Like other countries in the world, particularly those in the East, that celebrate the ghostly and the macabre during the hottest season, we Americans have discovered that scary movies and spooky rituals are a great way to cool down…especially if they happen in a dark room with copious amounts of air-conditioning. And so, the tradition of Summerween was born.

In honor of our new favorite not-quite-holiday, Vogue has put together a list of some offbeat, disturbing, terrifying, and otherwise classic horror films set during the summertime. These films prove that you don’t need the temperatures to drop and the days to shorten to feel your spine tingle.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

The only Universal “creature feature” to be filmed predominantly in the daylight, this horror classic follows a scientific expedition into the sweaty, tropical jungles of the Amazon (in fact, most of the outdoor scenes were shot between the Universal backlot and the Florida panhandle), where the unsuspecting explorers encounter the mutant Gill-Man. Famous for its balletic underwater sequence with stuntwoman and body-double Ginger Stanley, The Creature from the Black Lagoon proved to be the menacing flip side to the frothy, beach blanket films of the decade. Released in the same year as Godzilla, it also helped to popularize an eco-horror genre that would be mined extensively in subsequent eras of drive-in and blockbuster films from The Birds to Jaws to Piranha and Jurassic Park.

And Soon the Darkness (1970)

This British/French thriller is a classic hybrid of rural horror, tourist cautionary tale, and the woman-in-peril subgenre that would emerge throughout the 1970s. Two British nurses are bicycling through France on summer holiday when they become separated, and one vanishes. Trapped in a small village with little language skill, the remaining traveler attempts to find her friend while dodging the advances of an overly solicitous man on a scooter. To worsen her fears, she learns that the village was the scene of another woman’s rape and murder some years before. Of course, the villain is the last person you would suspect.

As screenwriter Brian Clemens explained of the film’s inspiration: “It’s very easy to frighten people in the dark because darkness itself is frightening, but we thought it would be nice to frighten people in daylight.” And Soon the Darkness’s use of a remote setting and lean plot, with its hapless main characters and knowing locals, imbues it with an awkward realism recognizable to any travelers who have found themselves lost and alone in a strange land.

Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (1971)

In a decade full of notorious and controversial films, Don't Deliver Us From Evil makes a good case for the banning it received in its native France. Based on a real-life incident of folie à deux in New Zealand with more than a nod to the infamous Papin sisters case, the film follows two Catholic schoolgirls on summer vacation in a rambling château who experiment with Satanism before turning to murder. The horror commences innocently enough as the precocious girls Anne and Lore, alone and left to their own devices, begin to engage in childhood pranks, sexual games, and readings of Decadent poetry. But as their fascinations with death take on darker undertones, so do the pranks become more elaborate and twisted. When they finally commit the ultimate crime against a stranger, the girls pledge themselves to Satan and decide to honor their pact with a final, shocking performance before the school. Twisted and difficult to watch at times, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil might be the ultimate “what I did over my summer vacation…” horror film.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

The Blood on Satan's Claw is one of the earliest entries in the so-called “folk horror” genre, two years before The Wicker Man and decades before Midsommar. Set in the sunny fields of rural England between the Restoration and the Victorian eras, the film centers on a village whose children become possessed by a demon whose plan is to be reassembled through infected patches of their skin. While the village judge and doctor tussle over the rumors of witchcraft, the children, now drawn into a Satanic cult, engage in ritualized games (complete with robes and flower crowns) that climax in rape, flaying, and sacrifice. The dark violence of the juvenile cabal is heightened by the placid surroundings, what film critic Vincent Canby described as a “pastoral landscape that contains the threat of ‘eeveel’ within every sun-dappled glade.” Like many of the folk horror films that would come after, The Blood on Satan's Claw was also a parable of the youthful excesses of the Summer of Love and the violent collapse of the ’60s counterculture.

