Trick 'r Treat (2007)

Five interwoven stories that occur on Halloween.

My favorite horror anthology film of all time.  This.  Not Black Sabbath, not the Creepshows, not Tales from the Darkside, not Cat's Eye, not Tales from the Hood, not V/H/S, not Three Extremes, not Trilogy of Terror, not Body Bags, not From a Whisper to a Scream, not The Monster Club, not Nightmares, not The ABCs of Death, not All Hallow's Eve, not Tales from the Crypt (the movie), not... well, you get the idea.

And it's funny, because I believe this almost never saw the light of day, even after it was fully completed and finished in post-production.  There were trailers for this movie that ran for years before it ever came out, and I distinctly remember wondering what had happened to it.

Thank God it finally did (though it was demoted to STV, even though it's clearly a full budget theatrical release), where it could gather a cult following that propelled it to success.

I don't want to spoil anything about the various segments, just that they involve an unusually large number of.... actually I'm not gonna say.  Just watch the movie and go in blind.  It's better that way.

Let the Right One In (2008)

Oskar, an overlooked and bullied boy, finds love and revenge through Eli, a beautiful but peculiar girl.

This isn't just one of my favorite horror movies of all time.  This is one of my favorite movies of all time. Period.  That puts it somewhere around the top 5 of this entire list.  Which means I like it more than virtually every other movie I've just spent the last month gushing over.

You may have seen this.  You may have seen the American remake.  You may have read the book.  And I think I saw there was a television show or something.  But this is arguably the best of the lot.  Absolutely nothing is lost in adapting it from book to film, and, if anything, a few things were cut that actually make the story stronger.  How many films can make that claim?

Also, this may be the first and only film in history where you will actively cheer for the deaths of a group of children.  How fucked up is that?

The House of the Devil (2009)

In 1983, financially struggling college student Samantha Hughes takes a strange babysitting job that coincides with a full lunar eclipse.

Ti West's first appearance on this list.  I don't remember exactly how I first heard of this movie, but it was very possibly on the AV Club's "New Cult Canon."  A great series that explored films that were slightly off the beaten path, that is sadly not only defunct, but apparently been scrubbed from the internet for some reason.  It's really a shame.

Luckily, before that I happened, I was able to watch everything on the list, with this being one of the major winners.  It makes me very grateful I was able to somehow stumble across it.

I don't want to spoil anything with the plot, but the film's introduction (and the title itself) make it very clear that is going to have something to do with the "Satanic panics" that gripped the United States during the 1980s.  And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Keep an eye out for appearances by Greta Gerwig, AJ Bowen, Tom Noonan, and Mary Woronov.