TCM Monthly Preview: October 2025
October is TCM's most structurally coherent month of the year, and I mean that as pure admiration. The programming clicks together in a way that rewards attention: four consecutive Sundays of Hitchcock, escalating in intensity from Rear Window to Psycho. The Creepy Cinema Spotlight running every Friday with a different sub-theme - Bette and Joan, Women in Horror, Gene Tierney's Terror, Hitchcock/De Palma, and then, on Halloween itself, Creepy Cult Classics. Angela Lansbury as Star of the Month for her 100th birthday, with the birthday night itself on October 16th landing in the middle of the Horror Sundays sequence like a gift. And a Halloween Marathon on the 30th and 31st that runs essentially without pause from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? at 8am Thursday through Vampyr at 7am Saturday. October is the month TCM was made for, and this year's version is one of the better-organized I've seen.
Let me lay out the architecture first and then go deep where it matters.
The Sundays with Hitch series runs four consecutive Sundays: Rear Window and Spellbound (Oct 5), Notorious and The Man Who Knew Too Much (Oct 12), Vertigo and The Birds (Oct 19), Psycho and Shadow of a Doubt (Oct 26). Eight films, two per week, building from the civilized paranoia of Rear Window to the primal horror of Psycho, and the sequence is not accidental. The editors who put this together were thinking about what it means to move through Hitchcock's career as a sustained argument about fear, voyeurism, and the terror of domestic intimacy. I'll flag the essential nights as we reach them.
The Creepy Cinema Spotlight shifts themes each Friday, escalating toward Halloween: opening night is Bette and Joan (Oct 3), followed by Women in Horror (Oct 10), Gene Tierney's Terror (Oct 17), Hitchcock/De Palma (Oct 24), and Short, Brunette & Brutal plus Creepy Cult Classics on Halloween itself (Oct 31). The Spotlight is more eclectic than the Hitchcock Sundays, and some weeks are stronger than others, but the cumulative effect of a whole month of Friday horror programming with varying theoretical framings is genuinely interesting. By the time you reach Halloween you've been primed.
Angela Lansbury as Star of the Month gets her 100th birthday on the 16th, and the Lansbury Thursdays are among the most thoughtful programming decisions in the month - because what the schedule reveals across four appearances is an actress with a range so extreme that her Star of the Month could, without explanation, read as programming errors. The musical comedy star of The Harvey Girls, the psychological villain of Gaslight, the Grand Guignol of The Manchurian Candidate, the Sondheim of Sweeney Todd - these are not adjacent identities. More on the birthday night when we get there.
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Wednesday, October 1st opens with Julie Andrews' 90th birthday: The Sound of Music (1965) at 8pm, Victor/Victoria (1982) at 11pm. Victor/Victoria is the one I'd argue for more forcefully - Edwards directing Andrews as a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, and the film uses the formal conceit to make arguments about performance and identity that the musical genre rarely attempted in 1982. Andrews clearly loved playing the character's self-consciousness about her own disguise, and that enjoyment is visible in every scene.
Thursday, October 2nd opens the Lansbury Star of the Month: The Harvey Girls (1946) at 8pm. This is Lansbury before she was the Lansbury most people think of - she was 20, already Oscar-nominated twice (for Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray), and here in a Judy Garland MGM musical being used primarily as an ingénue. She's charming and slightly underused and you can feel the talent straining against the assignment. The month will show you what happened when she was given room.
Friday, October 3rd opens the Creepy Cinema Spotlight with Bette and Joan: Rain (1932) at 8pm and Another Man's Poison (1951) at 10pm. These are pre-Joan Crawford-and-Bette-Davis-at-war titles - Rain is Crawford before the rivalry, a film where she plays Sadie Thompson with a commitment to unglamour that was relatively rare for her, and the choice to begin the Spotlight here positions Crawford as a serious actress before positioning her as a cultural phenomenon. After midnight the Strange Occurrences sequence gives you Poltergeist (1982) at 3:30am - Spielberg producing, Hooper directing, and the film is genuinely frightening in ways that its family-audience framing only intensifies. A suburban house. A television. A child's hand against the screen.
