I was beginning to think I wouldn’t have many Halloween horror flicks to add to the complete holiday horror page this year, but I scoured my streaming services for a handful of new ones I hadn’t yet seen, plus I purchased a new Halloween horror Blu-ray for my collection.
NIGHT OF THE REAPER(2025)
While there’s some outdoor fall foliage and Halloween decor around, plus a person or two sporting a hint of a costume, the holiday is completely irrelevant to the plot of this movie. I don’t even know if it actually takes place on Halloween, and despite the main girl babysitting a little boy, they never discuss the holiday, which is unheard of for a boy of trick or treating age. The boy does, however, play Centipede and watch The House on Haunted Hill, so he’s my kind of kid.
I assume the movie is taking place in the 80s, even though it’s never stated. There’s a synthy score, VHS tracking effect added to the film, and the first scene has a girl dancing around to Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker”.
Also, despite the movie opening with a satisfying cat and mouse game and an implied kill, this is not a slasher. It’s more like a home invasion flick for the majority of its run. However, the final act takes a turn that essentially negates much of what came before it, leaving me feeling bamboozled by the tense slow burn I sat through for an hour. At the same time, that surprise trajectory makes the film rather unique.
For most of the movie, we have our main girl babysitting a little boy in a dark house in the middle of nowhere. She’s constantly sensing someone is outside, and there are also signs of weird stuff going on inside the house. This one is definitely reminiscent of Ti West’s The House of the Devil.
The isolated suspense of the main girl’s plight is interjected with a side story. The town’s hunky, widowed sheriff is being led on a sort of scavenger hunt for videotapes that give him clues to several murders. While delicious daddy Ryan Robbins of Riverdale is nice to look at, his story isn’t very compelling until the final act, when it at last meshes with that of the main girl.
Once you embrace the refreshed plot in the final act, it’s entertaining for sure, and the killer’s cloak and skeleton mask costume is definitely a vibe. There’s even gore introduced that wasn’t offered at all earlier in the movie.
V/H/S HALLOWEEN (2025)
The long-running franchise finally takes on our favorite holiday, but there’s no discovery of any VHS tapes to watch as in most of the previous films. This one just jumps into a simple horror setup that is revisited between the full segments and is mostly a non-story. A company is doing a tasting trial with a diet soda that causes participants to experience gruesome side effects. It definitely feels like a nod to the horrors experienced by those that dare to don the masks in Halloween III.
The five main tales all take place on Halloween (yay!).
1st story – This is a freaky fright. Two girls about to enter adulthood decide to trick or treat, with the emphasis on the tricks. When they are beckoned into a house for a haunted walkthrough, they become trapped in a nightmare of mutant motherhood. So nasty good.
2nd story – This is an underwhelming tale, but it does have a basic but satisfying found footage finale. After a massacre at a Halloween party, the only survivor is taken by the police to the scene of the crime, where we learn what happened to all his friends when the detectives experience the same situation. It’s kind of a possession story.
3rd story – More aged-out kids go trick or treating, but in this sleazy sick tale, they end up in a warehouse where they are turned into Halloween candy. There’s even a chocolate covered dick and balls, which I imagine have a creamy white filling. Delicious.
4th story – This is a really fucked up tale that sucks the fun out of Halloween scares for a dose of the realities of Halloween dangers. An electronics store worker preys on young people, abducting them and fricking peeling off their skin while filming it in grisly, agonizing detail. I guess it gets points for mixing things up with a different subgenre.
5th story – This is definitely the way to end a Halloween installment of the franchise. A family that loves Halloween sets up a haunted attraction, but when they create atmosphere in their attraction by playing an old Halloween music vinyl record they find, all hell breaks loose, with killer creeps emerging. I can’t fathom what would have happened if they’d played the record backwards….
The highlight here is a classic witch that flies around on her broom hacking up trick or treaters. This witch bitch doesn’t get enough screen time. She seriously needs her own spinoff movie, just like the freaky-eyed bar girl from the very first movie.
THE KICK BACK (2025)
This is a 63-minutes attempt to make what turns out to not even be a Black Halloween slasher comedy. The promise is all there, but nothing delivers.
A group of friends is preparing for a Halloween party. There’s brief mention of a steel-toed strangler story that ends up having no relevance.
The funniest party is when a couple of the guys at the party meet a white Karen next door who is literally named Karen.
