Horror countdown: 31 days of Halloween

What’s your favourite scary movie? Whether you’re into creepy kids, folk, haunted house, monster, natural, psychological, slasher, supernatural, vampire or zombie horrors … there’s something to tingle just about everyone’s spine in Showmax’s epic countdown to Halloween.

Why wait to find out what goes bump when you can stay up all night with a freaky festival of razorsharp horror movies? Gather your fiendish friends, find out what happens in the end and get ready to trick or treat till the sun comes up. Go on, dare to have a bloody good time. Turn your screens into screams this October and watch as many horrors on this list as possible!

Or check out the Halloween collections on Showmax.com here

Quick list

1. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (and Beetlejuice)

2. Nosferatu

3. Sting

4. Longlegs

5. Imaginary

6. Late Night with the Devil

7. The Invisible Man

8. Speak No Evil

9. Apartment 7A

10. The Watchers

11. Pinky Pinky

12. Talk to Me

13. The Radleys (Stream from Thursday, 16 October)

14. A Quiet Place, A Quiet Place Part II, A Quiet Place: Day One

15. This is The End

16. Demonic

17. The Meg

18. The Tokoloshe

19. The Last Voyage of the Demeter

20. Ouija and Ouija: Origin of Evil

21. Anaconda

22. Saw X

23. The Fix

24. Witchboard (Stream from Friday, 24 October)

25. The Nun

26. Abigail

27. Heretic

28. Van Helsing

29. Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch

30. Until Dawn (Stream from Thursday, 30 October)

31. The Curse of the Necklace (Stream from Thursday, 30 October)

31 Days of Halloween horror movies

1 October

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

In 1988, director Tim Burton’s (The Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) horror comedy movie Beetlejuice became our guide to a colourful and weirdly bureaucratic version of the afterlife.

We watched teenaged goth Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) explore her family’s new haunted house as her artist stepmother Delia Deetz (The Last of Us star Catherine O’Hara) frantically tried to make it over to match her modernist vision. And while they made themselves at home, the sleazy demon Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice, and played by Michael Keaton) tried to break out of the underworld and into the real world to marry Lydia so that he could claim his place among the living. 

Thirty-six years later, (nearly) the whole cast is back in for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – along with Lydia’s creepy ghost talk show producer (and boyfriend), Rory (Justin Theroux, The Leftovers), and her rebellious daughter Astrid Deetz (Jenna Ortega, American Carnage), who doesn’t believe that her mom can see dead people. 

2 October

Nosferatu

Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter

Director Robert Eggers – a lifelong fan of FW Murnau’s 1922 horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror – and his team have transformed one of our favourite cinema freaks, Bill Skarsgård (Boy Kills World, The Crow), into the rat-toothed vampire Count Orlok/Nosferatu. He oozes from the shadows, reaching out his clawed, corpse-white hands to grasp at the object of his obsession, newlywed Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp, Voyagers), the young bride of Orlok’s unlucky estate agent, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), who becomes his prisoner. Forget your noble Count Dracula and think back instead to a living corpse, scrabbling out of grave dirt to prey on the living.

3 October

Sting

Twelve-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Brown) secretly raises a tiny “spider” she finds, despite it hatching out of a glowing object that crash-lands in her aunt’s apartment. But this is no Peter-Parker superhero story. Sting, as Charlotte calls the creature, grows really big, really fast, and shows eerie signs of intelligence along with an insatiable appetite. Does the spider secretly escape, spin creepy webs and slowly cocoon the apartment building’s less mobile residents and pets. You bet! Does Sting have any kind of attachment to Charlotte? Doubtful. And, most importantly, is Sting a boy spider, or an egg-laying menace of a girl spider? Place your bets now. 