Saturday, October 4th has the Lin-Manuel Miranda Two for One: The Band Wagon (1953) and All That Jazz (1979). This pairing is one of the most audacious in October's schedule, and I suspect Miranda chose it rather than TCM assigned it. The Band Wagon is Vincente Minnelli's meditation on the relationship between a performer's ego and his actual talent, Fred Astaire as a fading star trying to make a comeback, and it's the warmest and most self-aware backstage musical Hollywood produced. All That Jazz is Fosse making the same film and setting it on fire. Both are about showbiz eating its creators alive. One of them thinks this is tragic. The other thinks it might be the point. Noir Alley gives us The Big Street (1942), Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball in a drama - not a comedy - and Ball doing something that proved she could have had an entirely different career.
Sunday, October 5th opens Sundays with Hitch: Rear Window (1954) at 8pm, Spellbound (1945) at 10pm. Rear Window is the most formally complete film Hitchcock ever made - a man immobilized in his apartment, watching his neighbors' windows, and the film is about cinema itself, about what it means to watch, about the voyeurism that movie spectatorship requires and what moral responsibility comes with it. I've written about it before and I'll just add: the film is structured so that the audience is implicated in Jeff's voyeurism before we realize we've consented to it, and the moment when Lars Thorwald looks directly at the camera - looks directly at us - is one of the most effectively disorienting shots in classical Hollywood. Spellbound is the weaker film but the Dalí dream sequence is extraordinary and Gregory Peck's performance of a man who doesn't know who he is has an internal logic the rest of the film barely earns.
The TCM Imports close the night with Kieslowski's Three Colors: Red (1994) at 2am and Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) at 4am. Someone at TCM is making an argument about cinema that asks you to be awake at 4am on a Sunday. Two of the most beautiful films of the last 30 years, back to back. Both about longing and the ways people fail to connect with the people they should have loved. Both films in which the meaning is carried by image and sound more than dialogue. This is the most ambitious TCM Imports pairing I've seen all year.
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Wednesday, October 8th is the Otto Preminger night: Laura (1944) at 8pm, Daisy Kenyon (1947) at 9:45, Anatomy of a Murder (1959) at 11:30pm, Angel Face (1953) at 2:30am.
Preminger is a director whose consistency of interest across wildly different genres constitutes one of the stranger careers in Hollywood - he made noirs, courtroom dramas, Biblical epics, musicals, spy films - and the connecting thread is his camera's refusal to take sides. The Preminger camera observes. It doesn't judge. In Laura this becomes a formal puzzle: a detective falls in love with a portrait of a woman he believes to be dead, and when she turns out to be alive the film has to figure out what to do with the desire it has already installed in us. Dana Andrews' obsession with a painted image is the cinema's obsession with itself, and the film knows it.
Anatomy of a Murder at 11:30 is the mature Preminger, a courtroom film that refuses to resolve into comfortable moral clarity: a man has killed his wife's alleged rapist, and the film doesn't decide whether the murder was justified, whether the rape happened, or whether anyone we're watching is telling the truth. James Stewart in a departure from his usual upright persona, playing a lawyer who may be helping a murderer go free. Duke Ellington wrote the score on-set and it sounds like nothing else in the courtroom drama genre. At 2:30am, Angel Face - Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons, one of the most disturbing last shots in noir. Stay awake for it.
Thursday, October 9th continues the Lansbury Star of the Month with a more obscure selection: In the Cool of the Day (1963), Dear Heart (1964), All Fall Down (1962). These are the Lansbury films from the period between her early MGM work and the stage career that would make her famous - the decade when she was doing supporting roles that didn't quite match what she could do. All Fall Down is the most interesting, John Frankenheimer directing Warren Beatty and Lansbury as his mother, and Lansbury's performance of a woman who enables and perhaps enables too much the son who destroys everyone around him is one of the films that most clearly shows what she would later accomplish.
