As the season turns from summer to fall, a young man's fancy turns to getting ready for Halloween.

In my case, that means drawing up a list of under-appreciated horror films.

When I first started reviewing movies for the newspaper, I warned you all my tastes are a bit weird.

As the old proverb goes, you knew I was a snake.

So, for this installment of “Cult Cinema,” we'll be reviewing a Halloween-themed two-fer of 1986's “Night of the Creeps” and 1987's “The Monster Squad,” the only two horror films written and directed by Fred Dekker.

It's worth noting, not only did Dekker co-write “The Monster Squad” with Shane Black, writer of the original “Predator” film, but Dekker and Black also reunited to co-write the latest installment in the “Predator” film series, coming to theaters this September.

In “Night of the Creeps,” aliens flying past Earth in the 1950s lose track of a canister full of parasitic brain-controlling slugs that turn people into zombies on exactly the same night that an ax murderer escapes from an insane asylum and starts stalking teenagers parked on the local lovers' lane.

Nearly 30 years later, the cop who stopped the killer that night finds himself facing off against his old demons when a cryogenically frozen body, of one of the people possessed by the slugs in the 1950s, is unthawed by accident as part of a college fraternity prank, and the dead begin to rise again.

And in “The Monster Squad,” a clubhouse of preteen fans of all the classic black-and-white monster movies find themselves tasked with saving the world from a team of those same iconic monsters, led by Count Dracula, with the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and even Frankenstein's monster in tow.

“Night of the Creeps” earned its hard-R rating through no shortage of nudity and gore, while “The Monster Squad” remained family-friendly enough to retain a PG-13 label, albeit with plenty of crude punchlines for preteen and teenage boys, including perhaps its most-quoted line: “Wolf Man's got 'nards!”

And yet, several parallels unite both of Dekker's films, from their generous helpings of humor to a shared sense of meta-fictional self-awareness about the horror movie genre itself.

Dekker wrote the script for “Night of the Creeps” in less than a week and deliberately included every B-movie cliché he could think of, while giving all the characters the same last names as his favorite horror movie directors.

Likewise, “The Monster Squad” treats the old Universal monster movies as documentaries, giving our gang of young monster movie fans the advantage of knowing how to deal with such powerful supernatural foes as Count Dracula, even as those monsters are portrayed more as the caricatures they'd become in the pop culture of the 1980s.

Dekker has a pitch-perfect ear for memorable dialogue, with endlessly repeatable lines like, “Screaming like banshees,” and hilariously deadpan exchanges such as the following:

“I got good news and bad news, girls. The good news is, your dates are here.”

“What's the bad news?”

“They're dead.”

And even before director Edgar Wright earned praise for showing Simon Pegg's comic obliviousness to the start of a zombie apocalypse in “Shawn of the Dead” in 2004, Dekker's “Night of the Creeps” features several scenes of characters so distracted by their own drama that they fail to notice their friends and colleagues have been turned into the blank-eyed, slug-spewing, walking dead.

And yet, in between the rushes, Dekker captures some genuinely haunting, understated displays of emotion, such as when the grizzled old police detective (played by Tom Atkins) tells his college student sidekick about the justice he meted out against the man who killed his ex-girlfriend, or when an elderly man known to the neighborhood kids as the “scary German guy” (played by Leonardo Cimino) is revealed to be a kind-hearted survivor of the concentration camps of World War II.

Before Wes Craven released his first “Scream” film in 1996, and before Nick Fury's post-credits appearance in the first “Iron Man” film in 2008, Fred Dekker understood the power that comes from having a fan's knowledge of the horror movie genre and from bringing together the stars of several separate film franchises to make up their own “shared universe.”