It's the most wonderful time of the year -- no, not that one, the spooky one! Starbucks has rolled out the annual pumpkin spice assault, ghosts and ghoulies are everywhere you look, and as summer fades into autumn, it's about the perfect time to start lighting the fires of the lil' jack-o-lanterns in your heart. Look, it's been a tough year and no doubt, it's going to be an unusual Halloween, but it seems like many of us are super excited to have something fun to look forward to and embrace as a community. And heck yeah. Halloween rules. Bring. It. On.
With that in mind, we've put together a handy list of the best Halloween movies streaming on Amazon Prime Video right now. Whether you're looking for something for the whole family or something that will keep you up at night, we've got the full gamut from spooky to scary as hell. If you don't find what you're looking for here, check out the Best Horror Movies on Amazon and the Best Halloween Movies on Netflix.
The Addams Family
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
Writers: Caroline Thompson, Larry Wilson
Cast: Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, Christina Ricci, Jimmy Workman, Judith Malina, Carel Struycken, Christopher Hart, John Franklin
If you feel like having a horror movie cheer you up, snap on over to The Addams Family posthaste! Heck, take your cue from the catchy theme song and snap twice! Based on the classic macabre family originally created by cartoonist Charles Addams, The Addams Family is a family-friendly piece of fun that wears its Halloween-friendly aesthetics like so many fierce Anjelica Huston lewks (which is to say, perfectly). Barry Sonnenfeld makes his directorial debut here, and he pulls out all the stops, lensing everything like the most immaculate live-action cartoon. Huston and Raul Julia are relationship goals to the nth degree, supporting each other’s eccentricities with enthusiastic aplomb, even if they involve, y’know, medieval torture. Christina Ricci’s Wednesday Addams is an instant icon. As for the Mamushka, a delightful dance sequence in the middle of the film? I’m smiling just thinking about it, which is not a feeling you’ll get from many of the hardcore horrors on this list. Halloween can and should be fun, and The Addams Family reminds us how. -- Gregory Lawrence
A Quiet Place
Director: John Krasinski
Writers: Bryan Woods and Scott Beck
Cast: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe
John Krasinski has given us all a lot of laughs over the years, but with his creature feature A Quiet Place, the actor-director brings the thrills. Set in a world overrun by alien creatures who hunt by sound, A Quiet Place follows a family trying to survive in the silence.... oh, and the mother's pregnant. Silent birth? That's not a thing. Krasinski does a killer job building tension as the family catapults towards the inevitable arrival of the baby and the creatures close in on their home. I've rarely seen audiences so respectfully silent in a theater, clinging to the film's quiet atmosphere, quietly munching on popcorn when the score kicked in. Its a damn impressive directorial feat from Krasinski, who pretty much writes a love letter to Steven Spielberg with his set-pieces and Amblin-esque big heart, and it's one of the best tales about the terrors of parenting in recent memory. -- Haleigh Foutch
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Director: Scott Glosserman
Writers: Scott Glosserman, David J. Stieve
Cast: Nathan Baesel, Angela Goethals, Robert Englund, Zelda Rubinstein
A mockumentary following a Jason Vorhees-type serial killer as he prepares for his big night of killing, Behind the Mask is a sharply written spoof of slasher movie tropes that should be considered required viewing for any fans of the genre. Nathan Baesel plays the titular killer Leslie Vernon with a good-natured affability that heightens every gag in the movie, such as the scene in which he cheerfully saws through the branches of a tree just outside the house he intends to stalk in case any of his victims tries to climb out the window. It loses a bit of steam when the murders inevitably begin in the third act, ditching most of the humor to become the very slasher movie it spent the previous two-thirds of its runtime lampooning. But Behind the Mask is altogether an extremely fun watch for horror fans, and a legitimately funny movie in its own right. -- Thomas Reimann
The Cabin in the Woods
Director: Drew Goddard
Writers: Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard
Cast: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Sigourney Weaver
