Happy October, Polygon readers! We’re officially in fall, and you know what that means: Halloween season. With the spookiest holiday of the year almost upon us, almost every streaming service is going all out to deliver the very best horror and horror-adjacent films their respective libraries have to offer.
As always, we’ve gone through everything new in streaming this month to bring you the very best of October. There are plenty of exciting films 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 new movies for streaming services you should watch this month.
Where to watch: Criterion channel
Genre: Horror
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Form: Kōji Yakusho, Masato Hagiwara, Tsuyoshi Ujiki
There are plenty of great horror films about serial killers, but few are as terrifying as Healing.
This masterpiece from Japanese horror legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa follows a detective who investigates a series of strange and brutal crimes: horrible murders, each following the same pattern, committed by seemingly unrelated perpetrators who are all captured shortly afterwards and confess to their crimes.
While many great serial killer films pride themselves on being grounded in reality, and derive their fear from the idea that this could all happen in real life, Healing is a proudly supernatural film, which makes its crimes infinitely more disturbing and inexplicable. The entire film is an exceptional masterclass in building and sustaining tension, but few horror movie moments are better or more terrifying than Healingthe last 10 minutes. No spoilers. —Austen Goslin
Genre: Fantasy musical
Director: Masaaki Yuasa
Form: Avu-chan, Mirai Moriyama, Tasuku Emoto
Masaaki Yuasa is one of the greatest anime directors in the world, responsible for a string of undeniable hits such as Thinking game, Devil man cry babyAnd Keep your hands off Eizouken! – the kind of anime that taps into the intrinsic spark of what makes anime such a creatively elastic medium, while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of what audiences deem possible through the medium itself.
His latest film, Inu-Oh, could only emerge from an imagination as unbridled as Yuasa’s: a historical musical about a blind biwa player and an eccentric masked dancer who join forces to arouse both admiration and anger from their audience. It’s a psychedelic fantasy musical in a hair-metal style with elastic character animation, trippy colors and banging tunes. —Toussaint Egan
Genre: Horror thriller
Director: Zach Cregger
Form: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long
There aren’t many movies like it Barbarian. Unfortunately, the best way I can recommend this movie is to say that if you don’t know anything about it (and like horror movies), you should stop reading this blurb and go see it right away. If you need a little more explanation, I’ll do my best without giving anything away.
The film follows Tess (Georgina Campbell), a young woman who visits Detroit for a job interview and arrives at her sketchy Airbnb late at night. When she gets there, a mysterious man (played by the always unreliable Bill Skarsgård) is already there, claiming that he too has booked the place. What his real intentions are, and whether or not this is an honest mistake, leads to incredible tension, but it’s everything that comes after that that really makes the film special.
Since this is a horror movie, it isn’t technically fair to ask you to go completely blind, so with that in mind here are a few notes: Barbarian It’s extremely scary, it’s very violent and gory, it’s extremely disturbing, and it’s also one of the funniest and most entertaining films of the past decade. In other words, if that sounds like your kind of movie, you should absolutely watch it, and if it doesn’t, you’ve probably stopped reading this blurb by now. —AG
Genre: Supernatural horror
Director: Mike Flanagan
Form: 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 The radiantwhich follows Danny as an adult (Ewan McGregor, giving a career-best performance) who has lost connection with his psychic ability. The story really moves forward when he discovers a young girl who also excels and is hunted by a gang of what essentially amounts to vampires who feed on people who excel.
The book version is muddled and uncertain whether it is a sequel to King’s original book or the legacy of the classic film that King never liked. What makes Flanagan’s film adaptation so special is how well it bridges the gap between both books and the Kubrick film, making this feel like a missing link to the film. The radiant that ties everything together perfectly, and also tells a surprisingly poignant and moving story in itself. —AG
Genre: Action thriller
Director: Gareth Evans
Form: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Donny Alamsyah
Timo Tjahjanto, the director of 2018 The night comes for usreturns with his latest ultra-violent action thriller, The shadow gets lostlater this month. If you’re as excited about that movie as we are, rewatch the film that first put Indonesian action cinema in the global spotlight. 2011 The raid: redemption Iko Uwais plays Rama, a rookie paramilitary police officer who takes part in a raid on an apartment building to arrest a notorious crime lord.
However, things quickly go wrong when Rama’s team is besieged by a small army of heavily armed criminals, killing the majority of his comrades. However, the only way out is through the road, as Rama and his remaining teammates fight their way through the building to demand justice on behalf of their fallen colleagues. The raid: redemption is a meager, average (emphasis on mean) action thriller that will make you gasp in horror and delight at the spectacular acts of violence on display. —AT