“Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas,” back in a couple of theaters and now in 3-D, is a good pick for Halloween viewing.

Touchstone Pictures

It’s the time of year when vampires and zombies and ghosts are on everyone’s mind and this Halloween Hollywood has unleashed more than its share of ghouls down at the multiplex.

Best is “Zombieland,” a tongue-in-cheek horror road movie that’s loaded with surprises. Set in a near-future world where a strange disease has infected most of the populace, it revolves around four survivors who try to make it from Texas to the West Coast. It’s not easy what with zombies everywhere, from little-girl zombies to bride zombies to stripper zombies. One character has come up with dozens of rules on how to avoid them — Rule #1 Cardio (the ability to outrun the fleet-footed zombies); Rule #31 (always check the back seat before driving off); Rule #17 (don’t be a hero). The rules pop up in bold letters on screen to remind the hero of what must be done. This is zany horror at its best, something that will make you laugh and squirm at the same time.

Unfortunately, the wonderfully titled “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant” will only make you squirm. After a clever opening sequence in which the title character is seen playing a hand-held video game in his six-feet-under coffin, the film winds up disappointingly low in both horror and comedy. Too bad because there’s a funny performance by John C. Reilly as a 200-year-old vampire, not to mention the Monkey Girl and Evra the Snake Boy. But then, no doubt the PG-13 rating de-fanged the film.

Of course, there’s always the old reliable cut-up horrors of the “Saw” movies. This year it’s “Saw VI.” Yet with a story line that hasn’t changed very much since the original’s debut in 2004, this year saw “Saw VI” open well behind “Paranormal Activity” in its second week of wide release. That film, which cost about $15,000 to produce and has already made more than $40 million with virtually no advertising other than word of mouth, continues to grow. Much of it was shot in grainy black-and-white video footage as a couple set up a camera in their bedroom to record whatever it is that’s scaring them at night. Is it a ghost? A demon? Their imagination? Some feel “Paranormal Activity” is a descendant of “The Blair Witch Project,” another cheapo horror that kept audiences on the edge of their seats.

A favorite that has been brought back to a couple of theaters is “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas,” now in 3-D. It’s rated PG, so it’s not really goose-bumping scary. But it has creepy-funny touches in its tale of the skeletal Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, who tires of the annual ghoul fest and sets his sight on becoming the next Santa Claus (or Sandy Claws as Jack calls him), without realizing what the spirit of Christmas is as he packs a sack filled with snakes and goblins.

If you can’t make it to a theater, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” is just one of many horrors that you can bring into your living room.

After you’ve passed out the last piece of candy to the ghouls and goblins with their trick-or-treat bags, you can turn off the lights and plop yourself down in front of the video screen for some ghoulish chills all your own. It’s best to watch these classic — and not so classic — horror films cuddled up to someone warm, whether it’s the favorite person in your life or your favorite cat . . . preferably black.

Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Mummy are all pretty durable creatures whose stories never dim in the retelling. But some people would prefer something a little more recent — Freddy Krueger and his long nails scratching out horror on Elm Street, Jason in his hockey mask doing away with countless annoying young people in the Friday the 13th flicks or Michael Myers, who kept returning home from that asylum with murder on his mind in the Halloween series.

We first were terrified by flesh-eating zombies who came out of their coffins to feast on the living in George Romero’s low-budget, but still very effective, “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968. The creatures mindlessly and persistently kept coming at their victims who, in the scariest sequence of all, have locked themselves in a house. The theme was so effective that Romero kept remaking it — “Dawn of the Dead,” “Day of the Dead,” “Land of the Dead” — and was copied by other filmmakers as well — “28 Days Later,” “28 Weeks Later.”

The horror of “Night of the Living Dead” and its many copycats was, of course, the idea that something very terrible was waiting in the dark, ready to jump out at you. That idea was used most effectively by Titanic director James Cameron in “Aliens,” his 1986 follow-up to Ridley Scott’s 1979 hit “Alien,” which first introduced us to the long-toothed, reptilian monster from a dead planet. “Aliens” went the original film at least 50 times better as Sigourney Weaver, the heroine of the first film, visited the Alien nursery on a hostile planet where the monsters were being hatched on an assembly-line basis. Backed up by a platoon of Marines, she and the producers discovered that you could get a lot more mileage, and scares, when you had dozens of the toothy critters lying in wait in the dark.

