When it comes to our ranking of all the major streamers, in terms of their horror and Halloween movie libraries, perhaps it’s no surprise that the family-focused Disney+ has typically fallen at the bottom of the list. After all, it’s the only one of the major forces in the streaming world with a philosophy that has historically put it at odds with intensely scary or disturbing horror content. Until recently, that is, when the greater merging of Disney-owned content suddenly opened the floodgates, resulting in Disney+ receiving many of the same horror films as other streamers like Hulu. All of a sudden, there are real horror movies like Alien on Disney+, and you’ve got to admit it’s a weird look.
At the same time, there’s also a decent selection of more wholesome, family-friendly Halloween movies to be found streaming on Disney’s service. The company has a long tradition of supplying scares in a more gentle and welcoming way, as in the famed Haunted Mansion of the Disney parks. And you can even visit said mansion via your TV screen, with the Muppets as your guide! Who could say no to that?
Here, then, are an unlucky 25 selections representing the best of the Halloween-appropriate titles on Disney+, both in the form of legit horror fare and more family-friendly films. Leave it to Disney to create such a deeply strange combination on one service.
These are the best Halloween movies on Disney+:
1. The Nightmare Before Christmas
Year: 1993
Director: Henry Selick
Stars: Danny Elfman, Chris Sarandon, Catherine O’Hara
Rating: PG
On simply a shot-by-shot basis, The Nightmare Before Christmas ranks as one of the most visually splendid films ever made. Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, becomes obsessed with Christmas and decides to hijack the holiday. Often presented under the title Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, the film echoes many of the hit director’s pet themes, with Jack being one of Burton’s many brooding artistic protagonists. The film’s actual director was Henry Selick, who oversees an ingenious design and a cast of endearing monsters. The film doesn’t quite have the narrative fuel and graceful song lyrics to match Disney’s best animated musicals, but every year the film looks better and better. —Curt Holman
2. Alien
Year: 1979
Director: Ridley Scott
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto
Rating: R
Conduits, canals and cloaca—Ridley Scott’s ode to claustrophobia leaves little room to breathe, cramming its blue collar archetypes through spaces much too small to sustain any sort of sanity, and much too unforgiving to survive. That Alien can also make Space—capital “S”—in its vastness feel as suffocating as a coffin is a testament to Scott’s control as a director (arguably absent from much of his work to follow, including his insistence on ballooning the mythos of this first near-perfect film), as well as to the purity of horror as a cinematic genre. Alien, after all, is tension as narrative, violation as a matter of fact: When the crew of the mining spaceship Nostromo is prematurely awakened from cryogenic sleep to attend to a distress call from a seemingly lifeless planetoid, there is no doubt the small cadre of working class grunts and their posh Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) will discover nothing but mounting, otherworldly doom. Things obviously, iconically, go wrong from there, and as the crew understands both what they’ve brought onto their ship and what their fellow crew members are made of—in one case, literally—a hero emerges from the catastrophe: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the Platonic ideal of the Final Girl who must battle a viscous, phallic grotesque (care of the master of the phallically grotesque, H.R. Giger) and a fellow crew member who’s basically a walking vessel for an upsetting amount of seminal fluid. As Ripley crawls through the ship’s steel organs, between dreams—the film begins with the crew wakening, and ends with a return to sleep—Alien evolves into a psychosexual nightmare, an indictment of the inherently masculine act of colonization and a symbolic treatise on the trauma of assault. In Space, no one can hear you scream—because no one is listening. —Dom Sinacola
3. The Fly
Year: 1986
Directors: David Cronenberg
Stars: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz
Rating: R
Between The Blob, The Thing and The Fly, the ’80s were a magical decade for remaking already iconic ’50s horror/sci-fi movies. The original Kurt Neumann/Vincent Price version of The Fly is sometimes waved away as nothing more than a “camp classic,” but it’s a substantial film that is often more mystery than it is horror—a tightly focused narrative hinging around the question of why a woman has confessed to messily crushing her husband to death in a hydraulic press. Vincent Price is as entertaining as the fly-crossed scientist as you would no doubt expect him to be. The Cronenberg version, like the remake of The Blob, takes that basic premise and dresses it in both gallows humor and body horror, as Jeff Goldblum’s researcher literally watches pieces of his body gelatinize and melt away in front of him. As “Brundle” he’s great, full of manic energy, ingenuity and eventually insectoid-enhanced physicality. Along with The Thing, the film is one of the last great hurrahs of the practical effects-driven horror era, featuring some of the more disgusting makeup and gore effects of all time. After seeing a man-sized Brundlefly vomiting acid, it’s difficult to ever look at a common housefly in the same way again. —Jim Vorel
