10 Best Movies Set On Halloween Night

Rob Zombie's directorial debut and his second entry on the list, 1000 Corpses is Zombie's love letter to Tobe Hooper, the legacy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the slasher films of the late 1970s and 1980s. Horrific and brutally funny, Zombie's agenda seems to be be a celebration of the darker side of Americana.

On the night before Halloween, four kids (including a young Rainn Wilson) researching a book on off-beat attractions and "crazy sh*t you see when driving across the country" through the night, arrive at 'Captain Spaulding's Museum Of Monsters and Madmen,' to fill up on gasoline.

Once there they are introduced to the Firefly family, a collection of colourful psychopaths led by Otis and the Harlyquin-esque 'Baby,' who promptly hold them captive and subject them to a night of torture and murder. The next day (Halloween), the cops send out a search party while continuing their search for a group of missing cheerleaders, also victims of The Devils Rejects, as they would come to be known in the sequel.

Zombie's love for uniquely American horror makes for uncomfortable viewing - it's easy to believe that, while perhaps not quite as deranged, there are backwater towns in rural USA that really do resemble the vacant, decaying and isolated one-horse anti-hamlets that time forgot.

Setting it over Halloween is Zombie at his most playful, his enthusiasm for all things rock-horror is infectious - surely the Firefly family are Leatherface's true legacy.