Every day can be Halloween if you put in a little effort! And by effort, all we mean is "switch on Peacock" with your remote control and enjoy. This subscription streamer has heaps of terrific horror movies just laying in wait. Classic ghost tales, feminist werewolf revampings, slashers old and new. With so much to choose from you might well be overwhelmed.
So, let us narrow it down for you a smidge — here are 26 of the best horror movies now streaming on Peacock.
Let the Right One In
Redefining all that B.F.F. can mean, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy director Tomas Alfredson's timeless 2008 adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel gives us the tender tween love story of a bullied boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and the eternal nightmare monster from hell, Eli (Lina Leandersson), who just happens to look like a sweet sullen young girl. Meeting up in the dead of night on the snowy playground outside their forbidding brutalist apartment building, the two young people sweetly bond, all while Eli's blood-harvesting sidekick goes through a series of tribulations nobody would wish on their worst enemy. But a twist of fate could change both of their lives forever.
You only really realize after the fact how horrifying this love story truly is. Alfredson plays it all like a YA novel, and that's ultimately the deepest horror of all. And, yes, Matt Reeves's 2010 American remake Let Me In (starring Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Grace Moretz as the young couple) is far better than it has any right being, but still — Team Original, if you ask me.
How to watch: Let the Right One In is now streaming on Peacock.
Tourist Trap
This deeply bizarre 1979 flick is courtesy of director David Schmoeller, who also gifted the world Klaus Kinski's wildly unhinged turn in 1986's Crawlspace, not to mention the first Puppet Master. Tourist Trap finds a group of horned-up twentysomethings getting lost on their way through the California desert and stumbling upon some sort of haunted mannequin museum, with dire consequences. Not that there are really any other kind of consequences when one stumbles upon a haunted mannequin museum. You've never heard anybody say they stumbled upon a haunted mannequin museum and had a good time, that much we can guarantee.
Anyway, it's the usual stuff — pretty young things picked off one by one by a masked killer. But it's all so freaking weird, with the mannequins and everything, that you won't soon forget it.
How to watch: Tourist Trap is now streaming on Peacock.
Black Christmas (1974)
It doesn't even have to be the holiday season to watch this slasher classic. Four years before Michael Myers stabbed his way onto the scene, there was director Bob Clark of A Christmas Story fame unleashing a perverted killer on a sorority house full of extremely likable girls — including Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, and Margot Kidder (pre-Lois Lane).
As a group of sorority sisters on winter break endure a series of increasingly obscene phone calls, their enormous house begins feeling smaller and smaller. Black Christmas masterfully isolates the girls one by one with no idea they're being stalked, much less that half their friends have already been murdered. Not until it's inevitably too late. 2001 star Keir Dullea co-stars as a rageaholic pianist slash main suspect, but nothing in this deeply unsettling flick is ever as clear as it seems. Except maybe that crystal unicorn figurine that one of the girls gets stabbed with.
How to watch: Black Christmas is now streaming on Peacock.
Curtains
Some say the 1983 Canadian slasher Curtains is only worth watching for one scene. But that's unfair as there are many delights to be had… as long as Canadian slashers from the '80s are the sorts of things you find delight in.
Directed by Richard Ciupka, the film's got an unusual plot as far as slasher movies go. A prestigious slimeball movie director invites a gaggle of young, thirsty-for-fame actresses to an isolated mansion to audition for the lead role in his new movie. Showing up out of the blue to complicate matters is the director's former muse (Samantha Eggar of The Brood fame), who has "aged out," as far as the director is concerned. She's prepared to fight for the role tooth-and-nail anyway. Suffice it to say that tensions are running high even before a masked killer shows up and starts offing the actresses one by one.
All of the expected cat-fighting and the humor at the expense of overly serious actors in Curtains remains totally on point, especially when it's Eggars on-screen, as nobody in 1983 was doing big-eyed unhinged better than she. But that aforementioned one killer scene does get hollered about for good reason. You take one iced-over pond and a maniac wearing a hag mask while wielding a sickle, and that's cinema, baby.
