Best Halloween Horror Movies and Specials for 2022

Is there anything better than the Halloween season?

Sure, here at Polygon we cover horror all year round. We have our ongoing lists of the best horror movies to watch at home and the best horror movies on Netflix, updated every month of the year.

But Halloween is also a special time of year for year-round horror fans.

For the past two years, Polygon has put together a Halloween Countdown Calendar that offers a Halloween-friendly movie or TV show to watch at home every day in October. We’re excited to bring that back once again with 31 spooky picks to keep the spirits up all month long.

Every day for the whole month of October we add a new recommendation to this countdown and tell you where to watch it. So curl up on the couch, dim the lights, and grab some popcorn for a terrifying and fun crowd of Halloween surprises.

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Oct 1: Audition (1999)

Image: Arrow Movies

in the Audition, Takashi Miike’s 1999 psychological horror thriller, Love is consensual fiction. Years after losing his wife to a terminal illness, widower Shigeharu Aoyama is urged by his son to get back out into the world and find someone. Aoyama agrees to a suggestion from his friend, a film producer, to audition for a non-existent film in order to find a potential bride among the candidates. His search eventually leads him to Asami Yamazaki, a beautiful former ballerina with a murky past.

As Aoyama grows closer to his new love interest, he finds himself ever more entangled in a web of intrigue that threatens to tear him apart emotionally, psychologically, and even physically. There is something dark in Asami, yes, but there is also a latent darkness in Aoyama, arguably even darker. The only difference is that Asami has embraced that darkness and made it her own.

Miike’s film keeps his cards relatively close to his chest most of the time, unwinding his tightly wound mystery like a garrote wire before peeling off his skin in cute artifice to reveal a throbbing mass of terror seething beneath. The film descends into a macabre fugue of assumptions, deceptions and cinematic sleight of hand, with dreams that almost feel real and confronted with a reality too frightening to be anything else. In the end, these are just words. Only pain can be trusted. -THE

Audition can be found on Arrow Video and Hi-Yah! streamed, free with ads on Tubi and free on Kanopy with a library card. It can also be borrowed or purchased digitally vudu and Apple.