Friday, October 10th runs Women in Horror for the Creepy Cinema Spotlight. He Ran All the Way (1951) and Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) as the prime-time entry, then The Haunting (1963) at 11:30pm. The Haunting is the essential entry and it's the best film in the Creepy Cinema Spotlight all month. Robert Wise's adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House - Julie Harris as Eleanor, a woman whose psychological fragility makes her the perfect vessel for whatever Hill House contains - and the film is frightening through suggestion and negative space, the opposite of Poltergeist's explicitness. Nothing is shown. Everything is implied. The camera angles are wrong, the architecture is wrong, and Eleanor's narration is the voice of a woman trying to hold her reality together and losing. It's one of the great horror films and it arrives on this night as if TCM is proving a point about the Spotlight.
Saturday, October 11th pairs The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957) in the Jamie Lee Curtis Two for One. Neither film features Curtis, which makes this a case of a programmer with very good taste using the Two for One slot as an excuse to pair two of the most formally aggressive American films of their respective decades. The Manchurian Candidate is Frankenheimer at the height of his powers - political assassination, brainwashing, Laurence Harvey as a man with no self to protect, Angela Lansbury as his mother in a performance that makes everything else in October's Lansbury tribute legible. And Sweet Smell of Success is Mackendrick and Lehman and Hecht, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in the most brilliantly venomous film about New York media ever made, a film where every line of dialogue contains a weapon and the photography makes Manhattan look like a moral sewer that everyone in it has agreed to call glamour. These two films together, on a Saturday in October, is the best Saturday Two for One of the year.
Sunday, October 12th is Hitchcock Sunday 2: Notorious (1946) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). I wrote about Notorious at length in the August Rains entry - the most devastating film Hitchcock made about a woman being used by the men who claim to protect her, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant and Claude Rains, and the final sequence of the film in which Grant and Sebastian together help Alicia down the stairs has always struck me as one of the most morally complex shots in any Hitchcock film: the hero is complicit in the very thing he rescues her from. The Man Who Knew Too Much is the warmer film, Doris Day in the "Que Sera Sera" film, but it's also about a couple whose child is taken hostage and who are told to say nothing - the terror of enforced silence, which is a recurring Hitchcock preoccupation disguised in a family thriller format.
The Silent Sunday Night gives you Häxan (1922) at 12:15am - the Swedish documentary-fiction hybrid about witchcraft and its historical persecution, one of the most extraordinary films from the silent era, mixing staged dramatic reconstructions with what appear to be genuine documentary sequences about contemporary psychiatric practice, and positing that what the Middle Ages called demonic possession is what the early 20th century called hysteria. It's one of the films that most rewards being seen rather than just known about. The TCM Imports follow with Winter Light (1963) at 4am - Bergman's most arid and most honest film about faith, a country pastor who doesn't believe anymore, on a winter Sunday in a Swedish church. It's not for everyone but it stays.
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Monday, October 13th is Battle of the Fake Bands Night 1: That Thing You Do! (1996), This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Eddie and the Cruisers (1983), and A Hard Day's Night (1964) at 1:15am. Hanks' That Thing You Do! is the warm opener, a film about one perfect summer when a small-town band had a hit, and it is the kind of movie that Tom Hanks seems to find more naturally than anyone else - cheerful, specific, completely committed to its own modest ambitions. Spinal Tap at 10pm is the pivot from warmth to satire, and Reiner's mock-documentary remains the most precisely observed comedy about the gap between what musicians think they're doing and what they're actually doing. A Hard Day's Night at 1:15am closes the night by proving that the original article - the actual Beatles, Richard Lester directing, a film made in six weeks about being the most famous people on earth - is funnier and stranger and more formally adventurous than anything that follows it.
