It’s that time of year again, when the Jack-O-Lanterns glow and so do TVs with the flickering fun of horror movies. With that in mind, ComingSoon.net is debuting it’s new regular feature IF YOU LIKE THIS… and this inaugural edition focuses on Halloween terrors! Check out our selections in the gallery below!
So what is IF YOU LIKE THIS… anyway? It gives us a chance to provide movie lovers sick of the same old perennial favorites by comparing popular or classic films with movies you may not have seen or even heard of. It’s a chance to do a deep dive into obscure cinema and maybe discover a new favorite based on your love of an old one! Think of it as a wine pairing but with movies, and a break from the same-old-same-old.
In this Halloween edition we bring out the big guns like Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers and pair them up with some frightful recommendations that, in many cases, have genuinely cool connections with these fan favs.
Which pairing from our IF YOU LIKE THIS… Halloween Edition will you check out? Let us know in the comments below!
If You Like This... Halloween Edition
-
IF YOU LIKE… The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick's take on the Stephen King novel is a brilliant examination of familial desolation...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… Burnt Offerings (1976)
... but Dan Curtis' Burnt Offerings gave us a similar story of a family playing caretaker to a spooky house a year before King's novel was even published.
-
IF YOU LIKE… Night of the Living Dead (1968)
To many George A. Romero's seminal zombie film set the tone for all that followed...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… The Plague of the Zombies (1966)
...but the zombie imagery in Hammer Studios' English plague flick created a template for their look and behavior.
-
IF YOU LIKE… Friday the 13th Series (1980-2009)
While the Friday the 13th films may have cemented the popularity of the slasher film in America...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… A Bay of Blood (1971)
...it was Italy's Mario Bava who created the first modern "body count" movie set against the backdrop of the woods with A Bay of Blood, a.k.a. Twitch of the Death Nerve. Friday the 13th Part 2 famously stole at least two sequences wholesale from Bava's picture.
-
IF YOU LIKE… The Conjuring (2013)
While Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga may have turned Ed and Lorraine warren into iconic supernatural warriors in the Conjuring franchise, they were not the first to play the real-life paranormal investigators. That honor goes to...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… The Haunted (1991)
...Diane Baker (The Silence of the Lambs) and Stephen Markle (Star Trek: The Next Generation) as supporting characters in the Fox TV movie The Haunted. You can read a more detailed examination of this fascinating "lost Conjuring movie" by clicking here!
-
IF YOU LIKE… Saw Series (2004-2017)
The character of Jigsaw in the Saw films has a knack for coming up with elaborate Rube Goldberg-style traps to kill and maim his victims...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
...but Vincent Price was pulling this same stuff decades before in the two Dr. Phibes movies, including a scene in the first movie where a doctor has to surgically remove a key from his son's body to unlatch him before acid rains down on top of him!
-
IF YOU LIKE… Psycho (1960)
When Psycho came out in September of 1960, it shocked audiences by taking the big marquee name (Janet Leigh) and murdering her 30 minutes into the picture, after positing her as the seeming main character. Coincidentally...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… The City of the Dead (1960)
...another picture from the UK titled The City of the Dead (Horror Hotel in the U.S.) that came out the same month as Psycho pulled the same thing! It featured another blonde beauty (Venetia Stevenson) driving to a creepy hotel where she meets a brutal end, although this time its at the hand of a coven of witches!
-
IF YOU LIKE… The Babadook (2014)
When director Jennifer Kent was creating the now-iconic title character for her film debut she took a lot of inspiration from early silent German Expressionist films, especially...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
...Robert Wiene's 1920 classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, featuring the great Conrad Veidt as a creepy somnambulist who commits murders at the command of the evil title doctor.
-
IF YOU LIKE… Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
Francis Ford Coppola's version of the classic Bram Stoker tale had a cool look and inventive costumes, but in terms of the storytelling it actually borrowed a number of elements from...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… Bram Stoker's Dracula (1973)
... another television film from producer/director Dan Curtis, also titled Bram Stoker's Dracula! Specifically, Coppola lifted the idea of the historical Vlad the Impaler and Dracula being one and the same, and Mina being a reincarnation of Vlad's dead wife.
-
IF YOU LIKE… An American Werewolf in London (1981)
John Landis' 1981 comedic horror masterpiece set a new bar for horror make-up. However, in the same year two other important werewolf movies also appeared, namely Joe Dante's The Howling and...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… Wolfen (1981)
...the criminally underseen Wolfen. Directed by Michael Wadleigh of Woodstock fame and very loosely based on the novel by Whitley Strieber, it features Albert Finney as a burnt-out cop following the trail of some grisly murders in New York City that may or may not have been committed by a pack of Native American werewolves.
-
IF YOU LIKE… A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
While you may think that Freddy Krueger has a monopoly on murdering innocent people in their dreams, that's not exactly true. In fact, two years prior to the first Nightmare on Elm Street...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… The Slayer (1982)
...the semi-arthouse-y indie horror flick The Slayer depicted a small group of people stuck on an island, where a creature from one of the women's dreams manifests in reality and begins killing them off one-by-one.
-
IF YOU LIKE… Halloween Series (1978-2018)
Many horror fans and even critics like to posit that John Carpenter's original Halloween created many of the slasher film cliches, but in actuality...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… The Spiral Staircase (1946)
...all of those same tropes can be found in the 1946 thriller The Spiral Staircase. It centers on a town where a serial killer of women with disabilities is on the loose, and focuses on a mute woman trapped in a house where the killer lurks. POV shots, black gloves, hiding in closets... it's all here!
-
IF YOU LIKE… The Sixth Sense (1999)
Audiences were shocked to find out that director M. Night Shyamalan had pulled the rug out from under them, and through cinematic sleight of hand convinced them that Bruce Willis' character was alive when he was in fact...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… Carnival of Souls (1962)
...dead the whole time. Kinda like Candace Hilligoss in the dreamy, disturbing cult classic Carnival of Souls, which influenced not only The Sixth Sense but also the George A. Romero zombie movies!
-
IF YOU LIKE… Insidious (2010)
James Wan's take on the haunted house movie involves spirits in a ghost dimension who glom onto a young boy in order to take possession of his body. If you're a fan of Insidious and its sequels/prequels then you may also enjoy...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… Audrey Rose (1977)
...Robert Wise's Audrey Rose, which is a classy horror film about a young girl born at the same time a young girl died, and part of that girl lives on in her. Although it takes a strange left turn into courtroom drama in the third act, the finale is still quite shocking even by today's standards.
-
IF YOU LIKE… Evil Dead II (1987)
Sam Raimi's middle chapter in his Evil Dead movie trilogy is the perfect blend of humor and genuine frights. You'll find that same blend of the silly and the scary in...
-
YOU'LL LOVE… Cemetery Man (1994)
...Michele Soavi's much-overlooked Cemetery Man, which stars Rupert Everett as a cemetery caretaker who is constantly trying to hold the ever-rising dead at bay.
