Top Horror Movies Streaming This Week

Obsession has returned to number one this week after briefly falling to number three after being unseated by two new films. The terror tale had a two-and-a-half-month streak going from the time it was released on streaming and has bounced back with relative ease.  We haven't heard that star Inde Navarette has returned to Hollywood Horror Nights as a scareactor, but we did hear she felt that the moment was “surreal” when she met the “Freaky Nikki” costumed character when she visited the theme park attraction.

The film has already done well with awards on the film festival circuit, but won big at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, winning Best Wide Release, Best Lead Performance for Inde Navarette, Best Director and Screenplay for Curry Barker, and Best Kill; as for the name of the kill, I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it yet.

Obsession is now streaming on Peacock.  Obsession will leave Peacock on November 15.

Speaking of the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, Backrooms is another winner at the ceremony. It won Best First Feature; Jeremy Fox took the Chainsaw for Best Cinematography, and director Kane Parsons and Edo Van Breemen won for Best Score. The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell and gives us our first cinematic vision of The Backrooms creepypasta.

Parsons has stated that he intends to continue the story, and it was announced in September that he was to direct a sequel for the independent studio A24 that released the first film. Since he's been constructing a world around the Backrooms since he was 16, it's likely that he has some very intriguing ideas for Backrooms 2.

Backrooms is now streaming on HBO Max.

Adam Scott (Hellraiser: Bloodline, Piranha 3D, Krampus) is mostly thought of as a comedic actor, but he started his career with his second film role in the fourth Hellraiser movie and made a wonderful impression with his crucial scene in Osgood Perkins' The Monkey. He stars in Damian McCarthy's third film, Hokum, with Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, and Michael Patric.

Neon, the independent studio, released the film, which was nominated for four Fangoria Chainsaw Awards: Best Wide Release, Best Lead Performance for Adam Scott, Best Screenplay for Damian McCarthy, and Best Cinematography for Colm Hogan. It didn't win, but Hokum, written and directed by McCarthy, is a leap forward for the filmmaker, as his first feature, Caveat, was a streaming-only release on Shudder, which has believed in his talent for a while. His next film, Oddity, was released in theaters and got even more praise from critics. Hokum did very well at the box office and with critics.

Hokum is now streaming on Hulu.

Halloween, the holiday, is within sight, and John Carpenter's highly influential masterpiece has improved its standing on this week's list, which isn't that surprising.  For a film that is nearly 50 years old, no dust has settled on its lean and mean construction, its memorable characters, its villain, and its quietly artful moments.  The score, composed by Carpenter, has come to symbolize the scary season and horror movies in general.

If you play the song, your mind immediately recalls the film. With the title sequence that is so simple yet subtly haunting, just orange titles and a jolly jack-o'-lantern that slowly gets closer and closer, it then drops you directly into the first sequence of terror. Its status as one of the greatest horror films ever made and one of the most beloved is safe within its 91 minutes of slasher film fan paradise.

Halloween is now streaming on AMC+ and Shudder.

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson are the giddy, loving couple in the midst of a gory body count movie, in both senses of the phrase, that addresses the rarely-answered question in most slasher films: “Where does the killer go between movies?” Jack Haven plays Little Death, the English-language version of the colloquial term for orgasm in French, la petite mort, with a mix of gentleness and bloodthirsty skill.

Dylan Baker, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Kevin McDonald,  Louise Weard, and Patrick Fischler co-star as the people around the queer female director, played by Einbinder, Kris Williams. The director and writer of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun, has wonderful fun playing with the genre's tropes to construct a romantic slasher killer fantasy that is bloody and sexy as well as a knowing satire of the genre and filmmaking itself.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming on Mubi.

Sean S. Cunningham's sixth film was the first independent slasher film to be acquired by major studios for distribution after a bidding war ensued when the completed film was shopped in Hollywood. It has spawned a film franchise with twelve films and one newly released television series, Crystal Lake. While Friday the 13th has always been a popular horror film to watch in October, as a classic, it is most likely that viewers are also checking out the original film due to interest that has risen from the release of the new show.

Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, and Kevin Bacon star in the film, which is the prototype for every scary movie set at a summer camp and any slasher film with a masked killer who uses multiple weapons to murder his (or her) prey.

Friday the 13th (1980) is now streaming on AMC+, Kanopy, Netflix, and Paramount+.  It will leave Peacock and Tubi in three days.

Deborah Ann Wohl (True Blood, Mother's Day (2010), Escape Room) stars in The Cycle, a Shudder Original film that has genre fans whispering excitedly. The legendary horror writer Stephen King made sure that people knew how he felt about the film since he said: “There's a movie coming on Shudder in October called THE CYCLE. I don't usually pump up horror movies (unless they are mine, haha), but this is special. Put it on your calendar.”

The film also stars Jeffrey Donovan, Will Hochman, Jack Doolan, Carl W. Crudup, David Myers Gregory, and Gretchen Corbett, and tells the story of a woman, a forensic anthropologist, whose father went missing 36 years ago. When his remains are found at a nightmarish crime scene,  she has no choice but to investigate what really happened to her dad. Clearly, the word has spread about the film as it landed in the top ten right away. It was directed and co-written by Jordan Downey.

The Cycle is now streaming on Shudder.

Brian De Palma is a director who is known for his incredibly stylish films. People don't realize, especially after watching the film, that 1976's Carrie was a low-budget film for a major studio. United Artists budgeted the film at $1.6 million but raised it slightly to $1.8 million, during a time when horror movies ruled at the box office. Some of the scenes, like Carrie White's walk home after the prom, were cut because they would have been too expensive to film.

Still, De Palma pulled out all the stops with a great cast: Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, William Katt, P. J. Soles, Betty Buckley, and John Travolta, and cinematography by Mario Tosi, an Italian artist who was also a cinematographer and a camera operator.  The famous scene that ends the movie was actually shot in reverse to capture an otherworldly quality, so there was also a spirit of experimentation that is rarely seen in mainstream horror.

Carrie (1976) is now streaming on HBO Max and Prime.

While we might think that most of the genre's most influential films come from the 1970s, and admittedly many of them do, that doesn't mean that films in other decades (or centuries) can't wield that type of influence too. Take Wes Craven's Scream, for example. Released in 1996, it changed the course of slasher films and horror in general, as the characters had a knowing sense of humor about the events around them and knew about the rules that you need to follow to survive a horror film.

The writer, Kevin Williamson, and director Wes Craven, created a sensation with Scream that resulted in a flood of films where the characters got the joke, even if the killer got them before the third reel. It even anticipated the rise of influencers and internet personalities who relentlessly document and discuss their every moment as if they were starring in their own movies. David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan, Skeet Ulrich, Liev Schreiber, Drew Barrymore, and Roger L. Jackson star in the film that blurred the lines between reality and fiction in a way that electrified audiences.

Scream (1996) is now streaming on Hulu and Kanopy.  It will leave Peacock in two days.