This underrated Netflix present is the right Halloween watch

Is there something higher than Halloween season?

Certain, right here at Polygon we cowl horror year-round. We have now our rolling lists of the perfect horror films you’ll be able to watch at residence and the perfect horror films on Netflix which can be up to date each month of the yr.

However even for year-round horror followers, Halloween is a particular time of yr.

For the previous two years, Polygon has put collectively a Halloween Countdown calendar, providing a Halloween-friendly film or TV present obtainable to observe at residence every single day of October. We’re delighted to deliver that again as soon as once more, with 31 spooky choices to maintain the temper going all month lengthy.

Daily for the whole month of October, we’ll add a brand new advice to this Countdown and inform you the place you’ll be able to watch it. So curl up on the sofa, dim the lights, and seize some popcorn for a terrifying and entertaining host of Halloween surprises.

Oct. 1: Audition (1999)

Picture: Arrow Movies

In Audition, Takashi Miike’s 1999 psychological horror-thriller, love is a consensual fiction. Years after dropping his spouse to a terminal sickness, widower Shigeharu Aoyama is urged by his son to get again out on the planet and discover somebody. Aoyama agrees to a proposal by his good friend, a movie producer, to participate in an audition for a nonexistent movie to be able to discover a potential bride from the candidates. His search in the end leads him to Asami Yamazaki, a gorgeous former ballerina with a murky previous.

As Aoyama grows nearer to his new love curiosity, he finds himself caught deeper and deeper in an internet of intrigue that threatens to tear him aside emotionally, psychologically, and sure — even bodily. There’s something darkish inside Asami, sure, however there’s a latent darkness within Aoyama too, arguably even darker. The one distinction is that Asami has embraced that darkness and made it her personal.

Miike’s movie holds its playing cards comparatively near its chest for many of its run time, unspooling its tightly wound thriller like garrote wire earlier than peeling again its pores and skin of meet-cute artifice to disclose a pulsing mass of horrors roiling beneath. The movie descends right into a macabre fugue state of assumptions, misdirections, and cinematic sleights of hand, with goals that really feel virtually actual set in opposition to a actuality too terrifying to be something however. Ultimately, although, these are simply phrases. Solely ache may be trusted. —Toussaint Egan

Audition is offered to stream on Arrow Video and Hello-Yah!, at no cost with advertisements on Tubi, and at no cost on Kanopy with a library card. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy on Vudu and Apple.

Oct. 2: The Vanishing (1988)

Picture: The Criterion Assortment

It’s not a horror film, per se, and but Stanley Kubrick stated that The Vanishing was essentially the most scary movie he had ever seen. This Dutch thriller from 1988 — typically referred to by its authentic title Spoorloos, in order to not confuse it with an inferior 1993 American remake by the identical director, George Sluizer — performs it cool, like a easy lacking individual case. Rex and Saskia are a younger couple road-tripping by means of France. They’re taking a break at a service station when Saskia abruptly, and utterly, disappears.

Initially, the horror of the scenario is within the banality of it: the sensation that it might occur at any time, to anybody. Sluizer underlines this with the matter-of-fact realism of his location capturing. Then, barely greater than 20 minutes in, he wrong-foots the viewers with an abrupt shift: We’re following Raymond, a contented French household man who seems to be rehearsing a kidnapping. The thriller of what occurred to Saskia appears already to be solved. What subsequent?

The best way the movie — based mostly very carefully on Tim Krabbé’s novella The Golden Egg — skips so rapidly previous the anticipated construction of a thriller thriller must sap pressure, however actually it builds an virtually philosophical unease. As Raymond, performed with a chilling brightness by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, walks us by means of the “how” of his crime, the “why” turns into a gnawing, rather more troubling query. We skip ahead three years and discover Rex obsessive about discovering out what occurred to his misplaced love. When a solution is obtainable, we share his starvation for it utterly, and comply with him to what may be essentially the most plainly horrifying ending of any movie, ever. This can be a minimal masterpiece of existential dread. —Oli Welsh

The Vanishing is offered to stream on The Criterion Channel, or for digital rental or buy on Apple and Amazon.

Oct. 3: Rampant (2018)

Picture: Nicely Go USA Leisure

One of many nice joys of horror is the array of subgenres it gives, and the subgenres inside subgenres that spool out of that. Take the monster film, for example. It’s a subgenre of horror by itself, and inside it you could have the vampire film, the werewolf film, and the zombie film, simply to call a number of. After which you’ll be able to dive even deeper and discover one thing like Rampant, which mixes the zombie subgenre with an unlikely pairing: the historic courtroom drama interval piece.

The film takes place in the course of the seventeenth century, beneath the Joseon dynasty in Korea. The film is full of political intrigue: The protagonist is an conceited younger prince known as again residence after his brother’s loss of life solely to search out political machinations already in progress when he arrives. The courtroom is struggling to determine methods to cope with the close by Qing dynasty in China (the place our protagonist grew up), with totally different factions forming.