4 October

Longlegs

Fortunately for arachnophobes, this isn’t a creepy creature story. Think occult serial killer detective drama instead. Phew! During the 1990s, FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, with Lauren Acala as the young Lee) investigates a string of cases in which fathers are murdering families before killing themselves. In each case they leave behind a coded letter containing Satanic messaging, and signed “Longlegs”. But none of the letters seem to be in any of the family members’ handwriting. Then Lee gets her own warning letter from Longlegs, and she uncovers a childhood connection to a weird man in pale makeup who visited her on her birthday back in 1974 – the year she got her first camera. Whoever Longlegs is, they’re up in Lee’s business, and maybe even in her house. PS: Nicolas Cage is in it. Playing who? Watch and find out!

5 October

Imaginary

Haunted teddy horror. Children's book author Jessica (DeWanda Wise) keeps having night terrors about her beloved character Simon the Spider, and her mentally ill father, Ben (Samuel Salary). Then, when she and her husband Max (Tom Payne) move into Jessica’s childhood home, Max’s daughter Alice (Pyper Braun) becomes obsessed with Jessica’s favourite toy, Chauncey the teddy bear. Their elderly neighbour, Gloria (Betty Buckley), starts sharing stories about Jessica’s childhood with Alice – involving incidents that Jessica can’t remember. And when Jessica becomes suspicious of Chauncey’s influence over Alice, it turns out that they’re the only two who can see the teddy…or the monstrous bear that he sometimes becomes. 

6 October

Late Night with the Devil

Found-footage horror. On 31 October 1977, during the live broadcast of variety late-night talk show Night Owls with Jack Delroy Season 6, recently widowed series host Jack (David Dastmalchian) launches a ratings-boosting spooky stunt in which he invites supposedly demon-possessed 13-year-old Lilly D'Abo (Ingrid Torelli) into the studio to meet his audience, along with three other guests: self-proclaimed psychic and medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), skeptic and ex-magician Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), and parapsychologist and author Dr June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon). Carmichael has promised a massive payday to anyone who can prove the existence of anything supernatural. But he could pay out more than he’s bargaining for, because Jack has made a deal with the Devil. Literally.

7 October

The Invisible Man

Prepare for a cunning modern twist on HG Wells's 1897 novel The Invisible Man, when architect Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) drugs her abusive mad scientist boyfriend Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) so that she can escape him and go into hiding with her childhood friend, police detective James Lanier (Aldis Hodge). Two weeks later, Cecilia is told that Adrian has taken his own life, and that he has left her $5 million in his will. It should be a relief, but Cecilia starts experiencing strange incidents that are, at first, brushed off as the result of PTSD from years of abuse, and then as the result of a bad reaction to her prescription medication. Cecilia has a different explanation: Adrian has faked his own death and used his top secret tech breakthrough to become invisible, and now he’s stalking her. Well, nobody’s going to believe that, unless Cecilia can catch him. Let the scaredy cat and invisible mouse games begin. 

8 October

Speak No Evil

American expats Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben Dalton (Scoot McNairy) are utterly charmed by British couple Paddy (James McAvoy, Atonement) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) when they meet by chance on holiday in Italy. So when the Daltons, who’re working in England, get an invitation for a weekend away at Paddy and Ciara’s farmhouse in Devon, they leap at the chance to leave behind their everyday squabbles about infidelity and unemployment. A relaxing getaway with their daughter, Agnes (Alix West) – who’s the perfect age to be a playmate for Paddy and Ciara’s shy son, Ant (Dan Hough) – would be just the ticket. From the moment they arrive, though, it’s like a shared apartment listing that looks good on the surface but more like a human trafficking hub once you read between the lines. Their hosts’ charisma slowly shifts into boundary-crossing creepiness, and Ant’s erratic behaviour has Louise and Ben wondering just what the English get up to in the countryside. 