Horror fans, assemble! Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods is a satirical, meta-happy love letter to every part of this genre, deconstructing and weaponizing every trope to a bizarrely effective, and often hilarious point. The cold open will make you think “This is absolutely not a horror movie,” and that is absolutely the point. You do have your requisite “teens uncovering horrors in a cabin in the woods,” no doubt. But to really understand the point Goddard and Whedon are making about these teens, and our relationship to them (i.e. “I’d like to see them get killed, please!”), you must orient yourself with Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins’ nebbish, fourth-wall leaning office workers, who seem to be overseeing our heroes’ laments and forcing them to fit into a very neat box. But what happens when your playthings jut up against the boxes, even breaking them? That answer is best spent watching with absolutely no further context, as Cabin in the Woods answers with puzzling, outlandish, confident glee. --Gregory Lawrence
Child's Play
Director: Tom Holland
Writer: Don Mancini
Cast: Brad Dourif, Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, Alex Vincent, Dinah Manoff
Part comedy, part horror, and 100% super creepy, Child's Play was the first film to introduce audiences to Brad Dourif as Charles Lee Ray, aka Chucky, the soul of a serial killer trapped in a tiny little ginger doll. When a loving mother gets her son his dream toy, she doesn't realize she just brought the toy from hell straight into their home. Chucky's design is an icon of horror for a reason and the ugly little sucker is still just as unnerving as he was when the film came out in the 80s, but it's his foul-mouthed one-liners and darkly comic personality that really make Child's Play endure as a delightful oddball slasher. -- Haleigh Foutch
C.H.U.D.
Director: Douglas Cheek
Writers: Parnell Hall, Shepard Abbott
Cast: John Heard, Daniel Stern, Christopher Curry
C.H.U.D. (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers) is one of those cult movies that doesn’t quite live up to the potential of its title but makes a fairly entertaining go of it. Taking place firmly in mid-80s New York City, the film is about a group of unhoused people living in the sewer who get horribly mutated into reptilian monsters by toxic waste, and who crawl aboveground at night to hunt for delicious citizens (and their dogs). It has some gnarly practical effects and a few truly great horror shots, including one particular standout in which Daniel Stern (yes, he is in this film) discovers the CHUDs worshiping at an altar of nuclear goo. But it’s also a little slow and occasionally gets so bogged down by its own plot that it forgets to deliver what we all came here to see, which is a bunch of people getting eaten by subterranean frog mutants. That said, it features John Goodman in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as a nameless beat cop who gets turbo-murdered by the CHUDs, so honestly, I don’t know why you’re not already watching it. -- Thomas Reimann
Creepshow 2
Director: Michael Gornick
Writer: George A. Romero
Cast: Lois Chiles, George Kennedy, Dorothy Lamour, Tom Savini
This is going to seem like a weird way to begin a recommendation, but I have to state upfront that Creepshow 2 mostly sucks. This 1987 sequel to the excellent 1982 horror anthology film from director George A. Romero and Stephen King once again adapts a handful of King’s short stories, but only features 3 vignettes to the original’s 5 and replaces Romero in the director’s chair. Two of those three vignettes are extremely hokey, but the middle segment, titled “The Raft,” is so freaking good that it totally makes up for the others. In it, a group of college students are enjoying an afternoon swimming at a lake when they get trapped on a wooden raft by a monstrous black blob in the water. The only thing the blob cares to do with its existence is eat these four plucky students, and it starts devouring them one by one in truly grotesque fashion. It’s absolutely some of the grisliest, most effective practical gore effects I’ve seen (think the 1988 remake of The Blob), transforming an otherwise silly-looking monster into something truly horrifying. This segment alone makes the entirety of Creepshow 2 a worthwhile watch. -- Thomas Reimann
Hell House LLC
Hellraiser
Director/Writer: Clive Barker
Cast: Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Doug Bradley