After which there are the zombies. Sure, a zombie outbreak arrives, recalibrating the significance of this royal battle for some (however not all) of its gamers. Our protagonist discovers this on his manner residence, and makes an attempt to persuade his father (and his father’s advisors) to do one thing about it. That results in some breathtakingly brutal swordplay motion in a pitch-perfect style mashup for the ages. –Pete Volk

Rampant is offered to stream on Hello-Yah!, FuboTV, and Viki, or at no cost with advertisements on Tubi, Crackle, Plex, Pluto TV, and Freevee. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy on Amazon, Apple, Vudu, and Google Play.

Oct. 4: Seconds (1966)

Picture: Paramount Photos

Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and aliens don’t have anything on the unstoppable means of ageing. All of us will grow old, life will get exponentially tough, and the one individual ready for us on the end line is Demise. John Frankenheimer constructed Seconds round such midlife terrors, granting New York banking exec Arthur Hamilton the chance to pretend his personal loss of life, reconstruct his physique within the type of Rock Hudson, and transfer to sunny Southern California as a sizzling, youthful dude named Tony Wilson. Like a small animal tramped beneath the sunlamp of the Santa Barbara solar, we see Hudson spiral by means of paranoia and remorse, replete with bare grape mashing and alcohol-fueled breakdowns. Evidently, the grass is never greener, and the one factor scarier than getting previous is staying younger.

The movie met boos at Cannes and puzzled critics who have been accustomed to main man Rock Hudson being simply that — a standard main man. However the movie has aged nicely, pun totally supposed. James Wong Howe’s cinematography, nominated for an Academy Award, holds the viewer inches from Hudson’s face, bends actuality by means of a fish-eye lens, and by some means makes stunning younger our bodies into nauseating bundles of limbs and flesh. And Hudson, now indifferent from his Private Model for many viewers beneath the age of 70, undercuts his Hollywood beauty with a humble efficiency of a person in full collapse. —Chris Plante

Seconds is offered to stream at no cost with advertisements on Pluto TV, or at no cost with a library card on Kanopy. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

Oct. 5: Bride of Chucky (1998)

Picture: Common Photos

The fourth film of the wickedly humorous Little one’s Play franchise takes the killer doll sequence in an thrilling new route. Bride of Chucky ditches Andy, the younger boy adopted by the murderous Chucky doll within the first three films, and as an alternative follows two clueless youngsters (Katherine Heigl and Nick Stabile) who unwittingly take two murderous dolls on a street journey and begin to suspect one another when the our bodies begin dropping.

The sinister inversion of the teenager street journey film could be enjoyable sufficient, however it’s the addition of Jennifer Tilly that actually makes Bride of Chucky sing. For the uninitiated within the Little one’s Play universe: The Chucky doll is possessed by the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif). Tilly performs Ray’s former lover and confederate, Tiffany, who brings the doll again to life and turns into a murderous doll herself.

The result’s two {couples} road-tripping collectively however unable to speak with one another. Heigl and Stabile’s Jade and Jesse are your typical youths in love — nonetheless attending to know one another and never totally trusting but — whereas Chucky and Tiffany’s bickering and delicate manipulations make this a joyous and twisted enjoyable time. Add in some breathtaking imagery from director Ronny Yu (Freddy vs. Jason) and cinematographer Peter Pau (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Killer) and you’ve got a franchise sequel nicely value your time. —PV

Bride of Chucky is offered to stream on Peacock. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

Oct. 6: Useless Ringers (1988)

Picture: twentieth Century Fox

Visually, 1988’s Useless Ringers have to be one in all David Cronenberg’s tamest films — excluding one extraordinarily disturbing dream sequence round midway by means of, and one grisly however out-of-focus lengthy shot on the finish. In any other case, this can be a movie composed of speaking heads in pristine, orderly areas, and varnished in Nineteen Eighties designer opulence: tearooms, working theaters, penthouses. His common physique horror is extra implied within the gleaming, twisted contours of medical implements than truly proven. But it may be his most devastating movie.

Jeremy Irons performs equivalent twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, who run a profitable fertility clinic in Toronto. Beverly, quiet and delicate, tends to the apply and the sufferers whereas the urbane Elliot climbs the medical institution ladder. They dwell collectively and typically fake to be one another, so shy Beverly can benefit from the fruits of Elliot’s womanizing. However their symbiotic relationship begins to fray and peel when Beverly falls in love with Claire (Geneviève Bujold), an actress and affected person who can’t bear youngsters as a result of she has three chambers in her womb.

Beneath Useless Ringers’ glassy floor, feeling runs deep and chilly. The extreme psychodrama that develops between the three characters — however largely between the dual brothers — builds to a conclusion that’s each appalling and shifting. On the movie’s coronary heart are the unimaginable performances given by Irons and captured by Cronenberg with cautious, unshowy craftsmanship. With out leaning too closely on figuring out make-up or tics, Irons not solely innately distinguishes Bev and Ellie, however builds an intimacy between them that’s as tender as it’s eerie. It’s like watching one individual tear themselves in two after which clumsily attempt to seal the wound. Useless Ringers is the stuff of tragedy in addition to horror. —OW

Useless Ringers is offered to stream on HBO Max. It is usually obtainable at no cost with a library card on Hoopla and Kanopy, or for digital rental or buy through Amazon and Apple TV.