Torso (1973)

Unlike most horror subgenres, Italian giallo films often mix blood and gore with summery climes and sun-baked landscapes. In Sergio Martino’s Torso, a group of Italian coeds attending a university in Perugia leave the city heat and rash of lust murders for a remote vacation villa in the mountains of L’Aquila, but a serial killer has followed closely behind them. Often cited as a proto-slasher film for its masked killer, high body count, and use of a “final girl,” the film’s most interesting aspects are more subtle in nature—namely, the way in which the city and countryside are depicted by Martino as obverses of the same dangerously misogynist culture. In the city’s sweltering heat, neither the boulevards nor the school provide any shelter for the girls, who are ogled, propositioned, and assaulted by the men around them. Besides the shadowy serial killer, all men are potential predators: male students, an art professor, a peeping tom, even one of the girls’ wealthy uncles. When the girls leave for vacation in the mountains, the rural setting also becomes a site of menace, both from the leering townsfolk and in the isolated villa from which the girls cannot escape.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s ability to terrify, repulse, and even sicken showed director Tobe Hooper’s precocious vision of homespun auteurism. But the story of five teenagers’ summertime encounter with a rural cannibal family is only part of the movie’s horror. If Leatherface is the film’s most iconic villain, the environment is another. TCSM is packed with images of blinding sun, sweaty flesh, rotting offal, and hovering flies, which seem to imbue the film stock itself with a grime that refuses to wash off. Shot during a brutal Texas summer on a shoestring budget with no air-conditioning and real animal parts, the film’s production became almost as notorious as the final product. “Everyone hated me by the end of the production,” Hooper is quoted as saying. All of this punishing sun and blood and heat contribute to TCSM’s assault on the senses (stories of actual vomit induction were reported in some early screenings) and continue to make it the most visceral of classic summer horrors.

Jaws (1975)

A New England island town. The summer tourist season. One very hungry shark.

Friday the 13th (1980)

The archetype of all summer camp horror, the original Friday the 13th has been retread and repurposed ad nauseam by hundreds of subsequent teensploitation films, including about a dozen of its own sequels and reboots. Its premise is shower, rinse, and repeat: horny teens enter the woods and are slain by a puritanical avenger. Perhaps because of its saturation in the culture, the film itself can come across as humorously obsolete as cut-off jorts, which seem to overstuff the film franchise. Never mind that Jason appears only in the last seconds of the film or doesn’t don his trademark hockey mask for another two sequels. Rather, it’s Friday the 13th’s prurient slant on an American rite of passage—the summer camp—that has made it one of the most successful independent films of its time, while its heady evocation of campfire legends, teenage libido, and summertime wayfaring (minus cellphones, the internet, and social media) has only grown in nostalgic magnitude in the present day. Just look at the recent glut of retro-slasher and ’80s-themed summer camp films made for Gen Z-ers who were born decades after Jason first emerged from Crystal Lake.

Whispering Corridors (1998)

In South Korea, scary season occurs not in autumn but during the height of summer. This tradition of yeoreum gongpo (“summer horror”) is considered a popular antidote to the region’s sweltering temperatures. After the relaxation of the country’s censorship laws in the 1990s, this seasonal custom was married to watching horror films, whose popularity has pushed the emerging Korean genre to innovative and exciting places. One of the first and most successful of these summer horrors was Whispering Corridors, a ghost story set in a strict all-girls’ high school where a former student returns from the dead to torment the abusive faculty. Unlike the other selections on the list, this film takes place mostly indoors, and its combinatory palette of bleached, fluorescent interiors and vivid window lighting with nighttime grays and blues has a claustrophobic and chilly effect. Whatever the film lacks in plot it recuperates in atmosphere. Whispering Corridors’ massive popularity has led to five sequels in the franchise thus far and influenced the works of fellow summer horror directors like Bong Joon-ho, Kim Jee-woon, and Na Hong-jin.

Hostel (2005)

A cult classic in the vein of And Soon the Darkness, Eli Roth’s Hostel exploded onto the screen with a notoriety befitting its gory subject matter. As an artifact of the Bush regime and its “War on Terror,” the film emerged in a disturbing era of American exceptionalism and foreign adventurism. These controversial subjects are confronted in Hostel’s delicious revenge fantasy about two American bros and their equally brash European chum who go backpacking across Eastern Europe on summer vacation and find their comeuppance. Lured by the promise of hedonistic pleasures and young women keen on Americans, they discover a Slovakian town where the locals act sinisterly and tourists appear to vanish. What the travelers don't know is that they are in line to become victims of an elite torture-for-pay racket. Hostel was one of the earliest entries in the so-called New Extremity or “torture porn” genre, which energized horror films in the late aughts and early 2010s. It also became a cautionary tale for all American coeds planning to travel abroad for the summer to bone up on the local language and respect the natives.