The very best Halloween horror motion pictures and specials to look at in 2022

Is there something higher than Halloween season?

Positive, right here at Polygon we cowl horror year-round. We’ve our rolling lists of the perfect horror motion pictures you’ll be able to watch at house and the perfect horror motion pictures on Netflix which are 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 out there to look at at house each 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.

On daily basis for the complete 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)

In Audition, Takashi Miike’s 1999 psychological horror-thriller, love is a consensual fiction. Years after shedding 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 pal, a movie producer, to participate in an audition for a nonexistent movie in an effort to discover a potential bride from the candidates. His search in the end leads him to Asami Yamazaki, a ravishing 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 inside 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 desires that really feel nearly actual set in opposition to a actuality too terrifying to be something however. Ultimately, although, these are simply phrases. Solely ache might be trusted. —Toussaint Egan

Audition is accessible to stream on Arrow Video and Hello-Yah!, totally free with adverts on Tubi, and totally free on Kanopy with a library card. It’s also out there for digital rental or buy on Vudu and Apple.

Oct. 2: The Vanishing (1988)

It’s not a horror film, per se, and but Stanley Kubrick stated that The Vanishing was probably 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 via France. They’re taking a break at a service station when Saskia abruptly, and fully, disappears.

Initially, the horror of the state of affairs 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 taking pictures. 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 way in which the movie — primarily based very carefully on Tim Krabbé’s novella The Golden Egg — skips so shortly previous the anticipated construction of a thriller thriller should sap pressure, however in reality it builds an nearly philosophical unease. As Raymond, performed with a chilling brightness by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, walks us via the “how” of his crime, the “why” turns into a gnawing, far 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 fully, and observe him to what could be probably the most plainly horrifying ending of any movie, ever. This can be a minimal masterpiece of existential dread. —Oli Welsh

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

Oct. 3: Rampant (2018)

One of many nice joys of horror is the array of subgenres it presents, and the subgenres inside subgenres that spool out of that. Take the monster film, as an example. It’s a subgenre of horror by itself, and inside it you will 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 court docket drama interval piece.

The film takes place in the course of the seventeenth century, underneath the Joseon dynasty in Korea. The film is crammed with political intrigue: The protagonist is an boastful younger prince known as again house after his brother’s demise solely to seek out political machinations already in progress when he arrives. The court docket is struggling to determine easy 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 house, 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 accessible to stream on Hello-Yah!, FuboTV, and Viki, or totally free with adverts on Tubi, Crackle, Plex, Pluto TV, and Freevee. It’s also out there for digital rental or buy on Amazon, Apple, Vudu, and Google Play.

Oct. 4: Seconds (1966)

Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and aliens don’t have anything on the unstoppable means of getting older. All of us will become older, life will get exponentially tough, and the one individual ready for us on the end line is Loss of life. John Frankenheimer constructed Seconds round such midlife terrors, granting New York banking exec Arthur Hamilton the chance to faux his personal demise, reconstruct his physique within the type of Rock Hudson, and transfer to sunny Southern California as a scorching, youthful dude named Tony Wilson. Like a small animal tramped underneath the sunlamp of the Santa Barbara solar, we see Hudson spiral via paranoia and remorse, replete with bare grape mashing and alcohol-fueled breakdowns. For sure, 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 conventional main man. However the movie has aged nicely, pun absolutely supposed. James Wong Howe’s cinematography, nominated for an Academy Award, holds the viewer inches from Hudson’s face, bends actuality via a fish-eye lens, and one way or the other makes stunning younger our bodies into nauseating bundles of limbs and flesh. And Hudson, now indifferent from his Private Model for many viewers underneath the age of 70, undercuts his Hollywood attractiveness with a humble efficiency of a person in full collapse. —Chris Plante

Seconds is accessible to stream totally free with adverts on Pluto TV, or totally free with a library card on Kanopy. It’s also out there for digital rental or buy on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

Oct. 5: Bride of Chucky (1998)

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

The sinister inversion of the teenager highway journey film could be enjoyable sufficient, but it surely’s the addition of Jennifer Tilly that basically 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 absolutely trusting but — whereas Chucky and Tiffany’s bickering and refined 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 price your time. —PV

Bride of Chucky is accessible to stream on Peacock. It’s also out there for digital rental or buy on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

Oct. 6: Lifeless Ringers (1988)

Visually, 1988’s Lifeless Ringers should be certainly one of David Cronenberg’s tamest motion pictures — apart from one extraordinarily disturbing dream sequence round midway via, and one grisly however out-of-focus lengthy shot on the finish. In any other case, it is a movie composed of speaking heads in pristine, orderly areas, and varnished in Eighties designer opulence: tearooms, working theaters, penthouses. His typical physique horror is extra implied within the gleaming, twisted contours of medical implements than truly proven. But it could be his most devastating movie.

