and I’m not entirely sure on whether or not I’ll dress up this year. (One year, I took the kids trick-or-treating as a monster bride.) We’ve got the food figured out, the decorations bought, the movies lined up and our costumes very nearly ready. Now all we’ll need is for Halloween to get here. (And then, of course, we’ll make a last-minute run out to the store to buy the candy!)