How to watch: Curtains is now streaming on Peacock.
Ginger Snaps
Teen sisters Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) are as close as they come, bonded by their experiences in a shitty world where they've been forced to take care of one another. The introvert Brigitte gets bullied a lot, and Ginger's always there to save her. Then, one night while out in the woods, Ginger gets her first period, and, uhh, things change. Namely, a werewolf drawn by her menstrual blood bites her, and she becomes a werewolf, much to Brigitte's chagrin.
An immediately classic spin on the werewolf mythos that folds monster tropes into the horrors of puberty, Ginger Snaps has two sequels and a pack of diehard lycan-fans. But the original stands on its own two sturdy hind legs just fine, telling a standalone story of a familial bond being tested and of useless boys being chewed up and spat to the side. Make sure to watch it with your sister on a full moon, especially if your cycles are in sync!
How to watch: Ginger Snaps is now streaming on Peacock.
The House of the Devil
Even before he was resurrecting the grindhouse aesthetic with X and indulging in an Oz-esque technicolor period phantasmagoria with Pearl, writer-director Ti West has shown an affinity for the past. One great example of this is 2009's The House of the Devil, a babysitter-in-peril horror flick that feels like a forgotten artifact dug up out of the early 1980s.
Jocelin Donahue stars as Samantha, a college student so desperate to rack up some cash that she ignores her intuition around a mysterious "baby-sitting" gig at a weird old mansion in the middle of nowhere. The House of the Devil is deeply infatuated with not just the aesthetics of its setting but also all the creepy trappings of the Satanic Panic stories of that era. It's a spooky vibe that anybody who was alive then will still feel in their bones. Quick cue the blood moon, weird knocking noises upstairs, and a banger of a scene involving a Walkman, not to mention an all-too-brief appearance by Greta Gerwig as Samantha's bestie. By the time the legend Mary Woronov shows up, we'll all be praying for daylight.
How to watch: The House of the Devil is now streaming on Peacock.
Starry Eyes
The lust for fame has perhaps never been shown to be so brutal as it is in Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer's 2014 horror movie. Alexandra Essoe gives one hell of a performance as a gifted but flailing young actress in Hollywood whose career is going nowhere and whose friends all suck. We spend just enough time with her in her miserable situation to understand why she'd be willing to make some sacrifices to move upward in The Biz.
Unfortunately for her (and for those shitty friends), those "sacrifices" start getting out of hand quickly. A casting director with a pentagram pendant is just the start of this deeply cynical A Star Is Born narrative's undoing, which literalizes the Faustian pact in blood and flesh and tears and pretty dresses for movie premieres. But as straightforward a narrative as Starry Eyes ends up telling, it's turned riveting by Essoe's fierce commitment and by a killer synth score that sets it all spinning. Some stylish devilry, indeed.
How to watch: Starry Eyes is now streaming on Peacock.
Eaten Alive
Though director Tobe Hooper rightly made his name with his 1974 masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (see further down this list), we nevertheless have a deep fondness for his 1976 alligator attack movie Eaten Alive. It is just so much weirder than this sort of thing has any right to be, and ends up all the more transfixing for it.
Filmed on a swampy soundstage that always feels like you're sitting in the audience for a regional theatrical production of a lesser-known Tennessee Williams play, the sweaty rednecks that Hooper specialized in find themselves converging on a run-down Bates-esque hotel. Only instead of a mother-loving boy in a wig there's a crocodile. And Real Housewives star Kyle Richards. And, yes, wigs too. Eaten Alive has a little of everything, and utter chaos ensues as it all comes smashing together. If this movie makes you feel like you've lost a little bit of your sanity while watching it, one suspects that's precisely what Hooper was aiming for.
