My 31 Days of Horror Challenge Has Come to an End 🎃

by ambi

I did it! I wrote 31 horror movie reviews in 31 days, spanning about 8 decades of cinema. It got rough somewhere in the middle. But I got in the zone in the last week or so and to the finish line early, by writing two reviews in a day a few times and setting them to automatically post on schedule (I'm writing this on Oct 29 😊). Still, this challenge ate up all of my freetime. Meaning I missed out on a lot of culturally significant media in October, like season 3 of Succession, Dune, and Squid Game. So to catch up on those, I'll be taking a much deserved break from blogging starting as soon I end this post. 

What did I learn from 31 scary movies? Well, good cinema is still being made today. And there were some bad movies in the past. The genre has certainly evolved to be more inclusive and more gory and less campy. The social commentary, I think, ha been more pointed in modern films even when it's just at the surface. Though it still looks like the '70s was the peak of experimental filmmaking. Of course, the list I made is pretty random with a lot of films from the '70s, so I really shouldn't be deriving a meaningful conclusion from it.

I know for sure that I won't be repeating this challenge next year... unless I get paid for it. Watching a movie everyday is doable, but writing a review to go along with it ain't sustainable. Maybe it's something to do every decade or so. I can't say that every review I wrote this month has been excellent criticism or analysis, but it must have helped my writing. Right? Or maybe a daily stream of reviews with little breathing room worsened it....


Happy Halloween, Samhain, and upcoming Day of the Dead! 💀


Oh and for fun, below is the full list, ranked from best to worst. It's how I feel at the moment. It isn't an entirely fair ranking, since there are so many different but equally valid approaches to horror listed here... but again, it's for kicks.

La Llorona is on top, because it's the film that most effectively connects to real-world conditions and offers a satisfying ending that affirms is humanist message. It represents the peak of what horror films can achieve. The rankings aren't based solely on this metric. Films like Raw and Daughter of Darkness are in the top 10 simply because I enjoyed them as movies regardless of their themes. Possessor is number 6 because I admire its craft more than I liked it. The ranking may not always be logical but... is any movie ranking ever logical, really? This is what feels right to me. Next year I might think differently. 


  1. La Llorona
  2. Onibaba
  3. Raw
  4. Ganja and Hess
  5. Eyes Without a Face
  6. Possessor
  7. Daughters of Darkness
  8. Satánico Pandemonium
  9. House
  10. The Loved Ones
  11. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
  12. The Innocents
  13. Candyman (1992)
  14. CAM
  15. The Hunger
  16. Hellraiser
  17. Don’t Look Now
  18. Candyman (2021) 
  19. Fear Street Trilogy
  20. Vampires vs the Bronx
  21. Bit
  22. In Fabric
  23. Belladonna of Sadness
  24. Alucarda
  25. La Maschera del Demonio
  26. A Tale of Two Sisters
  27. I Walked with a Zombie
  28. Host
  29. Phantom of the Paradise
  30. Cat People
  31. Re-Animator


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