Tuesday, October 14th is Late '50s Rom Coms: Indiscreet (1958), Pillow Talk (1959), Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957). These films are more interesting than their current reputation - the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies in particular are about two people who are very good at performing gender for other people's benefit, which takes on additional resonance when you know that Hudson was gay and was being positioned by the studio as the ideal heterosexual man. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is the one I'd argue for most strongly: Frank Tashlin's direction is cartoonish in the most productive sense, a film that looks like a Technicolor commercial for everything it's satirizing, and Jayne Mansfield doing an explicit parody of Marilyn Monroe while playing a character who is herself a manufactured cultural product. It's funnier and more conceptually sharp than most film theory about 1950s culture.
Wednesday, October 15th is the Aziz Ansari guest programmer night. Sullivan's Travels (1942) at 8pm, How Green Was My Valley (1941) at 9:45, Killer of Sheep (1978) at midnight, The Organizer (1963) at 1:45am.
This list is a quiet argument about what movies are for and who they're for. Sullivan's Travels is the Sturges film about a Hollywood director who wants to make serious films about suffering and learns, through experiencing actual suffering, that comedy is what people need - and then comes back to Hollywood and makes... comedies. It's a film about the value of entertainment that is itself great entertainment and is therefore either deeply sincere or deeply self-serving, and the ambiguity has kept critics arguing about it for 80 years. Killer of Sheep at midnight is Charles Burnett's landmark film about a Black man in Watts, made as a UCLA thesis film, which uses a formal simplicity - vignettes, moments, faces - to depict a life that American cinema had comprehensively ignored. It cost $10,000. It's one of the ten or fifteen most important American films ever made. The Organizer at 1:45am is Monicelli's Italian labor film, Mastroianni as a radical intellectual who helps 19th-century textile workers organize, and its mixture of tragedy and comedy is distinctly Italian and completely without an American equivalent. The Ansari list is more political and more global than the September PTA list, and it tells a different story about the programmer. Both lists are good.
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Thursday, October 16th - Angela Lansbury's 100th Birthday.
This is the night. Gaslight (1944) at 8pm, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) at 10pm, The Manchurian Candidate (1962) at midnight, Kind Lady (1951) at 2:15am, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1982) at 3:45am.
I want to make an argument about Angela Lansbury that the birthday night itself makes more clearly than I can. She received her first Oscar nomination at 18 for Gaslight, playing Nancy, the housemaid who knows more than she should about what Boyer is doing to Ingrid Bergman. She's in the film for perhaps 20 minutes and she's magnetic and specifically menacing - a girl who has calculated exactly what she has to offer and exactly what price she intends to extract. MGM then spent the better part of a decade not knowing what to do with her: too old for ingénue roles, too young for character work, too interesting to ignore but not interesting in the categories the studio recognized.
The Picture of Dorian Gray at 10pm is the film that made the dilemma most visible: she plays Sibyl Vane, a music hall singer who loves Dorian and is destroyed by him, and she won her second Oscar nomination for a role that required her to sing, break apart, and die before the film's midpoint. The studio kept giving her these early-death roles, these sacrificial women, because they didn't know what else to do with the combination of vulnerability and menace she projected.
The Manchurian Candidate at midnight is the answer to all of it. Eleanor Shaw Iselin - the mother who has sold her son to America's enemies, who runs a Senator husband she despises as an instrument of her own ambition, who loves her son in a way the film declines to explain but refuses to let you look away from - is the performance that made Lansbury's career make sense retroactively. The menace that MGM had been managing and suppressing for a decade is here given full permission, and what you understand watching it is that she had been doing a controlled version of this the entire time. She received her third Oscar nomination for this film. She didn't win. This fact remains one of the more significant failures of Academy Award history.
Sweeney Todd at 3:45am gives you the Sondheim, the collaboration that defined the last four decades of her career, the performance of Mrs. Lovett that remains the standard against which all subsequent interpretations measure themselves. She was 57 when she played it on stage. Here she's filmed performing the role in the 1982 concert recording, and to watch her in this after watching Gaslight and Dorian Gray and The Manchurian Candidate is to understand something about the through-line of a career that looked from the outside like a series of genre hops but was from the inside, I think, always about the same woman: intelligent, dangerous, underestimated, waiting.