4. Aliens
Year: 1986
Director: James Cameron
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Michael Biehn
Rating: R
Runtime: 138 minutes
James Cameron colonizes ideas: Every beautiful, breathtaking spectacle he assembles works as a pointillist representation of the genres he inhabits–sci-fi, horror, adventure, thriller–its many wonderful pieces and details of worldbuilding swarming, combining to grow exponentially, to inevitably overshadow the lack at its heart, the doubt that maybe all of this great movie-making is hiding a dearth of substance at the core of the stories Cameron tells. An early example of this pilgrim’s privilege is Cameron’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s horror masterpiece, in which Cameron mostly jettisons Scott’s figurative (and uncomfortably intimate) interrogation of masculine violence to transmute that urge into the bureaucracy that only served as a shadow of authoritarianism in the first film. Cameron blows out Scott’s world, but also neuters it, never quite connecting the lines from the aggression of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation to the maleness of the military industrial complex, but never condoning that maleness, or that complex, either. Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) story about what happened on the Nostromo in the first film is doubted because she’s a woman, sure, but mostly because the story spells disaster for the corporation’s nefarious plans. Private Vasquez’s (Jennette Goldstein) place in the Colonial Marine unit sent to LV-426 to investigate the wiping out of a human colony is taunted, but never outright doubted, her strength compared to her peers pretty obvious from the start. Instead, in transforming Ripley into a full-on action hero/mother figure–whose final boss battle involves protecting her ersatz daughter from the horror of another mother figure–Cameron isn’t messing with themes of violation or the role of women in an economic hierarchy, he’s placing women by default at the forefront of mankind’s future war. It’s magnificent blockbuster filmmaking, and one of the first films to redefine what a franchise can be within the confines of a new director’s voice and vision.–Dom Sinacola
5. Coco
Year: 2017
Directors: Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina
Stars: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Renée Victor, Ana Ofelia Murguia, Alanna Ubach, Jaime Camil, Sofía Espinosa, Selene Luna, Alfonso Arau, Edward James Olmos
Rating: PG
Thanks to its story and, most importantly, its setting, Coco may count as one of Pixar’s clearest successes—and for many who long to see their culture center stage instead of just a flavor sprinkle, the story of Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) as he struggles to pursue his dreams could prove the studio’s most meaningful yet. The implicit contract between films like Coco and the audience is a simple one: Sit back and let us immerse you in a world you haven’t seen before, or one you’ve only imagined. Directors Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina do just that. Coco’s underworld is richly textured and imagined, but so is the “real world” where we start and end up. Sure, by now it’s what we expect from Pixar, but it’s notable nonetheless. And the lasting accomplishment of Coco lies in the reverence and joy with which it depicts another culture’s celebration. Dia de los Muertos isn’t used as some convenient, exotic setting or explored through the eyes of someone from the United States (though early iterations of the script did just that, apparently). Instead, the film represents a full embrace of a culture and its people, as well as a celebration of family, both present and past. As such, it’s difficult to imagine healthier holiday fare. —Michael Burgin
6. The Sixth Sense
Year: 1999
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Stars: Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette, Olivia Williams
Rating: R
Featuring great performances by Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, along with a legitimately chilling atmosphere, The Sixth Sense was nothing short of a phenomenon when it hit multiplexes in 1999. Critical examination aside, it truly is a frightening film, from the scene where Cole is locked in a box with an abusive ghost to the little moments (I always found the scene where all the kitchen cabinets and drawers open at once while off-screen to be particularly effective). For better or worse, though, this is the defining film of M. Night Shyamalan’s career, and its success was a double-edged sword: It bestowed the “brilliant young director” label on him, but also pigeonholed his personal style as a writer to the extent that his next five features at least were all reshaped by the aftershocks of The Sixth Sense. Rarely has the danger of success been so clearly illustrated for an artist–Shyamalan crafted a scary film that still holds up today, and then spent most of the next decade chasing that same accomplishment with rapidly diminishing returns that have only recently been rehabilitated with the likes of Split. —Jim Vorel
