It’s the most wonderful time of the year if you’re a horror junkie! Some people love to dress up for Halloween, some people love to party, and some people (like me) love to grab a bottomless bucket of popcorn and scare themselves silly! In celebration of one of our favorite months of the year, we rounded up some of our personal favorite horror movies, guaranteed to make you squirm, sweat, and dig your nails into your armchair!
These movies have been personally selected for you based on your zodiac sign, chosen based on what you might like, but also what you’re most likely to not like and scared the most by, so grab some friends, turn off the lights, turn up the volume and enjoy a night full of scares.
For the curious, I’m using the fabulous Reel Scary website to help map out just how scary these movies are. Users rate movies based on Gore, Disturbing Content, and Suspense, and will let you know if you’re in for a tame evening or one full of nightmares!
Be sure to check out your Sun sign and your Moon sign’s horror movie recommendations (get your free birth chart right here to find out your Moon sign) if you want to add a little extra spook to your Halloween movie marathon.
Aries – Buried
Reel Scary Rating: 6.2
How are you with confined spaces, Aries? While on a contract in Iraq, kidnapped American truck driver Paul awakens to find himself buried in a coffin underground with nothing but a lighter, a cell phone, and his own increasing anxiety. With a dwindling oxygen supply and a dying battery, he must fight panic and delirium as he awaits a rescue that might not arrive in time.
Not for the claustrophobic or the faint of heart, this is as tense a 90 minutes as you’ll find anywhere on this list. For the Aries that loves to take charge, dive headfirst into challenges, and hates any feeling of being trapped, this one’s right up your alley.
…Did I mention the whole movie is filmed from inside the coffin?
Taurus – Climax
Reel Scary Rating: N/R
As a Taurus, you love to relax and are opposed to anything frantic, frenetic and anything posing a threat to that relaxation. Mind and mood-altering drugs are your worst enemy. Luckily we have filmmakers out there to play into that exact fear. Climax has a very simple and effective premise: A group of dancers gather to practice at an empty school for a night. They all celebrate with sangria – sangria that has been laced with LSD.
With mind-bending dance choreography, a brooding, thumping score from one half of Daft Punk, and realistic, long-take shots of the dancers’ dark and explosive nightmares, Climax is a full assault on the senses that should leave even the most battle-tested Taurus reeling.
There are not enough ratings on Reel Scary at this time, but my personal opinion is a 7 – what it lacks in gore it more than makes up for in disturbing content.
Gemini – High Tension
Reel Scary Rating: 9.0
Geminis are playful and communicative, they’re the social butterflies of the astrological world. The greatest fear for a Gemini is to be isolated, confined and lonely. The feeling of losing your mind would be truly terrifying – and that’s where High Tension comes in.
Not just the name of the movie, but named for the feeling it instills in its viewers, High Tension is the story of Marie and Alex, who go together to visit Alex’s parents’ in the French countryside. Things change quickly when the house is broken into by a psychotic truck driver, who brutally murders Alex’s family. He kidnaps Alex, and Marie hides in the back to try and free her – but the bloodshed is far from over.
Cancer – Frailty
Reel Scary Rating: 8.0
The ultimate nightmare for anyone who loves their family and would do anything to protect them. Frailty is a devilishly creepy tale of two brothers, one of which idolizes their Father, and one that is revolted by his actions but can’t bring himself to stop the terror.
Fenton walks into a police station on a rainy night and says he has information about a notorious serial killer that hasn’t been caught for over two decades. He tells the Sheriff that the killer was his brother, Adam. Through flashbacks, Fenton recalls the story of how his father believed he was instructed by God to kill demons in his name – demons masked as regular humans, and how his brother Adam began to believe his father and claimed he shared his prophetic visions.
For a Cancer that’s ever looked up to somebody in their family with reverence, this one might rattle you a bit more, but it’s a very suspenseful and tense movie, nonetheless, and worth the trip. Could you turn your back on your family?
Leo – It Follows
Reel Scary Rating: 6.2
Leos love to be noticed. They’re vivacious, theatrical and gain their energy from being noticed by others. Is there anything that would scare a Leo more than being noticed every waking moment, followed, until you die? It Follows has a very simple and terrifying premise that’s sure to make any Leos’s heart skip a beat whenever anyone walks towards them.
After Jay sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time, she learns she is the recipient of a fatal curse that is passed via sexual intercourse. Death will creep towards Jay at a slow, methodical pace, disguised as a friend or stranger. It will not stop. It will follow her until she finds a way to rid herself of the curse. Any fans of slow, brooding terror like Halloween will get a thrill out of It Follows.
Virgo – Blue Velvet
Reel Scary Rating: N/A
You, the Virgo, live a happy life. You are kind, gentle, practical and a bit of a perfectionist. Your house is always clean, your shirts neatly pressed, your hair always flawless. You live in a lovely house with a white picket fence, a beautiful spouse, two wonderful kids, and a dog. Your life is perfect – But with every perfect life such as this, there is a terrifying, seedy underbelly that can rear its head if you’re not careful.