How to watch: Eaten Alive is now streaming on Peacock.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Famously shot during a brutally hot Texas summer, you can immediately feel the sweat soaking through director Tobe Hooper's 1974 grindhouse masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre even before its characters are given any reason to work up one. We first meet our group of wayward twentysomethings (led by horror icon Marilyn Burns playing our final girl Sally) riding in one of those stereotypical hippie vans of the moment with the windows rolled down. But all the same, you can hardly breathe. The air itself looks thick and dirty. Squalid. And that sensation will only grow worse with every passing minute.
There's been a rash of grave-robbing in central Texas, as described in a nice little introductory monologue by John Laroquette (who received some of Texas's finest marijuana from Hooper as payment). Sally and her friends are headed to visit their grandfather's grave to make sure it's intact. Along the way, they pick up a seriously creepy hitchhiker, jaw about slaughterhouses, and end up at the home of a family of miscreants whose appetites for red meat has truly gotten the best of them. Texans and their barbeque, man! Still, as admirably disgusting as all that sounds, Hooper accomplishes his horror almost entirely through implication — but what disturbing implications they are. Just coming to understand how Leatherface gets his name is enough to turn you vegan. One of, if not the, greatest horror films ever made.
How to watch: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is now streaming on Peacock.
The Changeling
1980's The Changeling stars George C. Scott as a composer named John Russell who, after his wife and daughter are killed in a car accident in front of him, retreats to an isolated mansion outside of Seattle. Of course, the house is isolated for a reason. Slowly but surely, it begins spilling its secrets to him – there's knocking on the walls, a broken window, and an infernal red ball that keeps bouncing down the stairs.
Already in a fragile mental state due to his grief, John finds himself easily swept up in the unraveling of the mysteries, and the spirits in the house take full advantage. Brimming with iconic imagery, this is about as classic a ghost story as they come.
How to watch: The Changeling is now streaming on Peacock.
The Wailing
Horror films are a genre that are normally served best when brief. Too long a runtime, and it's hard to sustain the mood or the tension. The audience will inevitably begin poking holes in the plot. And yet Na Hong-jin's 2016 South Korean film The Wailing manages to sustain itself for nearly three hours – it's an anomaly!
How he does it is by making The Wailing several movies in one. It's a comic police procedural and a zombie outbreak movie and a terrifying demonic possession movie. It switches tones frequently, lurching from comedy to terror with wild abandon. In fact, there's so much going on it's difficult to summarize and capture anything near the scope of it. But the gist is there's this police officer (Kwak Do-won) whose daughter has gone missing, and all of the strange things happening in a rural village seem to be connected to that. And, ooh, are they ever.
How to watch: The Wailing is now streaming on Peacock.
Dead & Buried
"Seaside town with a secret" movies are one of the greatest of horror subgenres, from Messiah of Evil to The Fog. Dead & Buried belongs right there among the classics.
Directed by Gary Sherman (Poltergeist III), it takes us to Potters Bluff, where every tourist who comes into town meets the grisliest of ends at the hands of the locals. The sheriff (James Farentino) starts digging into the murders with the assistance of the local mortician (Jack Albertson, aka Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka!). But things only get weirder and weirder as they go along. There are too many surprises here to ruin — just trust, you will not guess where this one is going.
How to watch: Dead & Buried is now streaming on Peacock.
The Beyond
If you've never seen a Lucio Fulci movie, there's no good place to dive right in. It's all chaos, all the time. And even after you've seen most of his movies, you're still likely to have no idea what the hell is going on in half of them.
1981's The Beyond is the middle chapter in his so-called "Gates of Hell" trilogy of films, sandwiched between City of the Living Dead and The House by the Cemetery. But there's not really a coherent order to what occurs; just expect a gateway to hell to be opened and all sorts of truly vicious horrors to come spilling out. Fulci films are all about the languorous nightmare vibes — everyone behaves totally irrationally, but they somehow still work if you can subscribe to their dream logic.
The Beyond stars (as do all three of the films in the trilogy) the great Catriona MacColl. She plays a different person in each movie, and here she's Liza, a New Yorker who's moved to New Orleans to take over a crumbling hotel she's recently inherited. Immediately, strange things start happening, mostly involving reanimated corpses and exceedingly slow scenes of grotesquery, and Liza does her damndest to figure out what's driving it before Hell takes over Earth. And let's just say that Fulci's not known for happy endings.
