7 scary movies to watch in the theater this Halloween season

There’s something to be said this time of year about curling up at home under a blanket and staying up too late watching scary movies. But it’s always more fun to be scared to death in front of a crowd. In a time of fluctuating movie attendance, horror is the only genre you can consistently rely on at the box office – because not even the most sophisticated home entertainment system can replicate the sense of community of an entire room full of strangers screaming and screaming at the same time. According to Screen Boston’s essential repertoire trackers, more than 40 spooky films will be showing at area indie theaters in the 10 days leading up to Halloween. Here are some highlights.

When the Somerville Theater screened FW Murnau’s “Nosferatu” earlier this month, it was accompanied by a live performance by Gina Nagger’s New England Film Orchestra, featuring Czechoslovakian virtuoso Matěj Číp on cymbal. Now they’re running it with… Radiohead? Get ready for the local debut of Silents Synced, a program that combines early silent films with ’90s alternative rock records. Did you ever get high in college and watch “The Wizard of Oz” while listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon”? Same idea here, except Murnau’s 1922 chiller is played over Radiohead’s “Amnesiac” and “Kid A.” I tried it out at home and some eerie synchronicities abound: Count Orlok makes his first appearance right as “Knives Out” begins, and the climax begins with the aptly titled “Motion Picture Soundtrack.”

Even if you find the band’s sullen, mesmerizing sound a bit annoying, it fits perfectly with the dark sadness of Murnau’s film. But “Nosferatu” – itself a bootleg of “Dracula”, which Bram Stoker’s widow tried to sue out of existence – is an infinitely adaptable work, already remade by Werner Herzog in 1979 and appearing in a new Hollywood version at Christmas ” The Lighthouse” director Robert Eggers. Purists and people who don’t like Radiohead can see the film a few days later at the Brattle Theater with live music by the Andrew Alden Ensemble or with a solo organ score by Brett Miller at Symphony Hall.

“Nosferatu” opens Saturday, October 26, at the Somerville Theater and Wednesday, October 30, at the Brattle Theater and Symphony Hall.

Coolidge After Midnite’s annual all-night horror movie marathon keeps most of its programming secret until the films hit the screen, releasing only the first two titles as a taste of what’s to come. In its 23rd edition, the 12-hour extravaganza, produced entirely on 35mm, launches this year with two films about mad scientists, forming an unusually thoughtful double feature about man’s hubris and its consequences. James Whale’s thrillingly entertaining adaptation of HG Wells’ The Invisible Man made Claude Rains a movie star, even though we don’t see his face until the final shot. The brilliant early special effects have aged better than some of last year’s CGI monstrosities, and Rains’ endearing arrogance is a smart introduction to director David Cronenberg’s devastating romantic tragedy.

“The Fly,” an unexpectedly weighty remake of a 1958 B-picture by Vincent Price, is the sexiest and saddest gross-out movie ever made, starring a heartbreaking Geena Davis who cares about her real-life future ex-husband, Jeff Goldblum cares – the on-screen chemistry between them is off the charts – after a lab accident links his genes to those of an insect. There was a lot of talk at the time about the film being a metaphor for AIDS, but in true Cronenberg style it’s more about how our bodies will eventually betray us and how in every romance one lover will inevitably outlive the other. Good luck to the five films that have to follow this one.

The 23rd Annual Halloween Horror Marathon will take place Saturday, October 26th through Sunday, October 27th at the Coolidge Corner Theater.

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It is said that the best satires are indistinguishable from reality. Fourteen years before “Scream,” lesbian activist and “Rubyfruit Jungle” author Rita Mae Brown penned a slasher film parody called “Don’t Open the Door,” which was rewritten by director Amy Holden Jones and shot with a semi-straight camera became the face of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Corman didn’t care about the subversion his filmmakers did as long as they met their quota of bare breasts and bloodshed, and The Slumber Party Massacre is a hilarious, self-reflexive, scare-quote slasher film that’s so slyly high-strung , that a Many critics at the time – and even horny teenagers who may have rented the VHS multiple times, er – completely missed the joke.

