Autumn has fallen and it’s time once more to celebrate the primal, compulsive instinct of fear. Rainestorm finishes its horror trilogy and goes to the well one last time to highlight 31 days of spooky scares that season the eerie atmosphere of Halloween.

Hex cast: 2002

The charm: Based on the Japanese film of similar name, The Ring addresses the urban legends and fascination with the non-existent snuff film genre that came of the VHS era, particularly the Faces of Death series. It’s the realization of that dreadful little feeling up your spine that witnessing a real death, or witnessing a bewitched video that sneaks in subliminal images, can somehow damage or even kill you. A ghost story done well will naturally have a complementary element of mystery to it. Gore Verbinski takes the best elements of the Japanese creepy-girl-with-long-black-hair trend and Westernizes it with Naomi Watts as Intrepid Reporter, Rachel Keller, who sets about investigating why her niece was apparently scared to her literal death. Unraveling the clues of a cryptic video that supposedly kills you a week after viewing it, the stakes are raised when she finds her son has watched it. Special optical effects more often than not undermine horror films (just look at the perplexingly popular Poltergeist), and CGI will virtually always destroy them. But director Verbinski wisely holds these moments out until very late in the picture and uses them sparingly. The end result is a ghost story for the technology age, made even more relevant by VHS’s imminent obsolescence.

Focal point: Rachel’s nervy and unnerving trip down an old, abandoned well.

Entrancing trivia: The success of The Ring at the box-office paved the way for several more American remakes of Japanese horror films. So now you know who to credit/blame.

Speak the words: “You weren’t supposed to help her.”

Companion spell: Videodrome (1983). David I-need-to-shower-after-watching-that Cronenberg breaks ground on the video as malignancy genre with his usual queasiness-inducing flare.

Cursed by: The cursed videotape itself is, as one character says, “very student film.”