Oct. 7: The Maintain (1983)

Picture: Paramount Photos

Michael Mann has a status as a slick, streetbound auteur. Movies like Thief, Warmth, and Collateral embrace the metropolis as a labyrinth, and crime as a psychological take a look at. The Maintain, his 1983 bounce to extra blockbuster fare, is admittedly nothing like these movies — aside from an extreme quantity of temper.

Set in 1941 Romania, across the time the Nazis invade the Soviet Union, the movie finds a German battalion stumbling upon a mysterious construction dubbed “The Maintain.” Two savvy troopers hope to loot what they assume is treasure inside. As an alternative, their heist unleashes Radu Molasar, a golem-like destroyer of worlds. Whoops!

When members of the infantry begin winding up lifeless, a vile SS commander (performed with ruthlessness by Gabriel Byrne) exhibits up to determine what the heck is happening. Naturally, he begins killing individuals, too. Mann slides between extra stark drama that one may anticipate from a movie plunging headfirst into World Struggle II geopolitics, whereas throwing supernatural curveballs that guarantee each nook of the story feels haunted. Ultimately, Scott Glenn exhibits up as a protector of the native village, which is being tortured by each Nazis and Radu Molasar, and the race is on to place an finish to it.

Backed by Tangerine Dream’s ecclesiastic synth rating and staged in among the most stunning, light-streaked stone units ever made (can a Romanian temple be a liminal area?), The Maintain is, little doubt, B-movie schlock. However within the palms of a grasp like Mann, it’s given the suave haze of a nightmare. —Matt Patches

The Maintain is offered to stream on The Criterion Channel, and at no cost with advertisements on Pluto TV. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy through Amazon and Apple TV.

Oct. 8: Samurai Jack — Episode XXXV: Jack and the Haunted Home

Picture: Warner Bros. Animation

Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack is a sequence that comprises multitudes. The premise of the present, regarding a samurai prince who’s transported right into a dystopian future by his nemesis, a tyrannical shape-shifting demon, and compelled to trek throughout a wierd and alien new world in seek for a manner again residence, is one which afforded a wealth of storytelling alternatives that ranged from epic and comical to somber and horrifying. Episode 35, “Jack and the Haunted Home,” matches squarely within the latter class.

Whereas touring alone one evening, Jack occurs upon a little bit lady crying in a forest. Chasing after her in an effort to console her, he finds himself drawn to a mysterious home whose malevolent power plagues him with beginning visions of an evil pressure preying upon helpless household. Jack’s drive to rescue the lady and her household from mortal peril nonetheless threatens to ensnare himself within the clutches of a spirit who thrives on remodeling the home into an unimaginable labyrinth from which there isn’t a escape.

“Jack and the Haunted Home” is an particularly spectacular episode, not only for its specific horror-centric premise, however for its depiction of the demon itself — a writhing mass of darkish tendrils that coalesce right into a ukiyo-e-style dragon with a leering jaw and piercing eyes. It’s a incredible episode that strikes a eager steadiness between unnerving terror and the extra action-focused emphasis of the sequence as an entire. —TE

Samurai Jack is offered to stream on HBO Max. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy through Amazon and Apple TV.

Oct. 9: Steven Universe — Chille Tid

Picture: Cartoon Community

Steven Universe is not any stranger to horror, and significantly physique horror. A Crystal Gem’s physique is the manifestation of their Gem — which itself is immutable — permitting them to shape-shift at will. It’s a part of what makes the present stunning; the Gem characters are all canonically nonbinary and might select the physique and gender expression that fits them. It additionally provides the present fertile floor to do terrifying issues, like depict the consequence of Gem “experiments” that produce disgusting, roiling lots of animated disembodied limbs.

On this vein, “Chille Tid” provides kid-accessible visible language to critical ideas like energy, consent, codependency, and martyrdom. The episode focuses on fusion, which up till this level has been depicted as extremely stunning. Fusion permits two Gems to morph collectively to create a bigger Gem with the character of their relationship. And the present treats this act with pleasure and reverence, constructing a lot storytelling across the energy of loving others. It additionally teaches the lesson that coercing one other Gem into fusion is a deep breach of belief. (And by the best way, in Gem World tradition, fusing with a unique sort of Gem is a large taboo — one other little bit of incisive real-world commentary from Steven Universe.)

