October is the perfect month for pumpkin carving, cozy sweaters, cuddling up with a warm cup of tea — and disgustingly violent slasher movies.

With Halloween just around the corner, the best way to ring in the holiday season is to settle in on the couch with a big bowl of popcorn, a generous selection of candy and a horror flick, although with some of these choices you may want to skip the food altogether.

Kicking off the list of genius, ghoulish and downright gross Halloween movies is of course the 2013 Evil Dead remake.

The original Evil Dead (1981) is undoubtedly a campy and delightfully cheesy watch. Director Sam Raimi is a master at combining just the right amount of dark humour and excessive blood-spillage, which is what makes Evil Dead one of the best low-budget horror films out there. No one can kill off a group of college students in such a cliché and gory manner quite like Raimi — that is until Fede Alvarez remade the film 30 years later.

The 2013 version of Evil Dead is without a doubt the most disgusting movie I have ever seen. A prime example of a film that you probably shouldn’t eat during, Evil Dead is a cringeworthy combination of flying limbs, spurting blood and characters that die all too slowly for the audience’s comfort.

A cautionary tale of what happens when you mess with the dark arts, Evil Dead follows five university students who take their friend Mia (Jane Levy) to a remote cabin in the woods to help her give up her drug addiction cold turkey. As any horror movie fan knows, taking a trip to the middle of the woods with your friends, especially if you’re teenagers or university students, is a fantastic recipe for getting shanked in your sleep. But Evil Dead doesn’t just kill off its characters — it eviscerates them.

After unwittingly summoning up satanic demons that had lain dormant in the woods for decades — because reciting passages from the Book of the Dead is obviously a great party trick —  the characters are trapped in a battle against evil itself and few of them live to tell the tale. Not for the weak of stomach, Evil Dead is a thrilling and vomit-inducing watch that is sure to have you cancelling your next getaway to the family cabin.

If the concept of zombie Nazis didn’t seem awesome enough already, Dead Snow (2009) takes it to a whole new level.

A Norwegian film directed and co-written by Tommy Wirkola, Dead Snow also tells the gruesome tale of a group of young adults who plan a remote weekend getaway — except this time it isn’t the devil going bump in the night. Dead Snow gives historical flair to the drooling and staggering zombies, presenting them as pissed off former Nazis intent on snacking on whoever decides to wander into their eternal (un)resting place.

The fact that the film is written entirely in Norwegian doesn’t distract from the delightful campiness and gore — it actually adds to it. It is completely appropriate for a film based around the events that happened in a mountain village in Norway to be written in the country’s mother tongue and listening to the characters speak and scream for dear life in Norwegian gives the otherwise silly movie a touch of authenticity. Fans of carnage and dark comedy will love this historical take on the traditional zombie flick.

Keeping with the unnatural and inhuman brand of horror movie, House of the Devil (2009), directed by Ti West,  is a beautifully suspenseful and less well-recognized work that is worth checking out.

Though it deals with much of the same satanic and black magic styled material as films like Evil Dead, House of the Devil freshens up the whole religion-gone-bad vibe by setting its action in the 1970s.

The build up and retro timeframe are so well done that you don’t even realize House of the Devil is a horror film until shit suddenly gets real halfway through it. The nostalgic 70s feel does little to draw away from the fact that the movie is downright horrific.

The story of Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), a young woman struggling to pay her rent who decides to take a mysterious babysitting job in order to earn a little extra cash, House of the Devil uses Hitchcockian suspense techniques to keep its audience on the edge of their seats. Half of the fun is waiting for something to happen. Though the ending is probably one of the most unexpected and disturbing plot twists I’ve ever seen in a film, the build up to it is a slow but satisfying burn that lures the viewer into a sense of false security before bringing that comfort crashing down around them.

Speaking of mental manipulation, Funny Games (1997) is a prime contender for the creepiest Halloween movie list.

Brought to life by director Michael Haneke, Funny Games unfolds the story of two young men (Arno Friesch and Frank Giering) who take a family hostage and torture them for their own sadistic amusement. This film differs from its peers in the fact that it doesn’t rely on special effects or excessive gore to get its point across. The fear that the film inspires in its audience comes from the fact that the plot is completely plausible. The villains are real men instead of monsters or demons and this is far more terrifying than any otherworldly evil could be.

Drawing out the family’s suffering with the intent of making the audience as uncomfortable as possible, Funny Games is a deeply unsettling movie that gets in the viewer’s head as much as it does the characters’. On par only with psychological thriller Silence of the Lambs (1991) in its ability to expose the dark reality of human nature, Funny Games is a gripping and thought-provoking film that is a must-watch — if you dare.