It appears that the killer slips into the party dressed in a ski mask and goggles, but don’t expect any death scenes. There’s a partying montage, but none of the hip hop used is horror or Halloween themed. Bummer. We need more Halloween hip hop.
There’s a psychic who does some psychic readings that don’t amount to anything. She has a voodoo doll that doesn’t mean anything. The lights go out. One guy gets knocked out. There is a gratuitous twerk scene that seems to be a guy just hallucinating. One guy is temporarily tied up. Everything is revealed to be a prank…but what was the prank? Nothing even happened.
55 minutes in there’s actually a kill. That’s the end. That’s it. 7 minutes of bloopers and credits fill out the remaining time.
HELLOWEEN (2025)
This movie forms its premise by embellishing on that true story from years ago in which creepy clowns were mysteriously being spotted in small towns everywhere. While that reality fizzled out with no real resolution…well…so does this Halloween horror movie.
If you could even call it a Halloween horror movie. Despite a perfect Halloween night opener with a little boy in a clown costume killing a woman, don’t expect anything Halloween related here beyond one brief scene with a jack-o’-lantern, as well as blatant references to the John Carpenter classic.
The idea is that a young boy who went on a murder spree as a child is now in a mental institution, still dressed as a clown. Michael Pare is a reporter that covers true crimes. He teams up with the killer clown’s psychiatrist to figure out if the patient is somehow pulling the strings of all the clown sightings around the country, like he’s the leader of some sort of killer clown cult.
The bulk of the movie focuses on the therapist and her daughter trapped in the mental institution and being chased by the clown…until they eventually move the game of cat and mouse to a house so we can get a jack-o’-lantern logically into a shot.
The scares and suspense are forced and flat, there’s no body count, and worst of all, there’s an in-your-face promise that you’re getting a sequel whether you like it or not.
COFFINTOOTH (2024)
This 75-minute movie follows Scream Team Releasing’s tradition of producing Halloween horror movies with a retro 80s vibe. Unfortunately, it’s an uninspired slasher with a weak plot line.
We are introduced to a psycho family on a farm—the mom is being accused of digging up her dead son, there’s a butcher dude lurking around that I think must be another son, and the two investigators that come to the house are killed after the discovery of a tortured, naked girl in the basement.
Jump ahead 30 years. There are fall harvest and Halloween establishing shots that do a great job of setting the seasonal tone, plus visual clues that it is now the 1980s.
The gist is that our main girl seems to have a past history of being abused by her father, but that back story is barely touched upon. The bigger focus seems to be that her brother, who is dating her best friend, forgot about the best friend’s birthday. There’s also talk of their plans for Halloween, and all three get into some form of a costume eventually, but we never quite make it to a Halloween celebration or any trick or treater action.
Instead, we get a masked killer torturing and killing totally random naked girls, the murder of two workers at a general store, what seems to be an attempt to recreate the scene of the old lady making a sandwich for her husband in Halloween II, and a shower scene highlighting the best friend’s fiery red bush, followed by a doggy style sex scene.
Eventually, the main girl is abducted for a sit down dinner with the crazy mother and her killer son. Once he removes his mask, I can only assume he was somehow resurrected 30 years ago when she dug him up, because he looks like death. Why was he killing random people? Why did he abduct the main girl? What happened to the butcher guy from 30 years ago? How was this family never caught when the mom was suspected of digging up her dead son and the two investigators sent to arrest her just disappeared?
It’s all quite generic and anticlimactic, right up to the final girl fighting back thanks to her underdeveloped sexual abuse PTSD storyline, with Halloween entirely dropped from any relevance by then. But props to the filmmakers for choosing to feature one random guy character wearing a shirt that says “real men eat ass”. He should have been the star of the film. To me, he was.
WNUF HALLOWEEN SPECIAL (2013)
I finally checked out this Halloween horror comedy mockumentary, which I see praised all the time online. I’ll give it credit for perfectly nailing the look of a live Halloween show on TV in the 80s, complete with cheap commercials you would swear are genuine, but other than that novelty, this one is agonizing to sit through. The “commercial breaks” most likely make up more of the duration of the film than the “Halloween special”, which features a dude hosting a show at a house where a guy hacked up his parents with an axe after chatting with a Ouija board.
