A teenage girl meets a boy on the road, they fall hard for each other, and then they eat people. That’s the pitch for the best movie streaming this month, and it’s one of the gentler ideas on this list.
Spooky season is here. Every major streamer is loading up on horror, and October’s new additions include stone-cold classics and newer films that will put you off sleeping. You get zombies, slashers, body horror and even a little creepy romance. Make popcorn, grab a blanket and keep the remote close (pausing is allowed).
Start with the cannibal love story
Bones and All takes the young-love road movie and makes it gory. Maren (Taylor Russell) has a history of biting people. She sets off on a cross-country trip to find her mother and get some answers about where her gruesome cravings come from.
Along the way she meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), another “eater,” and falls for him. Then the two of them try to build a life together, which is complicated when the relationship runs on a shared appetite for human flesh.
“Like Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All is a sensual movie, particularly visually,” one critic said, adding that “Guadagnino luxuriates in the kind of big-sky-country vistas that made Andrea Arnold’s similarly summer-break-themed American Honey so memorable, and he lights his leads warmly in the day and with skulking fervor at night.”
The critic said the bigger achievement is the balance of tones: “But it’s more remarkable for the way he and Kajganich navigate the push and pull between the story’s romantic elements and horror themes. There’s a big metaphor at play here about how parents, families, and friends enable aberrant behavior until it feels normal, and how being protected from the world can make it hard to properly enter it. And it plays in radically different ways at the same time: both through the lens of two young kids on a romantic road trip, and as two growing monsters seducing and killing other people for food.”
Vampires, two ways
Doctor Sleep picks up 31 years after The Shining. Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) is a grown man who still can’t shake the memory of his father’s murderous rampage. This adaptation of Stephen King’s book goes further into Danny’s psychic powers. He forms a bond with a girl who also has “the Shining” and tries to protect her from a brutal vampire.
Then there’s the Tarantino-scripted cult classic that starts out as a crime drama and swerves hard into grindhouse horror. Bank robbers Seth (George Clooney) and Richie Gecko (Quentin Tarantino) run for the Mexican border to meet a contact at an all-night strip club. The strippers turn out to be vampires. Now the brothers have to survive until dawn.
The low-budget ones that hit hardest
It Follows is another cult hit, and it squeezes everything it can out of a tiny budget. College student Jay Height (Maika Monroe) sleeps with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) for the first time. Afterward he tells her that a strange entity will now pursue her until she passes it to someone else through sex.
Nobody else can see the thing chasing her. Jay goes looking for answers while trying to buy herself time, and it’s a premise you’ll keep thinking about well after the movie ends.
The most unsettling setup on this list might be the genre-bender about Chloe (Lexy Kolker). She’s seven and has never stepped outside her run-down suburban home, which may be haunted, because her father Henry (Emile Hirsch) says bad people are waiting outside. The movie gives away what’s really going on slowly, while Chloe and Henry fight over who controls their fraught lives.
A haunted Irish hotel, if that’s more your speed
Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, an American author who travels to the Irish hotel where his parents honeymooned so he can scatter their ashes. The honeymoon suite is locked, and supposedly it’s haunted by a witch. While he deals with the odd locals and staff, Ohm has to face his own past along with the hotel’s secrets.
The canon, all in one place
A Nightmare on Elm Street was built to make you scared of falling asleep. A group of teenagers are hunted by Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), an undead killer who murders his victims by getting inside their dreams. It’s considered one of the best horror films ever made, and it spawned a pile of sequels.
Even if you’ve never seen Psycho, you know the shower scene, which is one of the most famous moments in film history. Alfred Hitchcock helped invent the slasher with this story of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a secretary who embezzles money and hides out at the remote Bates Motel. Something sinister is waiting for her there.
Wes Craven, the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street, teamed up with writer Kevin Williamson on Scream, which makes fun of slasher tropes. In this one, knowing your horror trivia can keep you alive. A group of high schoolers hunted by a masked killer try to survive by following movie logic. Pluto is also streaming all four Scream sequels, so you can marathon the whole series.
And the twist that made a career
After one of his patients kills himself, child psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) sees a shot at redemption in Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a boy who can see ghosts. The two work together to help the dead who haunt Cole find some peace.
The Sixth Sense launched M. Night Shyamalan’s fondness for twist endings, and it’s still one of his best. Most of you already know the twist. Watch it anyway and keep an eye on Willis in every scene, because the clues were there the whole time.