The word that comes to mind when discussing the 1987 horror classic Hellraiser is, “Yikes!” If you only know the Hellraiser mythology via the imagery of Pinhead (Doug Bradley, just doing the best work), that’s only the tip of the visually upsetting iceberg. Taking its cue from HP Lovecraft’s unfathomable terrors, where the breaking of our corporeal form offers simultaneous pleasure and pain, Clive Barker puts a suburban couple past the point of absolute Hell when they accidentally resurrect Pinhead and his vicious team of demonic Cenobites. The practical effects on this sucker are wild, made even wilder by its borderline seductive breaking of taboos, especially as it relates to Christianity, in the name of punishment melded irrevocably with reward. It’s a purposefully muckraking picture, sexualizing violence and drenching the screen with gorily inventive imagery, one that’ll stick to your bones for sometime after you watch. -- Gregory Lawrence
Hereditary
The Houses October Built
House on Haunted Hill
Director: William Castle
Writer: Robb Bell
Cast: Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Richard Long, Alan Marshal, Carolyn Craig
If you're in the mood for something classic to set your Halloween spirits alight, you can watch both the black-and-white and the colorized versions of House on Haunted Hill on Amazon. No, not the underrated 90s remake, but William Castle's giddy Vincent Price vehicle, which relishes in setting a spooky tone and the unleashing gimmick after gimmick on-screen. The set-up is a trope all its own at this point -- a group of people agree to spend the night in a haunted mansion for reasons (money, in this case) and regret the choice -- but House on Haunted Hill is mischievous and playful with the construct, especially the iconic Price, having fun in his role. It all builds up to a cracking ending, making for one of the breeziest classic horror watches that's bursting at the seems with haunts. -- Haleigh Foutch
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Writer: W.D. Richter
Director: Philip Kaufman
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright
Undoubtedly the very best of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake continuum (The Invasion in 2007 was the last big screen iteration but there’s one currently in development), the 1978 version is the funniest, sexiest, most barbed entry, one in which the country’s desperate desire for self-help and post-Watergate suspiciousness gleefully collide in a rip-roaring sci-fi spectacle. Some of the familiar beats from the original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers are replicated here, but has been updated and enhanced – a small town becomes sprawling San Francisco, with the invading pods coming down and blossoming as tiny flowers. Also, the effects are much gooier.
Director Philip Kaufman, working from a pitch-perfect script by unsung genre stalwart W.D. Richter, assembles an all-star cast including Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright as San Francisco intellectuals navigating the alien threat (Sutherland is a despised health inspector). Kuafman pokes fun at new age treatments (there’s a great scene in a healing mud bath) and even casts the man who played Spock as a Dr. Spock-like celebrity therapist (one of the movie’s very best jokes). But he also doesn’t skimp on the thrills; the husks of former humans reveal themselves in a mass of puddling ooze and there’s a great set-piece at a farm for the inhuman pods. If you only see one Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie, make it this one. - Drew Taylor
The Neon Demon
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Writers: Nicolas Winding Refn, Mary Laws, Polly Stenham
Cast: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Keanu Reeves
Nicolas Winding Refn had long been touting an “all-female horror movie” that he had planned to make and the result of all that talk was The Neon Demon. (Not to be confused with I Walk with the Dead, a horror movie that he prematurely announced would star Carey Mulligan, be set in Miami, and feature lots of sex.) In Neon Demon Elle Fanning plays a naïve Los Angeles transplant looking to make it in the modeling world. She meets a pair of venomous models (played by Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee) and a seemingly sympathetic make-up artist (Jena Malone) who are simultaneously enchanted and deeply envious of her effortless beauty. From that simple premise, The Neon Demon piles on the crazy, including (but not limited to) scenes involving necrophilia, cannibalism, cougars and Keanu Reeves cameoing as a scumbag motel owner (he’s so, so good). Critics were baffled but the movie is beautiful and intoxicating and would make for a great double-feature with the new Suspiria, two films bubbling over with raw, witchy female power. When you watch be sure to crank up the volume on your at-home sound system, too, Cliff Martinez’s chilly electronic score (even better than his work with Refn on Drive) and Sia’s end-titles banger need to be heard as loud as possible. – Drew Taylor
Overlord
Director: Julius Avery
Writers: Billy Ray, Mark L. Smith
Cast: Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Gianny Taufer, Pilou Asbæk, Bokeem Woodbine