There are segments about the killer and the murders, interviews with spectators on the street, protests by a religious group that thinks Halloween is satanic, kickbacks to newscasters in the network’s studio, and a tour of the house with both a priest and a ghost hunting couple clearly modeled after Ed and Lorraine Warren.
All the shocking events that are said to take place in the house while airing the show conveniently happen during the commercial breaks, as the host keeps explaining upon returning to the live broadcast. What to do when you have no budget to add genuine scares to your movie? Cut to commercial, of course.
Honestly, the offscreen, terrified meows of the ghost hunter couple’s cat, which they bring with them but we never see, is the funniest part of the whole movie. The best horror part is the out-of-left-field, brutal conclusion that is over in a flash after the “special” is abruptly cut short. Seriously, the ending is so satisfying. Unfortunately, everything that comes before it is as weak and crappy as that British movie Ghostwatch that supposedly terrified viewers in the early 90s but is unbearable to watch. I’m pretty sure this movie was making the terrible decision to try to mimic that film.
RL STINE’S PUMPKINHEAD (2025)
Imagine that. A movie called Pumpkinhead that actually takes place on Halloween. Although there’s no gore or kills, I’d say this Tubi original adaptation of an R.L. Stine story might be too intense to serve as a gateway horror for younger kids. However, it’s perfect for tweens…and, well, me. It’s also from the director of the queer zombie flick Slay, which appears on a television screen on Halloween night within the movie as a fun little meta moment.
We open strong with the cool looking creature Pumpkinhead chasing a boy through a field. Then we get fantastic outdoor autumn and Halloween scenes as a woman and her two sons come to live in a small town.
The younger son steals a gnarly pumpkin from a barn, and the next thing you know, his older brother disappears. Not only that, but no adult, including their mother, remembers the brother ever existing.
With the help of a new female friend and a quirky adult dude living in a trailer home, the main boy tries to find out what became of his brother, and how he can make everyone remember him again. A story of child sacrifices, the harvest, and a magical book unfolds, and a freaky, pumpkin-headed scarecrow comes to life and terrorizes our main trio as they try to stop the Halloween night madness that ensues. It even does the spider crawl. Eek!
This fun, light supernatural creature feature delivers several great chase scenes, and Pumpkinhead has a frightening jerky movement, but naturally there are no kills, the mythos and backstory are a bit messy, and the details are never fully clarified. What is quite satisfying and sad is the surprisingly dark outcome at the end.
10/31 Part IV (2024)
As is usually the case with indie Halloween flicks from Scream Team Releasing, the fourth film in this anthology series nails the holiday vibes and the spirit of 80s VHS horror, complete with a few faux horror trailers in between stories. However, the stories themselves have been getting progressively weaker with each sequel. The only standout story for me this time around is the first one. I think if the series continues, the filmmakers really need to start focusing more on writing stronger tales so the substance lives up to the style.
This time around, the horror hostess is totally animated, which is always a fun way to introduce a horror anthology.
We then get four different tales.
Story 1 – A dude buys an old slasher on VHS and invites a couple of friends over to watch it on Halloween night. The clips of the movie on the tape are cheesy and low budget, and I wouldn’t mind if it became a full-length feature of its own. But for the sake of this short tale, the killer, who is a Jason type, crawls out of the television to kill in real life. The death scenes are lots of throwback fun.
Story 2 – The general premise is interesting, but the horror element feels rushed. After the death of his daughter by poisoning, I assume from Halloween candy, a grieving dude who owns a candy factory offers to donate treats to the town for Halloween. He has darker motives, however, but those backfire when one of his victims shows up…after she’s dead. Unfortunately, that plot point is rushed right at the end, whereas him being terrorized in his candy factory by the dead bitch could have and should have been the meat of the tale.
Story 3 – After black and white flashbacks to a witch burning in 1969 (does no one study history anymore?), a group of modern day, celeb wannabes comes to the house of the long dead witches to star in a reality show. Brinke Stevens is their hostess, and she has devilish fun playing the role, but there’s not much to the plot and little in the way of witch action. Bummer. This could have been a witchy blast.
Story 4 – Despite a satisfying delivery of horror, there’s not much to this final tale. A dude working at a haunted attraction gets attacked and bit by something, becomes an incredibly realistic part of the attraction, and kills his coworkers. The end. Awesome.
