For many people, the scariest part about Halloween is the idea of putting on a costume. But even those (poor souls) who no longer treasure a mountain of Milky Ways still appreciate a good spine tingle. And these days there is no shortage of ghost, witch, werewolf, and especially vampire stories.

From Twilight to True Blood to Count Dracula himself, we’ve been suckers for bloodsucker tales since the eighteenth century. In March 2009, The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella explored the thrill of vampire literature and concluded that the genre’s success relies on “a simple device, used in many notable works of art: the deployment of great and volatile forces within a very tight.”

That same month, Robert Sullivan wrote a profile of Stephenie Meyer for Vogue and asked: “How did a suburban mother of three become the next big thing in publishing with her chaste-but-erotic Twilight series?” The answer is that Meyer’s books are not horror “but a good old-fashioned romance.” As Sullivan noted, “Twilight takes place in a teenage fermata, an emotional arena that is, for many young girls, simultaneously imaginary and absolutely real. And the boy, by the way, is completely intoxicated with the girl.”

The other horror archetype that has traditionally appealed to teenagers is of course the werewolf. When MTV re-booted the Teen Wolf franchise last summer, Alex Pappademas traced its hairy appeal in The New York Times. “If ‘Teen Wolf’ builds on the original’s sneakily radical message of self-acceptance instead of fetishizing its characters’ suffering like Twilight,” Pappademas wrote in "We Are All Teenage Werewolves," “there’s a chance Teen Wolf 2.0 will look as zeitgeisty in retrospect as some of its adolescent-lycanthrope genre forebears: a no-judgment monster show for the same proudly atypical fan base that Lady Gaga refers to as her ‘little monsters.’”

For pure Halloween thrills though, nothing beats an old-fashioned ghost story. In 2006, Mary Roach reported on a hilarious hunt for a spook that was haunting the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship in existence. “I still harbor a nagging desire to see or hear a ghost,” Roach wrote in “Something Blubbery This Way Comes.” “Because if you see one, then maybe one day you'll be one, and that's a nicer prospect than just being dead.” And after days of ghostbusting, Roach found what she came for—or did she? “Sometime around 3 a.m., I'm awakened by something I've never heard before,” she recalled. “It's a strange, clotted, desperate sound, like a man choking on blubber. It's frightening. It's definitely in the room with me…”