Get in the Halloween spirit with these horror videos from YouTube

Terrence O'Brien, a writer at the tech and entertainment site The Verge, has wrapped up his Halloween-season recommendation series by skipping a single film or album and instead collecting a small set of creepy, disturbing and plain odd videos on YouTube. He says the list has something for different tastes, from fans of surreal art-house shorts to cosmic horror and classic viral clips.

What made the list

One pick is Cecelia Condit's 1983 short film Possibly in Michigan. It found an audience more than 30 years later, after being uploaded to YouTube and spreading to Reddit. O'Brien describes it as a feminist musical about cannibals that could have been directed by David Lynch. The film runs only 12 minutes, yet it has inspired hours of YouTube videos analysing its unsettling imagery and meaning.

Another is Homemade Gatorade, an uncomfortable road-trip short that combines stiff animation with heavily processed video. The author says he is never sure whether to laugh or squirm.

The cosmic horror entry is Portrait of God. O'Brien argues that big-budget films in the genre often show too much, while this one spends much of its short runtime staring into an apparently empty abyss.

The list also includes Heck, the short that was later turned into the experimental horror film Skinamarink. It offers a similar slow-building tension but lasts 29 minutes rather than 100.

Also featured is a one-minute loopable short by David B Earle, full of abstract, nightmarish visuals that did well on early YouTube. A four-hour looped version exists for anyone who wants to play it at a Halloween party. The list closes with a song by Nick Lutsko.