Top 10 Halloween Parties & Masquerade Balls!

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Happy Friday of a Halloween Eve our dear good friends!

So, what are your big plans for tomorrow night? Gonna go out and do a little trick or treating? Never too old for that one, right? You gonna stay in and load up on booze and herb and get down with a horror movie marathon? Always a good idea. How about Halloween Haunts…hayrides, amusement parks, themed attractions? Can never go wrong taking that avenue. Or hell, maybe you’ve got yourself a Halloween party to attend – costume ball style. Yeah, I like that idea.

As such, we thought what better way to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve than by crashing some of the coolest and creepiest cinematic bashes ever held in horror flicks. Halloween parties, costume balls, masquerade parties, semantic hair-splitting aside, if such galas are found in a known horror/thriller movie, we’re stumbling our drunk ass that a way. You down? Good! Jump in line and frequent our Top 10 Halloween Parties and Masquerade Balls above!

#2. EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

F*cking Red Cloak! We’ll continue to beat the drum for Kubrick’s masterstroke of an inadvertent swang-song, EYES WIDE SHUT, for its sublimely subliminal complexities and hypnotic dreamlike affect. I mean, how’d you like to be gormless little Tom Cruise bumbling into a Satanic sexy orgy held by high-society power-elites rocking spookily ornate masques and antiquated facades? Yeah, f*cking frightening! Of course, in the context of the film, based on a novel translated as Dream Story, the whole damn thing is likely just one elaborate, pot-induced lucid dream.

#3. PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)

Celebrating its 90th birthday this year, the inimitable Lon Chaney chiller THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is still boasts indelible imagery that’s just as disturbing (if not more) than its new generational counterparts. I mean, look how gnarly that masquerade scene would look in color if released that way back in 1925. Old grannies would be shitting their diapers! Based on the famed Gaston Leroux novel, it seems no matter how many times they try to recapture the magic established by Chaney, nothing can outlive the original. As it should be!

#1. NIGHT OF THE DEMONS (1988)

“Eat a bowl of F*ck! I’m here to PARTY!” One of the all time great Halloween horror movie scenes comes courtesy of Kevin Tenney’s NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, a nocturnally nasty bit of late 80s cheese. You know the steez, when a double fistful of young dumb teenagers decide to throw a Halloween bash at Hull House, the local funeral parlor, a seance summons an evil supernatural force. Great festive vibes and atmospheric revelry, right down to Linnea Quigley’s sexy pink panties. Or for that matter, Diora Baird brassiere in the stylish ’09 redo. A true treat indeed!

#4. THE MASQUE OF RED DEATH (1964)

Score one for the great Roger Corman for what’s likely his most skilled and accomplished of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations. In THE MASQUE OF RED DEATH, Corman bestows the power to all time horror great Vincent Price (PHIBES!), who here plays a Satanic worshiping dark prince who ravages a small town under the scourge of the Red Plague. But soon, when Price invites guests to attend his Gothic masked ball, a mysterious figure in a red costume seizes opportunity when the Prince mistakes him for the devil in disguise.

#5. HALLOWEEN 5: REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS’ (1989)

It only took five films, but damn are we glad that Michael Myers got to rip, slash, strip and thrash his way through at least one bona fide Halloween party in his illustrious 3-decade reign of terror. Only seems right! HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS is that flick, as Myers wickedly waylays a pair of unsuspecting teens in the tower farm All Hallows Eve soiree. Not only that, my man pulls out the pitchfork and scythe to conduct his brand of carnage, jousting Spitz in the back and shredding Sam’s chest wide open.

#6. TERROR TRAIN (1980)

All aboard the motherf*cking TERROR TRAIN! What a great conceit. Now granted, the holiday in celebration is actually New Years Eve, not Halloween, but for all intents and purposes (not to mention color scheme and festive rituals), the outcome is the same. When a handful of college throw a masked NYE bash on a moving locomotive, a sadistic slaughterer has boarded the train in order to exact revenge for a prank pulled on him 3 years prior. Extremely solid slasher whodunit with scream queen vet Jamie Lee Curtis in her horror halcyon prime.

#7. DONNIE DARKO (2001)

Come on now, who wouldn’t want to hit up Darko’s pad on Halloween for a night of angst-ridden mystification? We’ve got “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division and “Under the Milky Way” by The Church on the speakers, we’ve got a tapped keg and Ronald’s four stolen beers, we’ve got Maggie Gyllenhaal looking hot as hell in a Cleopatra getup, and of course, our titular antihero’s twisted visions of liquid spears emanating throughout the orange and black dipped abode. F*cking party time!

#8. THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

The murderous masquerade ball in the THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES is equal parts riotously regal and bizarrely barbarous. We love this movie! If you’ve not seen it, old Vinny Price stars as the disfigured Dr. Phibes, who is dead-set on serving Biblical vengeance on the 9 doctors who he deems culpable for his wife’s death. This includes sneaking up on one of the docs at a costume party, where, in a scene quite similar to Brad Pitt’s demise in THE COUNSELOR, cinches a sharpened brace around the guy’s neck (in a giant frog head) until slowly kills the poor sumbitch. The good doctor knows best!

#9. LABYRINTH (1986)

As if Bowie’s androgynous glam-rock mullet wasn’t unsettling enough, poor Jennifer Connelly is thrown headlong into a dizzying era of bizarre puppet-faced Jim Henson creatures in the 1986 cult curio LABYRINTH. You know, what starts mildly sweet and romantic soon pitches into panic when Connelly is quickly cordoned by entire room full of rapacious Victorian and Venetian era masked men and women on the sexual advance. Talk about a goddamn nightmare!

#10. SWEENEY TODD (2007)

Leave it up to the fancifully Gothic stylings of Tim Burton to sweep THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET up in lavish masquerade romp. Always one for the operatically macabre, here Burton gets to imbue his own trademark sense of fashion and costuming. Hell, is that even a Beetlejuice getup I see on the right side over there? Now, granted, the ball doesn’t play a hugely significant role in the film per se, but if there’s one viciously vile Victorian era costume party that’s worthy of attending, it’s the one thrown by SWEENEY TODD!