9 October

Apartment 7A

At the beginning of the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, a young woman falls from the seventh floor of a posh New York apartment building at 1021 West 72nd Street. Now let’s rewind. The woman who left the apartment so abruptly, dancer Terry Gionoffrio (Julia Garner), flies back up into her apartment, and we keep rewinding all the way until the moment everything went wrong, right back at the start of new horror film Apartment 7A. It’s 1965 and Terry’s dreams of Broadway stardom hit a roadblock when she falls and mangles her ankle partway through a performance. Battling through recovery, a desperate Terry follows Broadway producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess), hoping to plead her case. But before she can, she collapses outside Alan’s apartment building, the Bramford. “Kindly” Bramford residents Minnie (Dianne Wiest) and Roman Castevet (Kevin McNally) pick up the poor dear and hustle her inside up to their home to help her to recover. And they offer Terry the key to the apartment next door to theirs, which they own. Rent-free in New York City? Terry will take it, thank you. But the culty Castevets have plans for Terry and they’re plotting to move a tenant into her womb.

10 October

The Watchers

This spooky supernatural tale, produced by M Night Shyamalan (Trap), is his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan’s first film as a director. After her car breaks down while she’s delivering a parrot to a zoo, Mina (Dakota Fanning), an artist, becomes trapped in an ancient forest in Ireland. An older woman named Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) offers Mina and two other lost strangers, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), shelter in her house, which she has nicknamed “the coop”. She warns them not to leave at night, or the Watchers will take them, and not to explore the Burrows, where the Watchers hide during the day. As the months pass, though, Mina and Daniel get curious. Meanwhile, the Watchers keep a close eye on the coop, and begin to mimic its inhabitants more and more successfully.

11 October

Pinky Pinky

Pinky Pinky is a creepy and unsettling reinvention of an urban myth about an evil bathroom monster. Essentially a South African take on A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, a paedophile principal who died in a fire returns to haunt an all-girls boarding school. Zazi Kunene stars as a young student who attempts to overcome the loss of her twin sister and becomes aware of a grotesque yet shadowy threat. Haunted by her sister and trying to escape the clutches of a real-life sexual predator, she enlists the help of a new friend.

12 October

Talk to Me

"I see dead people" is a famous quote from The Sixth Sense and now it's the crux of the Australian supernatural horror mystery drama Talk to Me. The film centres on a group of teens whose devil-may-care experiments with the afterlife lead to dire consequences when they summon the dead through a possessed hand. Talk to Me’s smart and unique concept sets it apart as a fresh and original horror, blending coming-of-age elements to engage beyond its effective scare tactics. Solid performances and sharp writing anchor the drama as it explores themes around grief and friendship.

13 October

The Radleys (Stream from Thursday, 16 October)

Horror comedy based on Matt Haig’s 2010 young adult novel of the same name. The Radley family are suburban vegetarian vampires … or at least husband Peter (Damian Lewis), a doctor, and his housewife partner Helen (Kelly Macdonald) are coping with their managing their “addiction”. As their children Rowan (Harry Baxendale) and Clara (Bo Bragason) come of age, though, the lure of bloodlust is becoming too strong to resist. And Will is forced to call on his twin brother Will (Damian Lewis again), a practising vampire, for help when the family’s true nature is exposed. Damian Lewis brings a lot of mischief and humour into his double role, so it’s worth sinking your teeth in just for that.

14 October

A Quiet Place, A Quiet Place Part II, and A Quiet Place: Day One

John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place alien invasion horror films dropped us into a post-apocalyptic world in which handfuls of survivors of an alien invasion learn to be very, very quiet, or get snatched and annihilated by blind creatures who’re lightning fast. In the first film, John and his wife Emily Blunt play a husband and wife raising their children in a world of silence. The family has developed all sorts of ingenious workarounds, which are fascinating to watch.

In Part II, we see the same family’s lives from the start of the invasion, as they try to find a way of spreading the information they’ve learned about the aliens’ vulnerabilities. And in the prequel film, A Quiet Place: Day One, Lupita Nyong'o plays Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient who’s stuck in Manhattan when aliens attack Earth. Sam, her cat Frodo, and everyone they meet, have to figure out how to evade the attackers – long before anyone figures out the rules.

