Halloween -- the most home-video-ish of all holidays. Selecting the right horror film for end-of-October has become a cultural ritual, and here're just a few of our recommendations:

Haxan, or Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) Benjamin Christiansen’s messy, crazy, thoroughly disreputable, frequently banned Danish silent has been resurrected as a creaky novelty at least three times since it was made – once, in 1968, with a narration read by William S. Burroughs. Hardly a serious work of art or even a visceral genre entry, the movie is nonetheless jam-packed with decaying Gothic imagery the likes of you’ve never seen before, from black masses to possessed nuns to witch burnings to multiple Lucifers ruining the lives of innocents and sacrificing infants. You’ll find no better ambient video for a serious Halloween party.

The Cat and the Canary (1927) The first true trapped-in-a-haunted-mansion-on-a-rainy-night-to-read-the-will movie, and hokey as all get-out, but marvelously musty, too, and pungently Expressionistic-with-a-capitol-E (Germanic master Paul Leni was the director, transplanted to Hollywood, and every architectural inch of the movie is ornately trimmed out). It’s a lovely, nightened place to visit, and inoffensive for kids.

Vampyr (1932) Austere cinema master Carl-Theodor Dreyer – in his first sound film – tried his hand at an outright horror film on assignment, but the end-product cannot be anything the dilettante producers anticipated. Gauzy, somnambulistic, fog-clogged to the point of dislocation, Dreyer’s film is based on a Sheridan Le Fanu story, but is less a tale told than a suffocating dream endured. But Dreyer produces passages that loiter in your skull, particularly the funeral march as seen from inside the coffin. Independently made and badly preserved, the sound is unreliable, and the multi-national cast never seems comfortable with whatever language they’re speaking. All to the better.

The Mascot (1933) Ladislaw Starewicz was a Lithuanian puppet animator whose sketchy career stretches from the pre-Revolutionary days to the Kruschev era, and is roundly acknowledged as the grandfather of stop-motion animation as it has grown to encompass Czech masters Jan Trnka and Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and even Wallace and Gromit. This inventive short – available on several video collections – presages the Toy Story films as well, following the adventures of errant toys lost in a dark city, and climaxing with a windblown, Devil-haunted confrontation that is still chilling.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) Self-consciously campy about Halloween – buttressed by cartoon-black-cat title cards and lots of faux wind whipping through the studio-Brooklyn trees – this priceless farce remains stagey, and remains a living demonstration of how "staginess" is no handicap at all if the material crackles, and you’ve got Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Jack Carson and Edward Everett Horton to fill out the single set with their earnest energies. Crazy brownstone aunts who also happen to be serial murderers, Josephine Hull and Jean Adair are the straight men in this scenario, which director Frank Capra keeps whipping along like a relay race. A pungent evocation not only of the usual Hollywood backlot atmospherics, but of the Brooklyn autumn of 1944, when this hilarious trifle was what the old neighborhood badly needed.

The Tingler (1949) Perhaps the most inventive of William Castle’s cheapo postwar horror ditties, this barren, desolate fantasy posits a neurological bug on everyone’s spine that, if you’re scared enough and can’t scream, grows to the size of a loaf of Italian semolina (with rubbery caterpillar legs) and kills you. Few things in mid-century drive-in history compare to the look on Vincent Price's face as he finds the foot-&-a-half, insectoid "tingler" in an autopsied cadaver, wraps his rubber-gloved hands around it, and pulls. Of course, the thing gets out, and even attacks a cinema projectionist, crawling across the white screen – at which point, in 1949, Castle had certain wired seats in the theater buzz and jolt their occupants. Those were the days.

Horror Hotel (1960) A public domain bad dream that has surely lodged in the reptile brain of every kid who ever saw it on local pre-cable TV, this otherwise forgotten British-made horror film was virtually remade as Silent Hill, but the original, however penny-ante and cheesy, still grips, with its shadow-&-cardboard New England setting, a palpable air of neglected-village dread, and a deftly written plot beginning with the Salem witch trials and proceeding to the present. With Christopher Lee in a plummy walk-on, a king’s ransom in dry-ice clouds, and a stirringly heroic denouement.

Carnivals of Souls (1962) Made for peanuts in Kansas (and the Utah salt flats) by a company normally busy with industrial shorts, this ghostly orphan of the ‘60s is one of those movies whose ill-exposed film, stiff acting and general air of gray yesteryear poverty lends it a fantastic chill. A woman in a car gets run off a bridge – but survives, it seems, into an arid Lawrence, Kansas where the heroine (an unforgettable Candace Hilligoss) sometimes goes unseen like a phantom among the populace, and is herself haunted by silent ghouls. It may be a latent-‘50s adaptation of Bierce’s "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," but it’s the dead-air sense of menace and dislocation that makes it stick in your memory like a burr.

