If you have ever grabbed your arm rest in fright while watching the recent Halloween remake or buried your face in your scarf (as I often do during the scary parts of movies) when a particular stanza in the Dawn of the Dead score made you jump, you are already familiar with composer Tyler Bates‘ work. With Halloween upon us, I thought it only appropriate to sit down with Bates to pick his brain about all things horror from his favorite scary movies to what he loves about composing for them to his favorite Halloween memories (and costumes.) Read on to hear about his experience working with directors Rob Zombie and Neil Marshall, how his early exposure to horror films may have set his current career in motion, and what may happen when you attend a wedding on Halloween.

October continues, and we’re moving to our next batch of favorite on-screen monsters. This week we’re talking about zombies and all the glorious ways George Romero changed that sub-genre forever. Originally an urban legend in Voodoo culture, the term “zombie” was forever married to an image of mobs of the undead searching for flesh to sink their rotting teeth into. It’s a friendly image, no doubt. We’ve already turned our eardrums over what Romero had to say on the commentary track for Dawn of the Dead, the sequel to this groundbreaking classic, but now we’re going back to the source. This time around, Romero has brought along two members of the cast and his co-writer, John Russo, so the conversation should be a bit livelier than creatures they all had a hand in creating on screen. So here we go, all 26 things we learned from the commentary track for Night of the Living Dead.

Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. Island of Lost Souls. The Most Dangerous Game. The Night of the Hunter. The Blob. For a company perhaps best known for releasing pristine editions of international arthouse classics, The Criterion Collection certainly has a healthy amount of cult films in its repertoire. Cult cinema is often a difficult beast to recognize, for such films avoid the roads best travelled in their journey towards recognition and renown. Unlike seminal films in the collection including The 400 Blows, 8 ½, or Rashomon, cult films aren’t typically met with immediate cultural or institutional recognition upon release, aren’t made by internationally-recognized talent, and don’t always have an immediately traceable history of influence. That is, however, what makes cult films so interesting and so valuable: they emerge without expectation or pretense and signal the most populist and anti-elite means by which a film can gain recognition, pointing to the fact that there are always valuable films potentially overlooked between the pages of history. Herk Harvey’s low-budget drive through horror masterpiece Carnival of Souls (1962), like many cult films, emerged into the top tier of film culture in some of the unlikeliest of ways. Harvey was an industrial and educational filmmaker; the $33,000 Carnival was his only feature work. The film had ten minutes lobbed off of it for its drivethru run to fit more screenings, and was largely a non-event when it first graced American screens. Carnival’s success is owed mostly to genre film festivals, late-night television

“They’re coming to get you Barbra!” This movie is a lesson to never, ever abide your elderly mother’s wishes and visit your father’s grave hundreds of miles away. If you do, you’ll get eaten to death. Or, you’ll have to hole up in a farmhouse that’s slowly but surely becoming overrun with the hungry undead. Night of the Living Dead is the first film from George A. Romero, the one that started a massive genre craze, the movie with working titles like Night of Anubis and Night of the Flesh Eaters and Monster Flick. It was a case of accidental racial and social commentary that has resonated throughout decades. It is the standard for how zombies should look and act like. Yet, for some strange reason, it doesn’t have a pie fight.

Whether it’s a mythical beast or a horrifying monster, we love it when characters change into something right before our eyes. Here’s a look at the best flicks featuring transformations.

We’re only a few weeks from Halloween and who better to get some ghoulish buzz going than director George Romero, who is beginning production on an untitled zombie film.

Before zombies were everywhere, they were terrorizing the citizens of Pittsburgh, PA, directed by the disturbed mind of a kindly man named George A. Romero.

If it’s hot where you live, but you still feel like you haven’t gotten all you can out of summer and it’s relentless, unforgiving, soul-crushing heat, here are ten movies you can watch that’ll help change your mind and keep you indoors.

It’s been 40 years since George A. Romero introduced the world to his special brand of flesh-eating zombies, and the landscape of American cinema hasn’t been the same since.