15 October

This is The End

This apocalyptic horror-comedy is an adaptation of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s 2007 short film, Jay and Seth Versus the Apocalypse. The pair have gathered all their famous real-life friends, including James Franco, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Michael Cera, and Emma Watson, to play movie versions of themselves. They act out what would happen, and how these versions of them might behave, if Los Angeles went through a Biblical-style apocalypse. After an earthquake shakes LA and the ground swallows up several celebrities, partygoers board themselves up in James Franco’s house and start laying down the rules for survival as they await help. But with so many me-first people under one roof, it’s chaos! It might be easier to make your peace and take your chances with the hellish demons roaming the streets. 

16 October

Demonic

Demonic is from the creative mind of Neill Blomkamp (Chappie, District 9), who leans even further into the realm of horror after his grisly Oats Studios experiment. In this ambitious and intriguing sci-fi horror thriller, a young woman tries to communicate and reconnect with her estranged and incapacitated mother. Yet, when she bypasses her mother's locked-in syndrome through experimental VR technology, their dysfunctional relationship throws up a new, more frightening challenge: demon possession. Much like The Cell, this visually striking, surreal and unnerving horror explores the dark limits of the subconscious and mother-daughter bonds.

17 October

The Meg

Sci-fi action film. Disgraced search and rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) has a shot at redemption when billionaire Jack Morris (Rainn Wilson) and the researchers at the underwater research facility Mana One, under Dr Minway Zhang (Winston Chao), run into trouble while exploring a hidden section of the Mariana Trench. It turns out the Megaladon shark isn’t extinct, it’s just hiding, hungry, and territorial. 

Feeling sharky? Also watch

Deep Blue Sea: Sci-fi action film. In an underwater ocean facility that would have a James Bond villain waving fistfulls of cash, a team of scientists is conducting research by experimenting on mako sharks. But scientist Dr McCallister (Saffron Burrows) has made them super-smart, and when one escapes, everyone must fight for their lives as the facility becomes a watery death maze.

The Black Demon: Nixon Oil company inspector Paul Sturges (Josh Lucas) takes his family along when he’s sent to inspect the Diamante offshore oil rig. But their fun getaway gets off to a bad start when a massive megalodon that rig workers have nicknamed the Black Demon shows up and destroys their boat, stranding them on the rig with the environmental catastrophe that Nixon Oil has created.

18 October

The Tokoloshe

When it comes to South African folklore, it’s difficult to escape the tokoloshe – now a stylish horror movie starring Petronella Tshuma and Dawid Minnaar. A local version of the dreaded boogeyman, this evil dwarf-like water spirit is thought to be under the control of witch doctors in an effort to torment or kill. An atmospheric, experimental and visually striking local horror, The Tokoloshe centres on a night shift cleaner at a creepy rundown Johannesburg hospital. Trying to start over, Busi has to navigate her way past a claustrophobic environment, predatory manager and an evil presence.

19 October

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

The Last Voyage of the Demeter chronicles the doomed journey of a merchant ship ferrying 50 mysterious wooden crates from Carpathia to London. The crew soon discover they are not alone on board: at night they are stalked by a hidden passenger whose monstrous thirst for blood turns the trip into a harrowing nightmare. Based on a single chilling chapter from Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula, the film has been praised by horror icons like Guillermo del Toro, who called it “gorgeous, lavish and savage,” and Stephen King, who called it “a throat-ripping good time.”

20 October

Ouija and Ouija: Origin of Evil

Did you know that the ouija board we’re familiar with from movies is based on a toy trademarked by Hasbro in 1950 (and their recorded use dates back to only 1886)? So it should be no big deal when Debbie (Shelley Hennig, with Claire Beale as the young Debbie) throws her board in the fire in front of her childhood friend, Laine (Olivia Cooke, with Afra Sophia Tully as the young Laine). But spooky stuff happens, and Laine gathers her and Debbie’s friends at Debbie’s house to use her ouija board to try to reach her on the other side. That’s not a great idea, and when horrific things start happening to the friends, too, they go looking for the original owner of Debbie’s ouija board. In a rare case of the sequel getting more fan love than the original, in Ouija: Origin of Evil, we see how a fake spiritualist and her family unwittingly invite an evil spirit named Marcus (Doug Jones) to take over their nine-year-old daughter, Doris (Lulu Wilson), when they contact him using a ouija board during the 1960s.

