The best Halloween horror movies and specials to watch in 2022

Is there something higher than Halloween season?

Sure, right here at Polygon we cowl horror year-round. We have our rolling lists of the best horror movies you possibly can watch at residence and the best horror movies on Netflix which are up to date each month of the yr.

But 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 accessible to watch at residence day-after-day of October. We’re delighted to convey that again as soon as once more, with 31 spooky alternatives to preserve the temper going all month lengthy.

Every day for your complete month of October, we’ll add a brand new suggestion to this Countdown and let you know the place you possibly can 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)

Image: Arrow Films

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 in the world and discover somebody. Aoyama agrees to a proposal by his good friend, a movie producer, to participate in an audition for a nonexistent movie in order to discover a potential bride from the candidates. His search finally 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 online of intrigue that threatens to tear him aside emotionally, psychologically, and sure — even bodily. There is one thing darkish inside Asami, sure, however there’s a latent darkness inside Aoyama too, arguably even darker. The solely distinction is that Asami has embraced that darkness and made it her personal.

Miike’s movie holds its playing cards comparatively shut to 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 reveal 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 nearly actual set in opposition to a actuality too terrifying to be something however. In the tip, although, these are simply phrases. Only ache will be trusted. —Toussaint Egan

Audition is obtainable to stream on Arrow Video and Hi-Yah!, totally free with adverts on Tubi, and totally free on Kanopy with a library card. It can be accessible for digital rental or buy on Vudu and Apple.

Oct. 2: The Vanishing (1988)

Image: The Criterion Collection

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

Initially, the horror of the scenario is in the banality of it: the sensation that it may 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 are 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 method the movie — primarily based very carefully on Tim Krabbé’s novella The Golden Egg — skips so rapidly previous the anticipated construction of a thriller thriller ought to sap pressure, however in reality it builds an nearly 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, way 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 comply with him to what could be probably the most plainly horrifying ending of any movie, ever. This is a minimal masterpiece of existential dread. —Oli Welsh

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

Oct. 3: Rampant (2018)

Image: Well Go USA Entertainment

One of the good joys of horror is the array of subgenres it gives, and the subgenres inside subgenres that spool out of that. Take the monster film, as an illustration. It’s a subgenre of horror by itself, and inside it you might have the vampire film, the werewolf film, and the zombie film, simply to identify just a few. And then you possibly can 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 throughout the seventeenth century, underneath the Joseon dynasty in Korea. The film is full of political intrigue: The protagonist is an boastful younger prince known as again residence after his brother’s loss of life solely to discover political machinations already in progress when he arrives. The courtroom is struggling to determine how to take care of the close by Qing dynasty in China (the place our protagonist grew up), with completely different factions forming.

And then there are the zombies. Yes, 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 method residence, and makes an attempt to persuade his father (and his father’s advisors) to do one thing about it. That leads to some breathtakingly brutal swordplay motion in a pitch-perfect style mashup for the ages. –Pete Volk

Rampant is obtainable to stream on Hi-Yah!, FuboTV, and Viki, or totally free with adverts on Tubi, Crackle, Plex, Pluto TV, and Freevee. It can be accessible for digital rental or buy on Amazon, Apple, Vudu, and Google Play.

Oct. 4: Seconds (1966)

Image: Paramount Pictures

Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and aliens don’t have anything on the unstoppable strategy of growing older. All of us will become old, life will get exponentially troublesome, and the one particular person ready for us on the end line is Death. 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 in 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 by means of paranoia and remorse, replete with bare grape mashing and alcohol-fueled breakdowns. Needless to say, the grass isn’t greener, and the one factor scarier than getting previous is staying younger.

The movie met boos at Cannes and puzzled critics who had been accustomed to main man Rock Hudson being simply that — a standard main man. But the movie has aged effectively, pun absolutely 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 one way or the other makes lovely younger our bodies into nauseating bundles of limbs and flesh. And Hudson, now indifferent from his Personal Brand 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 obtainable to stream totally free with adverts on Pluto TV, or totally free with a library card on Kanopy. It can be accessible for digital rental or buy on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

Oct. 5: Bride of Chucky (1998)

Image: Universal Pictures

The fourth film of the wickedly humorous Child’s Play franchise takes the killer doll sequence in an thrilling new path. Bride of Chucky ditches Andy, the younger boy adopted by the murderous Chucky doll in the primary three movies, 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, nevertheless it’s the addition of Jennifer Tilly that basically makes Bride of Chucky sing. For the uninitiated in the Child’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 talk with one another. Heigl and Stabile’s Jade and Jesse are your typical youths in love — nonetheless getting to know one another and not absolutely 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 might have a franchise sequel effectively price your time. —PV

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

Oct. 6: Dead Ringers (1988)

Image: twentieth Century Fox

Visually, 1988’s Dead Ringers have to be one in every of David Cronenberg’s tamest movies — apart from one extraordinarily disturbing dream sequence round midway by means of, and one grisly however out-of-focus lengthy shot on the finish. Otherwise, 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 ordinary physique horror is extra implied in the gleaming, twisted contours of medical implements than truly proven. Yet it could be his most devastating movie.

Jeremy Irons performs similar 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 reside collectively and typically faux to be one another, so shy Beverly can benefit from the fruits of Elliot’s womanizing. But 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 kids as a result of she has three chambers in her womb.

Beneath Dead Ringers’ glassy floor, feeling runs deep and chilly. The intense psychodrama that develops between the three characters — however principally between the dual brothers — builds to a conclusion that’s each appalling and transferring. At the movie’s coronary heart are the unimaginable performances given by Irons and captured by Cronenberg with cautious, unshowy craftsmanship. Without 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 particular person tear themselves in two and then clumsily attempt to seal the wound. Dead Ringers is the stuff of tragedy in addition to horror. —OW

Dead Ringers is obtainable to stream on HBO Max. It can be accessible totally free with a library card on Hoopla and Kanopy, or for digital rental or buy by way of Amazon and Apple TV.