Horror movies to stream for Halloween

‘Let the Right One In’ borrows its title from a Morrissey song, but don’t let that put you off. It’s an angular and lusty tween horror movie based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s bestseller in which lonesome, whey-faced 12-year-old Oskar becomes smitten by a young, female vampire named Eli. After initiating an adorable romance in the snow-coated forecourt of their glum housing complex, they soon realise that both of them are baying for blood. He’s privately fantasising about stabbing up his schoolyard tormentors with a pocket knife and she needs to sate an appetite for the red stuff that keeps her from dropping dead… again.

Watch it in Australia: Let the Right One In is streaming on Stan.

The streets of London are terrorised by blood-crazed maniacs - nothing new there then. Except that those same streets seem so preternaturally quiet. Twenty-eight days have passed since the Rage virus was unleashed; four weeks which have decimated the population. When Jim awakes from a coma it's as if he's still in the throes of some frightening fever dream: Robinson Crusoe in Piccadilly Circus. Survivors Selena and Mark bring him up to speed. They haven't seen another living human being for days, they say. The unliving come out at night.

Watch is in Australia: 28 Days Later is streaming on Disney+. 

Hell hath no fury like an outcast teenage girl ridiculed in front of her classmates. Director Brian De Palma’s grasp on Stephen King’s novel is never in doubt: this is a truly throat-grabbing horror movie, sporting a handful of pitch-perfect set-pieces, not to mention one of the few examples of effective split-screen. Sissy Spacek’s performance in the title role is close to flawless: she was 27 when the film was shot but looks barely half that, and this otherworldly combination of maturity and innocence adds to the film’s unsettling tone.

Watch it in Australia: Carrie is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Book illustrator David is visiting the local mini-market with his son and a neighbour when a mysterious mist descends and a lock-up siege begins. Outside, bloodied men emerge from the murk, otherworldly carnivorous CGI insects splatter the shop glass, and as giant tentacles invade the loading bay, a micro-political war for ascendancy in defence tactics breaks out between David, the shop employees, a black lawyer with inappropriate private agendas and a strident Christian fundamentalist.

Watch it in Australia: The Mist is streaming on Netflix and Stan.

In Sinister, Ethan Hawke stars as Ellison, a struggling true-crime writer who moves with his wife and two children into a suburban house notorious for an unsolved mass slaying. It's as if the man has never seen a horror film in his life. After discovering old 8mm films on the property, he gains a grim insight to the murders and an occult connection. At the same time strange happenings in the family home start to influence daughter Ashley and point to a larger, darker force. 

Watch it in Australia: Sinister is streaming on Binge. 

Every few years, a horror movie comes along that promises to revitalise the genre, sometimes for the better (Ringu), sometimes not (Hostel). From the pen of Buffy creator Joss Whedon and Cloverfield scribe Drew Goddard, The Cabin in the Woods doesn’t so much set out to reinvigorate horror as pick it apart, analyse it, laugh at it and then blow it to smithereens just for kicks. It’s the funniest horror film since Evil Dead 2, the smartest since New Nightmare and surely one of the most breathlessly entertaining and original movies of 2012. Plus, Chris Hemsworth!

Watch it in Australia: Cabin in the Woods is streaming on Stan. 

Amelia (Essie Davis) is a tired-looking carer in a nursing home and grapples with single motherhood in the wake of a car accident that killed her husband while he was driving them to the maternity ward. Samuel (Noah Wiseman), the surviving child, now six, is stuck in his shouty phase, has a hyperactive imagination and is obsessed with weapons. These are precisely the wrong people to be reading dark bedtime stories, yet mysteriously, there’s a book on the shelf filled with scary, spiky monsters titled Mister Babadook.

Watch it in Australia: See The Babadook on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

The Exorcist set a high bar for all horror films that followed. Director William Friedkin weaves a story about a 12-year-old girl who becomes possessed by the Devil. As the girl begins to exhibit increasingly vile and vulgar behaviour, her mother enlists the help of a priest to perform an exorcism and cure her. The visual effects are absolutely disturbing, and all the more impressive for being entirely technical – from the hideous visage of the possessed girl to her now iconic head spin.

Watch it in Australia: The Exorcist can be streamed on Stan.

Fans of The Shining and Hereditary will appreciate Relic’s fusion of fraught family drama with haunted house creeper that hinges on powerful performances by Emily Mortimer (Mary Poppins Returns), Robyn Nevin (Top of the Lake) and Bella Heathcote (The Neon Demon). Nevin plays Edna, a recent widow whose disappearance brings estranged daughter Kay (Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Heathcote) to her crumbling home in rural Victoria. When Edna suddenly reappears, her increasingly frantic signs of dementia could be down to the vagaries of age – or is something more sinister seeping through?

Watch it in Australia: The Relic is streaming on Stan.

The Descent plunges six female friends into the depths of the Earth, and in doing so, mines a rich vein of subterranean terror. Trapped by a rock fall while on a caving trip, they are attacked by slimy humanoid predators. Despite their translucent skin and sightless eyes, these creatures are highly evolved, using their heightened senses of smell and hearing to stalk their prey. Forced to dredge up their primal instinct for survival, the women tool-up with ice-picks or whatever else comes to hand, clambering over carpets of bones, plunging into pools of offal or hiding in crevices as the ‘crawlers’ try to sniff them out.

Watch it in Australia: The Descent is streaming on Stan. 

Wes Craven draws on a shared pop-cultural heritage in horror flicks to fashion this bloody brand of post-modern comedy. 'So you like scary movies? Name the killer in Friday the 13th?' demands the anonymous caller of Barrymore's lone teen in the prologue. 'Hang up again and I'll gut you like a fish!' The killer describes his apparently irrational vendetta against the high school population of Woodsboro as a game, and in this, he's surely speaking for screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Craven, who kill off the clichés and all the wrong characters with panache. Intelligence, wit and sophistication - at last, a horror movie to shout about!

Watch it in Australia: You can watch Scream on Stan and Binge.

Wolf Creek tops the list of films that Tourism Australia would love to see banned. The story follows three naive backpackers who find themselves traipsing around the Australian outback. The hapless trio soon run into Mick Taylor (John Jarratt, playing a xenophobic, flanny-wearing bushman) who takes them captive and sets about murdering and mutilating them in all manner of grisly ways. The flick is made all the more gruesome for the fact that it was inspired by the very real Backpacker Murders that happened in Australia during the late 1980s to early 1990s. 

Watch it in Australia: See Wolf Creek on Stan.

Getting a blood transfusion of molten steel is possibly the only way you’ll stay in your seat all the way through this haunted house movie. No blood is spilled, but American censors rated it R (equivalent to our 18) anyway – reportedly for being ‘too scary’. It’s directed by James Wan (the man who started the ‘Saw’ franchise) and claims to based on ‘true case files’. Set in 1971, Carolyn and Roger Perron (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston) have just moved into a classic creepy old farmhouse: nooks, crannies and a barricaded basement. Wan builds mounting dread with silence and suspense, lingering the camera unsettlingly long here, creaking a door there. Finally, after a night from hell, the Perrons seek professional help. And if your house is haunted, who you gonna call? Lorraine and Ed Warren – the husband and wife ghostbusters (played here by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) who de-spooked the house in Amityville.

Watch it in Australia: The Conjuring is streaming on Netflix.