PS: For another “spin” on this idea, scroll down to 24 October for Witchboard.

21 October

Anaconda

When it comes to classic monster movies, Anaconda falls into the so-bad-it's-good category. The over-the-top adventure horror thriller journeys with a nature documentary film crew who are forced to change course when they’re taken hostage by a crazed hunter on the trail of a giant anaconda in the Amazon jungle. While the plot follows some well-worn grooves, the movie ratchets up suspense with a terrifying predator on the loose. While essentially a dumb fun escapade, it's armed to the teeth with a once-in-a-lifetime cast featuring Jon Voight, Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Danny Trejo and Ice Cube.

22 October

Saw X

The Saw franchise has come a long way, now onto its 10th instalment with Saw X. Having revolved around body horror with gruesome contraptions that force victims into moral dilemma death games, the serial killer known as Jigsaw finally becomes a star with a chilling anti-hero performance from series regular Tobin Bell. A welcome return for the franchise, Saw X is easily the best sequel yet. It shows there's still room for more gore as John Kramer becomes part of a scam to defraud people looking for a miracle cure at a facility outside Mexico City.

23 October

The Fix

Set in a dystopian future Cape Town with toxic air, The Fix follows a model who takes a new designer drug at a party and suffers a shocking transformation. Pursued by forces with competing interests in the drug’s effects, Ella discovers that her mutations could save the human race. Grace van Dien stars as Ella, opposite Daniel Sharman, Keenan Arrison, Clancy Brown, and Nicole Fortuin. The Showmax Original was the opening night film at MIPAfrica and the closing night film at Chattanooga, where it won the Dangerous Visions Awards. “We love this movie, from its killer lead performance by the wonderful Grace van Dien to its wild dystopian world and fantastic mutation effects,” says Chattanooga. 

24 October

Witchboard (Stream from Friday, 24 October)

This 2024 remake of the 1986 film is set in New Orleans’ French Quarter, where recovering addict Emily (Madison Iseman) and her fiancé Christian (Aaron Dominguez) are opening a restaurant in a historic building. While looking for mushrooms in a nearby forest, Emily stumbles across a stolen artefact – a spirit board (the precursor to the ouija board), which contains a pendulum made from a human finger bone. And instead of returning the board to the local museum, Emily starts to play with it. But like a monkey’s paw, every wish that it seemingly grants her comes at the expense of harm to others in her circle. And Emily gets pulled in deeper, with visions of the board’s maker, the French witch Naga Soth (Atonia Desplat), who was banished from her village by a greedy witch hunter in the 1690s.

25 October

The Nun

It wouldn’t be Halloween without a trip into The Conjuring universe! This Gothic supernatural horror has Bonnie Aarons back playing the Demon Nun possessed by Valak, from The Conjuring 2. 

In 1952, the Vatican sends Father Burke (Demián Bichir) and Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) to investigate when nuns at a Saint Cartha's Roman Catholic convent in Romania are attacked by unseen evil forces. Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), a villager who transports supplies to the nuns, describes how he found the body of one nun, sister Victoria (Charlotte Hope), who fled the convent. But Sister Victoria comes back from the dead to attack Frenchie, Father Burke is troubled by hallucinations and gets buried alive, and Irene learns the tortured history of the abbey building, unveiling an eerie truth about the nuns around them. 

