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It's October. Happy October! I was listening to a podcast recently where people were discussing their favorite horror movies, and I started wondering what mine were. So of course, I had to build a list.

I'll immediately be excluding a number of movies. Jaws, for example. It's an amazing film, but not horror. At least, I don't count it as such. Same thing for Silence of the Lambs. And while I'd like to include Slither or Tucker and Dale vs Evil, those really are more comedy than horror. The three-parter Fear Street also nearly made it onto my list, but I'm limiting it to ten.

Additionally, I know there are plenty of movies which are everyone's objective “best” movies, but this is my list, and it's about my personal favorites, so you won't see The Shining or The Exorcist here.

In thinking about this, I've come to realize that while my favorite genre, science fiction, is at its best when everything makes sense and is explained, horror is the reverse. Horror is at its best when things slowly begin to make sense as you learn more, but you never get all the way there, and the how and the why remain out of reach. How is Freddy Kreuger able to enter peoples' dreams? Why is Pennywise killing kids? It doesn't matter. This is a horror movie. Maybe that's why the new Alien movies that go back and explain everything are flopping so hard.

So let's get to my list. Honestly, I had trouble ranking a lot of these, so even though I'm saving my personal favorite for last, I'm not going to numbers these. Here we go. I've seen most of them more than once, and I'll likely watch them all again.

Totally Killer - The first time I watched this film, I had insanely low expectations, and I put it on to watch in the background while painting miniatures, folding laundry, or sorting through bills. Something like that. It became quickly evident that it was a mashup of Back to the Future and Scream, wherein the main character travels back in time to the 1980s to prevent some murders.

What I hadn't expected is that the movie would actually be good. It's one of the better slasher films I've seen, and it's very fun.

Barbarian - I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this movie. I wasn't paying it much attention until the big act 1 conclusion happened and I WTF'd so hard that I had to pause the movie and take a break.

If you haven't seen Barbarian before, the premise is that a woman rents a place, an AirBnB in a really really bad neighborhood, and it turns out a second guy has somehow rented the same property for the same timeframe. She almost doesn't let him in, and then the two of them have to figure it out. Where things go from there is something you'd never expect.

Us - Who'd have expected that Jordan Peele would be such a good horror director? Everyone loved Get Out, but the whole hypnotism thing just didn't do it for me. I preferred Nope, which felt a lot more like Signs, my favorite M.Night Shymalan movie. I should also point out that I don't think of Signs as a horror movie, or else it might be on this list. It's more suspense.

So Us has an amazing cast. Yahya Abdul-Mateen was in my favorite TV show of all time, and Lupita Nyong'o is just always good. I hadn't really seen Winston Duke in much outside of Black Panther movies, but he's good too.

Like so many of the movies in this list, it's difficult to talk much about the premise without giving too much away, but the bottom line is that a family rents a vacation spot and then has to deal with home invaders. But these home invaders are dopplegangers; they look exactly like them.

Ready or Not - A girl marries into a wealthy family who made their fortune selling board games. On the wedding night, as a tradition, they always play a game...

In this case, the bride-to-be draws the BAD card, and the family is obliged to hunt and murder her. The why of this, as if an explanation were important in a horror film, comes later. In the meantime, it's cat-and-mouse as the quirky characters in this dark comedy do their thing. As played-out as the premise is, it's well-done in this case. And oh gawd - that scene with the nail is just so hard to watch.

A Quiet Place - Post-invasion, humans are relatively scarce, and the animalistic alien monsters are everywhere. If you make any sound at all, they will show up and kill you. The premise is a huge setup, allowing for a wealth of tension-soaked scenes where barefooted characters slowly trod their painstakingly maintained sand-coated forest paths, breathing shallowly and communicating only in sign language until that one moment where one of them steps on a dry twig, then freezes, listening. Did one of them hear?

The kid actors, totally unknown before this film, crushed it. This film is a masterclass in suspense. In a world where the smallest sound spells doom, pregnancy can seem like a death sentence. Childbirth isn't famously silent, and babies aren't the stealthiest animal. Similar to the movie immediately preceeding this one in my list, there's a scene with a nail that gets me every time.

