Choosing the 2026 Spooktober Theme
Every Spooktober begins with too many movies and no theme yet. Then someone makes a suggestion, everyone takes a different meaning from it, and eventually we have a film festival.
This year we had four people picking: me, Linh, Emm, and (NEW CHALLENGER) my sister Anna. I opened the group chat on September 3. My first proposal was to make the list a little smaller: two themes, two movies per person, eight official selections. Enough for a good weekend festival, but spread across October so we might actually watch them.
Apparently the 2000s are old now
We considered slashers, human horror without supernatural elements (and vice versa) and practical effects. As a purposeful counterpoint to current AI-craze, I floated practical-effects-only horror. Tom Savini-style effects got an enthusiastic response, but alas, we chose otherwise.
The breakthrough suggestion came from my lil sis, who said she’d been getting into older horror. Emm and I excitedly started talking about stuff from the twentieth century, but Anna quickly corrected us. Okay, fine, I’m old. Twenty-first century it is.
The 2000s are old now — the age joke.
It was a good constraint, though. Familiar enough to have plenty of shared reference points, but with enough things we hadn’t seen—or hadn’t seen in twenty years—to make discovery possible. Emm started playing with Y2K names, including Y2Kill. We landed on Y2K: Yearn to Kill.
Not movies about the millennium bug. Movies from that era. The working range I clarified in the chat was 1999–2009.
Agreeing on a theme, repeatedly
With a theme in hand, we’d only just begun. I started pitching further sub-themes, ways for each of our choices to have extra meaning. Maybe each person would be limited to one sub-genre. Or maybe we all had to pick movies featuring the same actor or director. We quickly iterated.
The ultimate rule was that each person’s films should have something in common. Same actor, same director, same setting—whatever.
Connect your picks — agreeing on the mini-theme rule.
That gave us these little double features, plus Anna’s triple feature:
- Love Hurts — my picks: The Loved Ones (2009) and May (2002).
- Process of Elimination — Emm: Mindhunters (2004) and Identity (2003).
- Depp Cut — Linh: From Hell (2001) and Secret Window (2004).
- Girls, Ghouls and Giggles — Anna: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Jennifer’s Body (2009), and Shaun of the Dead (2004).
Anna makes her picks.
Linh originally had Mindhunters. She and Emm traded it for From Hell, which made both pairings work better. The names took some negotiation, too. My first version was Relationships Are Hard. Linh quite reasonably wanted something better than ‘Johnny Depp’ as a heading.
The movie swap — Emm and Linh trade films.
A festival, not homework
The other thing we wanted back was watching roughly together. Not necessarily pressing play at precisely the same second, but at least watching the same movie around the same time so the conversation had somewhere to go.
Same day, not same second — the shared-watching idea.
We discussed a group watch and possible cinema outings. The point was to give ourselves reasons to talk about the movies, not build a second job out of watching them. By mid-October there was room for spontaneous extras, too. I have learned from previous years to have rather low expectations for adherence to any real schedule or even the list, so the list is more of a starting point!
The theme also gave us something fun to build around: a poster, a ridiculous website, and four distinct corners of the same little festival. The movies were only the beginning.
Chat screenshots are cropped; display names have been shortened or edited to match this post.
AI editing disclosure
This post was heavily AI-edited using gpt-6.1-sol via OpenAI Codex in Hermes Agent, reconstructing the story from our planning chat. The project, opinions, and direction are mine. Earlier outline assistance was not individually tracked.