7. The Omen
Year: 1976
Director: Richard Donner
Stars: Gregory Peck, Harvey Spencer Stephens, Lee Remick, David Warner, Billie Whitelaw
Rating: R
In the canon of “creepy kid” movies, the original 1976 incarnation of The Omen stands alone, untainted by the horrendous 2006 remake. It has a palpable sense of malice to it, largely because of the juxtaposition of restraint and moments of extremity. Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) isn’t this little devil boy running around stabbing people, he’s full of guile, deceit and, scariest of all, patience. He knows that he’s playing the long game–it will be years and years before he achieves his purpose on the Earth, which gives him the uncomfortable attitude of an adult (and a pure evil one) in a child’s body. The film is brooding, sullen, broken up by staccato moments of shocking violence. In particular are the infamous scene wherein a sheet of glass leads to a decapitation, or the fate of Damien’s nurse in the film’s opening. The Omen can genuinely can get under your skin, especially if you’re a parent. —Jim Vorel
8. Hocus Pocus
Year: 1993
Director: Kenny Ortega
Starring: Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Omri Katz, Thora Birch, Vinessa Shaw
Rating: PG
Hocus Pocus feels almost like a sister story at times to Roald Dahl’s The Witches—not quite as vicious, by any means, but its trio of Sanderson Sisters do still want to murder a bunch of kids, which is pretty hardcore as Disney goes. Largely ignored by both critics and audiences upon its initial release, the film proved to be one of those later bloomers that thrived in the nostalgic mind’s eye in the 2000s, when it became a cable Halloween season staple—the Halloween equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life, if you will. The delightful viciousness of Bette Midler’s Winifred is a prime reason for why we’re still talking about the film today, as she found a way to combine her larger-than-life screen presence with a just a tinge of authentic menace. That the film simultaneously treats its witches as both antagonists and fish-out-of-water viewpoint characters serves to make them a loveable troupe of villains—how can you really hate these ladies after seeing them mistake an uncredited Garry Marshall for their demonic master? Thanks to the still-growing fervor for ’90s nostalgia, Hocus Pocus arguably feels more popular and relevant today than it ever has before. —Jim Vorel
9. The Host
Year: 2006
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Stars: Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doona, Go Ah-sung, Oh Dal-su
Rating: R
Before he was breaking out internationally with a tight action film like Snowpiercer, and eventually winning a handful of Oscars for Parasite, this South Korean monster movie was Bong Joon-ho’s big work and calling card. Astoundingly successful at the box office in his home country, it straddles several genre lines between sci-fi, family drama and horror, but there’s plenty of scary stuff with the monster menacing little kids in particular. Props to the designers on one of the more unique movie monsters of the last few decades—the mutated creature in this film looks sort of like a giant tadpole with teeth and legs, which is way more awesome in practice than it sounds. The real heart of the film is a superb performance by Song Kang-ho (also in Snowpiercer and Parasite) as a seemingly slow-witted father trying to hold his family together during the disaster. That’s a pretty common role to be playing in a horror film, but the performances and family dynamic in general truly are the key factor that help elevate The Host far above most of its ilk. —Jim Vorel
10. Hocus Pocus 2
Year: 2022
Director: Anne Fletcher
Stars: Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Sam Richardson, Doug Jones, Whitney Peak, Belissa Escobedo
Rating: PG
The good news is if you liked Hocus Pocus, you will definitely like Hocus Pocus 2…because it’s basically the exact same movie except with cell phones, better special effects and a cameo from Hannah Waddingham. Imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery. The bad news is…it’s the exact same movie. Hocus Pocus 2 gets a jolt of energy when the Sanderson sisters finally arrive about a half-hour into the film. Midler, Parker and Najimy are clearly having so much fun it’s hard to not go along with their hijinks a little bit. All the beats of the first movie are there, including a big Halloween party where the sisters perform. “I bet you’re looking for the stage,” one resident asks. “Always,” replies Winifred. Parker is hilarious as the daft younger sister. “I delighted in luring,” she laments. “‘Twas my only job.” (And suffice to say by default, this is a much better sequel than Parker’s And Just Like That…) —Amy Amatangelo
11. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Year: 1971
Director: Robert Stevenson
Stars: Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson, John Ericson, Ian Weighill, Cindy O’Callaghan, Roy Snart
Rating: G
The easiest way to sum up Bedknobs and Broomsticks is basically to say it’s Mary Poppins, except on half the budget and double the LSD. What the folks at Disney were thinking when they conceived of a tale that involved witchcraft, hijinks and the Nazis invading England it’s impossible to say, but Angela Lansbury makes for a fine, matronly witch in training. Like Mary Poppins, the film can boast an animated interlude involving an island of anthropomorphized animals, their designs all suspiciously similar to Disney’s own Robin Hood, which would be released two years later in 1973. And did we mention this is all in service of finding a spell that Angela Lansbury can use to repel the Nazi invaders? Truly, the ’70s were a bizarre time for Disney. —Jim Vorel
12. Maleficent
Year: 2014
Director: Robert Stromberg
Stars: Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple, Lesley Manville
Rating: PG
What little curiosity value Maleficent provides arrives mostly in the extravagant visual design. It’s not a patch on the landmark work in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty—still one of the most striking animated films ever made—but something to behold nevertheless. Consider it both a strength and a weakness that Stromberg clearly put so much effort into the film’s visual design (largely, it seems, at the expense of story), and his top-notch collaborators include makeup whiz Rick Baker (who designed Angelina Jolie’s witchy nose, horns and severe cheekbones), costume designer Anna B. Sheppard and production designers Gary Freeman and Dylan Cole. Their efforts vividly bring the fairy tale settings to life, updating one of Disney’s original witchy antagonists for the modern age. —Geoff Berkshire
13. Censor
Year: 2021
Director: Prano Bailey-Bond
Stars: Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian Schiller, Michael Smiley
Rating: NR
If Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and Alexandre Aja’s High Tension had a kid and raised it on Vinegar Syndrome releases, that kid would grow up to be Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor. A demonstration of refined craftsmanship and a gleeful embrace of horror’s grimiest mores all at the same time, Censor is the ultimate “have cake, eat it too” film, being both exceptionally well-made and stuffed to the gunwales with everything that makes horror worth watching: Creeping dread, paranoia, gross-out violence and inspired fits of madness, with a side of smirking defiance for the conservative pitchfork mobs that have tried to pin all the world’s ills on the genre since always. Bailey-Bond’s film is in conversation with history, the era of Margaret Thatcher and cultural garment-rending over the proliferation of video nasties among impressionable Brits. Enid (Niamh Algar), a film censor, fills her days watching graphically staged dramatizations of brutality, then cutting down their countless offenses to an acceptable size. One such picture too closely resembles a horrible incident from her childhood, one resulting in the disappearance of her sister—or more specifically, it’s the lead actress in the picture who too closely resembles her sister. The encounter sets Enid on a quest to recover her long-lost sibling, which takes her on a descent into insanity…plus a few choice gore shots. But as much as Censor connects with Britain’s past, it connects with horror’s past, too, in keeping with the genre’s tradition of self-awareness and self-critique. When social forces come together to blame horror for the existence of darkness, it’s because those forces can’t stand their own self-reflections. They need an easy way out, and moral panic is easy. Horror knows who the real villains are, and so does Bailey-Bond. Don’t take that as a warning sign, though: Censor isn’t stuffy or preachy, not at all. It’s the reason we go see horror movies in the first place.—Andy Crump
14. Frankenweenie
Year: 2012
Director: Tim Burton
Stars: Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau, Charlie Tahan, Atticus Shaffer, Winona Ryder
Rating: PG
When Victor Frankenstein’s beloved bull terrier, Sparky, is hit by a car and killed, his mission is clear: Bring Sparky back to life! Now Sparky’s good as new—except that he leaks water and anything he eats. And when the poodle he loves next door, Persephone, sniffs his new neck bolts, she gets an electric shock that adds Bride of Frankenstein-like streaks of white to her beehive hairdo. Sparky might be a re-animated dog made out of clay, but he’s also one of the most expressive cinema dogs of all time, one whose pain we feel when his resurrection is discovered and he runs away from Victor’s freaked-out parents. He finds himself in the pet cemetery, where he lies down mournfully on his own grave—after turning around in a circle several times like any dog. He heroically saves the day when other resurrected pets run amok, and we cheer when the formerly terrified townspeople all pitch in to bring Sparky back to life once more. —Sharon Knolle
