I've Got Some Spooky Season Streaming Recommendations!

Let’s be very clear! These are not my favorite horror movies of the last ten years! These are ten or so horror movies from the last ten years that are currently on ad-free streaming services that I would give “six bags of popcorn” on my personal scale (yes I'm ripping off On Cinema). Where four bags means I recommend the movie, and five means I think it’s phenomenal, cinematic artistry, six means I’ve already thrown it on a second time or stuck around flipping past it on TV. Six bags means it’s a vibe. A vibe that meshes with my own late at night or during a wasted day. More often than not, those movies tend to be suspense/thriller/horror flicks, because I’m either trying to regulate my anxiety by fixating it on a subject (it’s a thing!) or indulging my tendency for sleep procrastination. Welcome to my nightmare!

V/H/S/2 (Hulu) 2013

The first V/H/S movie is also on Hulu right now, but that came out in 2012 so I won't put it in bold. Both, however, are fantastic anthology movies with unique twists on the found footage concept. Demonic business, alien invasion business, ghost business, it’s all there, twisted, startling and tonally diverse. If I give V/H/S/2 the nod over the first one, it’s because of the Indonesian doomsday cult documentary sequence written and directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans. It’s a masterpiece of tense build-up and unexpected release. I have not seen the later sequels, so I cannot report the popcorn baggage there.

Unfriended (Netflix) 2014

Easily the best “staring at a laptop” film I’ve ever seen, thanks both to its use of brand-name apps (no distracting faux Googles or Facebooks) and a truly inspired use of on-screen text for exposition. The context is so familiar and dismissible - a group of teens are haunted by what they did last summer - that you might not appreciate formal innovations like watching someone draft and delete multiple DMs for our benefit. If you’re not allergic to teens yelling into their Skype camera or someone freaking out because they can’t forward an e-mail, this is a real hoot.

Creep/ Creep 2 (Netflix) 2014/2017

Not only is this another found footage franchise, it’s one where the only face on screen is usually Mark Duplass. So caveat emptor! But Duplass' vaguely annoying, untrustworthy persona is played to the hilt here, as a genial creep who’s hired a documentarian (Patrick Brice - who directs both movies - in the first, Desiree Akhavan in the second) to film him at an isolated cabin. FYI, if someone ever asks you to meet them alone in the woods and film them for a day? Don’t. Shit will probably get oppressively awkward, if not life-endangering.

He Never Died (Netflix) 2015

It only took him a couple decades in front of the camera, but Henry Rollins finally found not just a plausible context for his presence in a movie, but a goddamn vehicle for it. While he’s come off ridiculous as a doctor, a cop, a rando, basically any role I’ve seen him try since the '90s, I totally buy him as an awkward, stoic, causally violent near-immortal who survives on raw meat. He Never Died is less a horror movie than a supernatural John Wick movie, but it has ostensible vampirism, the devil and Steven Ogg (The Walking Dead, Trevor from GTA V). That sounds like Spooky Season to me!

Knock Knock (Peacock) 2015

In which Keanu Reeves, left home alone with his architectural drafting by his lovely wife and kids, is seduced by two young hotties stuck in the rain and quickly regrets everything. Knock Knock a flawed movie: the central conceit (if you do The Bad Thing, you deserve to pay no matter how nice or privileged you are) is muddled by a tangential, undeserved death in the middle of the movie. There’s a surprisingly trite, overfamiliar music drop at the end. The politics, sexual and otherwise, of director Eli Roth are so not above questioning. But this is a movie where two hotties (including a young Ana De Armas!) torture Keanu Reeves, who gives a hilarious performance as a man reduced to pathetic, snarling desperation (perhaps you’ve seen him growling about free pizza in memeland?). I realize not every Keanu Reeves fan wants to see him humiliated and shrieking, but I sure did. You might find it cathartic too.

Krampus (Peacock) 2015

Michael Dougherty’s belated follow-up to Trick 'R Treat, and worth the wait. Like that terrific Halloween-themed anthology, Krampus has a giddy, sick sense of humor, unpredictable kills and a cast delighted to indulge in the madness. Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, Allison Tolman and Conchata Ferrell are the adults who do such a bad job of running a family Christmas that a kid accidentally conjures Krampus, the anti-Santa, and a coterie of demonic assistants. A worthy perennial for Q4 of any year, and perfect for traumatizing whoever dares to put up Christmas shit in your home before Thanksgiving.

Hush (Netflix) (2016)

There’s a whole lot of Mike Flanagan content on Netflix, and this is probably my favorite of the movies he’s done. Kate Siegel, Flanagan’s wife and the film’s co-writer, plays a deaf novelist living out in the woods, who gets the attention of a masked hunter who’s apparently picked that night to kill everyone who crosses his path. The plot is a terrific opportunity for silent filmmaking that Flanagan plays to the hilt, and - as viewers of The Haunting Of Hill House know - Siegel's a formidable, expressive presence. John Gallagher Jr. stars as “chaotic evil.”

10 Cloverfield Lane (Paramount) 2016

Set in the same universe as other Cloverfield movies, though you wouldn’t know it for most of the running time. Mary Elizabeth Winstead wakes up trapped in a bomb shelter with John Goodman, playing a benevolent hothead who may have saved her from the apocalypse, and John Gallagher Jr, playing a seeming “true neutral.” It’s a claustrophobic game of wits and mutual suspicion until it really, really isn’t. I loved this enough that I saw The Cloverfield Paradox the same Super Bowl night they dropped it. That one gets two bags.

Hereditary/Midsommar (Showtime) 2018/2019

Heard about these two, horror movie fans? If you have Showtime AND haven’t bothered to see the biggest A24 horror movies of all time (I guess you’re just watching Dexter or music documentaries?), let me just go on record that you really, really should. Two post-feminist classic nightmares about women desperate for connection and peace, subtly told from the point of view of a guilty son and guilty ex-boyfriend, respectively. I say “post-feminist” because they’re movies that are influenced by feminism but not necessarily feminist, not to suggest that society is post-feminism. And in case that’s too heady, these movies are also spooky as fuck! Get to know Ari Aster’s visual steez before Hollywood jacks it entirely (I noticed they’re already filming cars upside down in trailers).

If you don’t mind ads, there’s some phenomenal films floating around Tubi this October as well. Southbound (2015) is one of my favorite recent horror anthologies, featuring tales circling drivers in a desert purgatory. Gretel & Hansel (2020) is an unconscionably gorgeous film by Oz Perkins, somehow able to earn a PG-13 despite the ever-evolving gothic creepiness of it all. I guess because the gross liquids aren’t red and nobody swears? The Belko Experiment (2016) is a nasty idea of James Gunn’s about a corporate anti-team building exercise that floated around Hollywood for almost a decade before it finally got made. The ensemble cast includes Michael Rooker (natch), Tony Goldwyn (rocking that hissable Ghost intensity!), John C McGinley, Melonie Diaz and John Gallagher Jr as “lawful good.”

In case it’s not clear, I am truly impressed by John Gallagher Jr’s range in b-movie thrillers and believe he should be immediately inducted in the hall of fame. All this and a Tony for Spring Awakening! What a champ.