When I’m going to watch a Halloween flick, these are the movies I’m most likely to be watching.

10. Garfield’s Halloween Adventure (1985)
Garfield and Opie cross the river to reach more houses and more candy-candy-candy and find themselves in a ghoulish pickle. CBS re-ran this one annually until 2000. Taking it off was unfortunate. They should put it back on. This is the first Halloween show I ever remember watching (as a 1st grade student in Angela Morrow’s library at Robbins Elementary).

9. The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrich directed this film adaption of Stephen King’s novel, starring Jack Nicholson. At one time, I hated this film—which is about a caretaker and his family being assigned to an isolated hotel for the winter—but I’ve gained a new respect for it over time. It’s actually pretty well done . . . especially for its time.

8. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)
Honestly, how can you let Halloween pass without watching this Charles Schulz classic? I mean, good grief. If you haven’t watched as Linus spends Halloween in the pumpkin patch awaiting the arrival of the Great Pumpkin (Halloween’s version of Santa Claus) while the rest of the gang are trick-or-treating, you aren’t American.

7. Scream (1996)
You laugh, but before Scream became so popular that you just couldn’t help but make fun of it (and before the dreadful sequels), it was actually a very good movie. With Wes Craven directing and an all-star cast that included Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette, this one was bound to succeed, and it did. This one raised the bar on all of those teen slasher films of the ’80s and inspired a new generation of horror flicks. “Hellooooooooo Sidney.”

6. The Exorcist (1973)
I was never much of a fan of those old horror movies, which is why I only have a couple on my list. But this one has to be on any short-list of classic Halloween films. The screen adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel, this one—about the attempted exorcism of a 12-year-old girl—is truly a classic. It came in a long line of horror flicks in the ’60s and ’70s, but carved out a spot all by itself in film lore.

5. Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
It’s almost hard to believe that Wes Craven produced this film on a budget of less than $2 million. Like The Exorcist, it holds its own in the horror genre, and Freddy Krueger is probably the single most easily recognized villain in Hollywood history.

4. Beetlejuice (1988)
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! This one—by Tim Burton—is an excellent mix of horror and comedy. Other films have tried it and failed miserably (most notably, Scream; though it was a well-done film, its mix of horror and comedy is almost disturbing). But Beetlejuice succeeded because it was comedy first and the fright part was secondary, instead of the other way around.

3. What Lies Beneath (2000)
What Lies Beneath (starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer) isn’t a horror film. But it does deal with the supernatural—and their house is haunted—and it’s one of my favorite suspense flicks; one of the few that can truly keep me on the edge of my seat.

2. Signs (2002)
What Lies Beneath might not be Halloween-ish, but it’s probably a lot more Halloween-ish than this one. But this is also one of my favorite suspense films, and it does include the extra-terrestrial, so that qualifies it as a Halloween flick, no? M. Night Shyamalan did a great job with this, and of course any movie featuring Mel Gibson is going to be a good one. I’m not typically into alien flicks. This one is an exception.

1. Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Is Tim Burton great or what? He’s a cinematic genius. This 1999 horror film, featuring Johnny Depp as Investigator Ichabod Crane, is only loosely based on Washington Irving’s classic, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But it’s very well done, and is at the top of my list of fright flicks. Heads are gonna roll!