15. The Empty Man
Year: 2020
Director: David Prior
Stars: James Badge Dale, Owen Teague, Stephen Root, Marin Ireland
Rating: R
From the start, everything about The Empty Man is misleading. Its title sounds like the absolutely terrible Bloody Mary-esque The Bye Bye Man or the botched adaptation of Slender Man, where spooky too-long shadow dudes creep up on some doltish teens. Those bad high school urban legend films (that this trailer is cut oh-so-specifically to evoke) don’t usually stray from the 90-minute mark. Even Candyman, maybe the best and most ambitious example of this type of film, is barely 100 minutes. The Empty Man’s 137-minute runtime clearly has more to do than kill off a couple of kids for failing to be superstitious enough. Rather than falling into that traditional type of stock schlock, The Empty Man follows a troubled ex-cop investigating the root causes of an incident that could’ve been the entire plot of one of those movies. “We knew we weren’t making that movie and nobody wanted to make that movie,” writer/director/editor David Prior told Thrillist. “But it turns out, the people who inherited the movie wanted that kind of movie.” It makes sense that the ever-expanding, ever-spiraling photos-and-folders paranoid conspiracy of The Empty Man can feel a bit like getting sucked into the kind of heady, hyper-specific hell that festers in the underbellies of Zodiac, Se7en or Mindhunter. That ‘70s thriller structure, dedicated to the paper trail, merges in The Empty Man with a downright otherworldly horror (used here in the literal sense, as opposed to terror) aesthetic that’s sheer scope makes a mockery of the movie’s shoe-leather detective work. But even The Empty Man’s start is a delightful little horror film all its own, a mythological amuse-bouche set on snowy Bhutan peaks where set design and some solidly naturalistic acting sell the scares. Great! Solid. Sold. And then the movie keeps going, as if to literally push past your expectations. Its narrative evolves into something increasingly strange and engaging. It’s like A Cure for Wellness, another cult favorite, in its dedication to piling on an investigator’s hallucinogenic obsession and repulsion as he finds himself suddenly so deep that climbing back out—or, perhaps, out for the first time—proves impossible. Prior’s grasp of tone and savvy subversion of different modern monster tropes, alongside a staggering and committed James Badge Dale performance, position the film as one that understands and appreciates studio horror movies, but has much bigger things on its mind. In short, it rules.—Jacob Oller
16. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Year: 1949
Director: James Algar, Clyde Geronimi, Jack Kinney
Stars: Eric Blore, J. Pat O’Malley, Colin Campbell, John McLeish, Campbell Grant, Claude Allister, Leslie Denison, Edmond Stevens
Rating: G
Disney’s adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is one half of a great film. After Bambi came out in 1942, Disney didn’t release a full-length animated film for almost eight years. Throughout the ‘40s they released a series of pictures that packaged together various shorter films, both animated and live-action, under names like Make Mine Music and Fun and Fancy Free. (This is also the era that brought us Song of the South, which is partially animated, partially live action, and almost entirely indefensible.) The last of these package films was called The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and combined two half-hour short features based on The Wind in the Willows and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. After that initial theatrical run Disney split the two featurettes, with Sleepy Hollow becoming a genuine Disney classic and Halloween staple, and The Wind in the Willows best being known for inspiring the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride attraction at Disney parks and the evil weasels from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Despite the budgetary and staffing issues that persisted at Disney during and immediately after the war, it’s a beautiful example of classic Disney animation from Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” with a crazed lead character perfectly suited for cartoons. Neither a short nor a full-length film, the half-hour Wind in the Willows and its erstwhile companion helped prepare theaters and audiences for Disney’s triumphant feature-length return Cinderella just four months later. —Garrett Martin
17. Barbarian
Year: 2022
Director: Zach Cregger
Stars: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long
Rating: R