Jones, who attended Wellesley College and studied film at MIT before working as Martin Scorsese’s assistant on Taxi Driver, turns the film into a wryly funny academic exercise while delivering on the quality of the genre. It’s a film that has over-the-top phallic images and also practices them. As part of Brattle’s two-week tribute to Corman’s insanely influential legacy, the screening will be followed by 1987’s “Slumber Party Massacre II,” a half-joking but mostly incomprehensible affair directed by Deborah Brock and starring the TV sitcom’s lead actress, Crystal Bernard. The sequel has its fanatical supporters, a group that this critic is not a part of.

“The Slumber Party Massacre” opens at the Brattle Theater on Wednesday, October 23rd.

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Director Griffin Dunne’s adaptation of Alice Hoffman’s bestselling novel was a critical and commercial dud upon initial release, but over the next few years it developed a fervent following on cable and home video. It’s easy to see why, as the film’s unruly pleasures are the ones that resonate with repeat viewings, emphasizing good humor and a great-looking cast over some puzzling plotlines and bizarre tonal shifts. Set in Sudbury, Massachusetts, but filmed on Whidbey Island, Washington, the film follows Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as temperamentally mismatched sisters from a notorious law-breaking family of witches and a very evil boyfriend (played by the former ” ER” types). Goran Visnjic – I miss that guy).

It’s a funny thing because who wouldn’t want margaritas in the moonlight while casting spells with old witch aunts Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest? Bullock and Kidman are positively radiant – they’ve never been better lit – the former striking serious sparks with Aidan Quinn, who plays a clueless Arizona cop. The plot is messy, but the film thrives on their sisterly bond – celebrating the only person in the world with whom you share a secret telepathic language and who will also bury a body with you in the rose bushes. Author Alice Hoffman will be present at the screening, presented by Lovestruck Books, which opens in Harvard Square in November. Broom optional.

“Practical Magic” will be shown at the Brattle Theater on Tuesday, October 29th.

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Mary Shelley never saw this coming. New Jersey power plant worker Jeffrey Franken has been kicked out of three different medical schools, but that doesn’t stop him from keeping his girlfriend’s head alive in a jar after it was otherwise mangled in an unfortunate lawnmower accident. He tries to reassemble them using parts from sex workers on 42nd Street, an experiment that goes comically awry in director Frank Henenlotter’s spirited, enthusiastically goofy splatter-fest.

Like many films from producer Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Studios, “Frankenhooker” is spectacularly cheap and beyond bad taste, but not without its own morals – it denounces polite society’s knee-jerk dehumanization of drug addicts and practitioners of the world’s oldest profession. The crux lies in a turn by Patty Mullen, 1988’s “Penthouse Pet of the Year,” in the role of the revived Elizabeth Shelley – note the name – who gives it all away, including some wacky comic timing, while performing a comeuppance brings about that Jeffrey’s chauvinism is appropriate. (Monica Bellucci’s big performance in the current “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” owes much to Mullen.) If you like that sort of thing, Henenlotter’s 1982 breakthrough, the even grittier “Basket Case,” will be released October 27 as part of showed the annual Halloween Hullabaloo at the Somerville Theater.

“Frankenhooker” opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Coolidge Corner Theater.

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On a more family-friendly note (heh, see what I did there?), the Somerville has paired a double feature of the original Beetlejuice with director Frank Oz’s fantastic adaptation of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s off-Broadway musical, a new version of Roger Corman’s 1960 schlock shocker about a bloodthirsty houseplant. Featuring the catchy tunes that Ashman and Menken used to revitalize a then-struggling animation studio called Disney, it’s a goofy nod to 1950s creature movies, with hugely charismatic leads from Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene, and stunning special appearances from Steve Martin and Bill Murray.

Oz brought the film to a screening at the Coolidge last year and talked about how he originally filmed the stage show’s finale, in which his main characters ended up being eaten by the alien plant. He learned the hard way that the difference between theater and cinema is that in a play the actors come back in front of the curtain at the end and everyone can see that they are doing well, whereas in the cinema these people came The love feelings of the last two hours are simply dead and gone. After earning some of the lowest test numbers in Warner Bros. history, “Little Shop” was hastily reshot, with the ending you’ll see in Somerville, where our sweet couple lives happily ever after, somewhere in the Greens.

“Little Shop of Horrors” opens at the Somerville Theater on Tuesday, October 29th.