The best horror to watch this Halloween

Polygon's horror fans are back with the annual Halloween Countdown, a 31-day run of short recommendations for the best movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream for the Halloween season. Tune in every day for a new recommendation, and find the entire calendar here.

Though Universal Pictures’ horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s popularized a series of now-iconic monsters, 1931’s Frankenstein also followed its gothic-novel source material in clarifying that sometimes, the real wrongdoing isn’t committed by a horrific creature of the night. Sometimes it’s the work of a doctor who’s gone mad with goth-science power. Two non-Universal horror movies from this period make for a particularly entertaining double feature for fans of monsters and/or mad science: Doctor X from 1932, and Mad Love from 1935.

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This House Has People In It is a 2015 entry in Adult Swim's ongoing Infomercials series, which features bizarre, often unsettling content ranging from fake prescription drug commercials to fictitious late-night talk shows. Presented as CCTV footage from within a suburban home, this hair-raising short follows a family as they go about what appears to be a perfectly normal day.

Parents Tom and Ann argue over how to handle their teenage daughter, Madison, who has stubbornly decided to lie face-down on the floor in what is presumably an angst-ridden protest against her parents. Meanwhile, her younger brother Jackson prepares for his upcoming birthday party, while his grandmother remains focused on a strange television program about sculpting clay instead of paying attention to the newest addition to the family: her infant granddaughter. In the basement, a handyman named Dennis works on the plumbing under the kitchen.

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Former convict turned handyman Arkin O'Brien (Josh Stewart) has a problem: If he doesn't pay off his debt to some loan sharks, they’ll have his wife and daughter killed. Seeing few options, Arkin heads to an old client's house to rob them — and discovers his client’s family is already being held and tortured by a masked psychopath who delights in putting his victims through sick, twisted games. Trapped in a house loaded top to bottom with traps, Arkin has to fight to survive.

This might sound a little like the Saw movies, with good reason: The Collector, originally titled The Midnight Man, was at one point being considered as a spin-off prequel for the Saw franchise, as an origin story for Jigsaw. Saw’s original producers read the script, though, and rejected the idea. Jigsaw’s origin story was later told in other movies, and The Midnight Man's script got reworked into The Collector. It wasn't all bad news for director Marcus Dunstan, though; he and co-writer Patrick Melton eventually got to be part of the Saw franchise, writing the screenplays for Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI, and Saw 3D.

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The 1952 Finnish movie The White Reindeer is one of the great lost classics of folk horror. Although it won prizes at Cannes and the Golden Globes in its day, it was largely forgotten until a gorgeous 4K restoration started doing the rounds in 2017. It’s an eerie, utterly otherworldly dark fairy tale set on the desolate, snowbound fells of Sápmi (the Arctic region sometimes known as Lapland, though the native Sámi people consider that name pejorative).

In a haunting prologue, it is foretold that a newborn Sámi girl will become a witch; she grows into Piriti (Mirjami Kuosmanen), a spirited woman who chafes against her lonely existence as the wife of a roaming reindeer herder. She seeks relief from a local shaman, but perhaps due to her innate magic, his love ritual goes wrong and transforms her into a vampiric shape-shifter, cursed to hunt and consume men in the form of a white reindeer.

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Before there was Skinamarink, 2023’s low-budget experimental horror oddity that took the watching-Shudder-at-2 a.m. sicko crowd by storm, there was Heck, 30 minutes of lo-fi nightmare fuel that's somehow even more unsettling than the feature it inspired.

On his YouTube channel Bitesize Nightmares, Kyle Edward Ball adapted his viewers’ real-life dreams into the most spine-tingling ASMR you could imagine. Full of locked-off shots of liminal spaces, color-drenched close-ups, and Ball’s own deep-throated narration, the hallucinatory horror that populated Bitesize Nightmares, which ran in earnest from 2017 to 2020, felt familiar to an internet that loved a good scare. But they were presented in a visual form that even the most evocative creepypasta could only hint at. It was as if Ball had used Final Cut Pro plug-ins to summon the devil himself.

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Long before Blumhouse, A24, and Jordan Peele, there was Stuart Gordon. The experimental theater director turned cult horror filmmaker made more than 20 films between 1985 and 2007. Many of them were schlocky B-movies full of cheap special effects, buckets of fake blood, and transgressive sexual behavior. The best of the bunch — which was also Gordon’s directorial debut — offers all three.

Released in 1985, Re-Animator is based on the H.P Lovecraft short story "Herbert West — Reanimator," and it follows a medical student named Herbert West (Gordon go-to Jeffrey Combs) who invents a serum that can bring the dead back to life. Unfortunately, they tend to come back as brain-dead, violent zombies. Things go from bad to worse when the serum falls into the hands of the villainous Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), who develops a method to control the undead.

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Mythology from all over the world is full of fairy tales about childless folk who pray to the gods, unwisely invoke fate, or bargain with the supernatural for a child — only to wind up raising something that isn’t human. These stories are often dark, but they generally turn out well for the adoptive folk, whose parental loyalty and love is rewarded in the end.

And then there’s Lamb.

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The Nightmare Before Christmas is inescapable this time of year. But fans of Tim Burton-produced stop-motion animated Halloween flicks scored by Danny Elfman should also check out Frankenweenie. Burton directed the 2012 stop-motion film, expanding the live-action short of the same name he made in 1984, to put a kid-focused spin on the story of Frankenstein and other classic monster movies.