In “Chille Tid,” Lapis, a depressed and extremely highly effective Crystal Gem, fuses with Jasper, a mercenary despatched to destroy the Crystal Gems on Earth. The fusion is repugnant. Lapis martyrs herself — shackling herself to an abuser and sinking them into the ocean. You may see the massive character they create combating in opposition to water-created handcuffs that spring from the ocean. That is solely made worse when you understand Lapis’ backstory: She solely lately escaped imprisonment from an enchanted mirror. It’s a deeply scary episode, particularly for youngsters’s tv, but additionally as an grownup — when you’ve got ever escaped an abuser, you understand the sensation too nicely. The imagery is unforgettable as a result of it’s actual.

For these of you who fear, Lapis does break away. And he or she does ultimately dwell in a renovated barn with Peridot, leading to the most effective fanons of the present. —Nicole Clark

Steven Universe is offered to stream on HBO Max and Hulu. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy through Amazon.

Oct. 10: The Final Winter

Picture: Antidote Movies

Larry Fessenden’s underseen 2006 horror masterpiece The Final Winter was manner forward of the climate-horror wave that the remainder of the world is barely simply catching up on. The film follows a hodgepodge combine of presidency officers, scientists, and researchers despatched to the freezing wilderness of Alaska in hopes of discovering oil. The group is most involved with digging right into a wildlife reserve, and whereas the federal government’s liaison, Ed Pollack (performed with menacing cruelty and almost-cartoon ranges of evil by Ron Perlman) is gung-ho about drilling, a number of of the scientists aren’t so certain. After a number of warnings to not, the group digs into the ice and disrupts long-dormant spirits, inflicting, after all, all hell to interrupt unfastened.

Fessenden’s film is notable not only for how nice and watchable (and scary) it’s by itself phrases, but additionally for a way successfully it synthesizes so most of the best horror subgenres into one story. It’s the most effective local weather change horror films, the most effective native-spirits-and-disturbed-land films, a incredible addition to the basic horror canon of the arctic expedition gone horribly unsuitable, and even matches properly subsequent to different government-creep-in-way-over-their-head films like Aliens.

However for all its time spent tapping into horror historical past, The Final Winter’s greatest characteristic is how unsettlingly it presents its personal theme. So far as the film is anxious, humanity is basically a parasite to the pure world, and the whole lot that goes unsuitable is the world merely combating again to defend itself. Loads of films present visions of the top of civilization, however few apart from The Final Winter make it appear to be the one cheap possibility. —Austen Goslin

The Final Winter is offered for digital rental or buy through Amazon and Apple TV.

Oct. 11: Close to Darkish

Picture: F/M

“Can I’ve a chunk?”

An attractive vampire western positively oozing with “cool,” there isn’t a different film like Close to Darkish. Kathryn Bigelow’s outstanding solo directorial debut began a superb streak, main proper into Blue Metal, Level Break, and Unusual Days.

Bigelow wished to make a Western, however studios weren’t precisely champing on the bit to fund these within the Nineteen Eighties. So she and co-writer Eric Purple got down to mix the Western with one other style almost as previous as cinema itself: the vampire film. The current successes of Fright Evening and The Misplaced Boys didn’t harm, both.

Close to Darkish has incredible motion set-pieces — a barroom brawl and a shootout in a bungalow stand out particularly for his or her pressure constructing and use of sunshine, respectively. It’s additionally darkly humorous, and full of biting dramatic irony (a vampire giving a hickey to an unsuspecting neck, some acute early wordplay the place your information that this can be a vampire film modifications the whole lot).

The costumes are pitch-perfect, and the make-up is uncontrolled (the consequences to create the phantasm of burning pores and skin are merely astounding). However I can solely go to date with out speaking about Invoice Paxton. Paxton, who performs the out-of-control vampire Severen, is a pressure of nature in Close to Darkish. He’s an electrical presence at each flip, equal components menacing and attractive, and is essentially the most memorable a part of a particularly memorable film. —PV

Close to Darkish is offered to stream on The Criterion Channel.

Oct. 12: Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Picture: Kaijyu Theater

There are plenty of inventive methods to explain Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 body-horror masterpiece: “cult basic,” “visionary,” “extremely fucked up,” to call a number of. The outline I’ve roughly settled on is “transhumanist body-horror supervillain love story.”

The primary quarter-hour of Tetsuo hit like an adrenaline increase shot straight to the occipital lobe, chronicling the story of a salaryman and his girlfriend who by chance run over a mysterious eccentric with a body-morphing “steel fetish.” Later, upon realizing they’ve each been contaminated with similar affliction, the couple probes on the newfound bodily, psychological, and sexual dimensions of their weird situation, all whereas their sufferer turned adversary plots his revenge from the shadows.

Tsukamoto’s magnum opus is horrifying, attractive, and endlessly authentic, continuously reinventing itself with frenzied stop-motion montage and cackling quick-cut audio cues that hold the viewer on the fringe of their seat. Chu Ishikawa’s rating feels just like the religious antecedent to digital music acts like 9 Inch Nails and Portishead, with its droning industrial clamor and burst-fire drum loops searing into your eardrums like acid consuming away at sheet steel.

