10 Best Horror Movies Set On Halloween Night

The original and the best, William Friedkin took William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel and made The Exorcist a permanent piece of Western pop culture. While last year marked a mind-boggling 50 years since the release of the movie that was once colloquially dubbed the scariest film of all time, The Exorcist has proven itself time and again across the decades, beating back imitators, contenders and naysayers to emerge triumphant - despite the many times Hollywood has sullied its name with inferior sequels and prequels.

While few if any of us have trouble conjuring up the movie's many iconic moments in our head - Regan (Linda Blair) crawling down the stairs backwards, turning her head 180 degrees and vomiting up pea green soup - hardly anyone associates the movie with Halloween, despite this being the setting for all the horrors that unfold in the leafy suburbs of Washington DC.

Much like classic authors' attachment to the frame narrative, filmmakers used to have a hard time believing supernatural events could happen (or that audiences would buy them) unless they were pegged to some kind of larger explanatory event, be this Halley's comet, summer solstice, or, indeed, Halloween. And so the misty cloak of Halloween is draped over the fateful night of The Exorcist's exorcism, providing perhaps a little context but nothing of any meaning to the plot.