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Friday, October 17th is Gene Tierney's Terror for the Creepy Cinema Spotlight: Leave Her to Heaven (1945) at 8pm and Black Widow (1954) at 10pm. Leave Her to Heaven is one of the strangest films in the noir catalog - a film shot in Technicolor at a time when noir was a black-and-white form, and the color makes the violence more rather than less disturbing because there's nowhere to hide. Ellen Berent's jealousy is pathological and beautiful and the film never lets you look away from either quality simultaneously. Tierney plays her with a stillness that the Technicolor saturates into something genuinely sinister. The shot of her watching a crippled boy drown in a sunlit lake is one of the most quietly horrifying images in classical Hollywood cinema.
Saturday, October 18th is the John Carpenter Two for One: James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), which is not a Carpenter film either - this is the slot where TCM lets a filmmaker program rather than appear. The pairing is a genuine critical argument: Whale's Frankenstein is expressionist, theatrical, haunted by German cinematography; Fisher's Hammer version is lurid, visceral, shot in color that bleeds. Boris Karloff in the original, Peter Cushing as the doctor in the remake. The monster as tragic figure versus the doctor as the monster. It's a course in what film style does to moral argument.
Sunday, October 19th is the Hitchcock Sunday you've been waiting for: Vertigo (1958) at 8pm and The Birds (1963) at 10:15.
Vertigo is the most personal film Hitchcock ever made and also the one in which his treatment of women is most nakedly what it is: a film about a man who destroys a real woman in order to recreate a woman who never existed. Kim Novak playing Madeleine playing Judy playing Madeleine, and the Russian dolls stack in both directions simultaneously. Stewart's Scottie Ferguson is not a villain in the usual sense - he's a man whose obsessive love requires a woman to not be herself, and the film is honest about how much this kind of love has always been the thing romance narratives celebrate. Bernard Herrmann's score is the only music I know that sounds like falling and like vertigo itself, a spiraling that never resolves.
The Birds at 10:15 is Hitchcock demonstrating that he could still terrify without psychology, without plot, almost without explanation - the birds attack because they attack, and the absence of reason is the point. The Bodega Bay sequence at the school is one of the most precisely built suspense sequences he ever made, and then the ending simply stops, the characters driving away through a world that has turned, and Hitchcock doesn't give you catharsis or resolution because the world he's describing doesn't provide them.
The TCM Imports give you The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) at 4:15am - one of the great Japanese ghost films, a woman murdered by her husband who returns in forms that destroy him - and its placement after Hitchcock Sunday is either accidental or inspired. Both Vertigo and Yotsuya are about women who die and come back as the instruments of the men who loved them wrongly. The conversation between them across the Import gap is worth noting.
Monday, October 20th is Battle of the Fake Bands Night 2: Almost Famous (2000), The Commitments (1991), Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982). Almost Famous is the best film in both nights' programming - Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical account of a teenage journalist following a band on tour in 1973, and what makes it more than nostalgia is its honesty about what the music meant and what the people making it were like. The Commitments is pure pleasure - a Dublin soul band assembled from scratch, playing American music that has nothing to do with their actual lives, and the film understands exactly why that transplantation is the most authentic thing any of them have ever done. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains at 12:45am is the discovery of both nights: Lou Adler's 1982 film about a punk girl group that becomes famous for a pose, and the film's analysis of how authenticity is manufactured by the culture industry is more radical than almost anything made in its era. It wasn't released theatrically. It should be much better known. The overnight adds The Last Waltz (1978) at 2:30am - Scorsese filming The Band's final concert - which is the rare music documentary that feels like a great film, not merely a great record.
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Tuesday, October 21st is Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi night, and the anchor is The Black Cat (1934) at 8pm, which is the most fully realized film either man made together - Edgar Ulmer directing, Lugosi as a man returning to the house where his wife and daughter were violated by Karloff's Satanist architect, and the film is genuinely nightmarish, a production design of swooping modern architecture over a WWI battlefield where the dead still lie, and a revenge narrative that ends in a skinning scene that the Production Code somehow permitted. It's one of the pre-Code films that most clearly demonstrates why the Code existed and also why we miss it. Son of Frankenstein (1939) and The Body Snatcher (1945) continue the evening.
