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Want horror for Halloween? Critics pick music, books, games and more to help

From a creepy Hollywood comedy to trick or treat for gamers, Guardian critics suggest their cultural classics

Forget slasher films – the essential Halloween movie is Frank Capra’s 1944 comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, which takes place one Halloween night in Brooklyn in a creepy old house next to a churchyard. Cary Grant plays Mortimer Brewster, a drama critic who discovers on his wedding day that his sweet old maiden aunts are, in fact, serial killers with bodies piled up in their cellar. Then his long-lost brother turns up – also a serial killer, with the same body count as the old ladies, and who, to evade capture, has had plastic surgery, making him resemble the horror icon Boris Karloff (played by Raymond Massey – Karloff performed the role in the Broadway version). It has to be the most meta event in Hollywood history. A rather delirious 31 October. Peter Bradshaw

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