Burn, Witch, Burn! (1962) Another British genre toot, this Fritz Leiber-derived witchcraft opus is actually a sharp analysis of marital dysfunction, focusing on a churlish university prof (the rather windy Peter Wyngarde) who discovers his wife of many years (Janet Blair) has long been a practicing sorceress. Pragmatically abolishing the trappings from their life together is his first and last mistake – unbeknownst to him, the wife has been battling rivals and protecting her husband in a secret conjurors’ war.

The Haunting (1963) Of all the reflexive choices for Halloween self-programming found at your local chain videostore, this Shirley Jackson-derived humdinger may come as the biggest surprise to genre fans born since 1970 – this is a true horror film, dread-drenched and blood-chilling and old-dark-house atmospheric like none other. It is not a horror film as Hollywood has defined it over the last quarter century: that is, a decidedly unthreatening litany of F/X, gore, soundtracks blams and glib jokes. In terms of authentic all-hallow’d vibe, this movie is a treasure trove – chilly drafts, gray skies, dark hallways, rooms not to be entered, sounds in the night. This haunted mansion is not cozy, the ghosts do not have problems the plot solves, the heroine is not a plucky teenager. No one gets killed by flying objects; in fact, you don’t see the phantoms at all. But the scenes of supernatural siege are nonetheless the most alarming and scarifying in cinema history. Try it on some "young adults" who think horror movies are just to be giggled at, and watch them get shaken at their roots. Not to be confused with the 1999 remake, which is less frightening than a car alarm.

The Gorgon (1964) Perhaps the flat-out strangest of all of the Hammer Studio horror films of the British ‘60s, utilizing yet again the peerless cheesy old-village vibe, overlit histrionics and garish monster melodrama so familiar from their Dracula and Frankenstein series, but at the heart of it, haunting a backwards hamlet… a figment from Greek mythology, literally, a snake-headed titan whose visage can, and does, turn men to stone. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee stalk about contemplating the absurdities, and the Old World chilliness is fab.

An American Werewolf in London (1981) The preeminent Halloween party film, being a delicious fusion of several key elements: sophomoric irreverence (personified by Griffin Dunne’s masterful turn as a decomposing dead slacker), monster-movie shocks (being pre-digital, all of the transformation scenes are done with make-up, robotics and sweaty actors), and superstitious mood – the misty moors, the cramped inn with secretive locals, the stranger-in-a-strange-land vision of London (and English hospitals). Complete with a soundtrack made up of nothing but songs with "moon" in their titles, John Landis’s movie is enough of a reference point to have invaded real life – there has been for years a very real pub in Manhattan’s West Village called The Slaughtered Lamb, with the film’s very same wolf sign hanging outside, and a dusty cellar where the owners have been known to show the film all day on October 31st.

The Company of Wolves (1984) Another kind of werewolf film altogether – directed by Neil Jordan from the stories of Angela Carter, this dream-like, story-within-a-story fairy tale uses the lycanthrope legend to take on, in all seriousness, the story of Little Red Riding Hood and its overbearing Freudian subtexts. The make-up technology isn’t up to Landis’s movie (or its contemporary, Joe Dante’s Californicated version The Howling), but the trippy Grimm-ness and overt sexual imagery make it a much stranger experience.

The Halloween Tree (1993) Nobody ever sang the song of Halloween as passionately or as lyrically as Ray Bradbury. (A faithful remake of Something Wicked This Way Comes, filmed dreadfully in 1983, is waiting to be made.) This Hanna-Barbera-produced cartoon version of his young-reader novel is torn between a brooding plot (four children chase after the soul of a dying friend) and a rather trite and episodic tour of the holiday’s traditions through the ages, but the man’s rhapsodic sense of the season is unmistakable.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) The real deal, a radical realigning of genre prerogatives, and a lean, mean, pants-soiling machine set in the very real American scrub forest of your forgotten preadolescent nightmares. Forget the astonishing hype, spinoffs and spoofs this movie generated when it was first released – that’s just history now, leaving behind the first movie that genuinely understands fear. It is without a doubt the all-time ideal Halloween renter – it’s the audiovisual equivalent of every sleepover ghost story you ever heard, and it really happened! No, it didn’t, but think about that lucky, traumatized first audience at the Sundance Film Festival who saw the movie at midnight, in the mountains of Utah, without being told it wasn’t a documentary. Daringly, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s film is nothing more than the rough footage shot by a three-student documentary team who have decided to make a cheesy film about a chunk of Maryland woods and its accompanying witch legend. What happens is simple: they can’t get out of the woods, the overnight hike turns into days of hysteria in the wilderness, and something – something – begins to reveal itself to them, in ominous nighttime sounds, pagan signs, and worse. Throughout, the fact that we see only what the beleaguered trio manage to film, and often not even that thanks to the limitations of light and focus in handheld moments of primordial terror, makes this more than just a horror movie – it’s a return to your childhood’s starkest memories of abandonment and dread. Saying The Blair Witch Project is a convincing experience is only scratching the surface – because you believe it, because your vision is limited, because the actors are in reality alone in the dark, because it doesn’t even seem to be a movie but rather somebody’s home footage gone terribly, sickeningly berserk, it might be the scariest movie ever made.

