Horror Movie Month 2026

Here’s what we watched in Horror Movie Month this year!

October 1: Creep Box (2023)

Slightly creepy dude invents a NeXT cube that can simulate the dead for about fifteen minutes. All anybody wants to do is turn this into a skrillion dollars, but he’s more in it for the science. And also his dead wife?

It was okay, and I appreciated its general commitment to the bit, but fundamentally: only okay. Also, not really a horror movie, I think. That said, “it was on Shudder” covers a lot of choices.

October 3: Cat Cam (2025)

Disappointing. We had hoped for “Paranormal Activity, but mostly a cat”, or “Good Boy, but it’s a cat”. Instead… it was pretty boring. Also, it had Jiavani (as seen on Dropout) as a totally insufferable jerk. We didn’t get anywhere near enough cat.

October 3: Livestream from Hell (2026)

Kevin Hart decides to become a live streamer, but is overbearing and bad at it. Somebody at his livestream event starts killing people. Hijinx ensue. But the key thing to know, here, is “from Hell” means “goes very badly” and not “streamed from the third circle of Death”. Funny, but not funny enough.

October 3: Poppers (1984)

I think we watched this mostly because of the very provocative poster on Shudder, and because the kid thought it would be good queer 80s horror. It was decent, but not amazing. Fun to see a 1984 Spanish exploitation-ish movie, which must’ve been related to the end of the Franco regime, but I don’t know the culture well enough to say.

It was very economical. It knew that it could just not show a bunch of things, and that the viewer would work it out. I thought this was well done! I also liked the most civil “you’re going to be the prey in our hunt” scene I’ve seen.

In brief: not great, but the best thing we’d seen so far, by far.

October 4: Control Freak (2025)

A woman has a successful career as a motivational speaker. Unsurprisingly, her personal life is kind of a mess. Repressed trauma, strained personal relationships, poorly-handled stress, lying to her spouse. This begins to manifest in physical ways. Mostly ants. And itching. She’s told to try to relax, which stresses her out. In the end: she should’ve tried to stop scratching so much at her itches.

This was fine. It wasn’t amazing, but it delivered on what it promised. Also, it had a good poster, I thought.

October 4: Portal to Hell (2025)

I liked this one a lot! Guy who seems likely to go to the grave with a song unsung is at the laundromat, and one of the dryers seems to have become a portal to hell. A demon crawls out of it, one day, and says he’s here to collect the guy’s favorite neighbor’s soul. The demon is voiced by Richard Kind. The neighbor, crusty but benign, is played by Keith David. Do I have to go on?

It got a little schmaltzy by the end, but I had a lot of fun and recommend it.

October 5: He’s Watching You (2024)

Did not enjoy. Tiresome and derivative. “What if a slasher, but generational trauma?” I will quote the Letterboxd review that made me laugh: “Show me on the doll where he abandoned you.”

Whatever, there’s a masked serial killer and people think it’s the protagonist, but it isn’t. The protagonist is just weird.

October 6: Haunted Heist (2025)

Bad. Dude gets out of jail and gets his three high school buddies to do one last heist. But he doesn’t tell them it’s a heist. Also, none of them are actually skilled at any sort of heist things? I laughed a couple times, but it wasn’t worth the investment. The bit about “Rat Face George” was funny, though.

October 7: Dead Ant (2017)

A glam band from the 80s is still touring and is going to play at a low-prestige music festival in the desert. But first! They’re all going to eat magic mushrooms. Hijinx ensue, mostly centered around giant ants. Tom Arnold, Jake Busey, a little Sean Astin, and Sydney Sweeney about a week before she got famous. We watched it hoping it would sit alongside Heavy Trip… but it didn’t.

Again, I laughed a couple times, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

October 8: Infirmary (2026)

Body cam found footage movie. Absolutely forgettable. Watch Grave Encounters instead.

October 9: Lady Terminator (1988)

Was this a horror movie? Who can say? What was this?

