Happy October, Polygon readers! We’re officially in fall, and you know what that means: Halloween season. With the year’s spookiest holiday almost upon us, nearly every streaming service is pulling out all the stops to serve up the very best horror and horror-adjacent movies their respective libraries have to offer.
As always, we’ve combed through everything that’s new to streaming this month to bring you the very best of October. There’s plenty of exciting movies to stream this month, including a Japanese horror classic, a psychedelic anime musical, a pulse-pounding Indonesian action thriller, and much more.
Here are the movies new to streaming services you should watch this month.
Where to watch: Criterion Channel
Genre: Horror
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cast: Kōji Yakusho, Masato Hagiwara, Tsuyoshi Ujiki
There are plenty of great horror movies about serial killers, but few are as frightening as Cure.
This masterpiece from Japanese horror legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa follows a detective investigating a string of strange and brutal crimes: horrible murders, each following the same pattern, committed by seemingly unrelated perpetrators who are all caught shortly after and confess to their crimes.
While many great serial killer movies take pride in rooting themselves in reality, drawing their scares from the idea that any of this could happen in real life, Cure is a proudly supernatural movie, which makes its crimes infinitely more disturbing and unexplainable. The whole movie is an exceptional master class in establishing and sustaining tension, but there are few horror movie moments better or more terrifying than Cure’s last 10 minutes. No spoilers. —Austen Goslin
Genre: Fantasy musical
Director: Masaaki Yuasa
Cast: Avu-chan, Mirai Moriyama, Tasuku Emoto
Masaaki Yuasa is one of the greatest anime directors alive, responsible for a string of incontestable hits like Mind Game, Devilman Crybaby, and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! — the kind of anime that tap into the intrinsic spark of what makes anime such a creatively elastic medium all while stretching the bounds of what audiences consider possible through the medium itself.
His latest film, Inu-Oh, could only spring from an imagination as unbridled as Yuasa’s: a period-piece musical about a blind biwa player and an eccentric masked dancer who join forces to inspire both admiration and anger among their audiences. It’s a psychedelic, hair-metal-style fantasy musical with elastic character animation, trippy colors, and banging tunes. —Toussaint Egan
Genre: Horror thriller
Director: Zach Cregger
Cast: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long
There aren’t many movies like Barbarian. Unfortunately, the best way for me to recommend this movie is to say that if you know nothing about it (and like horror movies), you should stop reading this blurb and go watch it right away. If you require a little more explanation, I’ll do the best I can without giving anything away.
The movie follows Tess (Georgina Campbell), a young woman who is visiting Detroit for a job interview and arrives at her sketchy Airbnb late at night. When she gets there, a mysterious man (played by the ever-untrustworthy Bill Skarsgård) is already there and claims that he too booked the place. What his real intentions are, and whether or not this is an honest mistake, lead to some incredible tension, but it’s everything that comes after that really makes the movie special.
Since this is a horror movie, it’s not technically fair to ask you to go in totally blind, so with that in mind, here are a couple of notes: Barbarian is extremely scary, it’s very violent and gory, it’s extremely disturbing, and it’s also one of the most enjoyable and fun movies of the last decade. In other words, if that sounds like your kind of movie, you absolutely have to watch it, and if it’s not, you’ve probably stopped reading this blurb by now. —AG
Genre: Supernatural horror
Director: Mike Flanagan
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran
Doctor Sleep is a miracle. The 2019 horror film from writer and director Mike Flanagan (Midnight Mass) is an adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining, which follows Danny as an adult (Ewan McGregor, giving the best performance of his career), who has lost his connection with his psychic gift. The story really picks up when he discovers a young girl who also shines and is being hunted by a band of what basically amount to vampires who feed off of people who shine.
The book version is muddled, unsure if it’s a sequel to King’s original book or to the legacy of the classic movie that King never liked. What makes Flanagan’s adaptation so special is how well he bridges the gap between both books and the Kubrick movie, making this feel like a missing link to The Shining that connects everything together perfectly, and tells a surprisingly poignant and touching story all on its own too. —AG
Genre: Action thriller
Director: Gareth Evans
Cast: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Donny Alamsyah
Timo Tjahjanto, the director of 2018’s The Night Comes for Us, is set to return with his latest ultra-violent action thriller, The Shadow Strays, later this month. If you’re as excited for that film as we are, revisit the film that first put Indonesian action cinema in the global spotlight. 2011’s The Raid: Redemption stars Iko Uwais as Rama, a rookie paramilitary police officer participating in a raid of an apartment block in order to arrest a notorious crime lord.
Things quickly go south, however, as Rama’s team is besieged by an small army of heavily armed criminals, killing a majority of his comrades in the process. The only way out is through, though, as Rama and his remaining teammates thrash their way through the building to exact justice on behalf of their fallen colleagues. The Raid: Redemption is a lean, mean (emphasis on mean) action thriller that will have you gasping in horror and delight at the spectacular feats of violence on display. —TE
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