Jeremy Irons performs an identical twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, who run a profitable fertility clinic in Toronto. Beverly, quiet and delicate, tends to the follow and the sufferers whereas the urbane Elliot climbs the medical institution ladder. They reside collectively and generally 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 Lifeless Ringers’ glassy floor, feeling runs deep and chilly. The extraordinary psychodrama that develops between the three characters — however largely between the dual brothers — builds to a conclusion that’s each appalling and transferring. 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. Lifeless Ringers is the stuff of tragedy in addition to horror. —OW

Lifeless Ringers is accessible to stream on HBO Max. It’s also out there totally free with a library card on Hoopla and Kanopy, or for digital rental or buy through Amazon and Apple TV.

Oct. 7: The Preserve (1983)

Michael Mann has a repute 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 Preserve, his 1983 bounce to extra blockbuster fare, is absolutely 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 Preserve.” Two savvy troopers hope to loot what they suppose 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) reveals up to determine what the heck is happening. Naturally, he begins killing folks, too. Mann slides between extra stark drama that one would possibly count on from a movie plunging headfirst into World Warfare II geopolitics, whereas throwing supernatural curveballs that guarantee each nook of the story feels haunted. Finally, Scott Glenn reveals 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 a number of the most stunning, light-streaked stone units ever made (can a Romanian temple be a liminal area?), The Preserve is, little doubt, B-movie schlock. However within the arms of a grasp like Mann, it’s given the clever haze of a nightmare. —Matt Patches

The Preserve is accessible to stream on The Criterion Channel, and totally free with adverts on Pluto TV. It’s also out there for digital rental or buy through Amazon and Apple TV.

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

Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack is a collection 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 an odd and alien new world in seek for a manner again house, 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,” suits squarely within the latter class.

Whereas touring alone one night time, Jack occurs upon just a little lady crying in a forest. Chasing after her in an effort to console her, he finds himself drawn to a mysterious home whose malevolent vitality 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 nevertheless threatens to ensnare himself within the clutches of a spirit who thrives on reworking 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 improbable episode that strikes a eager stability between unnerving terror and the extra action-focused emphasis of the collection as a complete. —TE

Samurai Jack is accessible to stream on HBO Max. It’s also out there for digital rental or buy through Amazon and Apple TV.

Oct. 9: Steven Universe — Chille Tid

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 may 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 plenty 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 distinct kind of Gem is a big 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 big character they create preventing in opposition to water-created handcuffs that spring from the ocean. That is solely made worse when you recognize Lapis’ backstory: She solely just lately escaped imprisonment from an enchanted mirror. It’s a deeply scary episode, particularly for youngsters’s tv, but additionally as an grownup — in case you have ever escaped an abuser, you recognize 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 reside in a renovated barn with Peridot, leading to among the best fanons of the present. —Nicole Clark

Steven Universe is accessible to stream on HBO Max and Hulu. It’s also out there for digital rental or buy through Amazon.

Oct. 10: The Final Winter

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 crew 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, in fact, all hell to interrupt free.

Fessenden’s film is notable not only for how nice and watchable (and scary) it’s by itself phrases, but additionally for the way successfully it synthesizes so lots of the best horror subgenres into one story. It’s among the best local weather change horror motion pictures, among the best native-spirits-and-disturbed-land motion pictures, a improbable addition to the basic horror canon of the arctic expedition gone horribly mistaken, and even suits properly subsequent to different government-creep-in-way-over-their-head motion pictures 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 actually a parasite to the pure world, and all the pieces that goes mistaken is the world merely preventing again to defend itself. Loads of motion pictures present visions of the top of civilization, however few aside from The Final Winter make it appear to be the one affordable choice. —Austen Goslin

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

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