We went and saw this 1988 Indonesian movie, inspired in part by the centuries-old legend of the Queen of the South Sea but also by the (then) four year old film The Terminator.

Absolute shortest version: an evil sex spirit escapes her exile beneath the sea, possesses a young American woman (she’s an anthropolist!) and uses her to murder a lot of people.

It was fun, not only because it was weird and funny, but because we saw it at the Philadelphia Film Center, which we like a whole lot. The audience was terrific, and everybody had a better time because of everybody else. I wouldn’t watch it again, but I’d go to another equally weird movie with the same audience. Except the person who was sitting nearby and tapping their foot the whole time. That wasn’t great.

October 10: Resident Evil (2026)

I expected this to be good, and it was! We went to the movies again (once again the Philadelphia Film Society, but a different cinema), too. Most of the Resident Evil movies are, in my opinion, crap. This was not crap. It was a lot of fun. Creepy, sometimes scary, usually funny. Good work!

At the end, a guy leaving the cinema said, “What’d you think?” I said, “I liked everything but the ending.” He asked, “What kind of ending would you have liked?” I said I didn’t know, and I still don’t. But that’s okay, the movie was good.

October 10: V/H/S/MIXTAPE (2026)

Look, the V/H/S movies are a mxied bag. I’ve written about them before. The Halloween one is probably best. But this was … was it the worst? Maybe, maybe not. But it was a hot mess. The early ones were built around this idea that there is a weird cult around VHS tapes of horrible things, and the tapes somehow become powerful. That’s just a framing device for anthology movies, but it’s sort of weirdly fun. Last year’s was just bonkers fun.

This year they mostly had sort of a musical motif? But it was uneven and not spelled out. Between the shorts, we got GWAR. This should have been great, but even GWAR could not save this movie, and that’s saying something.

There was a not terrible adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Music of Erich Zann, though.

October 11: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

Quoting Letterboxd: “how many more perfect performances must Ralph Fiennes give us before we give him an Oscar?”

It was pretty good. Very well made. Fiennes was great. The Jimmy Savile inspired villain should’ve been a stupid idea that failed, but was pretty good, I thought. Or, at least, he was a more interesting character than I had expected.

I don’t know that this movie is for everyone, but if you decide you won’t watch it, go look up the scene with Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast. You won’t regret it.

October 11: Hokum (2026)

This was a really nicely done ghost story starring Adam Scott, who is usually really interesting to watch. He plays a troubled, unhappy, successful writer who travels to the off-the-beaten-path hotel where his parents honeymooned. It is haunted, we are told, and then we go a long time trying to figure out whether it’s really haunted.

Well shot, well written, well acted. I liked it.

October 12: Afraid (2024)

David Dastmalchian is a tech bro who goes by “Lightning”. He has an injection port on his belly for “peptides”. He convinces our protagonist, John Cho, to put a next generation Alexa in his house so it can take over his life and control everything. John agrees and things end badly. Also, we’re pretty sure that there was some sort of crossover with The OA.

It wasn’t great. It probably could’ve been pretty good, but the script wasn’t there. Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure we’re going to get a lot more “evil AI controls your life” movies. (We’ve had a lot already, for decades, actually…)

October 13: Ugly Sweater Party (2018)

This has been in our to-watch list for years. Dude gets invited to an ugly sweater party and goes. One of the sweaters is maybe possessed by a serial killer? The budget for this movie is $192.

It wasn’t great. We laughed a lot. It had some (bad) songs written just for the movie, which I am always happy to see. I wish it had been just a little wittier, but I don’t deeply regret the 81 minutes. This is not a recommendation.

October 14: Ghost Train (2024)

This is a Korean horror film about a YouTuber who is researching a haunted subway station. (“It was built on top of a suicide cult’s chapel,” they say, leading us to wonder why there was a chapel so far underground!) Week after week, the woman returns to ask the stationmaster about other hauntings. He tells her about things that have happened, and we see the story play out. By the end, of course, she is the next story.

