How I Watch 100 Horror Movies in 92 Days

Hi friends! At the time of me writing this post, it is less than 100 days until Halloween, but for people like me, it’s always Halloween. Although I indulge in horror content all year round, this is the time where my horror habits go up to 11 and it becomes pretty much the only thing I watch. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll probably know that for the past two years I’ve taken part in the 100 Horror Movies in 92 Days challenge. It can be a tough challenge and I’ve watched a lot of garbage, but it’s also a fun one.

This challenge was created by Spooky Sarah Says and you can find the full guidelines for the challenge on her blog, but the basic idea is this: watch 100 horror movies that you’ve never seen before in 92 days, starting on August 1 and ending on October 31. Sounds easy, right? Well, yes, in theory. In practise, it can be a lot harder than you thought. 92 days is both a long time and not a lot of time at all so you’ve got a lot of movies to fit in.

So, how do I do it without burning out or wanting to pull my hair out? Luckily for you, I came up with some helpful tips.

come up with a plan

When I say a ‘plan’, I don’t necessarily mean make a TBR-style list of 100 movies you want to watch. I’ve tried to do that in the past and I never end up watching every single thing I put on the list. You can go with the flow, but time isn’t always on your side. 92 days may be a long time but when you’ve got commitments you have to make time.

The first part of my current plan is to watch one movie a night on weeknights and at least two on the weekends while making as much use of my local cinemas as I can. Time may not be on your side but money isn’t always either. The second part is coming up with a rough list of movies that I’m prioritising. I’ve been slowly working my way through the Video Nasties list, but that can be difficult because a lot of those movies have similar names and plots and some were released with different names and at this point in my horror-watching career (which isn’t really a career), the Video Nasty list is just a weird blur of blood and guts.

It’s not the end of the world if you don’t watch every single thing that you put on your list, but having a goal to work towards is always a good idea.

pick a series you’ve wanted to watch or finish

There are some horror franchises out there that have a lot of movies in them. Last year, I priorities watching as many of the Universal Monsters movies as I could find, which was relatively easy since a lot of them are available on DVD.

Some franchises with a lot of movies in them include:

• Friday the 13th – 12 movies
• Child’s Play/Chucky – 8 movies
• Universal Monsters –  I’m not exactly sure of how many movies are in this series because some sources are telling me 83 and some are telling me more. Just know that there are a lot of these movies.
• Godzilla – 38 movies if you don’t count US recuts
• Hellraiser – 10 movies
• Halloween – 13 movies
• Alien  – 8 movies (soon to be 9!)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street – 9 movies
• Predator – 6 movies

Naturally, watching one single series in a go can get tedious, so switching them around or not even finishing it is fine.

use your local cinema as much as you can

I’m very lucky that where I live in England there are seven cinemas that I can use and now that I have my own car, I can get to wherever I want to go a lot easier than I could while I was depending on public transportation. I say that while still being a learner driver, but whatever. At the beginning of the challenge, you probably won’t be making a lot of cinema trips since not a lot of horror movies are released in August but the plus side is that it’ll be easier on your wallet.

By the time October comes around, and we get closer to Halloween, more horror movies are releases, both old and new. Check if your local cinema does any Halloween screenings and if they do any horror movie marathons. My local indie cinema does a Halloween ‘all-nighter’ on the last Saturday of October every year where they show horror movies all night with a different theme for all four screens. Last year they screened all five Evil Dead movies in one screen, showed movies about aliens in another, sequels in another, and had four ‘mystery’ movies in the last screen where I spent the entire night. You’re not always expected to stay for the entire night at these kinds of events if you don’t want to, but it’s a good way to get your numbers up in one go.

do a deep-dive on streaming services

Depending on what streaming services you have and also where you live, you can find a pretty good selection of horror movies. The services I have are Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Movies (UK only), Disney+, Paramount+, and Shudder. Out of these six, obviously Shudder is the best one because it only has horror movies and some horror-adjacent movies. If I had to say which were the worst, it would be a tie between Disney+, Paramount+, and Amazon Prime.

Here in the UK, you can watch horror movies on Disney+ because it’s not limited to being a ‘family friendly’ service but the selection is very poor. All the Alien, Predator, and The Omen movies are on there, as well as David Cronenberg’s The Fly but a lot of the other movies that Disney+ has are not what I personally would consider to be horror and are more along the lines of thrillers. Another problem that I have with Disney+ is that when you go onto the website or into the app, you can’t go to an option that shows you all horror movies. You have to find a ‘collection’ that doesn’t have every horror movie in it. I understand that it’s so that kids don’t watch things that they’re too young for, but you have to have an adult profile to find them to begin with.

Paramount+ has more horror movies, like the entire Scream series, Paranormal Activity , Smile, both Terrifier movies and most of the Friday the 13th movies (there’s some complicated history there) but it’s still a very small selection. When I looked at what was available, I counted 36 movies and I’ve seen 22 of them. Obviously, I’m not gravitating towards Paramount+ for horror.

