In observance of the autumn spell when we celebrate the primal instinct of fear, Rainestorm highlights 31 days of spooky scares to season the eerie atmosphere of Halloween.

Reign of terror: 2010

The horror… the horror: Superior to George A. Romero’s rather sloppy original, Breck Eisner’s follow-up to his underappreciated Sahara is a sharply edited, briskly paced fright that has its protagonists on the run for the duration of the film. As with Romero’s … of the Dead movies, this could easily serve as a parable of war, with strange, anonymous soldiers invading the small town and the locals turning on each other. Eisner has a gift for pacing and staging sequences. He knows when to let the tension build and when to let it spill over. Much like John Carpenter’s Escape From New York, The Crazies illustrates the desperation people feel in a microcosmic society with death at every corner.

Halloween haunt: Ogden Marsh, Iowa: typical Halloween-ish small farming town. The rural setting offers some great stranded-in-the-middle-of-nowhere disquietude and a feeling of desolation.

Tastiest treat: An evasive detour into a seemingly deserted automatic car wash turns terrifying.

Check the candy for: Original Crazies star Lynn Lowry in a cameo appearance as “Woman on Bike.”

Devilish discourse: “Don’t ask me why I can’t leave without my wife and I won’t ask you why you can.”

Goes great with: Vacancy (2007). A genuinely smart, unnerving and unpredictable film featuring protagonists that are actually clever for a change, and for whom you genuinely root to escape. The crazies in Eisner’s movie could easily stand in for the snuff-film baddies of this horror delight.