Movies

The best horror movies and Halloween specials to watch in 2022

October 2, 2022

Is there anything better than the Halloween season?

Of course, here at Polygon, we cover horror year-round. We’ve got our drop-down lists of the best horror movies you can watch at home and the best horror movies on Netflix that are updated every month of the year.

But even for year-round horror fans, Halloween is a special time of year.

For the past two years, Polygon has been running a Halloween Countdown schedule, featuring a Halloween-appropriate movie or TV show available to watch at home every day of October. We’re thrilled to bring it back once again, with 31 spooky picks to keep the mood going throughout the month.

Every day throughout October, we’ll add a new recommendation to this countdown and let you know where you can watch it. So curl up on the couch, dim the lights and grab some popcorn for a whole host of terrifying and entertaining Halloween surprises.

October 1: Hearing (1999)

In Hearing, Takashi Miike’s 1999 psychological horror thriller, Love Is Consensus Fiction. Years after losing his wife to a terminal illness, widower Shigeharu Aoyama is urged by his son to come back into the world and find someone. Aoyama accepts a proposal from his friend, a film producer, to audition for a non-existent film in order to find a potential bride among the applicants. His search eventually leads him to Asami Yamazaki, a beautiful former ballerina with a troubled past.

As Aoyama grows closer to his new love, he finds himself caught deeper and deeper in a web of intrigue that threatens to tear him apart emotionally, psychologically, and yes, even physically. There is something dark inside Asami, yes, but there is also a latent darkness inside Aoyama, arguably even darker. The only difference is that Asami embraced this darkness and made it his own.

Miike’s film holds its cards relatively close to its chest for most of its runtime, unraveling its tightly coiled mystery like a tourniquet before peeling off its skin of cute artifices to reveal a thrilling mass of horrors. which roll below. The film descends into a macabre fugue state of assumptions, misdirections and cinematic sleight of hand, with dreams that feel almost real against a reality too terrifying to be anything else. In the end, however, these are just words. Only pain is trustworthy. —Toussaint Egan

Hearing is available to stream on Arrow Video and Hi-Yah!, free with ads on Tubi, and free on Kanopy with a library card. It is also available for digital rental or purchase at Vudu and Apple.

October 2: The Disappearance (1988)

A sinister-looking man with a goatee smiles at another man against a black background in The Vanishing.

It’s not a horror film per se, and yet Stanley Kubrick said that Disappearance was the scariest movie he had ever seen. This 1988 Dutch thriller — often referred to by its original title Spoorloos, not to confuse it with an inferior 1993 American remake from the same director, George Sluizer — plays it cool, like a simple missing person case. Rex and Saskia are a young road-trip couple through France. They are taking a break at a gas station when Saskia suddenly and completely disappears.

Initially, the horror of the situation is in its banality: the feeling that it can happen at any time, to anyone. Sluizer emphasizes this with the concrete realism of its location shooting. Then, just over 20 minutes later, he takes the audience on the wrong foot with an abrupt change: We follow Raymond, a satisfied French family man who seems to be rehearsing an abduction. The mystery of what happened to Saskia already seems solved. And then ?

The way the film – based very closely on Tim Krabbé’s short story The Golden Egg – leaps so quickly beyond the expected structure of a mystery thriller should sap the tension, but in fact it creates an almost philosophical unease. . As Raymond, played with chilling clarity by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, guides us through the ‘how’ of his crime, the ‘why’ becomes a nagging, far more unsettling question. We fast forward three years and find Rex obsessed with finding out what happened to his lost love. When an answer is offered, we completely share his hunger and follow him to what might be the most gruesome ending of any movie. It’s a minimal masterpiece of existential terror. —Was Welsh

Disappearance is available to stream on The Criterion Channel, or for digital rental or purchase on Apple and Amazon.