Holiday weekends are always big for movie-going. Families spend Thanksgiving evening going to see Harry Potter (well, they were going to), Christmas Day perusing the Oscar hopefuls, Memorial Day helping people like Michael Bay break the bank, and the Fourth of July worshipping at the altar of Will Smith. But, even though it never gets the same attention as those others, Halloween is truly one of the biggest movie holidays of the year. Don't believe us? Go to a Blockbuster at about 7 pm Halloween night and just TRY to find a horror movie still in stock. Sure, there might be some leftover copies of House 2: The Second Story and Ghost Ship, but almost everything else will in the hungry hands of Halloween lovers who really, really want to spend their October 31st getting scared in front of their TVs.

So what haunted horror flick should you spend Halloween with? It all depends. Will you be with others and, if so, who? Audience is a BIG factor in picking the perfect Halloween movie. There are questions of appropriateness (probably shouldn't show the local Trick-r-Treaters Cannibal Holocaust), subject matter (FYI - I Spit on Your Grave is NOT a good date movie), and what you're looking to get out of the experience (do you want to spend the two hours laughing in disgust or cringing in honest-to-god terror?).

In the hopes that, this year, we can prevent desperate last-minute video store scrambles that end with you coming home with Basket Case 2, here are our picks for the PERFECT Halloween movie for almost any audience.

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... KIDS TEN AND UNDER

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

Forget about the Mr. Toad part of this Disney package feature - which is actually a very nicely done adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's classic The Wind in the Willows - Walt Disney's 1949 cartoon version of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is one of the greatest, unheralded Halloween movies of all time. The sublime thing about Disney's Sleepy Hollow is that it's both appropriate for kids - they'll recognize the classic Disney look - and actually, legitimately, really pretty damn scary. While Tim Burton recast the Headless Horseman's tale into an action movie, Disney turned the story into the ultimate creepy campfire story and it works beautifully. One minute you're laughing along with narrator Bing Crosby, the next, you're gripping your armrest as Ichabod Crane flees the Horseman in one of the great all-time movie chases. This animated short is perfect for pre-tweeners who are looking for slightly more scares than the Great Pumpkin can provide, but beware - your skeptical kids might actually be spooked by this underseen Disney classic.

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... TEENS THIRTEEN TO SIXTEEN

The Monster Squad (1987)

What could be better for teens not yet old enough to delight in the NC-17 thrills of a Rob Zombie movie than a sarcastic ode to the classic movie monsters of yester-year headlined by a pack of foul-mouthed junior high kids? Fred Dekker's Monster Squad isn't a perfect movie - though it has recently attracted a cult following with a 20th anniversary DVD and showings at the Alamo Drafthouse - but it has a lot going for it, most notably, a great script by Shane Black (writer of Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). 13 to 16-year-olds are too jaded to scare easy, but too young to show the really depraved horror movies yet, so Monster Squad is perfect because it's all about cynical, naive kids having to face the icons of modern Halloween (Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, etc). It's not particularly spooky, but if you don't want your high-school freshman showing his friends Hostel in your basement rec-room, this is a great, fun alternative with just enough PG-13 swearing and sex-references to make the not-ready-for-R-rated-players think they're getting away with something. However, beware - DO NOT accidentally rent the similarly-premised Van Helsing instead. NOTHING good ever came from watching Van Helsing.

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... DISAFFECTED 20-SOMETHING HIPSTERS

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

How can you scare the disaffected hipster? If you show them classic horror, they'll just sit there debating gender roles in Old Hollywood. If you show them modern slasher horror, they'll roll their eyes and make mental notes on how to best deconstruct it on their blog. How do you unnerve a generation of Xanax-popping Diablo Cody-wannabes who were reared on Mystery Science Theater and Death Cab for Cutie? You hit them where it hurts - reality. Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream is one of the most profoundly depressing, bone-numbing scary movies ever made. Honest to God, this descent into the hell of drug addiction should be shown to scare straight every person who ever appeared on A&E's Intervention. Let's see if the hipster with the penchant for making ironic comments on Twitter can stomach watching Aronofsky's painfully real characters slip and slide down into their own personal nightmares and find themselves facing levels of degradation and humiliation that would make Leatherface go give his mom a hug. This is the perfect Halloween movie for the hipster crowd - a tale of horror that's practically impossible to be ironic about.

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... DATE NIGHT

Halloween (1978)

It might seem like a cheat saying that Halloween is a perfect movie to watch on Halloween (duh), but John Carpenter's classic is not only a classic horror film, but also, it's perhaps THE best horror flick to watch during a romantic movie night. Why? Well, even though there's the long tradition of men taking their girlfriends to a scary movie with hopes that their dates will jump into their laps seeking comfort, that's a much harder task to accomplish than one might think. The movie has to be scary, sure, but it can't be TOO scary or too gross or too esoteric or too violent - there are a lot of factors that can kill a mood. The Exorcist is, unquestionably, a terrifying movie, but watching Linda Blair do wrong things with a crucifix doesn't really get ladies in the mood, if you know what we're talking about. However, Halloween, strangely enough, features the perfect balance of all the elements, making it really damn scary, but not offensive or off-putting. There's a strong female heroine, some nice classic thrills, simple storyline - perfect for a date-night on the couch. Just make sure that a). you don't accidentally rent the Rob Zombie remake or b). your date realizes that Jamie Lee Curtis is only saved by her virginity in the end.

