Spooky movies, both cutesy like Hotel Transylvania and creepy like Carpooling Shock (below) keep the Halloween spirit alive in November. Photos: CFP

Perhaps it's the lasting ghoulish influence of Halloween and the approach of the newly-invented Chinese Single's Day (November 11) that are making so many of November's new movies fall into two genres - horror and romance.

But that's only the first half of November. Later in the month, there will be more choices, including action, sci-fi and international blockbusters from Hollywood and beyond.

Halloween's lasting horrors

Though Halloween is already in the past, there are still quite a few horror flicks trying to seize the moment.

Released on October 31 and running throughout November are two domestic horror films, Baby Blues and Cold Pupil.

A work of Hong Kong director Po-Chih Leong, best known for his 1976 gangster film Jumping Ash, Baby Blues is said to be a combination of US film The Dark Half (1993) and Japanese film Hanako (1995). When a couple moves into a new house, they start to fall on some bad luck. And from an old man, the couple learns the house brought misfortune to its previous two owners as well.

Cold Pupil, co-directed by Hong Kong director Ching Kwang Che and mainland director Wang Ke, is adapted from a European stage play. The horror stories are linked to a long-standing grudge between two families.

Another spooky film, Hollywood animation Hotel Transylvania, delivers a not-so-scary ghost story suitable for kids.

In Hotel Transylvania, audiences get to see all the famous monsters - Dracula, Frankenstein, werewolf, mummy. But this time, they are not gathered to discuss how to attack the humans, but rather how to escape from mankind altogether.

To protect his daughter Mavis from humans, Dracula builds a high-end hotel, regarded as a resort for monsters. Everything goes haywire when a human boy, Jonathan, runs into the hotel, and things get worse when Dracula finds his daughter falling in love with Jonathan.

With the interesting portrayal of the staid characters and the cute, funny behavior of the monsters, Hotel Transylvania is well suited to warming up autumn nights at the cinema.

Three other horror flicks coming to theaters this month, all domestic, will put viewers firmly at the edge of their seats: Carpooling Shock challenges trust, Black Mirror recounts mysteries of the past, and Bu Bu Zhui Hun reveals the secrets kept inside a hospital.

Love is in the air

Ever since Love Is Not Blind became a box-office surprise hit in November 2011, Single's Day has become a new hot period for films, especially romantic ones targeting moviegoers in their 20s and 30s.

This time, seven romantic flicks enter into a fierce competition for audiences' affections: Dating Fever, Sweetheart Chocolate, Love You for Loving Me, Love Speaks, Who Moved My Dream, Bachelors' Love and My Boyfriends.

Starring Chinese mainland singer-actress Han Xue and rising Taiwanese star Sie Yi-Lin, Dating Fever has a theme quite relatable to many readers - the blind date. In many big cities in China, blind dates have become a common way for young people to find love. And in Dating Fever, five single young adults tell their sometimes happy, sometimes awful experiences in blind dates.

Different from Dating Fever, Sweetheart Chocolate is more dreamy, with a 10-year love triangle between a Chinese beauty (Chiling Lin) and two Japanese hotties (Ikeuchi Hiroyuki and Fukuchi Yusuke).

With scenes taken in the beautiful Hokkaido, the film is a feast for the eyes. The ears won't suffer either, as famous Japanese musician Joe Hisaishi scored the film.

Can love span age differences? It is a question bothering many lovers today as well as the two leading characters in Love You for Loving Me. Sheng Xiaole (Wang Luodan) falls in love with Yapeng (Zhang Hanyu), a man 18 years her senior. Attracted to each other because they're opposites, they soon find out their differences cause them problems, too.

Blockbuster bonanza

Besides Hotel Transylvania, November will see another six imported films from Russia and the US, bringing the Chinese theaters another round of competition between domestic mid-budget works and imported blockbusters.

Premiering last Wednesday, Russian World War II epic Stalingrad, starring German and Russian actors, shows the more human side of war by focusing on common soldiers and civilians.

Thor: The Dark World, scheduled to hit screens in the Chinese mainland on November 8, continues where The Avengers (2012) left off. A year after the fight in New York, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) faces revenge from the dark power, as Malekith is planning an even bigger scheme. While he is able to reunite with his love, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), Thor has to sacrifice everything to save the world.

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, known for sci-fi adventure thriller Children of Men (2006), brings a new work of the same genre to the world audience - Gravity. The film tells the story of two astronauts (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) who survive an explosion on a space shuttle and then must attempt to return to earth.

After the screening in the US this fall, Gravity received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with an average rating of 9.1 on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.6 on IMDB. Its appeal lies in its tense plot, careful portraits of the characters and close-to-real experience of space. Chinese audiences can see what the fuss is all about starting November 20.

In 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, audiences saw banker Andy Dufresne escape from prison after being wrongly sentenced. The forthcoming Escape Plan offers a character that may be even more cunning than Dufresne, as Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is a structural-security authority who checks the security of prisons by escaping from them.

In his last mission before retiring, Breslin is set up and trapped in the prison. He must seek help from fellow prisoners such as Emil Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to get out.

Though Schwarzenegger and Stallone had met in The Expendables 2 (2012), it is in Escape Plan that the two action stars finally come to stand side by side - an action-packed fantasy come true.