15 Recent Horrors You Should Avoid This Halloween

John Carpenter's Halloween. Wes Craven's Scream. A Nightmare on Elm Street... It's not Halloween without a good horror movie marathon.

Once you look past the obvious classics, however, it can be difficult to find good Halloween party screening material, particularly when it comes to modern horrors. To borrow a horribly over-used cliche, they just don't make them like they used to.

Ideally, you want to bring the fun and the scares, in equal measures. Nothing too needlessly gruesome, nothing too serious, nothing too silly, nothing that's just plain bad. Balance and entertaining, it's not too much to ask.

And while there has been something of a revival of the genre recently, there's still a lot of unforgivably poor trash being released in the name of horror. And as a public service, it's time to pick those fetid turds out.

These are the recent horror films that you should definitely think twice about settling down to watch this All Hallows 'Eve...

Eli Roth's Hostel was among the first of its kind for a Western film (we're not counting the Takashi Miike pieces it was heavily influenced by), and is, along with the similarly influential Saw, widely credited with kick-starting the genre's 'torture porn' phase. A brutal, gory and undeniably scary work of cinema, what it lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for in guts (literally, at times) and bravado. The sequel is even better.

Less so, the third entry in the series.

Directed by Scott Spiegel and written by Michael D. Weiss, with minimal involvement from Roth, it ships the franchise off to Vegas, and skips the cinematic release. Cheap, ugly and unimaginative, it adds nothing to the story worth telling, and seems largely to have killed off the franchise, stone cold dead.

Unless you're planning on boring your Halloween guests to death (one bug-bite demise aside), this one is best avoided. For our money, you'd be better off with the more recent Baskin, instead, which takes the torture basement theme and truly runs with it... all the way to Hell.