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... ALL AGES

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

What happens if you're looking for a great Halloween movie, but you're stuck with a mixed group, ranging from 8 to 80, with interests ranging from Goosebumps to The Grudge? Go for the easy choice - Henry Selick and Tim Burton's classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. There's something for almost anyone in this stop-motion masterpiece, which deftly balances an innocent holiday-spirit charm with a nicely subversive, Edward Gorey-esque sense of humor. (Our one complaint about Nightmare is that the funny moments never really hit home. You'll smile throughout the whole film, but rarely laugh out loud.) The movie has become such a cult holiday hit that Disney has been re-releasing Nightmare to theatres every year around Halloween since 2006 - in Digital 3D format, no less. If you can find a 3D theatre showing the movie on October 31st, forget trick 'r treating and spend your holiday in Halloweentown.

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... CLASSIC MOVIE FANS

Nosferatu (1922)

Forget about Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, and the entire cast of Twilight. Max Schreck plays, hands-down, THE scariest vampire of all time in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, a silent film that can captivate even the most jaded movie fan. Nosferatu is often overlooked in favor of Lugosi's 1931 Dracula when talking about the iconic classic black-and-white movie monsters - creatures like Frankenstein, the Wolf-Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon - but Schreck's Count Orlok makes Lugosi look like he should be counting things on Sesame Street. His performance is operatic in scope and his appearance is so haunting and alien that it's hard to shake off. Sound has become such a pivotal part of modern horror films - the creaking of a slowly opening door, the hum of a rusty chainsaw - that it's hard to fathom that a movie could be so unsettling without any sound at all, but Nosferatu is, without a doubt, the founding father of horror cinema and needs to be appreciated as such. (And if you want to cleanse your palette afterwards, watch Willem Defoe's hilariously oddball performance as Schreck in 2000's Shadow of the Vampire.)

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... PARENTS AFTER THE KIDS HAVE GONE TO BED

The Fly (1986)

After the kids have come down from their candy high and finally drift off to sleep on All Hallows Eve, what should any good parent do? Start cleaning the eggs and toilet paper off their porch? Steal a few Snickers out of their kids' candy bags? Or sit down with their significant other and watch a smart, well-made horror movie for grown-ups? Of course, the answer is the latter, but what movie should they chose? Let's be frank - The Exorcist, The Shining, and Psycho are a little played out, so what about David Cronenberg's The Fly? Around Halloween, this modern monster classic never gets the same attention as something like Nightmare on Elm Street, which is a damn shame because Jeff Goldblum's slow transformation from Seth Brundle to Brundle-Fly is a million times creepier and stomach-churning than anything Freddy Krueger ever did. Plus the shocking-as-hell ending will be particularly chilling to any parent looking for a late-night thrill after putting their offspring to bed. Leave the slashers for the teenagers. It takes David Cronenberg to scare an adult.

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... GORE ENTHUSIASTS

Evil Dead 2 (1987)

This was a hard one. If you're looking for pure quantity of gore, it's almost impossible to top Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (originally titled Brain Dead), which features a scene with a lawnmower and a house full of zombies that has to be seen to be believed. And while there are tons of Faces of Death-type movies and Italian zombie flicks that have really pushed gore to strange and unsettling places, you can't deny that Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn is one of the most creative, gleefully watchable, gore-happy horror movies ever made. There's just something about watching B-movie icon Bruce Campbell get doused with gallons of multi-colored goo or having to chainsaw off his own hand that makes us smile - not because we hate the guy (he delivers one of THE best high-energy horror performances of all time in ED2), but rather, because Raimi is such an expert at conducting this giddy opera of over-the-top gore that we simply can't wait to see what happens next. Evil Dead 2 is a landmark in the history of horror movie gore and, if you haven't already seen it, don't you want to know what everyone else is talking about already?

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Perfect Halloween Movie For... THE ELECTION OBSESSED

Masters of Horror: Homecoming (2005)

We know that some of you will have a very hard time enjoying Halloween this year knowing that, only 4 days later, America will be picking its next president in one of the ugliest, most high-stakes elections of the past half-century. But there's no reason why the politically-obsessed can't enjoy some good-natured bloodletting - and we're not talking about the kind you normally see on The O'Reilly Factor or Hardball. If your Halloween movie picks keep getting shot down by your friends who can't stop talking about Obama and McCain, try steering them towards Homecoming, the 2005 episode of Showtime's popular "Masters of Horror" series, directed by Joe Dante, who gave us The Howling and Gremlins. Homecoming is one of the most political horror stories in recent memory, a scathing indictment of the Iraq War in which dead soldiers rise from the grave to vote the incumbent president who got them into the war out of office. It's subversive, satirical, horrific, and it has an honest-to-god point-of-view, something that very, very few horror movies come with nowadays. No matter how you feel about the war, Homecoming is a great horror film and will DEFINITELY spark a debate afterwards, which may or may not be a good thing.

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Did we miss any PERFECT Halloween movies? Do you honestly think that Van Helsing and Hocus Focus are underrated gems? Sign up for a My VideoHound account today and let us know how you feel in the comments section below.