Favorite horror movies for a stormy night

I'm so busy I rarely get a chance to watch movies for fun anymore. I'll think of a list, but it will mostly be theoretical.

Never really bothered to do it but I would probably watch the original 'Friday the 13th'.

John Carpenter's original Halloween since the main story launches during a storm with Michael Meyers' escape from the mad house. A Frankenstein flick would also be appropriate.

I've been known to schedule these during a snow storm:

The Shining
Misery
Cold Prey

Hey, that’s a great question. My favorite “horror movies” are the ones that aren’t really scary yet have that great ol’ “dark and stormy night” feel to them, a night of mystery and horror, when “…the air itself with filled with monsters,” as Elsa Lanchester’s Mary Shelley puts it in Bride of Frankenstein.

And, indeed, Bride is an excellent choice for this category; it’s not really scary, but it’s beautifully atmospheric and hilarious, and the whole thing plays out in a world of dark and stormy nights. Great movie. Of the Uni classics, Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein also great dark and stormy night movies. Not Universal, but Dracula director Tod Browning’s parody of his own movie, Mark of the Vampire (’32), is wonderful, as is his The Devil-Doll (’36).

House on Haunted Hill (what a delight!) and The Old Dark House, which the OP mentioned, are also excellent. In fact, many “old dark house” pictures fit into this theme, even if they aren’t straight horrors: Night Monster (’42), The Cat and the Canary (’27), Horror Island (’41), The Black Cat (’41), Charlie Chan’s Secret (’36), and many more. I’m rather fond of a little ODH b-picture called The Girl who Dared (’44), but that’s because I watched it years ago and asked about it on IMDb’s INTK board.

I do love this film. One of those rare 80s comedies, which just gets better and funnier, every single time I re-visit it.

But I have no problem seeing that it might not suit everyones taste of comedy. Especially as this is probably far away from your "ordinary" Tom Hanks film. Still, for me, Rick Ducommun and Bruce Dern sure stole the show, where I think Hanks knew from early on, that he would not be able of "competing" with his co-workers for the comedy part, and pretty much fitted well into the more "straight" forward character, but that makes it even funnier, or so I believe.

It's odd that for all of the great iconography of 'a dark an stormy night' there really aren't that many movies that fit that bill fully. And as someone pointed out on these boards once, when you see a storm in a movie there's often lightning and thunder but you hardly ever see constant pouring rain. It's an expensive and difficult effect for a production to keep up for more than a brief sequence.


There are a couple of old good Disney shorts that have this atmosphere such as Mickey Mouse - The Haunted House from 1929 and The Old Mill from 1937. Then there's Lonesome Ghosts, also from 1937 that has a winter storm horror atmosphere.

There's another one that I remember seeing that I think might have been like a proof-of-concept/animation test where they were testing out new techniques in layered animation, but I can't find it anywhere. I feel like it's something I've seen a number of times, and I also remember seeing it as described as a test at the Disney family museum in San Francisco. I don't think it was any of the aforementioned pieces, but I suppose I could be wrong.

As said above some of the first movies that come to mind are Identity, Friday the 13th, The Old Dark House from 1933, The Old Dark House from 1963, Murder By Death from 1976, Ten Little Indians... also Clue does this pretty well.

There's a movie I've never seen but always heard about as a oddity called Thundercrack! It's evidently very hard to find, and it doesn't even come up when you search for it on IMDb, but if you Google it then Google will link you to its IMDb page. Weird. Apparently it's part narrative horror/comedy and part pornography. I've heard it's very strange and has a dark and stormy night premise and atmosphere, but I'm not entirely sure I care to see it... at least not enough to seek out what seems to be difficult to find.

As far the winter storm atmosphere goes, there seem to be more obvious ones, but I don't believe that Stephen King's Storm of the Century tv miniseries has been mentioned. I had never heard of it and watched it for the first time last winter. It's actually pretty good, and fits the dark-and-stormy night thing in a way that other wintry movies don't necessarily.


I also see that there's a movie from 2009 called Dark and Stormy Night that's listed as a horror/comedy, but that also doesn't seem to be especially well liked.

Considering how much things have changed for the past 10-11 months, around the world. I guess a lot of people have gotten used, either they like or not, in getting much "closer" to knowing their neighbors and their daily routines, maybe even so, more than they ever wanted to.

I am just glad my neighbors are pretty much in the "not knowing them that much or close" category.
Not really many nosy/noisy ones, in my building.