The power of something compels us to obsessively return to certain movies time and time again, but what is it? Tender nostalgia? Primordial connection? Easy accessibility? Catharsis through comedy, through fear? Debauched thirst? And how many times must a movie be watched to earn the coveted “obsessively” qualifier? While we don’t have a definitive answer for the first several questions, we can confidently confirm the last: five times. Anything fewer than five rewatches is not an obsession, but an infatuation. Let’s get serious, people.

When we crunched the numbers to calculate our most obsessively rewatched films of 2020, comfort watches with catchy soundtracks seemed to reign supreme, with Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and both Mamma Mia!s leading the pack (Looking at my own stats, I can admit to having contributed—I’ve watched those three movies a combined 24 times).

For Hallowe’en (or Hooptober, for those who practice), we thought we’d resurrect this idea—but with a twisted twist. Here are the narrative feature films with a ‘horror’ genre tag that have been logged five or more times by the most Letterboxd members, updated as of fall 2023. A closer look at the entries reveals a gravitation towards slashers, creatures, silliness and most damningly, psychological torture manifested from our most primal fears. Come and play with us!

“What’s your favorite scary movie?”

If Ghostface were to call and ask us his signature question, Letterboxd’s answer would decisively be Scream—and we wouldn’t even be lying in a vain attempt to appeal to his ego and convince him to spare us. Your unkillable passion for the campy meta-slasher franchise means that all six installments made the list, with two of them (the original and the 2022 requel) even slicing their way into the top ten. We earned that Letterboxd name-drop in Scream VI! The official obsessive rewatch ranking is as follows:

Some sequels outsell

While we’re on the topic, a quick note on sequels: the first installment of a series does tend to be the most rewatched, but there are occasional upsets. For example, Final Destination 3, or, Mary Elizabeth Winstead vs. a Rollercoaster, is more obsessively rewatched than the original (Devon Sawa vs. an Airplane).

The love for FD3 seems to stem from three key components: 1. The aforementioned MEW (“Mary Elizabeth Winstead is still my favorite scream queen because of this movie”—Haley). 2. Emo boy Ian (“Ian is a goddamn icon. Way ahead of his time. I’ve decided to tattoo his face on my ass.”—Dakota Joaquin). And 3. The infamous tanning booths-match-cut-to-coffins. “I just think that the transition from two sunbeds to the coffins is the greatest scene in cinema history,” reads the most popular review, written by Aaron. “So glad there’s not an actual Letterboxd Wrapped because they’d call me mentally ill for watching this eight times,” writes Holly, who has now logged it ten times, and for the record, we think that is normal—commendable, even. (We do actually have a Letterboxd Wrapped, called Year in Review, and it’s strictly a judgment-free zone.).

Passion for slashin’

Up next we have John Carpenter’s Halloween, carving out a Michael Myers-sized (6’9”) space for the subsequent slashers on the list. Every entry in the influential franchise—from the original series to the Rob Zombie reboots to the David Gordon Green requels—made the cut, with the first, Halloween (2018) and the curiously Michael Myers-free Halloween III: Season of the Witch rounding out the top three. “I still imagine living in an alternate timeline, where this didn’t bomb and we ended up getting a feature-length horror anthology installment each year,” writes Jacob Knight. “Carpenter’s best score… A buzzing, synth-driven midnight movie spell.”

No slasher is complete without a final girl to root for, and it looks like Laurie Strode, Sally Hardestry (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Jess Bradford (Black Christmas), Lila Crane (Psycho), Alice Hardy (Friday the 13th) and Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare on Elm Street) all survived to the top 50. There’s a lot of love for Marilyn Burns’ bloodcurdling performance as Sally in particular, with Muriel saying, “Sally covered in blood and laughing hysterically is the absolute blueprint,” and Aaron offering “nothing but love and respect for the original scream queen”.

While The Thing didn’t necessarily enjoy the same financial success as either of those, it earned something even more valuable: the hearts and minds of Letterboxd members. Carpenter’s paranoia-soaked sci-fi is the highest rated entry of the top ten obsessively rewatched list, currently boasting a 4.3 average star rating and a respectable 75th spot on our official top 250 narrative features list. “It makes me SO ANGRY that audiences and critics of 1982 went to theaters, sat down, were treated to watching THE GREATEST FILM EVER MADE and then were all unanimously like, ‘Nope, not good,’” laments Reece in his five-star review.

