By Speaking for the Los Angeles creeps, ghoulies, and sadists, there’s an even split in the festivities (or lack thereof) for this year’s rainy Halloween. My field reporting has returned some consensus sentiments. Fairfax lesbian pornographers who’d be known to dominate a Saturday-landing holiday are opting to stay home (accredited to both lack of general whimsy and, perhaps, a community-wide substance withdrawal), meanwhile Sherman Oaks girly pops are using this year to pop out like it’s the very last time (aka everyone is moving out of Los Angeles). All the Halloween parties on my docket were scheduled for last weekend, with Halloweekend proper just … sitting there pretty barren, unaided by a sudden stormy forecast. October’s traditionally been caught between two realms, one lauded by homebodies who yearn for 31 unbroken days of crafts, cocoa, and bundled up rewatches, and another—which I’ve passionately advocated for my whole life—where you mandate yourself to spend as many hours in as many strangers’ homes as possible in the stupidest costume of all time to play never-ending STI roulette. The horror flicks are a plus. But times keep changing. Gasoline got pricier, pumpkins are $7, reproductive health got a fair lot more challenging to maintain, and everyone’s bummed out to the point of medical depression—well, at least, everyone who’s safe to take your multi-piece costume off in front of. There’s a good chance, reader, that your 2026 Halloween is going to be spent in sweatpants in front of the TV’s glow, and, dearest reader, I may have the witch’s brew for you. Here are two personally curated, broadly themed, time-stamped marathons (12 films total!) to cure your November-scaries. Halloween can’t hurt you. (But the midterms can!)
WOMBS ‘n’ TOMBS
8 PM – 10 PM
RESIDENT EVIL (Dir. Zach Cregger, 2026)
At the time of writing this, Zach Cregger’s RESIDENT EVIL is not legally available to watch via home video, nor has it remained in many theaters (someone tell me why Halloween weekend is when these studios decided to fill screens with a ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD revival, a Mount Everest documentary, and Peter Berg’s THE MOSQUITO BOWL?), but bear with me: This spiritual adaptation of the legendary game series is a rollicking rollercoaster pinnacle of the horror genre. It is highly unusual for a zombie flick to maintain this scope, grandness, and altogether gruesomeness; Cregger runs to the end zone with the intellectual property in tow and spikes that shit with full knowledge that what he’s just done was designed for a rowdy packed house. If you’re inviting people over, there is no better choice for when there’s the most attentive guests in one living room. Feel free to replace this pick with the first two playable hours of Capcom’s RESIDENT EVIL 8, a bonkers installment that unfolds not too dissimilarly from how this film’s protagonist would deal with the surgical mutilation of his baby daughter.
10 PM – 12 AM.
THE UNBORN (Dir. Rodman Flender, 1991)
From fatherhood angst to the full-blown trauma of pregnancy, Rodman Flender’s THE UNBORN is a killer fetus movie built differently from the rest of its kin. Brooke Adams swoops in with a bravura performance, a profoundly vulnerable display of hormonal chaos, and the humiliation of becoming a sentient farm animal subjected to months of prodding, testing, milking, and being repeatedly ordered to sacrifice her own agency for this creature feeding from within her. Again, THE UNBORN ends with a killer fetus! Numerous killer fetuses! Yet, it still retains its slow-burn grounding of watching a woman’s reproductive system be weaponized against her more than it already naturally is.
12 AM – 2 AM
DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING (Dir. Lucio Fulci, 1972)
When those pure babies grow into frolicking children, Italian freakazoid Lucio Fulci surmises that perhaps the best way to keep these kids safe from the perils of adulthood is killing those motherfuckers young. One of the rare Fulci nightmares that abides by a three-act structure, DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING is a tremendously composed, propulsive slice of European sleaze about the dangers of letting men rely on brutish solutions to absolve superstitions, and how those dangers have Vultron’d into the formation known as the Catholic Church. Come for the mystery, stay for the whole thing flying off the rails, and have it stick around in your brain forever thanks to its surprisingly explosive cliff-top conclusion.
2 AM – 4 AM
THE CHURCH (Dir. Michele Soavi, 1989)
Since we’re in the realm of Catholicism and purity, might as well remain in Italy for an Argento prodigy’s glorious hodgepodge of Catholic heresies. The first ‘80s flick of the night, Michele Soavi’s THE CHURCH is a siege movie, a possession thriller, a psychosexual slasher, a domestic drama, occult psychedelia, apocalyptic prophecy, a time-hopping medieval hack-and-slash adventure, and an all-out attack on the arcane oppression of Christ’s disciples (as seen in a brutal, witch-hunting cold open that reveals itself to be a totally justified massacre since those annihilated villagers accused of demon worship were, in fact, successfully summoning demons). THE CHURCH is an anti-Church movie that’s also resolutely pro-Church—hey, just roll with it, they’re Italian. Soavi’s films are such lavishly constructed haunts, and this outpaces even CEMETERY MAN as his most gothically gooey. This is what you want wired into your brain in the dead of night.