Both muscular and lean, Overlord is a pulverizing experience, a beefed-up B-movie with a ton on its mind, a genre mish-mash that will leave you floored and entertained throughout. Jovan Adepo stars, in a phenomenal performance, as a WWII paratrooper whose mission goes horribly awry, and must fight his way to safety alongside his team and newfound allies. But this ain’t just 1917 — though it does boast a gripping, hair-raising, long-take-lensed plane crash that puts you in the heart of war. Adepo and his allies find horrific Nazi experiments, many of which turn soldiers into fierce, bloodthirsty, zombie-esque creatures. Julius Avery adeptly juggles these blended tones from screenwriters Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith, staging everything with a welcome sense of urgency while honoring the real emotional core of the traumas being experienced here. More people need to watch Overlord, and I am excited for you to join that list. -- Gregory Lawrence
Phantasm
Writer/Director: Don Coscarelli
Cast: Angus Scrimm, A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester
Don Coscarelli is consistently one of the most surprising, singular voices in horror and you can trace that all the way back to 1979's Phantasm, which is just completely wild, occasionally baffling, and spooky to the core. Set in a funeral home, Phantasm finds two teenage boys haunted by the Tall Man (Scrimm) and his deadly flying spheres. Phantasm has a lot of strange magic to it; the mischievous spirit, the sense of uncanny, the logic-defying terrors -- it's all classic Coscarelli, and it's a perfect fit for a good Halloween Mood. -- Haleigh Foutch
Suspiria
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Writer: David Kajganich
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz
Tales of Halloween
Directors: Darren Lynn Bousman, Axelle Carolyn, Adam Gierasch, Andrew Kasch, Neil Marshall, Lucky McKee, Mike Mendez, Dave Parker, Ryan Schifrin, John Skipp, Paul Solet
Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Huner Smit, Caroline Williams, Clare Kramer, Greg Grunberg, Barry Bostwick, Tiffany Shepis, Trent Haaga, Alex Essoe, Lin Shaye, Marc Senter, Pollyanna McIntosh, Kier Gilchrist, Dana Gould, James Duval, Graham Skipper, Adam Green, Sam Witwer, Kristina Klebe, Pat Healy
With the rise of digital filmmaking, we've found ourselves in a bit of a golden age for horror anthologies over the last two decades. They're cheaper and easier to make than ever before, and communities of horror filmmakers keep coming together to stretch their genre muscles between features. Tales of Halloween is one of those anthologies, driven by the horror community, rooted in the love of spooky season. Like all anthologies, it has hits and misses, and Tales of Halloween welcomes some unfair comparison to Trick 'r Treat, (which benefited from being the singular vision of one filmmaker, orchestrated into an interwoven film). Even if Tales of Halloween doesn't live up to the legacy of Sam and Trick 'r Treat's majesty (and what does, really?) it is a pretty delightful R-rated romp in the All Hallow's spirit, featuring ten short horror stories set on Halloween night. My personal favorite is Neil Marshall's man-eating pumpkin creature feature Bad Seed, but Tales of Halloween is as loaded with Halloween thrills as an overstuffed pillowcase full of candy. -- Haleigh Foutch
The Wailing
Writer/Director: Na Hong-jin
Cast: Kewk Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee
Whew boy, get ready for a ride. The Wailing, the third film from South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin, is unlike any horror film you’ve probably ever seen. It’s the kind of movie you’ll probably be puzzling over several years after you watch it. (We are.) The easiest way to describe The Wailing is that it’s about a mysterious Japanese who wanders into a remote South Korean village. After his arrival, mysterious things start to happen. Seemingly well-adjusted villagers murder their entire families. Villagers accuse the man of being a ghost or a devil-worshipper. Other villagers have strange sittings. There is, incredibly, a full-on exorcism. But Hong-jin never explicitly spells out what is happening in the town and wisely has the local police department be the audience surrogate. As they stumble to try to figure out what is really going on (and who is responsible) so are we. Incredibly long (156 minutes), The Wailing is not one for the faint of heart or those demanding easy answers and perfectly buttoned-up plotlines, but if you’re willing to fall under the spell of a uniquely transfixing, sometimes quite gorgeous, folksy horror epic, this one is for you. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you. – Drew Taylor