How to watch: The Beyond is now streaming on Peacock.
Abigail
Taking a break in between Scream sequels — a break that would prove to be permanent soon after — the directing duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (aka Radio Silence) reunited with Scream star Melissa Barrera to toss off this vampire ballerina goof, which ended up being a total crowd-pleaser and their best movie since Ready or Not. Barrera plays Joey, a laconic member of a gang of criminals led by Frank (Dan Stevens, doing his thing again). Together, they kidnap Abigail (Alisha Weir), the daughter of a very powerful man, and plan to hold her for ransom.
Little do they know though that, much like Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire before her, Abigail is actually an ancient bloodsucker trapped in the body of a tween ballerina, and have they ever busted into the wrong mansion this time. With a game cast that also includes Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, Angus Cloud (in his final role), and Giancarlo Esposito, Abigail might play its big twist way past when we've already figured it out, but it's having such a bloody good time you really don't care.
How to watch: Abigail is now streaming on Peacock.
Us
What if there was a world underneath our own world where doubles of each and every one of us lay in wait, biding their time doing weird pantomimes of our behavior until they could one day all report topside and take our places? Our places having been recently vacated because these doubles have just murdered us with large scissors, of course. That's the bizarre tale that Jordan Peele's 2019 doppelganger freakout Us spins, and that's before we even get into the "Hands Across America" of it.
With a killer cast including Lupita Nyong'o, Elisabeth Moss, and Winston Duke, Peele makes the oddness of his conceit work in what is essentially a home-invasion picture, delivering an unforgettable pile-up of scenes that are chock-full of immediately iconic imagery. The scissors, the red jumpsuits, the bunnies, oh my! And in the pantheon of horror performances that deserved but didn't get awards attention, Nyong'o's double-forked performance in Us stands especially tall. Tall, wielding scissors, and smiling that big broad terrifying smile — the one that will make you wanna crawl right outta your skin.
How to watch: Us is now streaming on Peacock.
Old
The current period in M. Night Shyamalan's directing career has been referred to as "Mid-Night," and that's a delightful play on words — as long as we're talking "middle-aged" and not "mid" in quality, because it's been banger after ridiculous banger from the man as far as I'm concerned. Shyamalan has embraced the sublimely outrageous, throwing logic and reality out the window in favor of stone cold entertainment and cinematic show-offery, and Old, his movie about a beach that makes people turn old, is some prime-cut movie beef.
Starring an international cast of genuinely superb thespians who are ready, willing, and excited to fully embrace this nonsense, Old features Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Abbey Lee, Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, Eliza Scanlen, and Aaron Pierre as the residents of a lush tropical resort who decide to take a day trip and visit a gorgeous secluded spot on the island. And suddenly minutes turn into hours, and the kids are all adults, and it's legitimately bonkers. But as silly and often scary as it is, Night also turns this into a moving paean to our lives slipping away from us. He's a magician.
How to watch: Old is now streaming on Peacock.
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
Every Nosferatu movie to date has been a classic, up to and including Shadow of the Vampire, the one about the fictionalized making of the original Murnau movie. But Werner Herzog's 1979 take on the infamous Dracula rip-off is in my estimation the lushest, the most gorgeous, and by far the weirdest. It certainly helps to be lush and gorgeous when your movie stars Isabelle Adjani. And it definitely helps being way out there weird when the other star is Klaus Kinski.
Herzog bridges the gap between those two actors' very different energies nimbly; this movie feels like dream and nightmare simultaneously, and there's nothing else like it. Visions of plague rats and burial caskets overtaking the streets of 19th-century Germany move through a fine grainy mist, as the cursed dance between the beauty and her beast slowly, surely inches itself toward the bleakest of dawns. It's the purest horror cinema: the essence of wanton despair. Wrap yourself up in this beauty, because you're about to get real cold, real quick.
