This is my fifth time participating in Hooptober, which is put on every year by Letterboxd user Cinemonster as a marathon for the latter part of September and all of October to enjoy a stream of Horror movies. Even though this is my fifth time doing this Horror-themed marathon, this is still far from the type of stuff I tend to watch (as I don't watch a ton of Horror in general). As of the start of this marathon, I had 1,135 feature films in my Watchlist, but only 12 of them had the Horror genre tag attached to them on Letterboxd (down fifteen from the start of last year's marathon). Likewise, of the 5,070 feature films I had rated prior to this marathon, Letterboxd only classified 500* of those as Horror.

So even though there are a decent amount of movies I would say I like that are Horror films, they still make up only a small percentage of what I tend to flock towards. Like the last few years, I guess we'll see if I can make it an entire six weeks watching not much else outside of the genre. Much like last year, I had to search outside my Watchlist in order to find several movies to help meet all the criteria of the challenge. Also, not all of the rest of these were in my Watchlist prior to making my list (though I did recently make a secondary list of possible Horror films to watch to pick from for this challenge). I will be ranking them as I go, and reviews can always be found in the Notes section. Feel free to join along if you like, so see below (or the official page linked to above) for the rules for the challenge.

Rules:

6 Countries (Sans USA or Italy) (X) (15)
9 Decades (X) (11)
5 Zombie Films (X)
3 Cult or Conspiracy Horror Films (X)
1 Film With a Black Director and Lead (X)
1 Film From a Mexican or Central American Director (X)
1 Canadian Film (X)
1 Former Soviet State** Film (X)
Your Most Popular Unseen Horror Film From the 1940s (X)
2 Post-Apocalyptic Horror Films (X)
1 Film With Dreams as a Plot Point (X)
1 "The Animals Are Pissed At Us" Film (X)
1 Silent Film (X)
4 Films Based on Novels (X)
1 Unseen Film From Cinemonster's Favorites List (X)
1 Film Written by Ernesto Gastaldi (X)
1 Film From 1932 (X)
1 Film From 1939 Called The Wizard of Oz (0/1)
1 Tobe Hooper Film (X)

Note: Twenty of these movies will not be first-time watches (#22 & #67-85 upon initial list creation). I tried to make sure all of the ones that were meeting criteria were first-time watches (except for The Wizard of Oz), but since I didn't have as much stuff in my Watchlist this year for Horror movies I thought I would add on some Horror movies I have been wanting to revisit and review. Also, I should be able to complete all the criteria with the first 22 films (as of the initial list creation time), so I will probably prioritize those first. Everything after that is technically a bonus film, so depending on how much stuff is coming off the Criterion Channel in October I may just extend this challenge as long as I feel like continuing with the theme in order to keep getting rid of some stuff I'd like to get to that I don't generally prioritize. Unwatched films at the end will be deleted, though if I finish all of these before the end of October I may add additional ones to finish out the month.

*By my math I only watched fifteen Horror movies between Hooptober last year and this year, which means there was one other one that I had watched previously that received the tag sometime in the last year (down from 23 the previous year). I'm not sure why the genre tags on this site change so frequently, but it's rather annoying.

**This can include any of the following: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, or Uzbekistan.