Wednesday, October 22nd remembers Connie Francis with Where the Boys Are (1960) and her subsequent films. The tribute is poignant in a way the schedule can't quite contain - Francis was at the height of her career when she was assaulted in 1974, and the decade of psychological difficulty that followed it cost her most of a decade of performing. Where the Boys Are catches her at the precise moment of her peak, and it's a film that is both entirely its era and more honest about what girls wanted and feared than most of what surrounded it.
Thursday, October 23rd continues the Lansbury month with Death on the Nile (1978) at 8pm - she's one of the ensemble suspects, and watching her in the Agatha Christie adaptation gives you a sense of the warmth and menace coexisting that the best Lansbury performances always find. All Fall Down (1962) at 12:45am is the more serious entry.
Friday, October 24th is Hitchcock/De Palma for the Creepy Cinema Spotlight: Suspicion (1941) at 8pm and The Fury (1978) at 10pm, then Body Horror through the night - The Tingler (1959) at 12:15am, Scanners (1981) at 1:45am. The Hitchcock/De Palma framing is an explicit argument about influence and derivation, and The Fury is De Palma at his most nakedly indebted to Hitchcock while doing things Hitchcock never attempted - the telekinetic finale is one of the most formally extravagant sequences in American genre cinema, a director demonstrating mastery by exceeding his influences. Scanners is Cronenberg doing body horror as corporate thriller, and the exploding head sequence is what the film is remembered for, but what the film is actually about - psychic surveillance, the corporation that manufactures and weaponizes human biology - is more interesting than the spectacle and considerably more prescient.
Saturday, October 25th has Carnival of Souls (1962) at 8pm and Rosemary's Baby (1968) at 9:30pm for the Paul Giamatti Two for One. These are two films about women trapped inside realities they can't fully understand, made six years apart, and their pairing works because Carnival of Souls - Herk Harvey's independent film, shot in Kansas and Utah for $30,000 - is Rosemary's Baby's shadow version, the same story with no money and no stars and a formal rawness that Polanski's craftsmanship smooths away. Both films end in the same place. The Noir Alley gives us Southside 1-1000 (1950), a procedural about counterfeiters with documentary aspirations, a good mid-tier noir. The overnight runs three Miss Marple films - Murder She Said, Murder Most Foul, Murder Ahoy - which is TCM at 2am saying: here are three Margaret Rutherford films in a row, you're welcome.
Sunday, October 26th is Hitchcock Sunday 4, the finale: Psycho (1960) at 8pm and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) at 10pm.
Psycho requires no introduction but deserves something more than a shrug. What I want to note is that the Sundays with Hitch series has been building to this in ways that only become visible in retrospect: Rear Window gave you a man watching from a safe distance; Notorious gave you the cost of surveillance and control; Vertigo gave you a man who destroys what he loves through the act of loving it; and Psycho gives you a shower curtain and five minutes that changed what the cinema was allowed to do to audiences. The series has been an education in how Hitchcock's obsessions evolved, and Psycho is where they all arrive at their terminal conclusion: the woman dies in the first third. The detective dies. Conventional narrative protection is removed and you're alone with Norman.
Shadow of a Doubt at 10pm is the companion piece - Joseph Cotten as a serial killer hiding in his niece's small-town home, and Hitchcock's most explicit argument about the evil inside American normality. The dark side of Rear Window's neighborhood. The TCM Imports give you Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) at 2am, which is three and a half hours and one of the greatest films ever made, a science fiction film with no science and no spectacle about three men entering a forbidden zone where, if you reach the center, your innermost wish is granted. After Psycho and Shadow of a Doubt, being asked to sit with Tarkovsky's silence and dread until dawn is either too much or exactly right. I'm inclined toward the latter.
