Every family has the argument. One generation swears the classics are the scariest movies ever made, and the other generation finds them slow. On Episode 78, Daniel Rosenberg and his daughter Olivia settle in to have that argument on the record, one horror movie at a time.
With Halloween less than two weeks away, here is a watch list drawn from the films they cover, grouped the way the conversation unfolds.
The classics that started it
The Exorcist, from 1973, is still the benchmark people measure everything against. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, from 1980, raises the question the episode keeps coming back to. Is a movie scary because of what it shows you, or because of what it makes you wait for?
The slasher era
John Carpenter's Halloween in 1978 set the template. Friday the 13th followed in 1980, and Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. The debate here is which of these hold up for a viewer raised on faster movies, and which survive mostly on nostalgia.
Prestige and Stephen King
The Silence of the Lambs won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1992 and still gets called a masterpiece. Stephen King adaptations get their own segment, including It, the 2017 film that brought Pennywise to a new generation.
Found footage and the new wave
The Blair Witch Project in 1999 proved a tiny budget and a shaky camera could terrify a whole country, and Wes Craven's Scream in 1996 made horror fans laugh at the rules while still following them. The Conjuring universe shows how far supernatural horror has come since.
If you want the 2026 releases, Daniel and Olivia also rated the biggest movies of 2026 on Episode 89. For the newer picks on this one, Olivia and Daniel get into Sinister, Longlegs, The Substance and Backrooms, the feature film built from the internet's favorite liminal space. They also take on the bigger question of why people keep watching scary movies that disappoint them.
Why it works as a family night
The episode ends where a lot of families end up in October, on the couch with the lights off. The best part of a horror marathon is not agreeing on the rankings. It is the arguing afterward.
Their other conversation, inside the mind of a serial killer, pairs well with this list. Watch the full episode for their picks, then tell them in the comments which movie still scares you.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