This worked well. I’m not sure it was entirely cohesive, but it had good atmosphere and some good stories. Also, it avoided two common problems: it wasn’t a short story forced to run feature length, and it wasn’t a bunch of shorts stuck together with only GWAR to bind them. It was well structured.

October 16: The End of Oak Street (2026)

We weren’t sure how much of a horror movie this was. Our finding, in the end: not really a horror movie. It was okay. But it was a loser for horror movie month.

October 17: Spider Island (2026)

This was a stupid little movie with lots of CGI spiders. But it was fun. We watched this in a hotel room, which makes almost any TV easier to enjoy. The premise is that an unethical corporation has built a luxury hotel on an island that is a nature preserve by, like, bribery and stuff. Doing this displaced zillions of spiders, who will now go fatally bite the hotel’s first guests. To make that more fun, the guests consist entirely of “influencers” who are vlogging the whole thing. Also, Tim McInnerny!

It was not great, but it was plenty fun.

October 18: Street Fighter (2026)

Not a horror movie, but I had been pestering Bryan for months that we’d have to go see this as a followup to watching MK2. It was a mess, but fun.

But also they had people in the 80s singing 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” which I could not get past.

October 19: Tammy and the T-Rex (1994)

This has been floating around my “oughta watch this sometime” for ages. Finally, it showed up on Shudder.

It was … weird. It knew how stupid it was, which mostly made it good. Denise Richards plays a high schooler whose boyfriend is beaten into a coma. A mad scientist (the guy who played Bernie, as in “Weekend At”) steals his body, scoops out his brain, and puts it into a giant animatronic T-Rex. Why? I mean, wouldn’t you?

It was fun, and I do not regret watching it. Go read the Wikipedia page sometime.

October 20: Etheria Film Festival 2026

This featured short such as Do Not Rewind (2026) and Wall Udder (2025). It was okay. Mixed bag, like many anthologies, but not really enough horror. This was mostly our fault, but: look, it was on Shudder.

Maybe my favorite was Superconscious, a movie about remote viewing experiments. It was a bit of a mess, but I liked what they were going for (until the end).

October 24: Lake Mungo (2008)

This is a mockumentary about a family whose teenage daughter died and now seems to be haunting them, maybe, just a little. Evidence adds up, collapses, and adds up again.

People talk a lot about Lake Mungo and how it’s an incredible piece of work. Gloria said she’d watched it before and was un-wowed, but that we could try again.

It was okay. I think it was well made. They knew what they wanted to make, and they made it. I had a couple problems with it. It had just a few too many twists, which started to make it feel like satire. Also, it felt like, at the end, I was supposed to say, “Oh, wow!” but I didn’t. I said, “Huh.”

Still, it did some things really well.

October 24: Ghostwatch (1992)

Gloria said, “Now that we watched that, let’s watch a great mockumentary.”

We’ve seen Ghostwatch before, but why not watch again? It’s really good! If you haven’t heard of it, check it out. Watch it. Later, read its Wikipedia page.

It’s presented as a live investigation into a supposed haunting of a house in west London. A bunch of well-known TV personalities appear as themselves. Things get weird. It caused controversy at the time, as sort of another War of the Worlds.

I don’t know how many times I could watch it, but twice was no problem.

October 25: Parasomnia (2025)

There’s a kid in an orphanage who has night terrors and has been through a number of major traumas. We see some of that, then cut to her present-day life when she has things under control, and things are going well. Until they aren’t.

Lots of dreams, confusion about what’s real, and some decent twists and turns. I liked it okay. No regrets.

October 25: Uncle Sam (1996)

I remember seeing this movie for rent back when “going to the movie rental place” was a thing. The poster was sort of burned into my memory. I was pretty sure it’d be awful, but I really did want to see it. Good news: I was right, it was awful.

It was William Lustig (who brought us Maniac Cop) and Larry Cohen (who brought us Maniac Cop but also The Stuff and lots of other movies I really like), and once I saw that in the credits I was excited. But it was bad.

