Today’s weather is awful.

Good news, everyone!  It’s Halloween.  Bad news!  It’s raining.

Halloween is the type of holiday that everyone loves because it gives us an excuse to get out and be seen in our most clever or ridiculous costumes.  But when the weather is terrible is significantly diminishes the fun of people-watching because everyone just wants to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.  And sure, you’ll still see people in costumes at whatever party or bar you’re planning on going to, but when precipitation threatens to ruin that facepaint you spent twenty minutes trying to emulate from some Youtube tutorial, what’s the point of putting it on in the first place?  Big dresses and pretty much anything that drapes or flows are out, too (sorry, bedsheet ghosts).  Anything integrating lights or electronics should probably be discarded as well.  Don’t even try to dress up as a toilet paper mummy, unless you don’t mind transforming into a human sewer over the course of the night.

I don’t mean to sound too negative.  If your Halloween plans are set, by all means, go out and have a great time.  But if the weather is getting you down, there is still plenty of fun to be had at home.  And by “plenty of fun to be had,” I actually mean “plenty of stuff you can watch on the internet while you eat candy.”

There are about ten thousand “TOP 100 SCARIEST HORROR MOVIES” lists floating around on the internet, so for the sake of avoiding redundancy, I am limiting my humble suggestions to spoOoOoky things that I have watched in the past month or two.  No The Shining, The Ring, etc.

HORROR MOVIE THAT’S NOT REALLY A HORROR MOVIE:

Angel Heart

This one only barely qualifies as a horror movie, and that’s because it has some supernatural stuff that happens at the very end of the movie.  But it has a serial killer and the opening shot kind of looks like the poster to The Exorcist, so sure, why not.  The truly scary thing about this movie comes from the realization that Mickey Rourke once looked like a normal (possibly even attractive) person.  Also, this movie was originally rated X, so if you’re a 13-year-old boy that should be more than enough to get you watching it.

TWO “SCARY” STORIES THAT ARE ACTUALLY JUST EMBARRASSING FOR RYAN GOSLING:

Goosebumps: “Say Cheese and Die”; Are You Afraid of the Dark?: “The Tale of Station 109.1”

As anyone who has ever seen Young Hercules already knows, Ryan Gosling was once a just polite dweeby tween (à la Aubrey Graham) before he morphed into the dripping Hollywood machohunk that is today.  Neither “Say Cheese and Die” nor “Tale of 109.1” is scary, but each is worth your 22 minutes if you have a thing for knocking people off their pedestals.  Also of note: “Tale of 109.1” also features an exasperatingly loud Gilbert Gottfried, doin’ his thing as usual.

SCARY MOVIE THAT WOULD BE BETTER IF IT DIDN’T HAVE A DARTH MAUL CAMEO:

Insidious

This movie was much better than James Wan’s awful Saw (a movie I was psyched to see in theaters with my mom when I was 15), but on a scale of 1-10 it still registers as a “meh.”  Like, I would maybe watch the sequel but only if it was on TV at 2:00 AM and I was paralyzed by boredom (the same reason I once sat through 70% of the atrocious Adam Sandler / Jennifer Aniston trashpile, Just Go With It).  The problem with Insidious is that it has legitimately tense and interesting moments, but all of those moments are significantly overshadowed by the fact that the main villain looks like Darth Maul (or maybe just his hippyish brother or something).  This doesn’t sound that bad but just watch the movie and you’ll understand.

SCARY MOVIE FOR ALL YOU GOPRO BROS:

V/H/S 2

V/H/S was better than its sequel, but I watched that movie like six months ago so it doesn’t qualify for this list.  V/H/S 2 is really stupid and is mostly not that scary, but it is extremely violent and has lots of nudity, so again, all you 13-year-old boys: this one is for you.  This movie is also pretty much a 90-minute Youtube demo for GoPro cameras, so it’s great if you are both an outdoorsy mountain bike nerd and also love stuff with zombies.  But really, what’s up with all the zombies in this movie?  I guess some of them were more demons than zombies, but, you know, if it looks like a duck…  Anyway, this movie is mostly entertaining and it even borders on clever at times, even though it is overall probably the stupidest thing listed in this article (moreso than the Gosling Nickelodeon shows).

And I guess that’s it.  Why do lists always have to be top tens?  This should be more than enough to distract you from regretting not just putting on last year’s costume and actually doing something instead of just sulking in your living room.  Happy Halloween!