Sleepy Hollow (1999) With this high-octane Gothic comic book, Tim Burton continues his unique, idiosyncratic and very personal career project: to reexperience and revivify the toy chest of pop-culture effluvia that sustained him, and many of us indeed, through our ‘Nam-era childhoods. Burton has said he wanted to homage the old British horror movies made by Hammer Studios, and as usual, he beat them at their own game – no Hammer film ever looked this crepuscular, this grandly, rottenly ghoulish. Extrapolating out Washington Irving’s nervous little ghost story (animated not at all ineffectively by Disney in 1949), the movie dazzles us with one Halloweeny motif after another, from scarecrows with candlelit jack-‘o-lantern heads to enough fog to choke L.A. However thin in the story department (like all of Burton’s films), it’s a fabulous hoot, and you feel the filmmaker’s macabre delight in every frame.

Donnie Darko (2001) Firsttimer Richard Kelly’s film defies description – it’s a wild, unpredictable beast that refuses to be caged by genre or expectations. Enveloped in a mood of cultural doom and psychological unease that is persistently haunting, this saga of teenage alienation is in a more or less constant state of cataclysm – internal or external, you decide. Donnie (the naturally affecting but abstruse Jake Gyllenhaal) is a high schooler in 1988, on the cusp of the Bush/Dukakis elections, attempting to navigate his terrain despite the fact that he sleepwalks, hallucinates, is becoming convinced that the world will end in 28 days, and has decided to stop taking his medication. He’s partnered by a skull-faced rabbit figure inciting him to destruction, and his suburban school is in the grip of a messianic self-help guru (Patrick Swayze), but Donnie’s primary problem is his own flexible reality; he doesn’t know any more than we do exactly how much his mental disturbance reflects and/or causes the cosmic countdown to Halloween. A feverish cult has sprouted around this changeling, and with its sense of ominous portent and middle-class-kid holiday ritual, it may be the best Halloween film ever made, even if it’s not frightening but is instead heartbreaking and mysterious. While the film seems clearly a free-fall study in psychological meltdown, by the end you’re not so sure if it isn’t revisiting An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (again!) or, more aptly, simply culminating in a stunning, purely cinematic act of salvation.

Satan’s Little Helper (2003) Forgotten genre freak Jeff Lieberman – his erratic career began in 1976, as the auteur behind the giant worm saga Squirm – manufactured this 80s-style gore-farce out of crummy horror-flick spare parts, but the upshot is conceptually maniacal and witty. A semi-delusional kid, obsessed with a Satanic video game, meets and obliviously assists a grinning-demon-mask-wearing psycho as he litters bodies through a prototypical suburbia on Halloween – a setup that, at least, allows Lieberman to fill front-lawn graveyard displays with real corpses and bloodied knives. Never released to theaters.

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005) A formal repeat performance of The Nightmare Before Christmas complete with identical character design and Danny Elfman songs, this sumptuous Black Foresty animation virtually oozes with gray, toyshop atmosphere. Of course, it’s strictly for the irreverent Halloween renter, although this endearingly modest movie has some real poetry in it, and a concrete relationship with centuries of Mitteleuropan legend and Ukrainian peasant myth.

Monster House (2006) High-concept digital animation brought down, definitively, to a trick-or-treater’s level. The myth of everyone’s childhood neighborhood – of the darkened, unkempt house on the block no one knows much about, and which may well be the site of unspeakable creepiness, or worse – is exploded out into a carnivorous piece of rotting architecture, swallowing hapless children (or at least their toys) and inspiring endless prepubescent schemes and surveillances. The climactic battle is naturally too long and loud, in the Spielberg mode (he and Robert Zemeckis were producers), but the draughtsmanship is imaginative, the voices (especially Jason Lee and Steve Buscemi) are sharp, and the tunnelvision of kids on a self-scaring tear is splendidly evoked.