Most people watch a handful of scary movies each October. Bailey Richards, PEOPLE’s resident horror buff, watched 170 of them — and that was just this year. After sharing 10 favorites from more than 100 horror films last October, Richards returned with a fresh Halloween watchlist built from a year of relentless viewing, and the horror marathon behind it began with a single reader comment: “You should get out more.” Rather than take the hint, Richards took it as a challenge, rolled up her sleeves and headed to the theater even more often.
The rules of the list matter as much as the picks. There are no blockbusters here. This year’s biggest genre hits — Obsession, Backrooms and Resident Evil — were deliberately left off, even though Richards recommends all three and counts her chat with Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette among her favorite interviews of the year. She also nods to the recent golden run of the genre: in 2025, Sinners and Weapons ruled awards season and the box office, building on the momentum ignited by 2024’s surprise hit The Substance. This list, instead, is all cult films and underrated gems.
A Vampire Mockumentary Steals the Crown
Leading the picks is I Love Paris, a French vampire mockumentary fresh off its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. More than a decade after What We Do in the Shadows cemented itself as the definitive vampire mockumentary, Richards says a new challenger has appeared from across the Atlantic. The film hinges almost entirely on Aminata Thiboult’s presence as Paris, a rising musician who leaves a trail of blood in her attempt to secure a music festival slot. Richards calls Thiboult’s turn one of the most delightfully disarming and endlessly amusing performances of the year, and praises the low-budget flick as one of the best depictions of a Gen Z protagonist put to screen.
(Columbia Pictures / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain))Mia Farrow’s Forgotten Masterclass
Next comes See No Evil, a 1971 psychological thriller starring Mia Farrow. Everyone knows Farrow’s scream queen turn in 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, but Richards argues she gave another all-time performance just a few years later in this lesser-seen film. There is no satanic cult here — just a raw, mundane and tragically beautiful kind of horror. After going blind in a horse-riding accident, Farrow’s Sarah goes to recover at her uncle and aunt’s peaceful countryside estate, where her rest is uprooted by a sadistic killer identified on screen only by his snazzy cowboy boots until the final moments. Richards singles out a bath scene she calls haunting, and a dread she describes as truly singular to this picture.
The third pick, Mārama, is Taratoa Stappard’s 2025 directorial debut. The 19th-century tale opens with text over a black screen declaring that it is grounded in the colonised history of Aotearoa New Zealand and depicts disturbing scenes of the violation and desecration of Māori culture. “To move into our future we must understand our past,” the text concludes. Ariāna Osborne stars as Mary, a Māori woman adopted and raised in New Zealand who slowly unspools an Englishman’s web of lies about her family. Richards calls Osborne a force to behold and warns, simply: it will shatter you.
(Bryan Berlin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))Deep Cuts from the Seventies and Beyond
For fans of the atmospheric dread of Backrooms, Richards points to Messiah of Evil (1973), in which a young woman travels to a coastal town in search of her father and the story dissolves into a delicious, dreadful liminality. The film carries a heap of alternate titles — Revenge of the Screaming Dead, Blood Virgin, Deep Swamp, Dead People — and Richards urges viewers to at least watch its movie theater and supermarket scenes. Then there is Oddity, Damian McCarthy’s 2024 Irish supernatural horror film about twin sisters Dani and Darcy, and a revenge carried out not with a knife or a gun but with a life-size wooden figure wearing a permanent scream. Richards discovered it after watching McCarthy’s Adam Scott-led Hokum in April, and says Oddity “knocked my socks off.”
The most mainstream name on the list is The Faculty (1998), Robert Rodriguez’s science-fiction teen horror written by Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson. Clea DuVall plays a brooding high schooler alongside Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Usher, Salma Hayek and Jon Stewart, in a story about extraterrestrial parasites taking over a high school. Richards describes it as Clueless meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Men in Black — “a must-watch.” Rounding out the ten are The Cycle, a crime-procedural-meets-creature-feature that premiered on the East Coast at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival with True Blood‘s Deborah Ann Woll and Burn Notice‘s Jeffrey Donovan; Creep 2 (2017), the found footage sequel Richards rewatched the night before interviewing Mark Duplass; Mario Bava’s 1963 giallo melodrama The Whip and the Body, starring Christopher Lee; and Thesis (1996), a twisty Spanish thriller about a film student in Madrid investigating snuff videos at her university.
(Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))A List Built at the Movies
What ties the ten together is how they were found: in theaters, at a film festival premiere, and across more than 350 movies — horror and otherwise — that Richards has watched so far this year. It is a cult classic lover’s list, assembled by someone who took “you should get out more” and turned it into a viewing schedule. Her advice is in the framing: add these to your Halloween watchlist expeditiously.