Amazon Prime is an odd one because there are hundreds of horror movies available and you can find anything from classics to blockbusters, but there’s also a lot of cheap shit on Amazon Prime. And by ‘cheap shit’ I don’t mean quirky little indie movies with really good practical effects, I mean direct-to-video stuff with no closed captions, bad acting, no budget, and special effects from a CD that cost a tenner. It’s also very easy to confuse a movie on Prime with another because some of the movies are titled and given images that are supposed to trick you into thinking you’re watching something else.

For example, you go to Prime wanting to watch Alien vs Predator so you select what looks like Alien vs Predator. But it’s not Alien vs Predator. You’re watching Alien Predator instead.

As I said before, Shudder is the best streaming service for horror, but that’s not exactly fair to say because it is a service that is dedicated to horror. Out of the services I’ve mentioned, Netflix is the best one to look through.

Netflix has a good range of horror movies, mostly more recent movies and more well-known movies but there are some hidden gems, especially among the Netflix Original movies.

piracy can be your friend

Going to the movies is expensive and streaming services don’t always have the movies that you want, I totally get that. Sometimes you have to hunt out the things that you want and that can take you to the high seas. Personally, I only use piracy sites as a last resort because there have been times when movies just have not released in the UK at all (looking at you Last Voyage of the Demeter) or have released a lot later (Pearl released almost a year after the US). The biggest thing with pirate sites is that you have to navigate them carefully; always use a VPN, an adblocker, and have your antivirus software turned on. Some of these sites are riddled with malware.

When I’m in the mood for something on the more ‘extreme’ end, I use a site called Effed Up Movies. Movies on this site are obviously not for the faint of heart, but it does have some movies that I think are pretty tame like Army of Darkness and Lords of Chaos (which only gets called ‘extreme’ because it’s based on true events that were horrible). I think that it’s a pretty safe website to use but keep your safety measures there just in case.

If you want a safer option, there are horror movies that have been uploaded to YouTube. Not just movies that were made by YouTubers who want to raise their image, classic B-movies and indie movies. I watched all the Toxic Avengers movies on YouTube as well as The Blob and the entire original Japanese Ju-On series. The quality isn’t going to be great because the uploaders have to work around the copyright system and it’s not a great accessibility option but if you can find something you want to watch, don’t pass it up. Naturally, not every single movie is going to be available so keep your expectations a little on the lower side.

bigger isn’t always better

There’s sort of a debate about movie run times that pops up every time a big A-list Hollywood movie is longer than 2 hours long, and I don’t normally throw my hat into the ring because my belief is that a movie should be as long as it needs to be. A movie like Oppenheimer has too much story to be told in 90 minutes, while a movie like My Neighbour Totoro doesn’t have enough story to be told in 3 hours. I definitely don’t think that every single movie ever made shouldn’t be longer than 90 minutes because that’s a hindrance, but when it comes to this particular challenge, I try my best to look for movies that are on the shorter side. This is pretty easy when it comes to horror because long run times aren’t that common in horror. Long horror movies certainly exist, like the It movies, The Shining, and Rosemary’s Baby, but long horror movies usually tend to be on the artsier side. In case you were wondering, the longest horror I’ve seen is It Chapter Two (169 minutes, or 2 hours and 49 minutes), and the shortest I’ve seen is 4444444444, which is a prequel to the first Ju-On movie (3 minutes).

The main rule for run times in this challenge is that a movie has to be longer than 45 minutes, so unfortunately for gorehounds like me the Guinea Pig series doesn’t make the cut. This isn’t like the Goodreads reading challenge where a book with five pages can count towards your total, we have to think here. That being said, don’t let the run time of a movie put you off from watching it. If you want to spend your evening in total dread while watching Philosophy of a Knife (4 hours and 26 minutes) then that’s your choice.

don’t focus too much on what other people are doing

Like a lot of other challenges, it can be easy to get caught up in the numbers game and feel like you’re not watching as many movies as you think you should be. There are people who have managed to watch 20 movies by the end of the first week, but there are things to consider about that, like maybe they work from home or their job is to do with movies, or maybe they’re school aged and on holiday, but that’s not important. Once you start to put pressure on yourself, you get sidetracked and lose your motivation.

Another way to not put pressure on yourself is to not get too hung up on what you’re watching. In some horror circles there can be some pressure to watch the most extreme things you can possibly find and if it upsets you or you don’t want to watch it then you’re a wussy little baby who should stick to Goosebumps or some garbage like that. You don’t have to watch anything that you don’t want to watch. There’s no harm in maybe pushing your limits a little bit, but even the most hardened horror veterans have their limits and there’s nothing wrong with that.

If you can watch extreme horrifically violent movies that are pretty much 90 minute SFX demo reels, good for you, but if you can’t, that’s fine too. The challenge is supposed to be fun, not a measure of who has the strongest stomach.

talk to me!

Would you ever give this challenge a go? If you are, do you have any priority movies you want to watch?