4 AM – 6 AM
BEGOTTEN (Dir. E. Elias Merhige, 1989)
Staying in 1989, I’m sure you were titillated by THE CHURCH’s goat-demon breeding finale. Great, well here’s E. Elias Merhige’s BEGOTTEN, where death is an act of creation! Dropping this into your 4 a.m. programming is like tossing a stink bomb into a plane cabin midway its 15-hour flight, best of luck, I’m not sorry for doing this to you, go fuck yourself, and also you’re welcome, I love you.
6 AM – 8 AM
ALIEN: COVENANT (Dir. Ridley Scott, 2017)
Who needs a piping hot cup of joe when you have Amy Seimetz and Carmen Ejogo screeching their way through what may be the 2010s’ best horror set piece? Of the many reasons ALIEN: COVENANT has yet to be declared a modern horror classic (read: Ridley Scott is still alive and busy making garbage, cliffhanger ending that’s coming up on a full decade of irresolution, and two franchise reboots), chief is how merciless COVENANT is—and there’s a kid-killing ALIEN movie directed by David Fincher that kills Ellen Ripley with a vat of lava. Capping off this marathon with a gory ode to death as a crucial step in evolution (and killing as the means of advancement), there’s so much more quality sci-fi carnage in this movie we’ve yet to fully process. Yes, this is the movie where Michael Fassbender erotically teaches a clone of himself how to play a flute, and, no, I don’t think we wasted any of the last nine years laughing about that, but few films have captured primal fear as honestly as ALIEN: COVENANT. Life’s a bitch and then you die really fucking hard. Good morning!
EVERYONE IS FREAKING OUT
8 PM – 10 PM
CHERRY FALLS (Dir. Geoffrey Wright, 2000)
In the general spirit of hysterically eulogizing the end of civilization by harping on Gen Z’s lack of sexual activity, the ever-randy CHERRY FALLS is the reckless post-Columbine barn-burner we can’t seem to grow out of. A turn-of-the-century cult classic that’s somehow still yet to be bestowed the revival it so deserves (or at the very least a theatrical), Geoffrey Wright’s truly insane meta-slasher has one foot in self-awareness and another in blissfully insensitive ignorance. When virgins start getting picked off one by one, the teenage population Virginia town of Cherry Falls races to get their pussies filled and penises pumped. As you could expect, everyone starts freaking out.
10 PM – 12 AM
THE INVISIBLE MAN (Dir. James Whale, 1933)
Programming pre-’70s fare in an all-nighter is historically a losing man’s game, but, by God, James Whale’s special effects extravaganza THE INVISIBLE MAN is as much of a party now as it must’ve been in 1933. Touting none of the sobriety of the other Universal monster movies, this thing is lean, loopy, and gleefully mean. A mad scientist yielding a successful batch of invisibility serum assumes the iron fist of Western power as his terror, incompetence, disbelief, and even more incompetence feeds into his psychopathic God complex. The results? Everyone starts freaking out.
12 AM – 2 AM
RED ROOMS (Dir. Pascal Plante, 2023)
Unfortunately, if you read Merry-Go-Round Magazine, then you probably more or less intimately understand Kelly-Anne’s entire personality and emotional arc. I have no clue how Pascal Plante communicated this degree of simultaneous obsession and techno-detachment that’s activating everyone’s secret little “Time To Be a Big Fuckin’ Freak” buttons – switches that aren’t hidden as far back in the brain as you’d think. In this modern paradox, our utter powerlessness sees us in control of unprecedented access to the nucleus of evil, and we’re encouraged to play chicken with just how close we can get to it. What happens when we let total schizos reign free on the Internet? Everyone starts freaking out.
2 AM – 4 AM
THE SADNESS (Dir. Rob Jabbaz, 2021)
I debated including Rob Jabbaz’s THE SADNESS: This monstrous splatter-flick plays fast and loose with savage sexual violence, but if you’re this far into the night of everybody losing their minds, it’s only natural to reach the mid-night apex of unbridled anarchy. A Taiwanese pandemic-era slaughterhouse, it provides such a perverse ante-up of our current global state of disrepair that it may actually cheer you up. I wrote all about THE SADNESS back in 2022! No joke, viewer discretion is advised, because everyone starts really freaking out.
4 AM – 6 AM
JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY (Dir. Adam Marcus, 1993)
FRIDAY THE 13TH is bar for bar the worst of the classic slasher franchises, don’t even get me started, but where I even more passionately diverge from the horrorhound concord is knowing in my heart that the despised JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY is easily the best outing of the bunch, in large part because of how scornful it is towards the bunk franchise it’s pissing all over. That’s what you get when you hand over a commercial franchise to a shithead 25-year-old! Whoops! I’m not sure if it’s more accurate to call JASON GOES TO HELL’s lore-erosion some sort of retconning or outright disrespect, but it’s a spin best reserved for minimal sleep: The immortal, murder-frenzied motor inside Jason Vorhees is actually a demonic worm that starts inhabiting one unsuspecting host after the next. Imagine SCREAM mixed with Bresson’s L’ARGENT. Unsurprisingly, everyone starts freaking out.
6 AM – 8 AM
PRINCE OF DARKNESS (Dir. John Carpenter, 1987)
In the end, there is no one left to freak out.
Happy Halloween!
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