Now, you’ll quickly realize that I don’t love gore horror and jump scare horror can be done really well and I’ll like it, but I do love me some B horror. So this list might have a little of those on it, but it’s going to be a lot of more monster feature shows that really feel like Halloween to me.

Stranger Things

Got to start off with the classic, if you haven’t watched it, I will say it’s not that scary if that’s what has been holding you back. The way this type of show is described is as “Kids on Bikes”. That means that you’re dealing with almost an adventure story, but with elements of horror thrown in as the kids are trying to figure out everything that is going on. Normally there is some element of the parents not believing them and the kids being right in the end and probably a teenager who is a non-believer who ends up helping in the end. Stranger Things definitely follows a lot of those tropes, but it builds upon them in interesting ways and while a lot of the 80’s Kids on Bikes style horror or just horror in general that this is based off suffered from poorer writing, Stranger things has very solid writing. Overall just a wonderful Halloween feeling show.

The Order

This one is as much a teen drama as a horror show, but you follow Jack Morton as he gets into the Hermetic Order of the Blue Rose, a secret, and magic, organization that his mother had gotten into before her mysterious death. This one is all about the monsters, the crazy magic, college aged kids, and basically anything and everything that could go wrong going wrong. This is not a serious horror show at all, but the monsters in it, the magic in it, if you want campy Halloween that somehow still takes itself seriously, this one is pretty solid for that. Don’t expect anything ground breaking, but sit back and enjoy a pretty convoluted ride.

Supernatural

If you want your Halloween show to take itself a bit more seriously, at least some of the time, Supernatural might be the right show for you. This is still monster of the week, but with CW melodrama. This ranges from a show that is straight up horror as it goes through it’s monster of the week to one that is extremely self aware and back again to horror. There’s a lot of this show, so if you wanted to wrap it up before Halloween, don’t plan on sleeping.

Ghost Hunt

This one is a bit different because it’s an anime. This one, as the name suggests is all about hunting ghosts. Teenagers hunting ghosts to be specific, but it does a good job of blending some wonderful horror elements together with some pretty fast and witty dialog in it as well. This has an interesting feel to it as well because being anime, the horror elements are more Japanese which is something that we have a vague idea of because of things like The Ring or as was hinted at in Cabin the Woods, but even those are an Americanized version of that. If you don’t know if you like anime, but you do like horror this is less “anime” in the sense of what people generally would consider.

Helix

Finale one for the list, and I do like to highlight some different ones, even though Stranger Things and Supernatural should always show up. But Helix takes horror in another direction. Playing off of the vibes of the The Thing, this Sci-Fi channel show is all about surviving in the Antarctic when something is going horribly wrong at the scientific outpost. It has a lot of those, who is or isn’t infected aspect of it going on, and overall, I enjoyed it when I watched it a while back. It’s one that I want to revisit as I know I never completely finished it that second season. If you want something that is more true horror and less Halloween horror, Helix definitely leans into that.

What are some other ones I could have or should have mentioned? I can think of a lot of them, and maybe next year I’ll do a massive Halloween show list or put out some sort of bigger list with a ton of different shows and types of Halloween shows so you can pick the ones that look best to you to watch.

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For a campaign though, I think that you have to find some lower level monster that seems classic campy horror that starts out harrowing the town that the 0 level or maybe level 1 characters are based out of.

Just as an aside, you might be wondering what a 0 level character is. That is basically that you’re just playing a villager, someone who wants to become a wizard might have a cantrip or two, but no first level spells. The characters probably don’t have anything more than a rusty short sword and a little bit of leather armor at best. Basically, you are really leaning into them launching into being heroes.

Anyways, back to what I’m going for. In the world you’re building these monsters should be normal. The players should know that the scary castle a long way up in the mountains that seems to be always casting a shadow over this town as a monster in it. They should know that the woods has werewolves in it. The creature from the Black Lagoon should be a few towns over, and this is a world that has campy and classic monsters around.

Now, something like this could just be the monster of a week, and while that is going to be good for a little while, eventually I think you should start dropping hints of something or someone bigger controlling everything. You don’t need to use Strahd’s stat block for your vampire lord, it can be lesser than that. I think that it would make sense for a Mummy Lord (or maybe a Lich) to be running this group. They are experimenting with other ways to extend life or something like that, or maybe the bodies are going missing and the Mummy Lord is using the monsters to kill off to create an army of the shambling dead.

I’d play around with whomever your BBEG is, give them some sort of curse. And make that a way either for the players to eventually win by solving the riddles and taking care of the mummy’s curse, or the riddles/curse could just reveal a weakness that the players will be able to exploit. The BBEG should also be very into monologues and having that evil genius mindset, though that might make more sense for an evil wizard in a tower or a lich as compared to a mummy lord, so there are different ways that you can lean into campiness and movie monsters.

What would probably take the most time would be finding those classic monsters you want to use. Some of them don’t fully exist in D&D. However, there are going to be things close, and just reskin them so that they look like what you need at the challenge level you need. And if you wanted to you could also pull in horror movie villains like Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees for your game to flesh out the cast of characters. Or you could also steal monsters from things like The Dresden Files and Supernatural to get an idea of how to be a bit campy, but also to use a wide variety of monsters instead of just limiting yourself to the classic movie monsters.

I think that something like this could be interesting for a game personally. It would allow you to pull in the players real knowledge of these things while they have to deal with them in the game. And it wouldn’t have to be a super high level campaign at the end, but you’d get a nice building feeling, especially starting at level 0 and going up.

What do you think? Would you want to play in this game? Have you used classic movie and movie monsters in your games?

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