For something a little closer to Earth, there’s “The Exorcist,” listed by many people as still the scariest movie of all time. When first released in 1973, the film created mass hysteria, with members of the audience fainting and even vomiting in the aisles, right along with Linda Blair on screen as the girl whose body had been commandeered by the devil. Her head spinning, the furniture flying, “The Exorcist” remains an eerie horror classic.

Some people might vote for Bela Lugosi as the scariest vampire of all in 1931’s “Dracula.” But an even eerier, scarier version of the Dracula tale was the 1922 silent version made in Germany by director F.W. Murnau, “Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror.” Gnome-like Max Schreck, with his super-sized fingernails and bloodshot eyes, is a frightening sight on his own. Add in Murnau’s shadowy touches and you have a true nightmare. Prefer sound and color? You can get an approximation of Murnau’s efforts in director Werner Herzog’s 1979 “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” starring Klaus Kinski as a suitably creepy Phantom of the Night.

Boris Karloff was such a success as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in 1931’s “Frankenstein” that he, like Bela Lugosi after “Dracula,” became one of the go-to guys in Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s if you wanted movie frights. “Frankenstein” itself is a still ghoulish delight. It’s on screen at Friday at 9:30 p.m. in Newport’s Jane Pickens Theater, or you can pick up one of the (widely available) copies that have added footage deemed too chilling for 1931 audiences. For a different spin on the subject, take a look at Mel Brooks’ comedy-horror “Young Frankenstein,” which spoofs the classic film, but adds clever touches all its own.

One year later, Karloff was covered in bandages for his other most famous role as “The Mummy.” One of the most terrifying moments in all horror films occurs near the start of this film when an archaeologist, alone with the Mummy in a recently reopened tomb, realizes that the Mummy has come to life, has left its sarcophagus and is at his elbow. The man’s bloodcurdling scream is a classic. The sequence is still frightening even though all director Karl Freund shows us of this encounter are the mummy wrappings being dragged across the floor as the Mummy makes his exit.

For not-so-familiar films that still give a jolt, choose one of these:

“Carnival of Souls” is a super low-budget movie, and yet an extremely effective horror tale that was made on the plains of Kansas and the area around the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Although it had few play dates when it first released to theaters in 1962, it has had much more success on DVD. Candace Hilligoss stars as a woman who gets run off a bridge in her car, but lives (or does she?) and takes a job as a church organist. But she’s unnerved that she’s being shadowed by a group of silent dancing ghouls that only she can see. Occasionally she goes invisible herself, a sort of phantom figure in the cult film and a premonition of things to come.

In the nearly forgotten “The Changeling,” George C. Scott plays a college professor who witnesses the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter at the film’s start. Haunted by this moment, he rents an enormous house where he soon discovers that he’s not alone. For up in the locked attic is a presence, the ghost of a little boy who was murdered there long ago and who now wants the professor to solve his murder and put his soul at rest. This intelligent film, played by a good cast that includes Melvyn Douglas and Trish Van Devere, is a horror worth investigating.

Another very good haunted-house tale, “The Others,” stars Nicole Kidman as a young mother who comes with her two children to a remote British island to await the return of her husband from the war. But when the servants mysteriously leave one night and are replaced by a new group, things get a little edgier, especially with the mother’s fragile state and her insistence that every room be locked tight when anyone leaves it. Is she going crazy or are there really ghostly doings in the house?

Children can have their own horrors on the video screen this season as well. Besides “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas,” you can ride with the Headless Horseman in Walt Disney’s 1949 animated short version of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Narrated by Bing Crosby, the film features a still reasonably scary trek through the woods where the Headless Horseman awaits. It will provide many happy hauntings.

mjanuson@projo.com