A round-up of all the best entertainment streaming this spooky season
By Brian Bowe
Boo!!! Did I scare you? Good! That should help you build up a tolerance to fright-filled surprises, and let me tell you, you’re going to need that armour when it comes to plucking up the courage to take on the list below. I’ve scoured all the streaming options available to you and picked out the best on offer. That’s right — this year, Halloween is on me.
When the trick ‘r treating has been done and all mindless bonfires crumpled into a glowing mound of charred debris, kick up your feet, tuck into your candy-coated haul and gaze upon all manner of ghastly and ghoulish home screen entertainment.
Netflix
Beetlejuice (1988)
The spirits of a deceased couple (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) are harassed by an unbearable family that has moved into their home, and hire a malicious spirit (Micheal Keaton) to drive them out.
With its sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, having come out in September and proved a juicy hit, why not return to the superior original: the film that propelled Keaton’s career into superstardom, kick-started the reign of 90s IT girl Winona Ryder, and made sure Belafonte’s Day-O was forever stuck in our heads. It’s an all-timer and, like many of Burton’s early output, works as a perfect gateway film to a life of weirdo cinephilia (speaking from experience here). When you’re 10, there’s no better movie than Beetlejuice. It’s so many different things at once, a combination of punk rock and German expressionism, outrageous and out of this world.
All the Final Destinations
The series revolves around people attempting to dodge death after one of them has a premonition of their group’s impending demise. This vision disrupts Death’s plan, prompting it to rectify the situation by targeting those who have interfered with the natural order of life and death.
Did you know Netflix has all the films from the Final Destination franchise, which just so happens to be my favourite horror franchise of all time! Well, you do now, and have no other option than to gobble them all up in one devilish and delicious sitting. I’m joking, of course, feel free to watch them in any manner you wish. Each one has its own unique charm. I only recently caught up with the third instalment, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and it might just be my fav of the bunch: lowrider jeans, compact digital cameras and guys rocking Bieber bangs. This flick doesn’t just bump off obnoxious youths in elaborate and gruesome set-pieces — it finishes off a whole era. As a noughties teen, I feel seen… and attacked!
Prime Video
Saw X (2023)
Hoping for a miraculous cure, John Kramer (Tobin Bell) travels to Mexico for a risky and experimental medical procedure, only to discover the entire operation is a scam to defraud the most vulnerable. Armed with a newfound purpose, the infamous serial killer uses deranged and ingenious traps to turn the tables on the con artists.
I’ve never been a big fan of the Saw series — the first one definitely caught my attention, something of a cultural event at the time – but I have a real soft spot for this film: the tenth in the series, if you can believe it. It’s gross and gorey, but also has a goofiness to it which I find totally charming. For a torture-porn flick which revels in the slicing and dicing of human body parts, it’s awfully heartwarming. I guess the tenth time’s the charm!
Carrie (1976)
Based on Stepehen King’s breakout 1974 novel, Carrie centres on Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a teenager who is disliked and bullied at school and lives with her controlling mother. She possesses telekinetic power and uses it against her enemies when things get out of hand, and boy, do they!
I can trace my love of horror back to watching Carrie as a child — Spacek’s piercing saucer eyes and Piper Laurie’s possessed performance, as her wild-haired ultra-puritanical mother, conjured a love for the macabre which has only grown in the decades since. Those passing decades also brought about sequels and remakes of Brian DePalma’s 1976 classic, but those are best forgotten. That Chloe Grace Moretz-led version is ghastly stuff, and not in the way we want.
Disney +
All the Alien films
The Alien franchise depicts a series of deadly encounters, predominantly spanning the 22nd and 24th centuries, between humanity and the Xenomorph; a hostile, endoparasitoid, extraterrestrial species.
Bradley Cooper
Look, I wasnt a fan of the recent Alien: Romulus, which, to my mind, was a watered-down, reheated gumbo off all the best bits from the previous films, right down to lifting quotes. So ignore that, but by all means gorge on all the other entries. Covenant, which came out to a muted response back in 2017, is better than the critics made out — prone to gothic and high-camp delights, and stars not one but two Michael Fassbenders.
Nightmare Alley (2021)
Down on his luck, Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) endears himself to a clairvoyant and her mentalist husband at a travelling carnival. Using newly acquired knowledge, Carlisle crafts a golden ticket to success by swindling the elite and wealthy, and soon hatches a scheme for the biggest score of his life.
Guillermo del Toro remaking Edmund Goulding’s 1947 noir classic seems a fine fit. The Mexican director has a good sense for the gothic, with films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone still giving us nightmares to this day. His take on Nightmare Alley kind of vanished as soon as it came out, getting nothing but middling reviews. Sure, it’s overlong at two and a half hours, but with the way del Toro crafts his worlds, so lived-in and gorgeously ornate, you just want to sink in and stay there for as long as possible. And hell, with Cooper in the mix, playing such a conniving and repulsive character, the longer the better.