Whereas a pure precursor to modern movies like Julia Ducournau’s Titane and David Cronenberg’s Crash, you’ll quickly sufficient uncover — even after greater than three a long time and two sequels — there nonetheless hasn’t been the rest fairly prefer it since. When you don’t have the abdomen for sadomasochistic body-modding or gore, it’s completely high-quality to provide this one a cross. When you do occur to provide it an opportunity, although, you’ll be handled to a visceral and unforgettable expertise. –TE

Tetsuo: The Iron Man is offered to stream on The Criterion Channel and Shudder, or at no cost with a library card on Kanopy. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy through Apple TV.

Oct. 13: Rigor Mortis

Picture: Fortissimo Movies

Describing this Hong Kong vampire film is a particularly difficult course of. On its floor, Rigor Mortis is a vampire/demon/ghost motion film. However while you dig a little bit deeper, it’s additionally a mini time capsule and a tribute to the supernatural horror cinema of Hong Kong’s previous.

The film follows a person who arrives at an enormous concrete condo constructing that appears to be haunted by each spirit you could possibly think about. He’s a past-his-prime actor and intends to take his personal life. When he tries, twin spirits try to possess his physique, however then they’re stopped by a retired vampire hunter who now runs the condo’s restaurant. What else would a vampire hunter do when there are not any vampires left?

This complete sequence solely covers the film’s first 10 or so minutes, and is an ideal setup for the particular model of understanding, in-on-the-joke supernatural motion ever current in Rigor Mortis — which after all does ultimately contain a vampire. It’s the type of early-2010s film the place the whole setting is grey, simply so the manufacturing has an excuse to color it crimson when the fights come. All of this will sound ridiculous (and it undoubtedly is), however by some means Rigor Mortis manages to strike the right steadiness of a so-serious-it’s-silly tone and modulates between the 2 moods with ease. It pivots from scenes of individuals trapping spirits in wardrobes to somebody desperately attempting to carry out a religious ritual to resurrect their beloved one, giving sufficient gravity to every that they’ll all come off as honest.

As entertaining as Rigor Mortis is, it additionally has a secret. Whereas not essential to getting the film, it does add one other stage of enjoyment. See, the protagonist is called Chin Siu-ho, which is additionally the identify of the actor who’s enjoying him, who additionally occurred to be the star of the legendary Hong Kong horror sequence Mr. Vampire. In different phrases, it’s a film a few real-world retired actor/martial artist who as soon as performed a vampire hunter, now meets a fictional retired vampire hunter, after which joins in on the vampire looking yet another time. –AG

Rigor Mortis is offered to stream on Peacock and Hello-Yah!, at no cost with advertisements on Plex and Tubi, or for digital rental or buy through Amazon and Apple TV.

Oct. 14: Witchfinder Common

Picture: Tigon British Movie Productions

Vincent Value is an icon of horror whose camp but commanding presence outlined so most of the lurid, theatrical British and American horror films of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s. His 1968 star automobile Witchfinder Common appears prefer it’s going to be a kind of movies, however beware. This can be a bitter, realist, historic type of horror, and each the movie and Value’s efficiency are lethal critical.

Witchfinder Common was tailored from a novel, and loosely based mostly on the exploits of a historic character: Matthew Hopkins, an English witch hunter who claimed, falsely, to have been awarded the title of “witchfinder common” by Parliament. Through the English Civil Struggle of the 1640s, a time of paranoia and lawlessness, Hopkins rampaged freely across the East Anglian countryside, sending over 100 individuals to the gallows on suspicion of witchcraft.

Though it performs quick and unfastened with the historic report, this grim, low-budget thriller doesn’t truck with the supernatural. It’s all concerning the evil of man. Value, in one in all his iciest performances, performs Hopkins as a manipulative fascist and sadist; in a manner, a type of serial killer. When he targets a kindly priest and the priest’s niece Sara (Hilary Dwyer), he’s pitted in opposition to the niece’s betrothed, a valiant Roundhead soldier (Ian Ogilvy).

However there’s nothing heroic concerning the battle on this movie, which, enjoying out in an eerily becalmed nation panorama, feels determined and suffocated. Dwyer unleashes a few of cinema’s most unnerving and memorable screams over the awful ultimate scenes. Director Michael Reeves was simply 24 when he made Witchfinder Common, and died of an overdose shortly after its launch: a tragic early finish to a promising profession that has solely added to the mystique of this unsparing film. –OW

Witchfinder Common is offered to stream at no cost with a library card on Hoopla. Enterprising readers also can discover the entire thing on YouTube.

Oct. 15: The Starvation

Picture: Peerford

What number of different vampire films open with a subterranean goth nightclub scene set to Bauhaus’ “Bela Legosi’s Useless” that includes David Bowie, the Skinny White Duke himself?

The late Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire horror movie stars Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as Miriam and John Blaylock, two vampires dwelling in New York who spend their time in relative leisure, enjoying the cello of their darkened mansion by day and stalking their prey at evening.

