I've noticed a tendency in recent years of channels doing marathons of the dozen or so Halloween movies, the Scream movie series, the Child's Play/"Chucky" movies, the god-awful Leprachaun movies, Friday the 13th movies, and such. Very few of which do a whole lot for me.
The first Halloween (1978) was a nice breakout movie for director John Carpenter, but beyond that mostly cheap thrills, mostly unspectacular.
Although as I said, while arguably not great, I like the Halloween III: Season Of The Witch movie.
There are so many other great supernatural and atmospheric Halloween movies, I kind of hate to see all that air-time monopolized by these questionably good movies.
Another I see fill up a lot of air-time are the collected adaptations of Stephen King in movies. While he has a few really good movies, such as the above listed The Dead Zone, or The Green Mile, most of King's movies are truly cheap, unimaginative and awful. Creepshow, anyone? Just awful. Catseye, Firestarter, Pet Semetary and its sequels, Children of the Corn, Maximum Overdrive, It, all cheaply done and truly awful.
Carrie (all three versions) are not spectacular either.
One I enjoy and think is well done is
Needful Things, a darkly playful story about the devil coming to a small town and opening a curiosity shop, where he gives each resident what they can't afford but most desire, asking one obligatory favor from each to allow them to purchase what they want, and in doing so, turns the whole town into rioting and chaos, consumed with grudges and hatred, killing each other. And toward the end, showing how the devil does this in cities, towns, nations all over the world, to stir up violence and wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needful_Things_(film)
For reasons I don't understand,
The Mist film is highly acclaimed, despite that I found it functional at best, with a lot of dialogue that was pure torture to watch, and third-rate special effects, but the critics for some reason gave it high reviews.
I guess for a lot of people, Stephen King is "Mr Halloween", the great master of horror. I find King's work hit and miss, and far more often miss.
But for reasons that escape me, critics are overly kind to his work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_by_Stephen_King