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Tuesday, October 28th is Pre-Code Essentials night, tied to the TCM book: Employees' Entrance (1933) at 8pm, Jewel Robbery (1932) at 9:30, Night Nurse (1931) at 10:45, The Divorcee (1930) at 12:15am, Three on a Match (1932) at 3am. This is the best pre-Code block TCM has run this year. Night Nurse is Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable as a villain, and a plot involving children being starved to death for an inheritance - one of the more explicitly disturbing plots in the pre-Code catalog. Three on a Match at 3am is the one I'd flag as the hidden entry: three women's lives tracked from childhood to adulthood, and the film is ruthless about what it observes. The pre-Code period lasted roughly four years (1930-1934) and TCM has been making the case across this month that those four years contain some of the most honest American filmmaking ever done.
Wednesday, October 29th honors Lee Grant's 100th birthday with Shampoo (1975) at 8pm, Down and Out in America (1985) at 12:45am. Grant is one of the great what-ifs of her generation - she was blacklisted in the early 1950s for refusing to testify about her then-husband, and the decade she lost from her career is a genuine loss to the cinema. Shampoo gives you her at full tilt in the Hal Ashby ensemble, and the Oscar she won for it was the Academy acknowledging, a decade late, what they'd missed.
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Thursday, October 30th - Halloween Marathon, Part One.
All day. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) at 8am, Spider Baby (1967) at 10:15, Freaks (1932) at 11:45am, then the Hammer cycle (Horror of Dracula, The Curse of Frankenstein), then the Val Lewton films (The Leopard Man, I Walked with a Zombie, Cat People) running through the afternoon and into the evening.
The Lewton sequence - three films produced by one man with minimal budgets and maximum intelligence - is the section I'd identify as the heart of the Halloween Marathon's first day. Val Lewton was one of the rare producer-auteurs in Hollywood history, a man whose signature on a film meant something consistent about what kind of horror it would be: psychological, atmospheric, resolved in suggestion rather than spectacle. Cat People (1942) at 6:30pm is the starting point, a film about a woman who believes she will turn into a panther if sexually aroused, and Jacques Tourneur directing it as if the woman's fear is the film's subject rather than the monster, which it is. Then I Walked with a Zombie at 5:15pm, which is Jane Eyre transplanted to the Caribbean and refracted through the history of slavery, a film far more serious about its subject matter than its title suggests. Then The Leopard Man at 4pm. After midnight: Nightmare (1964), Curse of the Demon (1957), Night of the Eagle / Burn Witch Burn (1962). The Seventh Victim (1943) at 1am - the most disturbing film of the Lewton cycle, a woman in New York searching for her missing sister who may have joined a Satanist group, and the ending of which I will not describe here except to say that it achieves genuine dread through a gesture of absolute quietness. The Hunger (1983) closes the night.
Friday, October 31st - Halloween Marathon, Part Two and the Creepy Cinema Spotlight finale.
The Universal Monsters sequence runs from dawn to dark: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) at 8:15am, The Invisible Man (1933) at 1pm, Dracula (1931) at 2:15pm, The Mummy (1932) at 3:45, Frankenstein (1931) at 5:15, Bride of Frankenstein (1935) at 6:30pm. These are the canonical early horror films, and the programming logic of running them as a day-long procession before the Creepy Cinema finale is correct: you're watching the genre establish its vocabulary before the Spotlight films use and distort it.
Then, at 8pm, the Creepy Cinema Spotlight finale: In Cold Blood (1967) for "Short, Brunette and Brutal," which I take to mean Richard Brooks' adaptation of Capote's true crime masterwork, a film that removes every dramatic protection from murder and leaves you alone with the fact of it. At 10:30, Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965), a Times Square sleaze nightmare featuring Sal Mineo that got lost for decades and is more formally interesting than its reputation. Then, after midnight, the Creepy Cult Classics: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Carnival of Souls (1962), House (1977), Eye of the Devil (1966), and Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) at 7am.