As John inexplicably finds his vitality and youth sapped away regardless of his immortal physique, he seeks out solutions and assist within the type of Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a gerontologist learning results of various blood sorts on the method of ageing. It’s not lengthy, nonetheless, that Miriam, who first sired John 200 years in the past, units her sights on claiming Roberts as the newest in her lengthy line of lovers.

Shot with icy blue colour grading and lighting juxtaposed with cavernous shadows shot inside John and Miriam’s luxurious New York penthouse, The Starvation is an absolute feast for the senses. Bowie delivers a characteristically phenomenal efficiency as John, equal components charming and aloof in his transient but memorable on-screen presence, and Deneuve is a sultry and tragic antagonist in her efficiency as Miriam. Sarandon provides an equally fascinating efficiency as a scientist who yearns for immortality within the type of fame and recognition solely to search out it within the bodily and religious type of vampiric longevity. When you’re in search of a horror movie as terrifying as it’s attractive, look no additional than Scott’s horror basic. –TE

The Starvation is offered to stream on HBO Max and Watch TCM. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy through Amazon, Apple TV, Vudu, and Google Play.

Oct. 16: Carnival of Souls

Picture: Harcourt Productions

At a lean 78 minutes, the 1962 thoughts recreation Carnival of Souls has no time to waste on scene-setting or character-building: It opens two seconds earlier than the motion begins, with a drag race that rapidly goes unsuitable, plunging one of many opponents right into a murky river. When one of many automotive’s passengers, Mary (Candace Hilligoss), improbably emerges from the water a full three hours later, it’s clear that one thing’s off about her, however it takes author John Clifford and indie director Herk Harvey the remainder of the movie’s unnerving run time to completely reveal what’s actually occurring.

In comparison with fashionable horror, Carnival of Souls is missing in massive scares and gory terror, however it turned a cult hit (and a significant affect on horror administrators like George A. Romero) for a cause: Harvey has a powerful command of eerie tone and unsettling imagery. A creepy organ rating, an escalating sense of one thing simply not proper, and a way of deep dread all cling over the movie, casting a dreamy spell as Mary staggers by means of her subsequent life. Harvey himself exhibits up within the movie as an eerie presence, stalking Mary with ill-omened intent.

Hilligoss’ big, haunted eyes and general sense of fragility make her a memorable protagonist, however the actual star of Carnival of Souls could be the deserted Saltair Pavilion in Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah, the place Harvey units a lot of the motion. He paid $50 for the rights to shoot within the disintegrating, remoted previous spa, a setting that appears prefer it has its personal ghosts and its personal nightmarish backstory. Carnival of Souls is classic cult horror, however it stands up immediately as a memorable expertise, and the trek by means of that nightmare pavilion is an enormous cause it’s endured. —Tasha Robinson

Carnival of Souls is offered to stream on HBO Max, Paramount Plus, The Criterion Channel, and Prime Video, at no cost with a library card on Hoopla, or at no cost with advertisements on Vudu and Tubi.

Oct. 17 – Don’t Look Now

Picture: D.L.N. Ventures Partnership

Horror films are sometimes autos for creators to provide perception into massive, difficult matters like faith, hope, loss of life, and even worry itself. However not often has any horror film met the topic of grief as head-on as Don’t Look Now does, or managed to deal with the problem in such a profound and unhappy manner.

This 1973 horror basic from director Nicolas Roeg follows a pair who transfer to Venice after their daughter tragically drowns (sure, Venice town stuffed with canals; sure, it’s a unhealthy concept). From there, the couple meets a pair of older girls, one in all whom claims to have psychic powers and insists that the couple’s daughter remains to be alive, which concurrently heals and hurts the couple’s rapidly fraying relationship.

To assist promote the overwhelming weight that grief can placed on an individual and the best way it will probably reshape their world, Roeg turns Venice’s countless alleyways, bridges, and water into one thing like a dreamscape, folding them in on one another and creating huge distances out of every canal. Town feels directly claustrophobic and miles broad, completely reflecting the confusion, and utter dismay of the characters and creating an environment of pressure that’s not often achieved in a film with as few direct and overt scares as this one. However that’s the type of film Don’t Look Now is, one that may sit with you want quiet grief for years to come back, with out ever making you bounce out of your seat. –AG

Don’t Look Now is offered to stream on Prime Video, at no cost with advertisements on Pluto TV, or at no cost with a library card on Kanopy. It is usually obtainable for digital rental or buy through Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu.

Oct. 18 – The School

Picture: Dimension Movies

Earlier than you see a single picture, The School kicks off with the blood-pumping guitar riff that opens The Offspring’s “The Children Aren’t Alright.” It’s the movie’s promise to you: This can be a film about teenagers in hassle. And it’s going to fucking rock.

Directed by Robert Rodriguez from a narrative by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel and with rewrites from late-’90s slasher king Kevin Williamson, The School is the under-sung pinnacle of teenage horror’s period of self-awareness.

