by Don Hall

Tired of the rehash of old franchises to chill your bones this October? Try a couple of these and be creeped out for good.

Revisiting (or rebooting) old horror classics for modern audiences is always a bit of fun but they aren't scary. The dread of seeing Michael Myers standing in his Captain Kirk mask became the candy corn of horror sometime around Halloween 5. The existential fear of zombies overrunning your neighborhood is getting tired because we already know everything one has to do to survive them.

Here are six cult classics you forgot about that will remind you how terrifying a solidly weird movie can be.

Phantasm (1979)

The Tall Man. Dwarf zombies wearing cloaks. A flying chrome ball with spinning knives. An amputated finger that transforms into a flying insect. Don Coscarelli's fever dream of horrific surrealism and themed around coming to grips with the death of loved ones is a genuinely bizarre cocktail of horror, bargain basement gore, and psychological enigmas. Funerals are macabre in the first place so why not set the fear in a funeral home with a malevolent embalmer chasing a kid in his dreams to make you afraid to sleep?

Videodrome (1983)

David Cronenberg is the reigning king of body horror. The Village Voice called him "the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world." Crash, Dead Ringers, and The Fly are among the nightmares he has given the world to be completely freaked out watching. Before them came the uncanny story of James Woods discovering a snuff and torture broadcast signal. Layers of mind-control conspiracy evolve as he exposes the signal's source, and loses himself in a series of incrementally bizarre hallucinations.

Eraserhead (1977)

Henry lives alone in a crap apartment surrounded by industrial gloom. When he discovers that a bootie call left his hook-up pregnant, he marries the expectant mother and has her move in with him. The couple's baby turns out to be a bizarre lizard-like creature that won't stop wailing. Other characters, including a disfigured lady who lives inside a radiator, inhabit the building and add to Henry's troubles.

David Lynch's first experimental film. Black and white. F-U-U-U-C-K-E-D UP. Watch this while doing psychedelics and you will be scarred for life.

Re-Animator (1985)

Stuart Gordon's quasi-Lovecraftian gore-fest is funny in a dry-as-a-bone way, disgusting in almost every scene, and a classic for anyone who dreams of a disembodied head giving a woman cunnilingus. Worth it just for Jeffrey Combs delirious take on the protaganist.

Deep Red (1975)

Dario Argento is a legend but you've only ever seen Susperia so what the fuck do you know?

David Hemmings plays a jazz pianist who unwittingly becomes entangled in a string of brutal murders. Befriended by a reporter (Daria Nicolodi, Argento's longtime companion and occasional screenwriter), Hemmings seeks to solve the mystery, only to find himself a suspect, then a target.

Under any other director this sounds like a CSI:Rome plot but Argento is a mad genius so this ain't that. Any film that features a nervous psychic, a necklace-induced beheading, and a score by the Italian rock band Goblin (another Argento trademark) is well worth your time and certainly better than another reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Jacob's Ladder (1990)

I remember catching this in the theater and after sitting in my car, stunned. I went out, grabbed a few shots of bourbon and chased it with some beer, smoked a joint, and went to another showing that night.

The synopsis, like so many of these, is dangerously simple: ‌Mourning his dead child, a haunted Vietnam War veteran attempts to uncover his past while suffering from a severe case of dissociation. To do so, he must decipher reality and life from his own dreams, delusions, and perceptions of death.

Focus on the "dreams, delusions, and perceptions of death." This one will mess you up some.

Halloween is a conundrum for me. I hate the dress up costume stuff but I love the movies. I like the candy but I don't care much for children. I can watch scary movies any time of year but viewing the squeamish celluloid in October is like watching Christmas movies in December.

I'm a busy guy so when I do settle down to creep myself out, I want it to count.