The Thing - Classic. John Carpenter. Kurt Russell. Wilford mother effing Brimley. Back when CG effects weren't a thing and special effects were mostly melted latex. Somehow, it still holds up. When you compare it to the 1951 film which it was remaking, The Thing from Another World, this 1982 film was a huge leap forward. And to put it in perspective, the 1982 film was 31 years after the 1951 original. If you go 31 years past this remake, you only make it up to 2013. It's things like this that make me feel old.

The scene in The Thing where Kurt Russell is testing blood samples by sticking a hot wire into them has got to be one of the most suspenseful scenes ever put on film. One by one, the other characters who are tied to chairs watch him, wide-eyed, waiting to see which of them is not still human. And when they do find out, how many of them will still be tied to a chair?

Scream - When it comes to slasher films, is there any better? From the Drew Barrymore misdirect in the first scene, this film kept you guessing about the identity of the killer, to the point where it was as much a whodunnit as a horror movie.

David Arquette's deputy Dewey was probably my favorite character, but really everyone was great. The obsession with deconstructing classic slasher movie tropes and subverting them really added an interesting angle, and the fact that Scream's killer wasn't an unstoppable killing machine really worked. Ghost Face would miss a stab, fall over, and scramble away awkwardly.

Cabin in the Woods - The first half of this movie is the most hackneyed and overused horror trope ever. Teenagers go to a creepy cabin in the forest for the weekend to get drunk and have sex, and something comes for them. An equally creepy old man warns them en route, but of course they ignore him. They learn too late that he was right, and they are killed one by one.

But in this film, there's this weird bit with office workers watching them. What's going on with that? Then the second half of the movie hits and things go completely off the rails. And then the rails start to come off entirely. I love this movie.

Cabin in the Woods is very meta, but in a very different way than Scream is. Whereas characters in Scream discussed and analyzed slasher movie tropes, those in Cabin in the Woods are smack dab in the middle of a horror movie cliche, and yet don't make the same stupid decisions that we so often deride those characters for making. As the story progresses, the curtain is pulled back, and things get weird.

The Endless - Easily the best cosmic horror film I've ever seen. It begins very slowly, but in the end this movie is downright Lovecraftian.

Two brothers return for a one-day visit to the commune where they were raised. Memories of their youth were fuzzy, and they'd been debating about whether it was a UFO death cult or not. The visit begins very benignly, but they do begin learning and seeing some peculiar things.

It Follows - Perhaps the thing that makes me love this movie so much is its crazy premise. The main character in the film has a curse - a transmissable curse. When you're cursed, a monster is following you. It's a slow-moving thing with no permanent form; it can look like anyone you know, or someone you don't know. And it's invisible to anyone who doesn't have the curse. It's easy to get away from it, but if it ever does catch up to you, it will kill you. Oh, and one last thing. You can transmit the curse to someone else, and away from you, by having sex with them. But if they die, then the monster comes after you next.

And that's it. That's the movie's entire premise. It doesn't matter where this curse started, how it might end, or what the monster is. All that matters is staying alive.

I've seen various takes on this film saying that it represents the anxiety of young peoples' first sexual experiences, or the inevitability of death, or blah blah blah. I just know that it's a fascinating and well-made horror movie with a very creative monster. And it's dream logic, like so much of the horror genre. You can figure out some rules of how things work, but in the end it doesn't make sense, because that's part of what makes horror scary.

There are elements of the movie which are easy to miss, but add to the feeling of wrongness. Nobody has cell phones, and one character drives a car that looks like it's from the 1970s. What year is it? Then a character shows up with a seashell-shaped e-reader - tech which doesn't exist in real life. One scene has the characters talking while swimming in an above ground pool, and a couple scenes later they're in winter coats. None of this is ever mentioned. It's unsettling.

And I've just learned that they're working on a sequel, although I'd be surprised if it's out in 2025. They're calling it They Follow. I'm in.

So that's my horror movie list. In retrospect, I might have also included In the Tall Grass, which I believe was written by Steven King. But I've only seen that movie once and I don't remember it super well.

Looking back on these films that I've enjoyed the most, I'm finding a commonality. Unlike the Nightmare on Elm Street or 28 Days Later movies, which are fairly front-loaded, my picks all have secrets and lore that are revealed over the course of the film. Often there's some big reveal. Gore and violence do not do it for me at all.