In The School, an Ohio highschool turns into hell for its college students when alien parasites infect the college school, turning them into murderous hosts that conspire to contaminate a bunch of scholars at first, after which the entire city. Because the parasites unfold and get extra highly effective, the chances of survival quickly dwindle — and a Breakfast Membership-esque motley crew bands collectively to defeat the invaders.

A part of the enjoyable of The School is in its style pastiche: The film is a winking mashup of sci-fi horror classics like The Factor and Invasion of the Physique Snatchers, whereas becoming in neatly with contemporaries like Scream and I Know What You Did Final Summer time (each written by Kevin Williamson). One other half is its astonishing forged of early-career stars: The Quick & Livid franchise’s Jordana Brewster seems, as does Jon Stewart, Famke Janssen, Elijah Wooden, and Usher himself. With a crisp script that strikes at an unimaginable clip and splendidly gross-but-not-too-gross sensible results, The School is a goddamn rollercoaster of a movie, an excellent horror film for individuals who need some scares for certain, however are largely down for a good time with a film. –Joshua Rivera

The School is offered to stream on HBO Max, or for digital rental or buy through Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu.

Oct. 19 – Unfriended: Darkish Internet

Picture: Blumhouse Productions

Within the yr of our lord 2022, there’s completely no cause anybody must really feel pressured to affix one other video name, and solely barely much less cause for somebody to really feel completely glued to a pc window. Unfriended: Darkish Internet is the psychopathic exception to each these guidelines, a horror film instructed strictly from the desktop of Matias (Colin Woodell). Through the course of his Skype name along with his buddies (this was pre-pandemic, if the app selection provides you pause), their evening collectively descends into terror as the unique homeowners of his laptop computer come a-callin’.

Although Darkish Internet is a sequel to 2015’s Unfriended, the 2 are unrelated, and, in my view, the pitch-black bleakness of Darkish Internet makes it the higher spooky month watch. Right here the darkish internet is simply as otherworldly as any supernatural presence, and the movie by no means lets up because it descends into digital chaos. There’s one thing to Darkish Internet concerning the ease with which our on-line life can bleed (actually) into our actual lives, and the way we’re all simpler marks than we’d anticipate. However for individuals who similar to to see a bunch of youngsters get taken out one after the other, it’s additionally simply straightforwardly that. Like with The Factor, there’s an enchantment to watching individuals methodically attempt a number of cheap steps to get themselves out of hassle.

However this being a horror film, there’s solely a lot you are able to do. To get caught within the internet of Unfriended 2 is to truly let your self dwell out a slasher film that’s darker than simply one other Zoom invite: a thriller based mostly on the planet we truly dwell in, or at the least the darkish underbelly beneath it. After Unfriended: Darkish Internet, that further Zoom invite won’t appear to be the worst name on the planet. But when your laptop computer background by no means totally feels safe once more — nicely, you’ll be able to at all times go outdoors. —Zosha Millman

Unfriended: Darkish Internet is offered to stream on Peacock, or for digital rental or buy through Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu.

Oct. 20: Within the Mouth of Insanity

Picture: New Line Cinema

Regardless of his monumental and complex affect, there are few good direct diversifications of H.P. Lovecraft. One of the best ones are oblique homages, like John Carpenter’s Within the Mouth of Insanity, a film that’s equal components unsettling, meta, and simply plain enjoyable.

The movie stars Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill, who performs an insurance coverage investigator, John Trent, who’s employed to search out Sutter Cane, a wildly profitable horror author gone lacking. Cane’s work, some say, is so affecting that it drives them to insanity, as Trent learns someday when Cane is attacked by a crazed man with an ax — a person who, Trent learns after police shoot him lifeless, was Sutter Cane’s agent.

That is the place issues get bizarre: In his seek for Cane, Trent begins studying the novelist’s work and discovers clues that Hobb’s Finish, the fictional setting of lots of Cane’s novels, could also be an actual place. As he drives off into the ominous woods of New England in quest of it, the road between what’s actual and what isn’t begins to blur for Trent, and he begins to search out himself in a horror story of his personal.

A lesser-known work from a contemporary grasp, Within the Mouth of Insanity is a tightly wound clock of paranoia, a recursive nightmare that asks the place the road is between fears actual and imagined. It’s excellent for individuals who desire a horror film that’s extra creepy than scary, and a piece that effortlessly toes the road between schlock and craft. Think about it the final word B-movie model of the extra blockbuster-friendly Cabin within the Woods: a horror story about horror tales, a enjoyable tackle a selected model of nightmare the place nobody has enjoyable in any respect. –JR

Within the Mouth of Insanity is offered to lease or buy digitally on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu.

