31 Days of Halloween Movies: A Film a Day for October 2026, With Runtimes

A film a day for all of October sounds easy until Tuesday night, when the film on the list runs two and a half hours. This is a 31 days of Halloween list for October 2026 in two tracks, family and grown-up horror, with the runtime of every film added up: per day, per week and for the whole month. Then the formulas that track it in Google Sheets or Excel.

The two lists, day by day

Both lists come from the Challenges tab of a movie watchlist spreadsheet. Runtimes are the ones stored in the file (public Wikidata records), in minutes; a different cut of a film can differ by a few minutes. Weekend rows are highlighted.

The file itself has no age ratings. The family track mixes animation (12 of the 31 films are labelled Animation) with live-action films like Gremlins and Beetlejuice, so check each title for your own kids and swap what does not fit.

How many hours is that

Add the minutes column and divide by 60. The two tracks are not the same size of commitment:

The grown-up track costs 704 minutes more, 11 hours 44 minutes over the month. Doing both tracks is 6,738 minutes: 112 hours 18 minutes.

By week, with October 1 falling on a Thursday:

The weeknight problem

The family track fits a school night: 18 of its 31 films are 100 minutes or shorter, and a 97-minute film started at 8:00 pm ends at 9:37 pm. Only two picks run past two hours, Ghostbusters: Afterlife (124, Tuesday the 13th) and Haunted Mansion (123, Thursday the 22nd).

The grown-up track is different. Twelve films are longer than two hours, and eight of those land on a Monday to Friday. Frankenstein on Monday, October 5 is 149 minutes: start at 8:00 pm and it ends at 10:29 pm. The fix is to move films, not to skip them. Six films run 141 minutes or more (Frankenstein, The Substance, The Shining, Nosferatu, Midsommar and It: Chapter Two), and October 2026 has five Saturdays and four Sundays. Midsommar and It: Chapter Two already sit on a weekend. Swap each of the other four with a shorter weekend pick, for example Frankenstein with The Rocky Horror Picture Show (100 minutes, Saturday the 10th), and Monday night drops from 149 minutes to 100.

It: Chapter Two, the longest film on either list at 169 minutes, is already on Halloween itself, a Saturday: 8:00 pm to 10:49 pm.

Track it in a spreadsheet

You need two sheets. Library holds every film you might watch: title in column A, year in B, an x in C when you have seen it, minutes in D, a list name in E. October holds the challenge: date in A, the film in B, and three formulas.

A2 (first day):   =DATE(2026,10,1)        A3 and down:  =A2+1

C2 (status):      =IF(B2="","",IFERROR(IF(INDEX(Library!$C$2:$C$1000,
                    MATCH(B2,Library!$A$2:$A$1000,0))<>"","Seen","To watch"),
                    "Not in the list"))

D2 (minutes):     =IFERROR(INDEX(Library!$D$2:$D$1000,
                    MATCH(B2,Library!$A$2:$A$1000,0)),"")

E2 (ends at):     =IF(D2="","",TIME(20,0,0)+D2/1440)

The status is not typed. It is looked up from the library, so ticking a film there updates every list the film appears in. If two films share a title (there are two Addams Family films on the family track, 1991 and 2019), put the year in the title in both sheets. Column E is the 8:00 pm start plus the runtime; a day has 1,440 minutes, so minutes divided by 1,440 is a time. Format the column as time.

Fill the three formulas down to row 32, then add the totals:

Hours in the plan:   =SUM(D2:D32)/60
Hours still to go:   =SUMIFS(D2:D32,C2:C32,"To watch")/60
Progress:            ="Seen "&COUNTIF(C2:C32,"Seen")&" of "&COUNTA(B2:B32)
Days behind:         =COUNTIFS(A2:A32,"<"&TODAY(),C2:C32,"To watch")

With the family list typed in, the first formula returns 50.28. In the sample file one family film (Coco, 109 minutes) and six grown-up films are already ticked, 7 of 62 across both tracks, which leaves 2,908 minutes (48 h 28 min) and 2,998 minutes (49 h 58 min) to go.

A film a day is a streak like any other daily habit. The habit tracker walkthrough has the formula for counting consecutive days if you want one next to the list.

If you start late

Days behind counts past dates that still say To watch. Start on Saturday, October 3 and it shows 2. On the family track those two films are 73 + 109 = 182 minutes; on the grown-up track 109 + 110 = 219 minutes. Add one of them to Saturday and one to Sunday and you are level by Monday. A family Saturday would be Beetlejuice plus The Nightmare Before Christmas: 92 + 73 = 165 minutes.

When the plan breaks: pick by time

Some nights the film on the list will not fit. Then the useful question is which unseen film fits the time you have. Add a helper column to the Library sheet that keeps the row number of every match, count the matches, and take one by number:

Library!F2:   =IF(AND(A2<>"",C2="",E2="Horror",D2<>"",D2<=100),ROW(),"")

H1:   7                                  (Roll: any whole number)
H2:   =COUNT(Library!$F$2:$F$1000)       (how many films match)
H3:   =MOD(H1*7919,H2)+1                 (which one to take)
H4:   =INDEX(Library!$A:$A,SMALL(Library!$F$2:$F$1000,H3))

There is no random function here on purpose: RAND recalculates on every edit and the pick would change while you are still reading it. Multiplying the Roll by a large prime and taking the remainder spreads the numbers around, and the same Roll always returns the same film. If nothing matches, H2 is 0 and H3 shows an error, so widen the limit.

Checked on the sample file: with the Halloween Horror 100 list and a limit of 100 minutes, 23 unseen films match. Roll 7 gives 7 × 7919 = 55,433, the remainder after dividing by 23 is 3, so the pick is number 4: The Blair Witch Project (1999, 81 minutes). Roll 8 gives number 11, Anaconda (1997, 89 minutes). Without the time limit 93 films match. On the family list with a 90 minute limit, 7 films match and Roll 7 lands on number 1, The Nightmare Before Christmas (73 minutes).

Skip the typing

The formulas are short. The slow part is the library: titles, years and runtimes for every film, typed once. The finished version has them inside.

Movie Watchlist Spreadsheet for Google Sheets and Excel

861 films in 21 collections with year, runtime, genre and director already filled in. The Challenges tab has both 31 Days of Halloween tracks from this article, plus 25 Days of Christmas and 52 Movies in 52 Weeks. Tonight's Pick filters by collection, genre, decade and minutes. Put an x next to what you have seen and every list updates.

Get the Movie Watchlist on Etsy →

When October is done, the next tab over is 25 Days of Christmas. If December spending is on your mind as well, the Christmas budget walkthrough covers that side.

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