‘Sinners’: Can Ryan Coogler’s Chiller Make It To The Oscars? Plus, 10 Terrifyingly Good Horror Triple Bills To Watch This Halloween

This weekend, Ryan Coogler’s genre-stretching box office smash Sinners, starring not but two Michael B. Jordans, returns to cinemas for a limited engagement, ostensibly for the creepy holiday season — but could Warner Bros. have an ulterior motive for the re-release? Although Coogler’s movie debuted in April, industry pundits believe the film has been a sleeper hit with critics and could make a dramatic comeback in the upcoming Oscar season.

Writer Clark Collis — author of the recent book Screaming and Conjuring, an exhaustive account of the horror genre’s dramatic resurgence over the last 30 years — believes that it might. “I think there is a good chance of Sinners winning a major award or two at the upcoming Oscars,” he says. “The Academy likes to reward commercial success, and Ryan Coogler would seem to be overdue a trophy of some sort. It may come down to whether voters want to salute a film in which Michael B. Jordan fights vampires or Leonardo DiCaprio fights Sean Penn.”

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On the negative side, there is the age-old and not entirely disproven theory that the Academy is biased against horror films, even after its recent influx of younger and more diverse voters (and, no, The Silence of the Lambs doesn’t really count). Says Collis, “The Academy has periodically voted to give Oscars to horror films, from The Exorcist to Misery to Get Out. But horror fans, myself included, will always believe that there is a level of prejudice against the genre and we will never forgive the fact that Toni Collette did not get a nomination for Hereditary.”

Meanwhile, to get us into the Halloween spirit, Collis has drawn up a list of 10 horror triple bills, ranging from the mildly spooky to the abjectly terrifying…

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Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams in ‘28 Years Later‘.

Sony

A 2025 HORROR FILM TRIPLE BILL
28 Years Later
Weapons
Sinners
A scary number of horror movies have been released this year, but which would best play nicely (or nastily) with one another? I recommend kicking off your triple bill of 2025 terror tales with filmmaker Danny Boyle’s long-awaited zombie sequel 28 Years Later, followed by Zach Cregger’s creepy puzzle box Weapons. To conclude, viewers should follow the blood trail to Ryan Coogler’s smash hit Sinners, a period vampire tale with not one but two great performances from Michael B. Jordan. Be advised, despite the movie’s two hours-plus length, definitely stick around for a mid-credits sequence that, for once, offers viewers something substantial into which they can sink their teeth. Acceptable alts for any film you may have seen too recently include Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey and Elric Kane’s dating drama-cum-ghost story The Dead Thing.

A HORROR-COMEDY TRIPLE BILL
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
Want to spend your Halloween screaming and laughing? Begin the night by traveling to London with 2004’s riotously hilarious zombie movie Shaun of the Dead, and then shamble over to Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, for Jennifer’s Body, a Diablo Cody-scripted box office bomb now widely regarded as an underappreciated classic. Conclude the triple bill with filmmaker Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep, starring Bruce Campbell as an aged nursing home resident who may or may not be Elvis Presley but definitely has an issue with the re-animated Egyptian resident killing off his fellow oldsters.

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A TONY TODD TRIPLE BILL
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
Candyman (1992)
Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)
The horror community lost one of its most beloved figures in November of last year when Tony Todd passed away at the age of 69 following a battle with stomach cancer. The actor first impressed genre fans with his performance as Ben in 1990’s Night of the Living Dead — a remake of George A. Romero’s classic zombie tale, directed by special makeup effects wizard Tom Savini — and confirmed his horror-icon status by playing the titular hook-handed killer in 1992’s Candyman. The clearly ailing Todd’s cameo in this year’s Final Destination Bloodlines added a layer of heart to the horror in the franchise reboot, another of 2025’s genre blockbusters.

AN ANTHOLOGY-HORROR TRIPLE BILL
Creepshow (1982)
V/H/S/2 (2013)
Trick ’R Treat (2007)
Why settle for just three scary stories when you can triple, or even quadruple, your fright-focused fun with a trio of anthology films. Inspired by vintage horror comics, 1982’s Creepshow came from the twisted minds of director George A. Romero and screenwriter Stephen King, the latter of whom also plays a doomed, meteor-encountering farmer in segment “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.” 2013’s V/H/S/2 is the second entry in the ongoing V/H/S franchise and features one of the horror anthology subgenre’s most unforgettable stories with “Safe Haven,” about a cult in Indonesia. Finally, writer-director Michael Dougherty’s Halloween-set Trick ’r Treat is an incredibly fun collection of interlinked yarns starring Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker and Brian Cox, who based his long-haired look in the movie on legendary horror director John Carpenter.

A HALLOWEEN FRANCHISE TRIPLE BILL
Halloween (1978)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Halloween (2007)
Speaking of John Carpenter (and Halloween-set horror), the slasher franchise that the director created with producer and co-writer Debra Hill unsurprisingly has become a must-watch for genre fans over spooky season. Start your triple bill with the original Halloween, a still-gripping scare machine in which Jamie Lee Curtis’ babysitter Laurie Strode is relentlessly menaced by the masked Michael Myers. The third entry in the series, 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch, was not a success on release, with potential audiences put off by the absence of Myers, but the reputation of director Tommy Lee Wallace’s film about lethal Halloween masks has since been elevated by aficionados. Both Jamie Lee and Michael were back for filmmaker David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween, a brutal sequel to Carpenter’s original and the first film in a new trilogy that would continue with 2021’s Halloween Kills and 2022’s Halloween Ends.

‘Psycho’ (1960)

A BLACK-AND-WHITE HORROR TRIPLE BILL
Psycho (1960)
The Haunting (1963)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 
This triple bill of vintage shockers serves as a reminder that movies don’t need to have red-colored blood — or have much in the way of blood at all — to be terrifying. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho remains a shocking experience from the Master of Suspense, and Robert Wise’s The Haunting, adapted from Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, remains a masterclass in slow-burn horror. Winding up the triple bill with James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein pays appropriate tribute to the era of the Universal Monsters while also prepping you for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s upcoming The Bride!

A FOREIGN-LANGUAGE HORROR TRIPLE BILL
[REC] (2007)
Ring (aka Ringu) (1998)
Let the Right One In (2008)
All three of these films were remade by Hollywood, but the originals are the superior watch (and you can sharpen up your foreign-language skills at the same time the movies are chilling your spine). The Spanish film [REC] stars Manuela Velasco as a TV reporter whose ride-along with a crew of firefighters turns nightmarish, and Hideo Nakata’s supernatural saga Ring is a highpoint of Japanese horror. Say good night (or “god natt”) with Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson’s touching vampire tale Let the Right One In.

A WES CRAVEN TRIPLE BILL
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Scream (1996)
Raised in a strict Baptist household, Wes Craven saw no horror films growing up, yet he went on to help reinvent the genre with these three movies. Salute the late filmmaker by viewing his grimly terrifying The Hills Have Eyes, his classic supernatural-slasher film A Nightmare on Elm Street and, lastly, his Kevin Williamson-scripted meta-tale Scream, which ushered in a new wave of teen horror and resurrected the genre as a whole.

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