The deceptively simple premise of Barbarian, the horror debut from writer/director Zach Cregger, is enough to induce genuine goosebumps. However, Cregger takes a creepy idea and concocts a breakneck tale of unyielding terror, giving audiences whiplash with each unpredictable revelation. When Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at her Detroit Airbnb on a forcefully stormy night, she finds that there’s no key in the encrypted lockbox to let herself in. After calling the host proves fruitless, she suddenly sees a light turn on through a front window. Tess frantically rings the doorbell, and the recently roused Keith (Bill Skarsgård) awkwardly answers the door. Realizing they accidentally double-booked the same rental for the next few days, Keith immediately insists that Tess get out of the rain and take the bedroom for the night (of course, he’s totally content with taking the couch). Surprisingly, she agrees. Though few viewers would likely make the same decision as the film’s protagonist, Barbarian wastes no time creating a thick sense of dread that clings until the credits roll. To divulge any further details of the film’s plot would thwart the winding, increasingly shocking narrative crafted by Cregger. With each terrifying reveal feeling fresher and freakier than the last, it’s encouraged to go into Barbarian with as little background and context as possible. Even citing Cregger’s horror references would serve to unnecessarily hint at jarring shifts in the film’s story, though comparisons to the work of fellow horror filmmakers James Wan, Tobe Hooper and George Romero are particularly apt. Barbarian offers up plenty of food for thought in its rancid banquet from hell. It’s got a biting socially-conscious undercurrent that addresses the bleak reality of existing as a woman in the U.S.—both past and present, whether residing in manicured suburbs or “shady” inner-city neighborhoods—even successfully weaving in a #MeToo subplot that doesn’t feel one-note or cursory. Even more impressive, Cregger incorporates this throughline with a heavy dose of humor, no doubt aided by his tenure as a member of IFC sketch comedy show The Whitest Kids U’ Know. Barbarian offers a fascinating take on the oft-unspoken claim men have long believed they have over women’s bodies. It does an excellent job at juxtaposing banal excuses for gendered violence with ghoulish, heinous ploys to strip women of their bodily autonomy (and their very humanity), exposing the malevolent nature of this deeply ingrained cultural misogyny. With the wounds still raw from the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade, Barbarian’s fixation on the omnipresent threat of rape in our society hits as hard as it (hopefully) ever could. Never relishing in the very brutality that it denounces, the film has its heart in the right place. It refuses to depict sexual violation on screen, cleverly illustrating the pervasiveness of this miserable reality without exploiting it for shallow shock value. Yet, even with the best of intentions, Barbarian will mercilessly run you through the wringer, letting these fucked-up facets of America absolutely ravage the screen—and your sanity—for 102 remarkably tense minutes.—Natalia Keogan
18. The Black Cauldron
Year: 1985
Director: Ted Berman, Richard Rich
Stars: Grant Bardsley, Susan Sheridan, Freddie Jones, Nigel Hawthorne, Arthur Malet, John Byner, Phil Fondacaro, John Hurt
Rating: PG
Perhaps Disney’s most notorious failure, The Black Cauldron is better than its reputation. It’s not necessarily good, though. This adaptation of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series is simultaneously too ambitious and not ambitious enough, trying to squeeze two books into 80 minutes by simply skipping over large parts of the story. Whole chunks of narrative are clearly missing, making this one of those bad movies that maybe would’ve been better if there was more of it. Part of the problem is that Disney itself didn’t believe in it—Jeffrey Katzenberg, who joined the company under Michael Eisner and Frank Wells in 1984, when the film was basically done, infamously tried to edit it like a traditional film, something that really doesn’t work in animation. Despite its flaws, The Black Cauldron features some of Disney’s creepiest and most unforgettable images, from the design of the villain the Horned King, to the climactic scene when he raises an army of the undead with the titular Cauldron. It was such a failure at the box office that it took 13 years for it to eventually get released on VHS, and still has never been released on Blu-ray. —Garrett Martin
19. Werewolf by Night
Year: 2022
Director: Michael Giacchino
Stars: Gael Garcia Bernal, Laura Donnelly, Harriet Sansom Harris
Rating: PG-13
The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s friendly nod in the vague direction of the golden age of Universal Monsters horror cinema, Werewolf by Night is a brisk Disney+ MCU special with obvious thematic tie-ins to the Halloween season. A group of mysterious big game “monster hunters” are assembled at a creepy mansion in order to compete for the ultimate prize: The “Bloodstone,” a powerful relic that gives one mastery over monsters and beasts. Among them is Jack Russell (Gael Garcia Bernal), who is carrying not one but multiple secrets regarding his own monster identity and his connection to that evening’s monster quarry. What follows is an old-fashioned, pulpy adventure with rather more blood than you’re likely to find in many other pieces of Disney+ original programming. —Jim Vorel
