Halloween was a special smash this year at Shudder as our head curator, Sam Zimmerman, took to the phones with our brand new Halloween Hotline. Fans of Shudder could call in to get a personalized recommendation from the Shudder library to fill their Halloween weekend with scares, splatters, and terror. The hour flew by, with …

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This year marks the 90th anniversary of Disney Cartoons’ innovative Silly Symphony series debut, The Skeleton Dance. Directed by the mouse man himself and drawn by Ub Iwerks, the short film features midnight mischief as a group of skeletons rise and dance a gruesome jig in a howling graveyard. Playing tunes on each other’s ribcages and stacking their skulls together, the dead unite for one night only, all to the cheeky tunes of composer Carl W. Stalling.

Life (and death) lessons from the late great Tobe Hooper: meat is murder, monsters wear human faces (some more literally than others), and the haunted house is where you find it. From the ode to nihilism that is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the slow-burning dread of Salem’s Lot to the niche favorite that is Lifeforce and beyond, Hooper returned to the haunted house more often than any other director in our beloved genre. Despite this, he never once made an entirely typical haunted house movie. Eschewing cobwebs and bats, he was able to mine new terrors from an old archetype by knowing its essence so intimately.