Plenty of contemporary creatures crawled their ways in, too, and honorable mentions include the mutant bear from Annihilation, Jean Jacket from Nope and Mother Suspiriorum from Suspiria (2018). (Interestingly, Dario Argento’s original placed exactly one spot higher than Luca Guadagnino’s remake).

Would it kill you to laugh?

Ghostface returns to claim spot number four for 2022’s Scream, which brings us to our next category: silliness. As previously mentioned, our 2020 list was filled with comedies, suggesting that a healthy sense of humor affects a film’s rewatchability factor (especially in the hellish depths of a pandemic). The Scream series’ campy tone could be part of why it takes up so much real estate (and why the much goofier Evil Dead II ranks above The Evil Dead)—for ultimate catharsis, we like a little comic relief thrown into our communal terror.

We also like a horny musical number. Enter Dr. Frank-N-Furter. The Rocky Horror Picture Show pelvic thrusts its way into fifth place, which adds up considering the cult classic’s reputation for interactive midnight screenings peppered with live performers and spirited audience participation. “Cinema does not get any more irreverent, more joyous, more camp, more musical, more sexy, more nostalgic, more genius than this,” attests Amy Andrews.

Horror comedies are abundantly represented throughout the list, most notably via the works of Jordan Peele. While his oeuvre isn’t necessarily laugh-out-loud funny—aside from some stand-out smart jokes in Get Out and Us—his background as a sketch comedian is beneficial for digging into the audience's psyches, for knowing exactly what to do to make them instinctually react.

While Mary Harron may not be a comic, she harbors this intrinsic intuition as well—her razor-sharp yuppie caricature American Psycho places at number eleven, with What We Do in the Shadows trailing closely behind. The latter was the victor of 2020’s overall most obsessively rewatched list, so it’s only natural that the vampire mockumentary pops up here, too. Lastly, two vastly different parables of friendship round out the top 25: Edgar Wright’s zombie parody Shaun of the Dead and Karyn Kusama’s sapphic succubus satire Jennifer’s Body.

Two additional top tenners—The Shining and It—also use the more innocent perspectives of children to interrogate fear, making the various torments that little Danny Torrance and The Losers Club face that much more effective. Kids’ imaginations can run wild, as can those of unstable and isolated adults, as demonstrated by the two swabbies (Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe) from The Lighthouse, which clocks in at number eighteen. Robert Eggers’ nautical chamber horror is just two spots ahead of another movie about a pair of guys losing their minds in a singular location: Saw. In case you missed it, we recently checked in with one of our members, Larry, who’s logged the first installment of the long-running franchise over 200 times.

Aside from Jigsaw, another mad genius with a passion for crafting borderline unsolvable psychological puzzles is the magnificent David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Laura Palmer’s (Sheryl Lee) brutal murder is the lodestone of Lynch’s original series, and this companion film expands upon her final week, applying a darker and graver tone to elicit a visceral empathy for the beloved character and her tragic fate. “One of the most soul-destroying pieces of fiction ever made,” writes Lily. “I have watched it three times in the span of less than a month.”

Similarly, Maria had an analogous experience with Black Swan, of which she’s logged eight watches so far: “Who’s more insane?” she asks. “Her? … Or me for rewatching this so many times?” Natalie Portman’s dedicated performance as a perfectionist ballerina earned her an Oscar (and a place on this prestigious list and her recent anointing as one of our favorite weird women), as did Jodie Foster’s role as FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. Chris has watched Jonathan Demme’s seminal serial killer study seven times, deeming it a “comfort movie” in one review while also admitting in another that the ending gives them “three anxiety attacks condensed into one every single time.”

At the end of the day, isn’t it exactly this irreconcilable tension between refuge and fear that keeps us coming back for more of the same horror, year after year, Hallowe’en after Hallowe’en? Or are we just in it for the reliable pleasure of watching a blood-spattered Bruce Campbell mow down Deadites with a chainsaw? We finally have a definitive answer: it’s both.