House (1977) at 3:45am deserves a note: Nobuhiko Obayashi's Japanese horror film, made as a deliberate assault on the conventions of the genre, uses every trick - animation, optical effects, direct address, impossible physics - to produce a film that is terrifying and absurd and genuinely unprecedented. A group of schoolgirls visit a haunted house. The house eats them. The film is structured like a children's story and feels like a nightmare and there is nothing else in the history of horror cinema quite like it. Being awake for it at 3:45am on Halloween is the correct way to see it for the first time.
Vampyr at 7am closes October as dawn comes up on November 1st, Dreyer's silent-era horror film about a man who drifts through a village haunted by a vampire, and the entire film has the texture of a dream - not the word "dreamlike" but an actual dream, the unlocatable anxiety, the wrong light, the wrong spatial relationships. It is one of the oldest films in the month's catalog. It remains among the most frightening.
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A note on November: The preview page shows a TCM Memorial Tribute to Robert Redford on November 2nd, which is the first I've heard of this. I'll say more in the November preview, but the lineup - Butch Cassidy, The Sting, All the President's Men, The Way We Were, A River Runs Through It - is the fullest version of what Redford meant to his era, and it will be a day worth building around. November also previews Rock Hudson as Star of the Month and the Conspiracy and Political Thrillers Spotlight. More soon.
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October 2025: The Superlatives
The Night You Can't Miss: Angela Lansbury's 100th Birthday, October 16. Gaslight, Dorian Gray, The Manchurian Candidate, Sweeney Todd in sequence. A century of an actress who remade herself so many times that most people only know one version of her.
The Sunday Series Worth Following: Sundays with Hitch, all four weeks. Start with Rear Window on the 5th and don't stop until Psycho on the 26th. TCM built a sustained argument about what Hitchcock was afraid of, and you can only see it if you watch in order.
The Film of the Month: The Haunting (October 10, 11:30pm). Robert Wise, Shirley Jackson, nothing shown, everything felt. The best horror film of the month including Halloween itself.
The Double Feature That Works Best: The Manchurian Candidate and Sweet Smell of Success (October 11, 8pm). Two of the most formally aggressive American films of their decades, paired on a Saturday because someone with very good taste got to make a choice.
The Guest Programmer Pick: Aziz Ansari's October 15 - Sullivan's Travels, Killer of Sheep, The Organizer. More politically serious than the PTA list, more global in its sympathies, and Killer of Sheep at midnight is the most important film in any guest programmer's October slot.
The Hidden Treasure: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (October 20, 12:45am). An unreleased 1982 film about punk, authenticity, and manufactured fame that anticipated every argument about the music industry that would follow. Find it.
The Late Night Worth Losing Sleep For: Stalker (October 26, 2am). Three and a half hours of Tarkovsky after Psycho and Shadow of a Doubt. A forbidden zone where your deepest wish comes true and the film refuses to say whether this is a gift. See it on the biggest screen you have.
The Creepy Cinema Entry That Earns the Spotlight: Leave Her to Heaven (October 17, 8pm). Technicolor noir. Gene Tierney in sunlit evil. The boy in the lake.
The Discovery of the Month: House (October 31, 3:45am). Japanese horror, 1977, a haunted house film structured like a children's book and experienced like a fever. Nothing in the month's catalog is stranger.
The Pre-Code Night Worth Planning Around: October 28. Night Nurse, The Divorcee, Three on a Match through the night. Four years of the most honest American filmmaking ever done, before the Code arrived to end it.
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October is the month where everything TCM knows how to do converges: the Star of the Month tells a story across her 100 years; the recurring Hitchcock Sundays build a cumulative argument; the Creepy Cinema Spotlight escalates week by week toward Halloween; and the Halloween Marathon goes 48 hours without stopping, running from Baby Jane to Vampyr, from the first light of Thursday morning to the first light of Saturday morning, and somewhere in that span contains most of what horror cinema has ever tried to do to you. Turn it on and leave it on. Some of it will be on in the background while you sleep. That's fine. Some of these films work better that way.
