Horror movies

For cinephiles, especially those with a masochistic desire to be scared, October is about more than fall foliage, college football and pumpkin-spiced fill-in-the-blank. The leadup to Halloween is a great excuse to immerse yourself in horror films.

But why settle for the same ol’, same ol’? Chances are you know the go-to fright franchises: Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Conjuring, etc. — and that doesn’t even include the monster classics of yesteryear. Thankfully, a whole world of spooky awaits beyond the blood-spattered neighborhoods of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. 

Here are nine terrific horror films available for streaming that you likely haven’t seen. Go watch ’em and scare yourself silly.

Ghosts in the attic

In 1980’s The Changeling, George C. Scott plays a music composer mourning the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter. And as every widower knows, nothing eases grieving like moving into a rambling old mansion that’s been uninhabited for a dozen years. The composer does so, only to be haunted by mysterious clanking noises and images of a child underwater in a bathtub. “The house is not fit to live in. It doesn’t want people,” cautions an old bitty with the historical society that owns the property. Shouldn’t that have been on a disclosure form? (Streaming on Apple, Amazon and AMC)

Creepy kids

Childhood can be challenging enough without having to navigate superpowers, but that’s the premise behind 2021’s The Innocents, a grim Norwegian-language flick about a group of latchkey children with supernatural abilities. That proves problematic when the kids in question are lonely, impulsive and short-tempered. In other words, they’re kids. Early on, one of the bad seeds drops a cat from high atop an apartment building stairwell. The shocker makes it clear that writer-director Eskil Vogt is willing to wade into decidedly disturbing waters. (Streaming on Apple, Amazon and MUBI)

Careful with that knife!

Brian De Palma spent most of his directorial career toying with the voyeuristic thematics of cinema, but the 1972 movie that put him on the map didn’t even bother with pretense. Sisters opens with a fictitious game show, Peeping Toms, in which contestants predict what an unsuspecting man will do when a pretty blind woman begins to disrobe when she thinks she’s alone. As it turns out, the would-be blind girl is a paid (and sighted) actress played by Margot Kidder. She wins a set of stainless-steel knives and winds up on a date with the game-show guy who gallantly chose not to ogle her. The resulting blood-soaked horror-comedy involves conjoined twins, murder and, of course, that set of knives. Bernard Hermann’s brilliant music score conjures up memories of his work in Psycho, while a strong supporting cast compensates for Kidder’s wobbly stab at a French-Canadian accent. (Streaming on Max, Apple, Amazon and Criterion Channel)

And speaking of Psycho, check out The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the 2015 directorial debut of Osgood Perkins, the real-life offspring of Norman Bates himself, Psycho’s Anthony Perkins. Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton portray troubled students stranded during break at an all-girls’ Catholic boarding school. The scares arrive through the painstaking manner in which Perkins — whose Longlegs was this summer’s surprise hit — employs deliberate pacing and dense sound design to build a sense of dread. Think of it as a nightmare version of The Holdovers. (Streaming on Apple, Amazon and Kanopy)

Not to be confused with the Billy Idol song of the same name, 1960’s Eyes Without a Face is a great, if underseen, horror classic. The French import features Pierre Brasseur as a doctor responsible for the severe disfigurement of his adult daughter Christianne (Edith Scob) in the wake of a car accident. Luckily for Christianne, if less so for the other young women in town, dad fancies himself an expert at face transplants. Eyes Without a Face’s surgery scenes reportedly sent some 1960 moviegoers rushing to the exits, but they are quaint by today’s standards. Director Georges Franju’s film is a hauntingly beautiful masterwork. (Streaming on Max, Apple, Amazon and Criterion Channel)

Could it be Satan?

Before filmmaker Ti West’s breakthrough X trilogy, he showed off his horror chops in 2009 with The House of the Devil. College student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is needing cash when she comes across a flyer for a babysitter. A pre-Barbie Greta Gerwig steals her every scene as Samantha’s pizza-chomping BFF, while exploitation icons Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov are the couple presumably desperate for a babysitter despite being childless. West lets the tension simmer before finally jolting the audience, at which point we are putty in his hands. (Streaming on Apple and Amazon)

What would any discussion of devils be without mention of The Exorcist? I don’t mean the 1973 masterpiece that launched scores of inferior imitators. William Peter Blatty, who authored the Exorcist novel that started it all, nabbed the writing-directing honors for 1990’s The Exorcist III, where serial killing meets demonic possession. George C. Scott (yep, him again) is at his most blustery as a police detective investigating a series of grisly murders in Washington D.C., but even Scott is no match for scenery-chewing Brad Dourif as the serial killer who makes Hannibal Lecter look like a Teletubby by comparison. (Streaming on Apple and Amazon)

Schlockmeister Larry Cohen did not lack for output, from the blaxploitation of Black Caesar to the baby horror of It’s Alive. For me, however, his magnum opus is Q: The Winged Serpent, an irresistible 1982 hodgepodge of gore, clumsy guerrilla filmma
king and endearingly awful special effects. It’s New York City at its scuzziest, and a winged serpent (duh!) is terrorizing the city from atop the Chrysler Building. Throw in an Aztec cult that skins its victims and a compelling (if oddly incongruous) Michael Moriarty performance as a hood who becomes the monster’s PR guy, and you have a drive-in classic. (Streaming on Apple and Amazon)

Can you dig it (up)?

In 1994’s Cemetery Man. Rupert Everett plays Francesco, the caretaker of an Italian cemetery where the newly dead invariably come back to life. He dispatches zombies with casual aplomb, but everything changes when Francesco falls hard for a sexy widow. Once they consummate their mutual passion on the grave of the dearly departed husband, the movie leapfrogs from strange to batshit crazy. Cemetery Man is not for all tastes, especially if you’re unamused by the prospect of adult male romancing a teenaged girl’s decapitated head, but adventurous gorehounds will dig Cemetery Man’s off-off-offbeat humor. (Streaming on AMC and Amazon)  

This article appears in Bigger than basketball.