ADMIT TWO · October Date Night · Seats: Back Row, Armrest Up
Picking a horror movie for two is harder than picking one for yourself. One of you wants to jump, the other wants a story, and later you both have to turn the lights off.
Our fix is horror about relationships. Movies about dating, marriage and love going sideways give you the scares, plus something to argue about on the walk to the kitchen. This year's big one proved the point: Curry Barker's Obsession, a supernatural horror film made for somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, finished at $520 million worldwide (Wikipedia, Box Office Mojo).
Heads up: every pick below is on goodrecmovies, and every one in the main list is a horror movie. Two non-horror cousins get their own labeled spot at the bottom. A couple of these are heavy, and we say so.
Tear the stub: love-gone-wrong horror for two
Bear (Michael Johnston) works at a music store with his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) and can't bring himself to tell her how he feels. So he breaks a novelty "One Wish Willow" and wishes she loved him more than anyone in the world (Wikipedia, Variety). The wish works. That's the problem. If you've already seen it, this is the one to put on for the partner who hasn't.
/Film calls this the closest match to Obsession story-wise: two horror films about a lonely man who gets his dream girl and pays the price (/Film). A widower (Ryo Ishibashi) lets his film-producer friend stage fake auditions so he can meet someone new, and the young woman he picks (Eihi Shiina) has a dark past (Wikipedia). /Film notes that its earliest audiences berated Takashi Miike himself, and the last act is famously hard to watch, so know that going in. Subtitled.
Scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) starts dating journalist Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis) while building teleportation pods, then sends himself through one without noticing a fly got in with him (Wikipedia). Ronnie watches the man she's falling for change, in body and in personality. David Cronenberg made a body-horror movie that plays like a love story, and its makeup effects won the Oscar for Best Makeup (Wikipedia).
Dani (Florence Pugh) and her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) are already drifting apart. He'd been planning to break up with her, but after an argument he brings her along to a once-every-90-years midsummer festival at a commune in rural Sweden (Wikipedia). Ari Aster built the film around a deteriorating relationship, inspired by a difficult breakup of his own (Wikipedia). Best watched with someone you're on solid ground with.
Mark (Sam Neill), a spy, comes home to West Berlin and learns his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) is seeing another man and wants to separate. What she does next gets stranger and stranger (Wikipedia). Andrzej Żuławski wrote it during his own painful divorce, and Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes (Wikipedia). Tom's Guide calls it the "deranged patient zero of the 'obsessive romance' trope" (Tom's Guide). It's a lot. Save it for the couple that wants a challenge.
Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) drugs her abusive boyfriend Adrian and escapes his house in the night. Two weeks later the news says he's dead, and she starts to suspect there's someone else in the room with her (Wikipedia). Leigh Whannell turned H.G. Wells's monster into a movie about being stalked and gaslit by an ex. It deals directly with abuse, so check in with your partner before you press play.
Dracula (Gary Oldman) sees a picture of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), fiancée of his solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and believes she is his dead wife Elisabeta reborn (Wikipedia). Francis Ford Coppola plays it as gothic horror and doomed romance at once, with Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing. The site lists it as Horror, Romance and Fantasy, which is exactly right for date night.
As a lonely girl, Ellen prays for a companion and accidentally forms a psychic link with the Nosferatu. Years later she's married to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), whose employer sends him to Transylvania to sell a crumbling manor to the reclusive Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). Orlok takes Thomas's locket, the one holding a lock of Ellen's hair (Wikipedia). Robert Eggers's remake of the 1922 silent classic stars Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen.
Park Chan-wook's vampire horror, with a love affair at its center. A Catholic priest (Song Kang-ho) volunteers for a vaccine experiment, catches the virus it was meant to stop, and ends up a vampire. He also falls for Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the wife of his childhood friend, who lives with her sickly husband and an overprotective mother-in-law (Wikipedia). It's based on Émile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin and won the Jury Prize at Cannes (Wikipedia). Subtitled.
The oldest ticket in the stack. Henry Frankenstein wants out of the life-making business, but his old mentor Dr. Pretorius and the Monster himself pressure him into building the Monster a mate (Wikipedia). Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride. More than 90 years on, it's still a great pick for a first scary date.
Not horror, but they belong on date night
A psychological thriller, not a horror movie. On their fifth anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) comes home to find his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) missing, and the media decides he's acting suspicious (Wikipedia). The scares come from the marriage itself, with news vans parked outside. Go in knowing as little as you can.
A sci-fi thriller, not a horror movie. Programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a week at his CEO's isolated home to test whether a humanoid AI named Ava (Alicia Vikander) can really think, and the two grow close (Wikipedia). If the part of Obsession that stuck with you was a crush that isn't what it looks like, start here.
Want more for the couch? The full best horror movies list is here. If one of you can't do blood, try scary movies that aren't gory, and if you'd rather skip the scares and keep the heat, there's the steamiest movies of all time.