Oct. 21: The Lady With All of the Items

Picture: Poison Chef

Very like the M.R. Carey e-book it adapts, Colm McCarthy’s bloody horror-action film The Lady With All of the Items is greatest skilled with none type of spoilers or plot abstract getting in. It’s a journey of discovery that unfolds in a very cautious and calculated manner, and discovering its precise subgenre of horror with out advance warning is an enormous a part of the expertise. It begins with a classroom the place youngsters in jail jumpsuits are closely restrained, held beneath navy guard, and presided over by a hostile supervisor (Paddy Considine) and a patrician physician (Glenn Shut), who deal with them like feral animals. Why precisely that’s the case takes some time to unfold, and if you happen to take pleasure in surprises, you need to cease studying proper right here and bounce straight to the streaming hyperlinks.

For people who find themselves extra particular and selective about their horror and must know what they’re stepping into earlier than they bounce in, although, right here’s a little bit extra: The Lady With All of the Items is a straight-up zombie film, however it’s one which sympathizes as a lot with the contaminated because the survivors making their manner by means of the standard harmful postapocalyptic wasteland stuffed with flesh-eating hordes. Melanie (Sennia Nanua), a younger lady contaminated with the zombie virus however (largely) able to restraint and management, winds up because the central determine in a drama constructed across the adults attempting to make use of her and her classmates to grasp and treatment the zombie plague.

The entire story finally ends up being a young fable with some significantly vivid and successful performances and a memorable-as-hell ending. This 2016 movie was a little bit early to the continuing wave of “What sort of world are we leaving our kids?” horror and sci-fi films, and it solutions that query in a manner that’s candy and unhappy — after sufficient intense flesh-eating motion to make this a strong entry within the zombie-movie canon. —TR

The Lady With All of the Items is offered to observe at no cost with advertisements on YouTube, Vudu, and Tubi, at no cost with a library card on Hoopla, or for digital rental or buy through Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu.

Oct. 22 – Black Summer time – “The Chilly”

Picture: Netflix

A criminally underrated horror present, Black Summer time is among the greatest issues streaming on Netflix, full cease. A derivative of Z Nation from Karl Schaefer (The Useless Zone) and Polygon favourite John Hyams (Common Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Alone), it’s a tense, ground-level depiction of the primary days of a zombie apocalypse. The present begins six weeks after the beginning of the apocalypse, and follows a mom (Jamie King) looking for her misplaced daughter, and the forged of characters she meets alongside the best way.

What makes Black Summer time stand out from the remaining is the sharp route – Hyams directs about half of the episodes, with Abram Cox (Miss No person) filling in for the opposite half. It’s the uncommon streaming present that has actual, succesful film administrators behind the digital camera, and that’s by no means been extra obvious than within the season 2 premiere, “The Chilly.”

Black Summer time leans on sequences that learn like one-takes [ed. note: it’s very rare to find a real oner out in the wild], enjoying up the stress inherent to a zombie apocalypse with the technical acumen to truly pull off such formidable sequences. “Luke and Sophie” opens with one such sequence, beginning with a person siphoning fuel out of a automotive right into a disgusting KFC bucket, keeping track of a lurking zombie a few hundred yards away, and persevering with in an exhilarating seven-minute one-take sequence that features seeing somebody flip right into a zombie, a brief change in protagonists, an intense automotive sequence, and a contemplative zombie gazing his personal reflection. It’s an excellent instance of how the present can ratchet from 0 to 60 right away, with edge-of-your seat motion. You may watch it with none extra context, and it’ll provide you with a reasonably excellent concept of whether or not this present is for you. –PV

Oct. 23 – Lake Mungo

Picture: Mungo Productions

Grief, ghosts, and early digital camera telephones are on the heart of this wonderful Australian found-footage horror film. Lake Mungo takes a docufiction method to telling the story of the Palmer household, whose teenage daughter, Alice, has lately drowned whereas swimming within the physique of water the film will get its identify from. The household is consumed with grief, however the whole lot will get a little bit stranger when Alice’s brother Matthew begins discovering sure methods to seemingly make Alice’s ghost seem of their home; at the least, that’s what he claims is going on.

The film’s investigation into loss and its results on households takes up most of its area, however it’s additionally stuffed with little moments concerning the secret lives that youngsters lead, pulling in a half-dozen Twin Peaks-style discoveries about Alice’s secrets and techniques. Regardless of all this making for some enjoyable twists, Lake Mungo is at its greatest when it’s a barely slower contemplation of whether or not or not shifting on is admittedly doable and if reminiscences, even the very worst ones, hold individuals’s spirits on the planet a little bit longer.

Maybe Lake Mungo’s only system in conveying this theme, and one place it separates from most found-footage movies, is by calling into query among the footage we’re being proven. Matthew’s ghostly photos, and their legitimacy, are known as into query a number of instances all through the film, which in the end leads us to query the whole lot we’re seeing. However by giving us a purposefully unreliable perspective, one which’s manipulated so clearly by the characters themselves, it sends us additional into the minds and the grief of the Palmer household in a manner that straightforward speaking head interviews or confessionals by no means might. —AG

Lake Mungo is offered to observe at no cost with advertisements on Tubi, or for digital rental or buy through Amazon, Apple, and Google Play.