Top image: Rosemary’s Baby (1968) dir. Roman Polanski 

Above all else, Halloween is about digging out those ultimate frighteners and getting a bit jumpy. The hardest part of it all? Deciding which horror flicks to make up your hair-raising movie marathon. No fear, we’ve heard your howls and asked some of Hollywood’s most exciting young names for their horror film recommendations. Welcome to The Collective Scream of Young Hollywood: an insider’s guide to crapping your pants. Fill your boots. Or underwear.

Earlier this year Alex Wolff starred in Ari Aster’s debut feature, Hereditary, a film centred on the toxicity of family in what was easily one of the strongest horror releases of the last decade. Wolff was superb as Toni Collette’s possessed son, who lives in fear of his mother for the duration of the film, as a fraught relationship steadily worsens and ultimately culminates in the film’s catatonic climax. In many of its themes regarding motherhood, the possession of female bodies and satanism, the film belongs to the same lineage as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, coincidentally a favourite of Wolff’s and a film that was referenced in selling him Aster’s vision.

Alex Wolff selects Rosemary’s Baby (1968) dir. Roman Polanski:

“My favourite horror movie and one of my favourite movies – period – is Rosemary’s Baby. The scene where Mia Farrow starts saying she doesn’t wanna be apart of Ruth Gordon’s odd pregnancy rituals anymore and wants to go to a real, regular doctor, while John Cassavetes angrily paces around the room getting undressed for the night is one of the greatest scenes in cinematic history. I believe it’s all done in one shot and as it pushes in on them, the blistering argument reaches a peak and for the first time in the film the pain of her pregnancy stops. Right on cue.

The movie is a masterpiece.”