Though it draws away from the realistic villain, Drag Me To Hell (2009) is a shocking and weirdly financially conscious watch that reminds us never to say no to scary old women who want an extension on their mortgage payments.

Following the life of loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) after her unfortunate encounter with a vengeful client (Lorna Raver), Drag Me To Hell is another fantastic Raimi-directed horror flick. Though not as unnecessarily bloody and cheesy as his previous works, his take on revenge via ancient curses walks the line between being chuckle-worthy and just plain gross. Plus let’s face it — though she might be half-blind and basically fossilized, that old lady is seriously terrifying. Raimi proves himself to be one of the modern masters of horror once again with this delightfully disgusting film.

Last on the list is the horrifying yet strangely endearing Let Me In (2010) which disproves the idea that vampires can’t be friends with humans without bleeding them dry.

Director Matt Reeves paints an adorable picture of bloodthirsty child vampire Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her tentative friendship with outcast Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee). While it has its dark moments — and oh boy are they dark — Let Me In is actually quite a touching film. Tackling the issues that face many elementary school age children such as bullying and parental separation, the movie makes the audience feel deeply for Owen and understand completely why he would want to remain friends with a 12-year-old girl who could kill him with her bare hands. Our hearts even go out to Abby, despite her taste for blood and tendency to lurk in dark tunnels.

Though Let Me In may be a vampire flick with romantic undertones, don’t mistake it for a pre-pubescent edition of Twilight. This poignant adaptation of the Swedish film Let The Right One In (2008) maintains the integrity of the original by contrasting the innocence of children with the dark power of the supernatural. After watching this movie, you’ll probably want to adopt your own kid vampire.

To take a more classic turn, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is easily one of the best horror book-to-movie adaptations around.

The Shining, much like Funny Games, examines a more realistic villain. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) shines in his role as the cabin-feverish father who takes out the stress of all work and no play on his wife and child. Shacking up in a remote hotel on a mountainside all winter in order to write what he believes will be the next great American novel, Jack fails to take into account that being confined in a small space for months on end isn’t exactly the best way to stay sane — and the fact that the ghosts that haunt the place are former caretakers of the hotel who axe murdered their families certainly doesn’t help.

The Shining is a brilliant look at the fine line between sanity and insanity. The audience wants to like Jack. He is a burgeoning writer, he has an amazing wife who is also an incredibly caring mother and his son, while somewhat off-kilter, is pretty darn adorable. But the cracks in his character begin to show right off the bat.

We find out almost from the start that he has a history of drinking problems and that his family has been caught in the crossfire on more than one occasion. Jack seems to be invested in becoming a better person though and just when it looks like he has overcome his shady past, he starts having heart-to-hearts with a ghost bartender and attending invisible masked balls.

The Shining contains an element of the supernatural without running too wild with it. Danny (Danny Lloyd), Jack’s son, has a special gift — he can see dead people. While this is a concept that has been done to death with The Sixth Sense (1999), The Shining revamps it by adding an element of believability in Nicholson’s portrayal of madness. The film leaves the viewer confused as to whether half of it actually happened or whether it was a figment of Jack’s imagination. This is undeniably a movie that can be returned to and enjoyed again and again.

If you’re looking for a true classic though, Psycho (1960) is one of the undisputed stars of the horror genre.

Said to be Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Psycho is a film that somehow gets better and better with age. Despite being 54-years-old, this movie continues to get a fright out of viewers with its infamous antagonist Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).

Norman is a complex character. His split-second transitions from shy hotelkeeper to sadistic serial killer are made all the more startling by the fact that the film is shot in black and white. The use of light and shadow is one of the most brilliant elements of Psycho. This movie just wouldn’t work if it was shot in colour. The emotions that play out across Norman’s face appear more stark and unsettling in the absence of colour. All that the film lacks in vibrancy it makes up for in sound  — let us not forget the screeching string instruments that accompany the iconic shower scene, which Hitchcock initially wanted to be just the noise of the water and Marion’s (Janet Leigh) screams before the shot was rejected by censors who believed it to be too disturbing for viewers.

Psycho is a trail-blazer that manipulates its audience and blurs the line between villain and hero. Even in the modern day watching Psycho will make you want to check behind the curtain after stepping into the shower.

Halloween is the prime time to revel in the bad special effects, popcorn spilling scares, gag-worthy murder scenes and cliché plotlines that make up the horror genre. Whether you choose to indulge in classics like the The Shining or delightfully disgusting modern thrillers like Drag Me To Hell, nothing feels quite as satisfying as watching a horror film in October — just don’t look under the bed afterwards.