A full month of spooktacular recommendations to stream, one night at a time
Whaaawasthat? The hush before the scream, the prickle on your neck, the first cold snap sneaking under the door? It can only mean one thing: Halloween season is back, and so is Polygon’s annual Halloween Countdown.
Polygon covers horror all year, but October deserves a special ritual. For the fifth year in a row, we’re rolling out a 31-day viewing project, with 31 staff-picked bangers across movies, TV, specials, shorts, and online oddities — each one easy to watch at home.
Every day in October, we’ll drop a fresh recommendation and tell you where to find it. Expect stone-cold classics, new-school nightmares, cozy Halloween specials, unnerving YouTube deep cuts, and bite-sized shocks that hit harder than you’d think. Dim the lights, pile up the candy, and consider grabbing a friend: yelping over a jump scare is better together.
Check back daily. We’ll keep the lights low. You handle the screams.
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Oct. 1: Doctor X / Mad Love
These overlooked mad-scientist horror movies are even darker than Frankenstein
Doctor X Image: Warner Bros. PicturesPolygon’s horror fans are back with the annual Halloween Countdown, a 31-day run of short recommendations for the best movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream for the Halloween season. Tune in every day for a new recommendation, and find the entire calendar here.
Though Universal Pictures’ horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s popularized a series of now-iconic monsters, 1931’s Frankenstein also followed its gothic-novel source material in clarifying that sometimes, the real wrongdoing isn’t committed by a horrific creature of the night. Sometimes it’s the work of a doctor who’s gone mad with goth-science power. Two non-Universal horror movies from this period make for a particularly entertaining double feature for fans of monsters and/or mad science: Doctor X from 1932, and Mad Love from 1935.
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Oct. 2: This House Has People In It
Adult Swim’s creepiest late-night video will leave you paranoid
This House Has People In It is a 2015 entry in Adult Swim’s ongoing Infomercials series, which features bizarre, often unsettling content ranging from fake prescription drug commercials to fictitious late-night talk shows. Presented as CCTV footage from within a suburban home, this hair-raising short follows a family as they go about what appears to be a perfectly normal day.
Parents Tom and Ann argue over how to handle their teenage daughter, Madison, who has stubbornly decided to lie face-down on the floor in what is presumably an angst-ridden protest against her parents. Meanwhile, her younger brother Jackson prepares for his upcoming birthday party, while his grandmother remains focused on a strange television program about sculpting clay instead of paying attention to the newest addition to the family: her infant granddaughter. In the basement, a handyman named Dennis works on the plumbing under the kitchen.
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Oct. 3: The Collector
This underrated serial-killer movie was almost a Saw prequel
Former convict turned handyman Arkin O’Brien (Josh Stewart) has a problem: If he doesn’t pay off his debt to some loan sharks, they’ll have his wife and daughter killed. Seeing few options, Arkin heads to an old client’s house to rob them — and discovers his client’s family is already being held and tortured by a masked psychopath who delights in putting his victims through sick, twisted games. Trapped in a house loaded top to bottom with traps, Arkin has to fight to survive.
This might sound a little like the Saw movies, with good reason: The Collector, originally titled The Midnight Man, was at one point being considered as a spin-off prequel for the Saw franchise, as an origin story for Jigsaw. Saw’s original producers read the script, though, and rejected the idea. Jigsaw’s origin story was later told in other movies, and The Midnight Man’s script got reworked into The Collector. It wasn’t all bad news for director Marcus Dunstan, though; he and co-writer Patrick Melton eventually got to be part of the Saw franchise, writing the screenplays for Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI, and Saw 3D.
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Oct. 4: The White Reindeer
This lost folk-horror classic has a radical, original take on vampirism
The 1952 Finnish movie The White Reindeer is one of the great lost classics of folk horror. Although it won prizes at Cannes and the Golden Globes in its day, it was largely forgotten until a gorgeous 4K restoration started doing the rounds in 2017. It’s an eerie, utterly otherworldly dark fairy tale set on the desolate, snowbound fells of Sápmi (the Arctic region sometimes known as Lapland, though the native Sámi people consider that name pejorative).
In a haunting prologue, it is foretold that a newborn Sámi girl will become a witch; she grows into Piriti (Mirjami Kuosmanen), a spirited woman who chafes against her lonely existence as the wife of a roaming reindeer herder. She seeks relief from a local shaman, but perhaps due to her innate magic, his love ritual goes wrong and transforms her into a vampiric shape-shifter, cursed to hunt and consume men in the form of a white reindeer.
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