Shot in black and white to better evoke the feel of 1930s gothic horror, Frankenweenie is both adorable and stylish. Its version of Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) is an awkward science-obsessed kid. When his dog Sparky is hit by a car, Victor turns his attic into a lab to bring the pup back to life.

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2024’s The First Omen is one of the best prequel horror movies of all time, but it stands on its own merits as an excellent possession flick. The story follows a young American woman (Nell Tiger Free) who travels to Rome to begin her service at a Catholic orphanage during a time of political unrest in late-’60s Italy. There, she encounters a malevolent force that shakes her faith to its core and unravels a chilling conspiracy, one designed to usher in the birth of the Antichrist.

Alien: Romulus, another horror prequel, was released that same year, and went on to win Best Horror Film at the 52nd Saturn Awards. Both films begin by establishing their own identities before tying back to earlier entries in their respective franchises.

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Horror fiends are living in a golden era. Practically every week, a new creature feature, paranormal thriller, or speculative zombie movie hits theaters. Shudder has become the essential home for indie and international horror, but Netflix, HBO Max, and Hulu have thrown their fair share of millions at the genre, too. It’s quite possible a gory vampire romp and a witchy epic will earn Oscar nominations next year.

Still, I would argue one spooky subgenre remains vastly underserved by today’s filmmakers and studios: polished schlock. “Elevated horror” is great, but sometimes, instead of a Paul Thomas Anderson-like meditation on grief masquerading as a gorefest, you just want to watch a bunch of horny teenagers drink beer, perform a seance, and then get brutally murdered by evil spirits. Blessedly, 1988’s Night of the Demons remains in circulation to fill the void.

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This classic 1951 creature-feature was the model for John Carpenter’s 1982 horror masterpiece The Thing. Both are based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. and concern a team of Arctic (or Antarctic) researchers dealing with first contact with a hostile alien being that crashes its UFO in the ice.

In adapting Who Goes There?, Carpenter stuck close to the original text, with a grossly shapeshifting alien that assimilates its victims and sows paranoia and distrust amid the small group. But The Thing From Another World is much less about the enemy within than the enemy without.

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Director James Whale was on a tear for the first half of the 1930s, directing three of the very best Universal monster movies: Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). During that run, he also made The Old Dark House (1932), which isn’t quite so famous, on account of being out of circulation for several decades, and eventually thought lost. Now a restoration and the rise of free streaming has made it one of the era’s more perpetually accessible classic horror movies. Though it’s more overtly comic than Whale’s monster movies, where the humor is more macabre, it’s nearly their equal in mixing gothic atmosphere and memorably strange, often funny characters.

Those characters converge by chance during a storm, when travelers Philip (Raymond Massey), Margaret (Gloria Stuart, 65 years before she was the old lady in James Cameron’s Titanic), Roger (Melvyn Douglas), William (Night of the Hunter director Charles Laughton), and Gladys (Lilian Bond) all seek shelter from a raging countryside storm. They find the home of Horace (Ernest Thesiger) and Rebecca (Eva Moore), elderly siblings who live with their mute, looming butler Morgan (Boris Karloff) and… maybe others? Some strange noises coming from upstairs, the correspondingly strange behavior of the owners, and the house’s many shadowy corners all seem to suggest something else threatening, even beyond the lumbering, silent Karloff.

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The universe surrounding the adaptations of Hannibal Lecter books is both rewarding and soul-crushing. There are some real duds, such as Brian Cox's Manhunter, the 1986 adaptation of the 1981 novel Red Dragon. But there are some incredibly rewarding pieces of media, too, like the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, featuring Anthony Hopkins as the disturbing cannibal, and Jodie Foster as the tough-as-nails FBI trainee Clarice Starling.

My favorite take on the books, however, is Bryan Fuller's Hannibal, which aired on NBC from 2013 to 2015. It’s a masterpiece in its gripping writing, splatterfest visuals, and deeper insight into the relationship between Mads Mikkelsen's Lecter and Hugh Dancy's FBI agent Will Graham. Hannibal is the show I return to each October. It’s a horror-thriller that wants to seduce and terrify you, all at the same time.

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While many episodes of Doctor Who start off with a creepy-yet-lighthearted cold open, 2007’s "Blink" (season 3 of the modern era of Doctor Who, episode 10) goes full horror-mode. It's 1 a.m., and a lone young woman named Sally (Promising Young Woman star Carey Mulligan) is exploring a dilapidated, abandoned home. Venturing further inside, Sally pulls at some loose wallpaper, and is horrified to find her full name somehow scrawled across the wall beneath it.

Unlike your average horror protagonist, Sally rightfully takes this as a sign she should get the hell out of dodge. When she returns home, her television is on, but instead of a static screen or a cursed video of a girl crawling out of a well, it's playing footage of The Doctor (David Tennant), who offers a warning.

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The worst season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is undeniably season 6. That’s not even up for debate. The nerds from high school are suddenly the main villains? Really? Not even mega-evil witch Willow in the finale can redeem that narrative choice.

And yet season 6 also features some of the best one-off Buffy episodes: the musical episode “Once More With Feeling,” Xander’s wedding, and “Normal Again,” arguably the scariest entry in a show with plenty of spooky moments.

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