How to watch: Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is now streaming on Peacock.
Child's Play
Killer doll movies have been a staple of the genre since its inception, but none have gone on to become more iconic than Chucky, the Good Guy doll that gets possessed by the spirit of a serial killer and spends the next four decades hack-slashing his way up and down the toy aisles. It all starts here, with the 1988 original from Fright Night director Tom Holland, with a script by Chucky's main man, Don Mancini. A single mom (Catherine Hicks) gives her little boy Andy (Alex Vincent) the large, ginger-haired doll she'll hope will cure his loneliness, only to have the foul-mouthed murderer in little red sneakers create a world of deadly mayhem instead. Whether you like your Chucky camp and over-the-top (as he's gotten in later installments) or simply terrifying, this classic straddles both sides of the petrifying poppet's personality perfectly.
How to watch: Child's Play is now streaming on Peacock.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Zack Snyder's greatest movie, hands down! (DC fans, that bait's just for you.) The Justice League director may not have nailed the capitalist critique that made George A. Romero's original 1978 zombie classic so biting, but Snyder's 2004 remake kicks all kinds of unholy ass all the same. It certainly helps that he's got Oscar–winner Sarah Polley as his leading lady, a nurse named Ana who returns from a long shift to find the world exploding into a cannibalistic apocalypse in an opening outbreak sequence for the ages.
As Ana and other survivors (or zombies-to-be) — including stalwart character actors like Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer, and Michael Kelly — all descend on a shopping mall to barricade themselves in for humanity's last stand, Snyder ramps everything up to eleven, twelve, and thirteen. This killer group of actors is what truly make this movie soar, giving us real-seeming people to worry about as the big zombie rampage starts turning them into snacks.
How to watch: Dawn of the Dead is now streaming on Peacock.
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
If you love found-footage horror, then this 2018 example from South Korea ranks among the most entertaining, jump-off-your-seat examples. The set-up is a standard one: Six YouTubers who host a ghost-hunting series head to a scary location and hit record until all hell breaks loose. In this case, the eponymous asylum is the setting, where it's rumored the hospital's director lost his mind and murdered everybody inside. Of course, we'll glean little bits of that backstory as the scares start kicking in.
But like all the best examples of this kind of movie, it's all in the execution (pun intended). Writer/director Jung Bum-shik nails both the atmosphere and the jump scares alike that are needed to make your trip to Gonjiam a terrifyingly memorable one. A flooded basement and a floating ping-pong ball have truly never been scarier!
How to watch: Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is now streaming on Peacock.
Q: The Winged Serpent
This is a horror movie for cityfolk who know there's nothing scarier than having a mysterious liquid drip on your head as you walk down the street. Cult maestro Larry Cohen (It's Alive, The Stuff) went absolutely bonkers with this 1982 monster movie that sees a giant dragon perch itself inside the top of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, and then proceed to chow down on the human-sized morsels milling below. There is a truly nonsense backstory involving an Aztec cult (Q is short for "Quetzalcoatl") and a rampaging cop slash jazz pianist (Michael Moriarty) that you 100% don't have to pay attention to. Q: The Winged Serpent lives and breathes by its scenes of a claymation dinosaur descending into rooftop pools and snatching unsuspecting New Yorkers off the sidewalks into its jaws and its claws. And by that metric, it's a sweeping serpentine success.
How to watch: Q: The Winged Serpent is now streaming on Peacock.
Night of the Demons
Totally grody and a heap of hoots and hollers, this 1988 supernatural slasher features the requisite set-up — a gang of unlikeable teens descend on an abandoned mortuary to have sex and do, like, drugs and stuff — but goes so wildly off the rails that it's hilariously unforgettable. It kicks off on one fateful Halloween evening when our intrepid gang of assholes, led by goth girl Angela (Amelia Kinkade), moons an old man on the street. And so he curses them.