20. Into the Woods
Year: 2014
Director: Rob Marshall
Stars: Anna Kendrick, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Chris Pine, Johnny Depp
Rating: PG
Film adaptations of beloved musicals are almost always polarizing; to succeed, the movie must simultaneously capture the magic of the stage while bringing something visually new to the proceedings. Movie stars take the parts of talented stage actors, sometimes to the detriment of the music. But the fantastical nature of Disney’s Into the Woods leads to a visual spectacle, and the cast—including James Corden, Emily Blunt, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Anna Kendrick—does a fine job with the songs. Streep is especially enjoyable as the story’s vindictive witch. The real joy here is seeing a Disney fairytale that satirizes Disney fairytales, but with half an eye on its tween-set base, it’s never quite as wickedly dark as Stephen Sondheim’s original. Still, it’s a refreshing twist to see the princesses taking control of their own destinies, and the humor of princes just a little too in love with their own charm won’t be lost on even the youngest audiences. —Josh Jackson
21. Muppets Haunted Mansion
Year: 2021
Director: Kirk Thatcher
Stars: Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, Eric Jacobson, Matt Vogel, Peter Linz
Rating: PG
The Muppets have a long and glorious history of taking nothing seriously. Muppets Haunted Mansion is a first, though: this time they’re not mocking TV genres, pop culture cliches or a beloved piece of literature, but a classic Disney theme park attraction. It’s been a long time coming; the Muppets made their Disney parks debut over 30 years ago, and have been outright owned by the Mouse since 2004. Fans of Jim Henson’s creations and Walt Disney’s theme parks can rest easy—this one-off special is a loving homage to both Kermit’s crew and Disney’s grim grinning ghosts. Muppets Haunted Mansion feels like a special episode of the classic Muppet Show. It’s a cameo-filled goof that roughly follows the structure of the ride, but with a story that sees Gonzo and Pepe the King Prawn visiting an infamous haunted house on the 100th anniversary of a legendary stage magician’s disappearance within. (Shades of Abracadabar, the swanky magic-themed bar at Disney World with a similar backstory.) Gonzo hopes to find out what happened to the magician, while Pepe just hopes to meet some celebrities at what he assumes is a high-end Hollywood party. Along the way they’re haunted by the house’s large lineup of ghosts, characters from the ride played by classic Muppets and the occasional guest celebrity. A valuable lesson about confronting your fears is learned, and the fourth wall isn’t just broken but jumped through again and again like the Kool Aid Man blasting through walls on a bender. Most importantly, laughs are had by all, with the combination of intentionally cornball Vaudeville schtick and genuine irreverence that the Muppets have long been known for. —Garrett Martin
22. Halloweentown
Year: 1998
Directors: Duwayne Dunham
Stars: Debbie Reynolds, Judith Hoag, Kimberly J. Brown, Joey Zimmerman, Emily Roeske
Rating: NR
At the end of the ’90s, still a few years before Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone adaptation would hit theaters (but well into the Harry Potter craze that was casting spells upon children all over the world), Disney tried their luck at the witches and wizards game. But this was no wide release, where children would drag their parents to the theaters and beg for snacks and soda. This was Halloweentown, one of three DCOMs (Disney Channel Original Movies) to be released on the network in 1998. There’s absolutely no competing with J.K. Rolling when it comes to the magic genre in the late ’90s and early 2000s, but Disney’s low-budget stab at the idea is actually positively delightful. If you grew up watching Disney Channel in the 2000s and 2010s, you eagerly awaited October every year so you could catch back up with teenage witch Marnie Piper and her dysfunctional, at times displaced, family. The first movie in the trilogy (we don’t speak of the so-called fourth movie in the series, Return to Halloweentown—a true DCOM tragedy), Halloweentown introduces us to Marnie, her mom and siblings and her grandmother, adorably portrayed by the dearly departed Debbie Reynolds. As a child, I wanted nothing more than to hop on that flying bus to Halloweentown and go broom-shopping with my grandma. Halloweentown is absolutely a Halloween classic, one that does a fine job teaching children about acceptance and inclusion, that can easily still be enjoyed today. —Ellen Johnson
23. Goosebumps
Year: 2023
Director: Rob Letterman
Rating: TV-PG
