I guess I only have a handful of Christmas movies that I have to watch every year during the holiday season, but they ARE must-see.

Halloween? Well, that's a treasure trove since there are so MANY horror movies I do enjoy (which is saying something since I find myself, as an armchair critic, pretty hard on the genre).

But maybe you'd like to throw a little local flavor into your horror movie experience with films that were set in the state where you live.

Insider.com has a list of the creepiest movies set in every state, so I went and checked on their selections for Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.

And, honestly, the one they picked for Illinois might be a far more interesting choice for Kentuckians.

Halloween is set in fictional Haddonfield, Illinois but is replete with references to Bowling Green and Warren County since director John Carpenter used to live there and attended Western Kentucky University. It's the stuff of local legend, but it's true.

For the Hoosier State, Insider made an odd choice (but, perhaps, the ONLY choice) since the classic they selected falls squarely into the sci-fi genre. Sure, there are plenty of tense, thrilling moments in Steven Spielberg's timeless Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I'd hardly call it horror. But, we ARE here to have fun and I'm nitpicking. We should just leave it at how cool it is that a film of that caliber was set in Indiana.

(By the way, if we're talking shooting locations, I have BEEN to Devil's Tower in Wyoming--an iconic site in Close Encounters.)

And finally, Kentucky.

The zombie genre probably began, in earnest, with 1968's Night of the Living Dead, a low budget black and white horror thriller that has ALWAYS worked because of that budget. Same story with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And, for that matter, Psycho.

Simplicity brings realism right into your grill and those three are my favorite examples.

But the "...of the Dead" and "...of the Living Dead" movies started sprouting forth like poppies in The Wizard of Oz, with most of them ending up not really worth the time.

Maybe it's why 1985's Return of the Living Dead works better than most of the other Dead sequels. It's a horror COMEDY. And the thing that's really funny to me is the seemingly random choice of Louisville as the setting for a horrible laboratory mistake that causes the dead to rise, all zombified, and go on a rampage.

Oh, and if you decide to make a trek to the 'Ville to seek out shooting locations, don't bother. While Return of the Living Dead was SET in Louisville, it was FILMED in Bakersfield, California.

So have some fun when you watch and look for long shots featuring big mountains in the background that are nowhere NEAR Kentucky.

Happy Halloween.

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