Halloween Kills, the latest entry in the enduring slasher movie franchise, is (if you’ll pardon the pun) killing it at the box office this weekend. Despite being available on streaming site Peacock, the box office take for the splatter-fest is north of $50 million, which is the biggest opening for both a horror movie since the pandemic started AND the best take for a movie debuting simultaneously in theaters and on a streaming site at no extra cost.

But it goes without saying that films that rely on gore for its scares – and the Halloween series definitely goes above and beyond in that department – are not for everyone. Some people like a good scare, but would prefer that their scary movies feature more psychological terror and less blood and guts. If that sounds like you, luckily there are plenty of films that have chills and thrills to choose from this spooky season. For your Halloween viewing pleasure, here are ten frightening flicks you can enjoy without having to cover your eyes the whole time.

PSYCHO (1960)

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller stars Janet Leigh, who is not only one of the original Scream Queens, she is the mother of Halloween actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who obviously comes by her horror movie qualifications honestly. This movie does feature a famously frightening kill, namely the infamous shower scene, but thanks to clever and quick edits, the audience may not even realize that they never see the weapon going into Leigh’s body. (Also, it’s in black and white, and Hitch used chocolate syrup to portray the blood.) Leigh’s character (spoiler alert!) dies pretty early on in the film though, and the real terror comes from getting to know Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who hides a disturbing secret. That twist ending was meant to be a secret, and Hitchcock extracted a promise from everyone involved in the film that they wouldn’t divulge it. We won’t, so if you don’t already know it, watch the film before All Hallow’s Eve.

THE SHINING (1980)

All work and no play make Jack (Jack Nicholson) a bad boy. Adapted by Stanley Kubrick from Stephen King’s novel, The Shining is a cautionary tale that shows what can happen if you lock yourself off from the world with your family over a snowy Colorado winter. Spoiler: it’s not pretty. Also a spoiler: this is not a bloodless movie, but the scares come from Jack Torrance terrorizing his family as his sanity and self-control completely unravels. Is he crazy? Possessed? If you’re Shelley Duvall, hiding from your axe-wielding better half, does it really matter?

POLTERGEIST (1982)

“They’re here!” In Poltergeist, a little girl draws the attention of some very bad things indeed after her family moves to a new housing development inconveniently placed atop an old Indian burial ground. Oops. JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson star as the parents of little Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke), who with her two siblings have to fight off demons in the television, creepy clown dolls (shudder!) and killer trees in this picture. The film doesn’t feature the popular definition of poltergeists – i.e. mischievous ghosts – but it does have a swimming pool full of malevolent spirits that will have you gripping the edge of your seat…and checking out the provenance of the land your house is built on. The film also carries some real-life horror as well: two of its young stars died way before their time. O’Rourke died of intestinal stenosis at age 12 while working on Poltergeist III, and Dominique Dunne, who played her big sister, was murdered by her boyfriend the same year the movie was released.

THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)

M. Night Shyamalan’s first “big twist” movie was The Sixth Sense, which starred Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment as a kid who was able to see dead people. The film was a sleeper hit: it didn’t do big box office in theaters but was a big hit by the time it was released to DVD, probably as people realized that there was a major reveal at the end (one which surprised a good chunk of the audience. Osment’s Cole talks to a few dead folks whose bodies have seen better days, but for the most part this is a gore-free, but chilling story.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

One of the earliest “found footage” films, The Blair Witch project is scarier for what it doesn’t show than for what it does. In search of a local legend, three amateur documentarians, director Heather, cameraman Josh and sound guy Mike hike into the gloomy Black Hills Forest to find the fabled Blair Witch. After they disappeared, the only clues to what happened come from the raw footage they left behind. Whatever happened during their creepy five-day journey we may never know, but it is definitely not on that footage. In this film, danger is always lurking, for all that it is camera shy. Even though we don’t see it, though, it is there, and it is deadly. Three unknowns (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard) played the leads, lending authenticity to the idea that this wasn’t a movie, but something that really happened.

THE RING (2002)

Whether you slide The Ring, or the Japanese film it’s a remake of, 1998’s Ringu into the VCR, prepare for a slow burn. In The Ring, Naomi Watts plays a  journalist must investigate a mysterious videotape which seems to cause the death of anyone one week to the day after they view it. Naturally, in order to do her research, she has to watch the tape, and then start the seven-day wait for whatever is coming to dispatch her (and her son, who also watched the cursed thing). If you don’t get the heebie-jeebies as the seaweed-haired Samara crab-walks out of a well in the video, well you are made of stern stuff indeed. The success of The Sixth Sense is what convinced Paramount to give the green light to this remake, which kick-started a slew of Japanese movie remakes, including The Grudge, Dark Water, Pulse and One Missed Call.

CORALINE (2009)

A stop-motion movie based on a children’s book shouldn’t be this unsettling, should it? Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline is in fact for kids, but not all kids, and the same applies to the movie. When Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) moves to an old house, she feels bored and neglected by her parents, and while exploring she finds a hidden door with a bricked-up passage. During the night, she crosses the passage and finds a parallel world where everybody has buttons instead of eyes, where she has attentive parents and all her dreams come true….except it’s really a nightmare world. Prepare to get the shivers when the button-eyed Other Mother (Teri Hatcher) invites Coraline to stay in her world forever and ever and ever.

THE CONJURING (2013)

When a family moves into a house that turns out to be possessed by grabby spirits, they put up with it through the first mortgage payment then decide that They Need to Do Something. Matriarch Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor) contacts the noted paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson), to examine the house. The Warrens discover that the whole area is lousy with evil spirits that are now targeting the Perron family wherever they go. To stop this evil, the Warrens call upon all their exorcising skills and spiritual strength to defeat this spectral menace at its source before it can destroy everyone involved. The Conjuring director James Wan took this film and used it as the basis of a extended universe of demonic terror in movies like Annabelle and The Nun, but the original film is more chilling and well-made than anything that came after.

THE BABADOOK (2014)

The Babadook is a nightmare come to life. I mean, just look at it! Amelia (Essie Davis), who lost her husband in a car crash on the way to give birth to her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), struggles to cope with life as a depressed, sleep-deprived single mom. Samuel’s is a terrified little thing, with a persistent fear of monsters. The two read a strange book they find in their house, one that tells the tale of the ‘Babadook’ monster that hides in the dark areas of their house. After thus conjuring it to life, she desperately tries to destroy the book in the hopes that the monster will take the hint and leave them alone. In addition to being scary, the movie plays like an allegory for those bad things that remain with us for a long time, like grief. Indeed, the Babadook says “the more you deny, the stronger I get” just as how attempts to suppress or ignore a problem cause it to fester or become exacerbated.

GET OUT (2017)

From producer-director Jordan Peele, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay, comes this unusual and original tale of terror. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) go upstate to visit her parents for the weekend. At first, Chris reads the family’s overly accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter’s interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that is more frightening than anything he could have imagined. Nor could we, the audience, have foreseen something so bone-chilling as the twist offered by this movie. Though it is at times pants-wettingly frightening, stay tuned until the very end for a satisfying payoff.