Every weekday until the end of October, CraveOnline will present an all-new Horror Movie Marathon to help you avoid showing the same old movies at your Halloween parties. Keep coming back every day for new schedules and party ideas!
The Future is a Frightening Place
Most science fiction stories assume that the future will be worse than our own. Sometimes just because society gets detached through the increasing availability of technological wonders, sometimes because those wonders seem destined to kill us.
Genetic tampering? That’ll kill you. First contact with alien life forms? That’ll kill you. Defying the laws of physics? That’ll kill you AND disfigure you into a monster, and that monster’ll kill everyone else.
So as much as we cling to our iPhones and thank heaven for modern conveniences, sci-fi horror movies offer us a great opportunity to explore our anxieties about progress, and also to cover everything in a blinking lights and a sticky goo. You’ll want to share these horrifying futures (and alternate presents) with all your friends, so let’s plan you a proper marathon!
Related: Horror Movie Marathon of the Day: Witchcraft
A Living Space Odyssey
Decking out your apartment and/or house with a sci-fi theme can be costly, because approximating future technology (even retro future technology) is costly. But there are things you can do to make it fun without burning a hole in your bank account or inventing new gadgets all by your lonesome.
Lights that blink out of sequence can be approximated with good old fashioned blinking Christmas lights, which you’re probably about to bust out pretty soon anyway. Might as well get started now. If you can find some heavy-ish cardboard, you can poke holes in it and shove the lights in there, creating a panel of futuristic-looking lights to place along your walls.
You can also finally get some mileage out of your high school science fair skills by creating fake solar systems to hang around your apartment. Or, failing that, get some cheap glow in the dark stars and place them all over the ceiling. Make sure you leave the lights on a good long while before your guests arrive. Then, turn ’em off and transport them into a galaxy of wonder/terror. Hang some of those space ship toys you’ve been clinging onto for years and years and build miniature armadas to populate your new universe!
Food Rations
Moon Pies. As many as you can carry. We shouldn’t have to explain this.
And it may be hard to find at a store, but you can order freeze-dried ice cream online very easily. Just like the astronauts ate!
Get The Right Movies
You can find a lot of decent, sometimes even great horror movies on Instant Streaming. Then again, so can everyone else. If you’re hosting a horror movie marathon, your guests expect you to show them something they haven’t seen before along with a handful of classic standbys.
So go to your local video store – the odds are good it still has a better selection than Netflix – or, if there aren’t any left in your neighborhood (such a shame), track them down online. Most of the movies we’re recommending are great movies that are either so popular they’re pretty cheap by now, or so obscure they are probably priced low since the demand isn’t high. But obscure movies can be the best surprises, and trust us, we’re about to recommend a ton of them.
Related: Horror Movie Marathon of the Day: Zombies
Put a Schedule Together
The film critics at CraveOnline have a tried-and-true formula for movie marathons. You start with a “Duh” movie (a popular film everyone has seen), partially to get it out of the way and partially because there’s a good chance some of your guests will arrive late and you don’t want them to miss the good stuff.
Then you get everyone’s attention with the “Unknown Classic,” a film that none of your guests have (probably) seen, so even someone who goes home early will feel like they got something special out of the evening.
Follow that up with some “Background Noise,” i.e. a film that won’t necessarily capture everyone’s attention. That’ll play in the background while everyone socializes. But you’ve got to make sure it has enough good parts that people don’t take their eyes off the TV for too long and forget why they came.
Now the time has come for a “Jumpstarter,” a really lively, crazy film that’ll grab everyone’s attention again. You’ll follow that up with something even weirder, the “Oddball,” to reward the folks who are still going. This will be the strangest film of the evening, maybe a genre-bender or the work of a mad genius, and it will be a great capper for the masses who will probably call it an evening afterwards.
And now that the evening is coming to an end, you’ll want to throw in something stupid. A real “Stinker.” Take the edge off the night’s festivities by talking back to the screen or falling asleep to a film that doesn’t really deserve your attention. It’s the perfect way to end an evening of otherwise great movies.
