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There's a whole cemetery full of horror movies to feast on this weekend, as per usual at Halloween. Also as per usual, I'm trying to suss out what the current crop of serial slayers and zombies have to say about the zeitgeist.

First, there's The Stepfather , a remake of the thriller of the same name that came out in 1987. The original starred Terry O'Quinn ( Lost ) as a serial killer with a mission: Marry a widow with kids, and try to perfect her family. When they inevitably disappointed him, he would slaughter them and move on. O'Quinn's performance, alternately spookily nice and searingly furious, scared the heck out of me.

The first Stepfather didn't do much at the box office, but it hit a nerve, especially for a generation of young adults who'd been children of divorce, who'd watched their single moms (we all lived with our moms back then) struggle to be feminists in a world that was adjusting to massive social changes. O'Quinn's character spouted aphorisms (“Father knows best!”) and attitudes (Families should sit down to dinner together) that were hokey and outdated, but felt comforting to anyone unsettled by the upheaval.

The new Stepfather , starring Dylan Walsh ( Nip/Tuck ) as the title character, and Sela Ward ( Once and Again ) as his unlucky bride, doesn't update the story much for its new generation, beyond the use of cellphones and the Internet, because it doesn't really need to. The divorce rate still hovers around 50 per cent; individual interests in a family are more fragmented than ever; life remains unperfectable; and men and women are still hashing out how to be independent and yet meet each other's needs.

“There's something intoxicating about the idea of being taken care of, as crazy as our lives are,” Ward told me when I interviewed her for More magazine. “The other day, I had this whole conversation with my husband [venture capitalist Howard Sherman] about how, when we first met, he was going to arrange our tickets to fly somewhere, and I had said, ‘No, I can handle that.' I was the same for everything: ‘No, I can do that.' Very adamant about my independence. And now my foot is up on a pillow” – she was recovering from a broken bone – “and I'm saying, ‘Can you get me a Diet Coke, and can you blah, blah, blah?' ”

She chuckled, delighted, and continued: “He asked, ‘Where's the woman I met who said, ‘I'm handling that'? I said, ‘Yeah, I don't know what that was about, but I'm not into that any more.' I'm loving the take-care-of-me part. I think women fought so hard to enrich our inner lives, we swung a little too far. We missed out on all those yummy things that men are supposed to feel needed about.”

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Ward, 53, was born in Meridian, Miss. “My culture was about: The woman needs to be taken care of, to be on the pedestal,” she said. “When I was in college [at the University of Alabama, where Ward was a cheerleader for the Crimson Tide football team], I would tell my mama, ‘So-and-so did her boyfriend's laundry,' and she would say, ‘Well, she's just stupid.' ”

Walsh's character in The Stepfather has no trouble finding women who are starved for TLC; they appear to be legion. But he's also not alone in feeling entitled to eliminate them when they let him down.

He's one of several serial killers out there now who murder their prey because they “deserve” it. There's the title character played by Michael C. Hall on the cable series Dexter , a serial killer with a conscience, who stalks and eliminates other serial killers. He's like Dirty Harry with a knife, clearing the world of scum, and the show's popularity is growing with each episode.

There's Jigsaw, played by Tobin Bell, in the Saw movie franchise. I haven't seen the newest instalment, Saw VI – in fact, I've only seen the original, from 2004. (I just can't watch torture porn; I don't need those images in my head.) But it was surely Saw that kicked the vengeance-killing idea into high gear.

Jigsaw targets people who are selfish, callous and heedless, and then puts them in intricate kill-or-die traps that force them to show just how selfish, callous and heedless they are. In a world where people are cruel and the law is unreliable, these films imply, a decisive act, even a murderous one, is better than inaction.

And then there's Zombieland , which neatly excises all morality from mass murder and instead practises it with glee, as if it's a supercool video game come to life. The victims are zombies, after all. (Almost everyone in the world has been infected with a fast-spreading virus that turns them into slavering cannibals.)

As a result, there's no reason for the few remaining humans (Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) not to kill them. The movie is hip and giddy, and – unlike 28 Days Later …, the sombre zombie film from 2002 – never pauses for one second to acknowledge that these are people being smashed with baseball bats, decapitated with garden shears or machine-gun-sprayed by the dozens.

It makes perfect sense that one of the trailers attached to Zombieland is for 2012 , the upcoming apocalypse movie that's already generating controversy because it revels in high-tech, high-gloss mass destruction – literally millions of people are killed – but expects us to care about star John Cusack's little family. It's the apotheosis of the video-game culture, where victims are pixels, not people.

So it's refreshing to see that the No. 1 thriller this Halloween is Paranormal Activity , an ultra-low-budget – $15,000 (U.S.) – homemade dig-vid with dinky production values and two unknowns, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, in the leads. They play a cuddly couple who're being hounded by a demon, and $62-million worth of tickets have been sold to audiences willing to watch them quiver through the oldest tropes in horror moviedom. (They hear footsteps in the night! Their doors slam all by themselves!) I think it's because they're playing people, who act like people. There's no subtext here, no vengeance plot, just some old-school chills.

The scariest thing about it is how gullible fans are to believe that the film's popularity grew from a grass-roots Internet phenomenon, rather than Paramount's carefully nurtured marketing campaign. But at least it's a trick that feels like a treat.