Happy-go-lucky college student Jeffrey Beaumont has returned home to help his father after a stroke. When passing through a field he finds a severed ear and teams up with his beautiful neighbor as amateur sleuths. They’re quickly thrust into a dark, twisted nightmare unlike anything they could have imagined, involving kidnapping, murder, a lonely lounge singer, and a depraved psychopath that carries around an oxygen canister for when he gets in the mood.
This movie is disturbing. But for the squeaky-clean Virgo, you might just enjoy seeing how the dark side operates. You have been warned.
Libra – Mandy
Reel Scary Rating: 5.4
Librans are obsessed with visuals and the look of things and are very protective of their relationships. They will definitely latch onto this neon-soaked, phantasmagoric tale of a man whose life is destroyed at the hands of a blood-thirsty cult in this beautifully lurid nightmare.
Nicolas Cage (a Capricorn) is completely unhinged as Red, who lives with his wife, Mandy, in the 1980’s Pacific Northwest. Their existence is savagely destroyed by a sadistic cult leader, which thrusts Red into a journey full of blood-soaked vengeance and laced with deadly fire. The film is bursting with color and set to an ominous score, which should please any Libra who will value the aesthetics of a scary movie just as much as the content itself.
Scorpio – Session 9
Reel Scary Rating: 6.2
Scorpios are clever, methodical and love to plan, and they like their movies just the same way. The themes of Session 9 should no doubt win over the Scorpio seeking a clever psychological thriller with the punch of a horror film. Session 9 is a seriously creepy movie set in a seriously creepy location.
An asbestos abatement crew wins a bid to remove the material from an abandoned insane asylum. What should be a straightforward and simple job is complicated by the personal histories of the crew. When one of the crew members stumbles upon the old tapes of a former patient with multiple personalities, things begin to devolve, and crew members begin to see things that may or may not be real. This one will make your skin crawl.
Sagittarius – Green Room
Reel Scary Rating: 9.0
Is there anything more frightening for a Sagittarius than being held against their will? Knowing that whoever is on the other side of that door will kill you when they get you should be enough to send the freedom-loving Sag into a full-blown panic attack. Punk band The Ain’t Rights want to make it big, and that means taking every gig they can possibly book. When they book a show at a Neo-Nazi bar in rural Oregon, things take a turn.
After witnessing a murder at the hands of a group of skinheads, the band locks themselves in a room in the back of the bar, desperate to survive, but the sadistic leader of the Neo-Nazis – played by Jean-Luc Picard himself, Patrick Stewart (a Cancer) – has a different plan, one that involves eliminating all the evidence. Extremely suspenseful and shockingly violent, this one is only for the Sags that can stomach it.
Capricorn – [REC]
Reel Scary Rating: 8.3
Capricorns love order, structure, and routine. Being self-sufficient is a necessity for the Caps, as they often feel like they can only depend on themselves and have to take matters into their own hands. The ultimate fear to bestow upon a Capricorn then would be to live in complete chaos and completely lose control.
[Rec] is the shortest movie on this list, clocking in at only 78 minutes, but trust me when I say that this movie starts in with the action right away and does not let up. Angela, a late-night TV host, and her cameraman are shooting a piece on firefighters when they are permitted to accompany them to a call at an apartment complex. Once inside, they discover they’re not fighting a fire, but something completely different, and the police have sealed off the building from the outside to keep whatever is in there contained – Including Angela.
Aquarius – Joy Ride
Reel Scary Rating: 4.6
Ah, the Aquarius – free-spirited, rebellious at heart, and eccentric. As an Aquarius, you’ve definitely played an innocent practical joke or two in your time. Maybe the results have been mixed, but your carefree attitude has probably gotten you out of a situation or two. What if you weren’t so lucky?
Lewis is on Summer break and is off to pick up his beautiful girlfriend across the country. He buys a cheap used car, sets off, and it’s just him and the road. Along the way, he picks up his Brother and they decide to have a bit of fun with the CB radio installed in the car. They convince a trucker that they’re a cute girl and prank him into meeting the “girl” at a hotel for fun. Things turn violent and the brothers find themselves being tormented cross-country by the mysterious trucker who decides to play some pranks of his own.
Pisces – Hereditary
Reel Scary Rating: 5.6
The newest film on the list, barely a year old, has already joined the upper ranks of horror classics thanks to its relatable theme of family, shocking imagery, and genuine scares. For the empathetic Pisces, who possesses the uncanny ability to understand and absorb the emotions around them, this one should hit particularly close to the place they feel the safest – home.
As the title implies, Hereditary is about what we leave behind to those when we pass. For the Graham family, when the matriarch of the family passes away, her daughter and grandchildren begin to unravel cryptic and terrifying secrets about their ancestry. Are they unlucky, or is there something more sinister afoot? We can outrun any problem in this life, except for what we’ve inherited. Sleep well, Pisces.
Conclusion…
Different things are scary to different people – some people are scared by monsters and demons, and some, like yours truly, are scared by itty-bitty spiders. That’s why the Horror genre is so successful, and getting scared is so much fun. To truly make someone scared, you can do it in any number of ways. No matter what your tastes, and no matter what you’re afraid of – there’s a horror movie out there designed to scare you silly.
Too scary? Not scary enough? Tell us what we missed!