Then again, you may want to just pick films from one of those categories to test your endurance. How many classics can you get through in one night? How many unsung classics can you discover? How can one weird-ass film top the next? We have multiple suggestions in every category to get you through the night, if that’s the way you want to play it.
Just remember: don’t overextend yourself. Six movies is probably the maximum number that anyone can handle. Don’t feel bad if people leave early. Just make sure the folks who stay get something special for their trouble.
Let’s Plan Your Sci-Fi Horror Movie Marathon!
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
Let's Plan Your Sci-Fi Horror Movie Marathon!
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1. The Duh
Good sci-fi horror movies tend to rise to the top pretty easily, so you have no shortage of classic (or at least well-regarded) movies at your disposal. You may want to play it safe and just marathon these films instead of our more esoteric recommendations that follow, but either way you owe it to yourself to show James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, still one of the great films about science gone amok, and filled with humor, pathos and eeriness.
Alternates:
The Invisible Man (1933)
The Thing from Another World (1951)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
The Thing (1982)
Re-Animator (1985)
The Fly (1986)
Event Horizon (1997)
Pitch Black (2000) -
2. The Unknown Classic
Sci-fi and horror nuts like to thing they've seen everything - and it's entirely possible that they have - but you'll have a good chance at surprising them if you show Richard Stanley's Hardware. Directed by Richard Stanley, the film is about a severed cyborg head that begins rebuilding itself in an apartment complex and tearing through the inhabitants because, "No flesh shall be spared." The effects are great, the mood is creepy, and the film is a real hidden treasure.
Alternates:
Island of Lost Souls (1932)
Shivers (1975)
Night of the Creeps (1986)
Brain Damage (1988)
Mimic: The Director's Cut (1997)
Pandorum (2009) -
3. The Background Noise
You'll want to keep the movies playing even when your guests start getting jittery and want to move around and/or talk amongst themselves. A nice slow burn sci-fi horror movie like Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is perfect for times like this. You'll be able to turn your heads towards the screen during the intense bits, but the story is so well known by now it won't be a total travesty if nobody watches during the talky parts.
Alternates:
The Blob (1968)
Village of the Damned (1960)
Galaxy of Terror (1981)
Leviathan (1989)
Cloverfield (2008) -
4. The Jumpstarter
Kick this marathon back into high gear with a film no one could possibly ignore, like the unfairly maligned 2001 sci-fi slasher Jason X. Yes, it's Friday the 13th in space, and yes that's pretty silly, but the movie is well aware of how ridiculous it is and has a ton of fun blending sci-fi tropes with old school 1980s slasher clichés, and they way they use a holodeck to distract Jason Voorhees is priceless.
Alternates:
Night of the Comet (1984)
The Blob (1988)
The Lawnmower Man (1992)
The Cell (2000)
Slither (2006) -
5. The Oddball
Lots of sci-fi horror movies take themselves pretty seriously, so finding a truly bizarre one - yes, more bizarre than Jason X - can be a real joy. And it doesn't get much more bizarre than Killer Klowns from Outer Space, in which an unidentified flying circus tent lands on the outskirts of town and unleashes alien clowns who terrorize the populace with man-eating shadow puppets and shockingly violent ventriloquism routines.
Alternates:
Phase IV (1974)
Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996)
Dreamcatcher (2003)
Big Ass Spider! (2013) -
6. The Stinker
Close out your evening with a real piece of junk - perfect for falling to sleep and/or talking back to the screen - like Robot Monster, one of the most famously bad movies ever made. It's a pseudo-poetic post apocalyptic non-thriller about an ape in a diver's helmet who is also a robot. It's as good as it sounds.
Alternates:
Bride of the Monster (1955)
Night of the Lepus (1972)
Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979) -
Alternate Marathon: The Alien Franchise
Ah yes, this was the elephant in the room wasn't it? In theory all of your guests have seen the Alien movies (or at least, they've seen the good ones), so we skewed our recommendation into other areas. Besides, if you're going to show one Alien movie at your sci-fi horror marathon, you might as well show all seven of them. Even the bad ones are weird enough to be worth watching in a drunken crowd, and the great ones are some of the best movies ever made in any genre. Or, more to the point, any two of them.
