Three killer vehicle films for Halloween
28 October 2026 · 2 min read
A car with nobody driving it. That's the whole premise, and it is enough for a movie.
It's spooky season and I've done the classics. Halloween. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Psycho. All good. But lately I've slid into a smaller subgenre, and I'd like to make the case for it. Evil vehicles.
Let's be precise. I'm not talking about killers who run people over. Death Race 2000 doesn't count. That's the horror version of The Cannonball Run, with points for pedestrians. I mean vehicles that are possessed and kill people of their own volition. Christine. The Hearse. Larry Cohen's The Ambulance. Crash! with an exclamation point, a 1977 thriller with a car that murders at least one hitchhiker before lunch.
Here's why screenwriters should care. A killer vehicle is the cleanest monster there is. It can't talk. It can't explain itself. You can't negotiate with it. Every scene becomes a problem of geography. Where is it, where are we, how fast can we run. That is structure you can see.
And the subgenre hits the same tropes every time, which makes it useful to study. People get run over. The monster is easy to escape and nobody escapes it. Somebody cracks up and walks out to meet it. Watch three of these and you'll have the whole toolkit.
My top three
Killdozer (1974). A possessed bulldozer picks off a work crew one by one. Every trope above, in order, plus a young Robert Urich being woefully underused.
Maximum Overdrive (1986). Stephen King's only directing credit, from his own story and his own screenplay, and it is exactly as insane as you'd expect from Stephen King of that era. The rules of the world do not exist. Trucks kill people. Electric knives kill people. There's a great murder by soda machine. And a waitress runs outside to shout that WE made the machines, so they shouldn't be able to do this. Good argument. The machines are not persuaded.
The Car (1977). My favorite of the lot, and the least known. James Brolin is the lead cop in a small Utah town with maybe four civilians and about two hundred police. A car shows up and starts picking them off. You can't shoot it. You can't crash it. The tires don't pop. There's a scene where it takes out two police cars driving side by side, and it does it by flipping itself over. Find it if you can.
So check for a driver before you cross the road. They thirst for blood.
The scenes from Maximum Overdrive and The Car are in the video above. Let me know your own killer vehicle picks!
Watch it
