This Halloween fans of the fear-inducing flick will be well catered for, with thousands of chillers, slashers and zombie head-mashers available to stream on a range of services. And as most of the evening is spent choosing what to watch – you need to start planning now.
Halloween is the perfect night for scary movies. Don’t let the hype dissuade you of this fact. The clocks have gone back, it’s darker earlier and enough sugar races through the average bloodstream to terrify anyone.
This year our very own Sam Inglis is running through a pre-Halloween Horrorthon and you can read his capsule reviews to get a taste of the good, the bad and the very ugly on offer.
There’s something wonderful about the huge numbers of people giving up to the occassion and spending one night of the year watching scary movies on their screens. Often times, our attention can waver in regular online dealings. While people scour subreddits for stock tips or flock to screen based casino games by the thousands, social media is the biggest distractor – so turn off your phones, turn down the lights. For we have such sights to show you…
What to watch…
We have more choice now than ever. So, we’ve chosen our favourite frighteners from some of the biggest streaming services around, but each and every one will have you sorted one way or another.
Ghostwatch
BFI Player from the 27th of October
The perennial Halloween film, perhaps our most recommended in the history of HeyUGuys, the BBC’s scariest hour and a half of television is essential viewing. It was recently chosen as one of the ‘game-changing’ moments of the BBC’s first 100 years, and it celebrates its own thirieth anniversary this Halloween night.
This ficitious broadcast, a live investigation of a haunted house in London, has become a cult classic since its sole airing. Never broadcast again, surviving for years on VHS tapes and the fading memories of those who were taken in, Ghostwatch endures. A documentary called Behind the Curtains provides notable insight into its importance and effect, and each year a ‘National Seance’ trends on Twitter as Cheese and Pickle sandwiches are eaten, and spines are chilled.
As powerful now as it was thirty years ago.
Hellraiser
Hulu (in the US, probably… Disney+ in the UK at some point)
It’s fair to say that one does not re-imagine, reboot or remake Hellraiser, one replays it. So heavy does the hand of Clive Barker fall over this particular horrorshow that no matter who far director David Bruckner looks to stray from the well worn path, sex, death, and the soul-piercing horror of the Cenobites are set in stone. Like H. R. Giger’s Alien design, Pinhead and their merry band of miscreants from beyond pop up, wield hooks on chains and generally destroy lives in gory ways. But it works – still.
Fans of raising this particular type of Hell will remember the potency of the imagery and the fear of the 1987 original. The law of diminishing returns fell hard on the sequels however, yet this new Hellraiser seems to have the blood of the original in its veins. It is shocking, seductive and visceral. Everything one could want in a Hellraiser film.
V/H/S/94 & V/H/S/99
Shudder
Horror hounds can find much to enjoy in the self-proclaimed Home for Halloween, and this year Shudder have found more footage with the latest V/H/S installment – V/H/S/99. This follows last year’s resurrection of the anthology series and could (we hope) become a yearly event, something the Saw and Paranormal Activity series have done in the past.
Directors of the segments this year are Johannes Roberts, Vanessa & Joseph Winter, Maggie Levin, Tyler MacIntyre, and Flying Lotus. The year promises a load of millennial angst along with the usual bloodletting, and we eagerly await to see how it plays out.
V/H/S/94 was a decent return to form for the series with Timo Tjahjanto’s grisly body-horror short The Subject and Ryan Prows’ brutal Terror providing the highlights.
The format is a winner, despite the variety of quality on offer, there’s always something fun to see. Hail Ratmaa.
Midnight Mass
Netflix
Mike Flanagan has made quite a name for himself over the last decade. Indeed, he’s come a long way from his brilliant low budget film Absentia, but his latest horrorshows, whether they are huge Stephen King adaptations or serialised updates of stone cold classics, are the sign of true talent.
However it is his own creation, the quietly named Midnight Mass, that showcases his best work thus far. A young man returns to his hometown on a small island at the same time a new, young priest arrives to restore the town’s faith. Things do not go well.
It is thanks to a carefully built sense of portent, dread and terror that Midnight Mass gets under your skin almost like nothing else. The performances of Hamish Linklater, Rahul Kohli and, in particular, Samantha Sloyan, carry this deeply felt story of redemption and ruin to its perfectly struck landing.
Whatever you watch this Halloween – enjoy…