A dead soldier who was, in life, a Bad Guy, is shipped home. His body had been lost for years. Shortly after arriving home, the corpse gets out of the coffin and goes on a killing spree. Why? He’s just a jerk. We laughed a lot, but it was bad.

Instead, consider watching Homecoming from the Masters of Horror series. It’s very different, but I thought about it a number of times while watching Uncle Sam.

October 26: Maniac Cop (1988)

How did we make it to 2026 without watching this pretty famous slashic? Who knows!

There’s a mysterious cop in NYC who is killing innocent people. The police brass try to say it’s a psycho with a stolen uniform, but one detective – Tom “Thrill Me” Atkins – is pretty sure it’s a real cop. Which is it?

I’ll let you find out for yourself, but don’t miss the jawline on this guy. The second male lead is Bruce Campbell, and his jawline absolutely pales in comparison. That’s saying something!

It was okay. I’ll probably watch the sequel. But it wasn’t really all that great.

October 28: Dolls (1987)

A rotten married couple, along with their cute kid, break down in the English countryside and seek shelter in a mansion with an eccentric couple and their many, many dolls. Not everybody will survive the night.

Gloria and I enjoyed this one a lot more than I thought we would. It was sort of a little morality play, and the (notable) actors playing the older couple were just great. The whole mood of the movie was unusual, and it really worked.

October 29: Dead & Buried (1981)

In a small town, visitors are being brutally killed, but nobody knows why or by who. Also, did one of them show up later as the new gas station attendant, with a new name? What even is going on?

This was one of many movies I noted while we watched the very long In Search of Darkness documentaries on 80s and 90s horror movies.

I liked it, but it wasn’t great. It was weird, which counted for a lot, but it needed work. Maybe some script editing, some pacing problems. On the other hand, it had Jack Albertson, who you may remember ad Grandpa Joe in Willy Winka and the Chocolate Factory, and he was a lot of fun to watch.

October 30: Salem’s Lot (2024)

Yeah, it was fine. Totally adequate adaptation of King’s vampire novel. I watched the whole thing without complaining.

October 31: Relaxer (2018)

“Look, it was on Shudder.”

Not a horror movie. Dude is repeatedly bullied by his brother, who gives him unwinnable “challenges” to prove his worth. The dude accepts a challenge to beat screen 257 of Pac-Man. This is impossible, but he won’t leave his sofa until he does it. He spends six months on his sofa.

Sometimes gross, sometimes stupid, but it committed to the bit, and I give it credit for that. I liked the ending, but getting there was just a bit of a slog.

October 31: Silver Bullet (1985)

We’d watched a King vampire movie, so I suggested we watch a King werewolf movie to balance it out. In retrospect, this was a mistake. Silver Bullet had its moments, but was bad.

Corey Haim plays a kid whose legs don’t work. He tools around in a sick motorcycle wheelchair, “the Silver Bullet”, made by his drunk uncle Gary Busey. Meanwhile, lots of people in town are getting brutally murdered. Some dude organizes a posse to find and kill the murderer, but the posse gets murdered. The sherrif, Terry O’Quinn, sadly shakes his head.

In the end, I’m pretty sure they kill the werewolf, but honestly, who cares?

On the other hand, Terry O’Quinn is still great.

Other stuff

We missed a few days, mostly because I had some traveling to do. We also watched some relevant TV:

American Horror Story: We watched a few episodes of season 13. We may watch more. AHS’s main problem, in my opinion, is “too many notes”. (That and Ryan Murphy’s frequent over-artiness.) AHS 13 is too many notes squared.

Crystal Lake: I didn’t expect to like this much, but I did like it. I thought it did a really good job telling a story nobody asked for. I would like a second season, but only if it retells the same time period, presenting an alternate take on the origin of Jason. I don’t want a continuation of the story we got. That was enough.

It: Welcome to Derry: Out of nowhere, there was a bonus one-off episode about the native people who lived near the woods where Derry was built. It was fine.

That’s it!

Some good stuff, some bad stuff. That’s how it goes! We’ll see if we have a better mix in 2027!