For those who aren’t regularly touring the Scholastic Book Fair, it’s easy to forget that the Goosebumps novels are a veritable industrial complex with over 400 million copies sold, which apparently makes it the second highest-selling book franchise of all time. As a popular gateway for younger audiences into a world of supernatural scares, these stories have unsurprisingly spawned plenty of adaptations, including the ’95 television series and a pair of recent films. The latest in this tradition is a new show from Rob Letterman (who previously directed the metatextual 2015 flick) that follows a group of high schoolers tormented by strange objects from a haunted house. While Goosebumps (2023) eventually builds towards interesting mysteries, the initial five episodes available for review feel awkwardly stuck between different modes of horror. It has shades of the anthology-styled storytelling of the previous TV show, the messy relationship dynamics of teen dramas, and supernatural thrills, but it’s unable to fully deliver on any of these elements, making for a decently entertaining but far from exceptional entry in this October’s festivities. —Elijah Gonzalez
24. Cobweb
Year: 2023
Director: Samuel Bodin
Stars: Lizzy Caplan, Antony Starr, Cleopatra Coleman, Woody Norman
Rating: R
Samuel Bodin’s upstart Cobweb arrived seemingly out of nowhere in the summer of 2023, and was sadly given very shoddy marketing that doomed it to a quick and uneventful theatrical release before it settled into the morass of VOD availability. That’s a shame, as Cobweb is a very skillfully directed horror yarn from the young filmmaker, unraveling a tangle of familiar tropes in a manner that is able to refresh almost all of them. The film has been expertly framed as a perspective we are seeing entirely from child height, featuring a grimy layer of nightmare unreality through which young Peter (Woody Norman) begins experiencing nightly disturbances from within the walls of his bedroom. It all has the feeling of dark fantasy or fairytale rather than the cold light of our own reality, helped along by scenery-chewing sinister performances from Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr as Peter’s not-at-all-suspicious parents. There are moments here still helplessly bound by cliche like a fly caught in a spider’s web, but Cobweb’s genuinely unnerving visuals, oppressive atmosphere, Halloween-rich setting and gonzo third act lift it above so many other superficially similar stories. —Jim Vorel
25. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Year: 2022
Director: Sam Raimi
Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Wong, Xochitl Gomez, Rachel McAdams
Rating: PG-13
Marvel still has a lot to figure out with how it handles its women, but it’s getting the multiverse idea under its feet. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness starts its fast-paced but forgettable first act with dialogue that could be improved by a middle schooler before giving way to an emotional Elizabeth Olsen performance that holds down some eye-roll-inducing lines about motherhood, ridiculous cameos as plot conduits, and horror cinematography, sound and direction bouncing captivatingly between the grotesque and comical. Despite boring opening salvos that reminded me why so many people have grown hateful of the Marvel movies, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness eventually becomes very fun to watch. It’s weird that so many Sam Raimi fans were hoping for a return to his horror auteur form considering (1) we’ve seen a bunch of skilled indie filmmakers squish their vision into the Marvel frame for a big paycheck and (2) Raimi is known to the wider film-watching public as the guy that made the original Spider-Man trilogy. It’s weirder still that the horror fans were kinda right to be hopeful: The second and third acts are full of horror imagery, jump scares and a Bruce Campbell cameo (and fellow Raimi collaborator Danny Elfman does the score). One of my favorite things about the first Doctor Strange was that the introduction of magic into the MCU meant exciting psychedelic visuals. Multiverse of Madness alternates between being comparatively rudimentary and going past the original into the macabre. Unfortunately, as with all Marvel movies, the director must square their vision with the circle of Kevin Feige’s machine. There are a lot of cool moments, but a lot of the flaws are derived from needing to set up a new superhero and connect to two or three or 20 movies. Opening with heavy CG that the actors aren’t interacting with in a way that’s legible as any kind of tangible space makes it hard to accept the movie. It’s less interesting. Too much time and money was spent on designing those FX monsters for me to come away thinking about how they could have gotten more out of the opening scenes by instead setting them in a series of dark rooms. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will surely be a commercial success, but it could have been more artistically satisfying if it wasn’t weighed down by the need to remind people of its outward connections. It stands better on its own than No Way Home but it’s still relying on early ‘00s Fox movies and internet fan castings for theatrical audience pops. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is everything you could reasonably expect from a Sam Raimi-Kevin Feige collaboration, but not much more.—Kevin Fox, Jr.