26 October

Abigail

A man known only as Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) assembles an anonymous heist crew to kidnap a criminal kingpin’s (Matthew Goode, Watchmen) young daughter, Abigail (Alisha Weir). They must then smuggle her to a remote mansion where they are to keep her captive until her father coughs up $50 million in ransom. The crew is told they’ll have the cash in hand by morning, after which they’ll split it and go their separate ways. Unfortunately for the heist crew – Frank (Dan Stevens, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire), Joey (Melissa Barrera), Rickles (William Catlett, Lovecraft Country), Sammy (Kathryn Newton), Peter (Kevin Durand) and Dean (the late Angus Cloud), whose codenames are based on the original members of Hollywood’s Rat Pack – both the little ballerina and the big, creepy mansion are hiding sinister secrets.

27 October

Heretic

The more you enjoy Hugh Grant’s bumbling romcom performances, the more you might enjoy how he turns his charm on its head as he embraces his villain era, especially in this claustrophobic horror film. Two young Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are forced to prove their faith when they knock on the wrong door and are greeted by Mr Reed (Hugh Grant). A sweet older man on the surface, he turns out to be the final boss of “well, actually” bros as he debates their beliefs before forcing them to take part in his deadly game of cat-and-mouse, including diabolical DIY faith-based “escape” rooms that he’s set up throughout his house. 

28 October

Van Helsing

Hugh Jackman plays Vatican-ordained vampire hunter Gabriel Van Helsing, with Kate Beckinsale (Underworld: Evolution) as his sidekick Anna Valerious, one of the last surviving members of a Romanian family who pledged to destroy Dracula in this monster mash of an action horror film inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. The story begins with Dracula killing Dr Victor Frankenstein around 1887, and only gets wilder as Van Helsing loses his memory after a fight near Notre-Dame de Paris with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

29 October

Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch

One of the OG horror comedies, Gremlins put a fresh spin on creature features when it came out in 1984. Like accident prone nice-guy hero Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan), everyone in the audience wanted an adorable fluffy Mogwai like Gizmo, which Billy’s inventor dad Randall (Hoyt Axton) buys under the counter in Chinatown one Christmas. The Mogwai comes with three seemingly simple (tricky to interpret) rules: keep it away from bright light; don’t let it come in contact with water; and never, ever let it eat after midnight. Break the rules, and the Mogwai pops out creatures of malice, mayhem and murder, known as Gremlins. In both the first and second films, the Gremlins run amok in a riot of fun (for them), taking over movie theatres, attacking bars, performing scientific experiments on each other, misusing microwave ovens, and outright murdering people in inventive ways, just for laughs. 

30 October

Until Dawn (Stream from Thursday, 30 October)

Based on the 2015 PlayStation survival horror game of the same name, Until Dawn follows Clover (Ella Rubin), her ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), her friends Nina (Odessa A'zion) and Megan (Ji-young Yoo), and Nina's boyfriend, Abe (Belmont Cameli), as they search for Clover’s missing older sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell) in the mining town of Glore Valley. In classic slasher movie fashion, they soon run foul of a murderous masked maniac. But there’s a twist, because dawn never comes and the survivors realise that they’re stuck in a time loop, and have to suffer through 13 nights before they can possibly escape. And they’re warned that they can "survive the night or become part of it", because humans aren’t the scariest threat in Glore Valley. 

31 October

The Curse of the Necklace (Stream from Thursday, 30 October)

Love a story where haunting and possession are a metaphor for hidden family psychological drama and trauma? Now throw in a little exorcism and kid trauma! During the 1960s, the Davis family are suffering thanks to dad Frank’s (Henry Thomas) alcoholic rages and abuse. Even though mom Laura (Sarah Lind) has kicked him out of the house, he still endangers them when he tries to win back Laura by giving her a necklace that he finds in an evidence bag at the police station. When Laura refuses to be bribed, Frank sneaks the necklace into their house as a “surprise” anyway. And the spirit of an evil dead boy begins to torment Laura and their daughters, 11-year-old Ellen (Violet McGraw) and 15-year-old Judy (Violet’s real-life sister, Madeleine McGraw) after Ellen starts wearing the necklace.