Yes, that's the entire diabolical set-up, and yes, that is the most 1980s horror movie set-up ever crafted. From there, the gang holds a seance, some nasty spooks get loosed, and everybody starts turning into demons one by one. And before you know it, horror icon Linnea Quigley (as the indispensable horny girl, Suzanne) is doing unmentionable things with a lipstick tube, there's strobe-filled dance sequence set to Bauhaus' "Stigmata Martyr," and Night of the Demons earns its place in the pantheon of perfect 1980s schlock.
How to watch: Night of the Demons is now streaming on Peacock.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Everybody who hated Halloween III: Season of the Witch when it came out in 1982 because it didn't have Michael Myers in it needs to send an apology note and a crisp ten dollar bill to writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace, because they were wrong — so very wrong! John Carpenter and Debra Hill decided after the second Halloween movie that Myers' tale had been told, and the Halloween films should instead become an anthology series. And oh, that it could've gone that route instead of descending into the decades of nonsense it eventually did when this movie flopped.
The tale of an evil toy corporation that's run by pagans plotting to murder children with cursed masks that contain a sliver of Stonehenge, Season of the Witch makes us mourn for all of the All Hallows-themed wackiness we missed out on. And just you try to get that "Silver Shamrock" jingle out of your head once it's wormed its way in there!
How to watch: Halloween III: Season of the Witch is now streaming on Peacock.
Frankenstein
Sometimes only a classic Universal Monster will scratch that spooky itch, and thankfully the greatest of them all is here with its big fingers at the ready: James Whale's 1931 masterpiece Frankenstein, and its equally excellent sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. Adapting Mary Shelley's legendary novel about a mad doctor (Colin Clive) bringing a corpse back to life through that modern boogeyman "electricity," Whale & Co. didn't make a single bad step in the movie's making. From Boris Karloff's casting as the monster, all the way down to the design of the bolts on his neck, every decision proved iconic.
It's as watchable and eerie as it was when it dropped in theaters almost a full century ago. It is, dare I say, alive!!!!
How to watch: Frankenstein is now streaming on Peacock.
Sleep Tight
In the middle of helming the exquisite found-footage [REC] quadrilogy, writer/director Jaume Balagueró took some time to concoct this chilling little 2011 thriller about a demented apartment concierge named César (celebrated Spanish actor Luis Tosar) who doesn't let little things like "privacy" or "doors" keep him from snooping around the lives of his unknowing tenants. Kind of like Phillip Noyce's infamous 1993 piece of trash Sliver with Sharon Stone but actually great and terrifying, Sleep Tight sees César sneaking into everybody's homes in the middle of the night, chloroforming them as they sleep, and then doing whatever the hell he wants to whilst they remain not-so-blissfully unconscious.
Balagueró's movie ends up being so super creepy precisely because it seems way too possible; indeed, there are echoes of many real-world news stories in this unsettling premise. Balagueró leans hard into every single one of the nightmares from this set-up that your brain can conjure up. Don't sleep on this underrated little terror!
How to watch: Sleep Tight is now streaming on Peacock.
Happy Death Day
Coming out of nowhere in 2017 and immediately seizing a spot in our collective imaginations (and then somehow repeating the trick with an equally terrific sequel, also on Peacock), writer Scott Lobdell's slasher-meets-Groundhog Day conceit is so perfect it amazes that nobody thought of it earlier. Actor Jessica Rothe — who is the big charismatic reason why these movies work — plays Tree, a college sorority girl who gets murdered by a killer wearing a terrifying baby mask on the night of her birthday.
Until the next morning, when Tree wakes up — back in her bed, alive, on the morning of her birthday all over again. Forced to figure out what the hell's going on and to elude the killer who has it out for her, director Christopher Landon's Happy Death Day reinvigorates the old slash-n-dash concept we've seen a million times over with charm and wit and a whole bunch of stabbing. Rothe rules the roost as a hilarious, exasperated time-tripping treasure.
How to watch: Happy Death Day is now streaming on Peacock.
UPDATE: Sep. 26, 2024, 1:56 p.m. EDT This feature was originally published on Nov. 18, 2023. It has been updated since to reflect current streaming options.
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