Welcome to the first annual—perhaps the only—Pepper Bough Halloween Movie Tournament!

Over the next nine school days, you will have the opportunity to vote for your favorite horror movies from this century, with the champion being crowned on none other than Halloween night.

The game is simple. Like any tournament, we have set up brackets in which horror movies can square off against each other in individual matchups. On each entry, there will be a poll for you to vote for your favorite of the two. The winner will move on to the next round.

Today’s first round match-up is . . .

3. 28 Days Later vs. 6. Midsommar

Our staff has put together some defense for each film. Take a look, then make your vote!

By 2000, the zombie film was as stale as week-old bread. Slow moving, brain-eating monsters no longer held the same place in popular culture as they had in the 70s and 80s. And then came “28 Days Later.” It was so scary that acclaimed horror novelist Stephen King bought out an entire 800 seat theater for a private screening. And he wasn’t wrong. Finding inspiration in the spread of the ebola virus, this pandemic horror is even scarier today than it was at the turn of the century. When our main character finds a church filled with dead bodies not yet reanimated with a “rage virus” it no longer feels like a bleak vision of the future; it feels like reality.

The scariest thing about “Midsommar,” Ari Aster’s head trip of a traveling folk horror story, isn’t the old people that commit suicide off a cliff, the strange mating rituals, or the boyfriend burned alive in a hollowed out bear suit. Nope. It’s that all these awful things happen in the vivid, playful light of day! Aster decided to take his horror to a part of the planet where there is no night during summertime and show us all the ugliness of a cult without the hint of a shadow. That he adds flowers and dancing and jubilant color only makes it worse when these happy shiny cultists do the craziest things. Few things are scarier.