“Spooky Season” is in full swing, so let’s look at some of the best titles to watch for this time of the year.
2022 has been a great year for horror. And while we here at 615 Film have already reviewed many of the year’s bigger spooky offerings, including Halloween Ends, Smile, Pearl, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Prey, Barbarian, and Nope, I decided to delve into 10 of 2022’s smaller, grimier, and flat-out weirder efforts currently available on streaming services for your Halloween binge-watching pleasure.
V/H/S99
Make 100 of these movies, and I will watch 100 of these movies. The fifth installment in this now decade-old anthology franchise dropped on Shudder last weekend, the second film in the series to do so after last year’s V/H/S94. Next year’s already planned V/H/S85 will do the same.
V/H/S99 features the usual gross-out, consciously low-budget outings across five shorts centered on an abandoned concert venue, a sorority initiation gone wrong, a warped take on 90s kids’ game shows like Legends of the Hidden Temple, a cross between American Pie and Rear Window, and a romp through Hell.
Where to Watch: Shudder
Deadstream
Joseph and Vanessa Winter, a husband and wife duo responsible for the fifth segment titled To Hell and Back in V/H/S99, had their breakthrough with Deadstream, a film in which a disgraced YouTuber (played by Joseph) livestreams a night alone in a haunted house to win back his viewers.
Deadstream nails the difficult balance of being a genuinely creepy movie that’s also legitimately funny. It’s tough to do both without being an outright parody or an annoying mess. Winter can be grating at times in the main role of Shawn, but that makes it an accurate portrayal of a YouTuber.
Where to Watch: Shudder
Significant Other
Maika Monroe and Jake Lacy make for a very watchable pair at the center of this sci-fi horror film in which a couple backpacking in the Pacific Northwest deal with both relationship issues and an alien lifeform from a crashed-landed meteor.
This movie has two distinct halves — the first half is a stripped-down, atmospheric horror setup, while the second is a borderline comedic T-1000-starring switch-up. I enjoyed the creative approach, even if the two halves don’t fully gel.
Where to Watch: Paramount+
Crimes of the Future
Body horror king David Cronenberg is back with his first truly twisted film in quite some time.
In the lineage of genre classics such as The Fly, Scanners, and Videodrome, the maestro of mangled bodies gets into some of his sickest shit yet in Crimes of the Future (which is not a remake of or even related to his 1970 feature of the same name.) Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, and a going-for-it Kristen Stewart star in a film about performance artists who conduct surgery in front of a live audience. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Where to Watch: VOD
Hellraiser
Apologies to the Twitter user who came up with this phrase because I can’t remember who said it, but this film was the yassification of Pinhead.
Hellraiser was bound to be remade eventually, and David Brucker, director of last year’s excellent The Night House, was a strong choice to do so. Bruckner certainly brought the atmosphere, but lackluster performances outside of star Odessa A’zion and the Cenobites, plus a reliance on some worn-out thematic tropes and some too-smooth streaming visuals, let the movie down. However, it’s still worth a watch for Jamie Clayton’s gender-swapped take on Pinhead.
Where to Watch: Hulu
Speak No Evil
One of the bleakest films of any genre you will see all year.
A Danish family is invited to stay at the house of a Dutch family they met months earlier while on vacation. What follows is some of the darkest, and most frustrating, social satire. Like Crimes of the Future this one is not for the faint of heart, but in a completely different way. it will have you yelling at your TV.
Where to Watch: Shudder
Watcher
Maika Monroe saw Jenna Ortega coming for her modern scream queen crown this year with X and Scream and responded with a pair of strong horror performances of her own.
Watcher is another genre hybrid (this time horror and psychological thriller) that finds Monroe having relationship problems alongside life-threatening horror issues. This time around, her partner is played by Karl Glusman and the two portray an American couple who have relocated to Bucharest where a serial killer called “The Spider” is decapitating women.
Where to Watch: Shudder, AMC+
Mad God
First of all, let’s hear it for Shudder! The official streaming service of all horror aficionados has provided half of this list of 10. It’s worth the subscription, even if just for the month of October to binge all these offerings.
From master visual effects artist Phil Tippett, Mad God follows a character named The Assassin on a stop-motion journey through an underground hellscape. Tippett, who worked on the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, and Robocop among others, delivers a visual feast in his directorial debut.
Where to Watch: Shudder
Werewolf by Night
Speaking of directorial debuts from masters of other aspects of filmmaking, I would be remiss not to mention legendary composer Michael Giacchino’s Werewolf by Night, which in my opinion is the most interesting product Marvel has produced in some time.
Werewolf by Night is a 53-minute-long TV special about a secret group of monster hunters who have been gathered to compete over something called the Bloodstone, but they must defeat a powerful creature to do take possession of the item. Gael Garcia Bernal stars as the titular Werewolf.
Where to Watch: Disney+
Orphan: First Kill
We will close with the second entry in the bonkers Orphan franchise Orphan: First Kill.
Released 13 years after the original film, First Kill is actually a prequel to the original. And it has a couple of tricks up its sleeves that rival the first outing. Isabelle Fuhrman once again does some heavy lifting to make the ludicrous premise work, and Julia Stiles is fully committed to the movie’s campy energy.
Where to Watch: Paramount+