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Magdalena Liendo
Consider celebrating Halloween this year by watching overlooked horror movies featuring deadly cults, unhappy ghosts, creepy clowns, evil hair, killer aliens and vengeful witches. I hope you like nightmares. The choices that follow are available on Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. (Please note that CNET may receive a commission if you click through the links to streaming services listed.)
Norwegian horror film Cadaver takes place during the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, where a starving family -- played by Leonora (Gitte Witt), Jacob (Thomas Gullestad) and their daughter Alice (Tuva Olivia Remman) -- finds hope in a charismatic hotel owner Mathias (Thorbjorn Harr) who lures them to his unusual dinner theater who promises them shelter and food.
Attendees wear creepy gold masks to differentiate them from the actors who wander around the hotel acting out scenes that include both sex and violence. Soon it becomes apparent this isn't a typical dinner theater.
Bad Hair, a horror satire set in 1989, follows an ambitious young Black woman (Elle Lorraine) who gets a hair weave to succeed in the image-obsessed world of music television. However, her flourishing career comes at a great cost when she realizes her new hair may have a mind of its own. While this is a dark comedy, it also touches on serious themes like what it means to deny your own culture and roots to succeed in a superficial world.
Based on Clive Barker's horror anthology book series, Books of Blood follows three tales tangled together by one thread. A self-professed medium who channels the dead via bloody graffiti, a troubled traveler who is sensitive to noise and two criminals seeking payment from a bookseller all intersect into one complete tale of terror.
Spiral tells the story of gay couple Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) and Aaron (Ari Cohen), who along with their 16-year-old daughter Kayla (Jennifer Laporte) move to a suburban small town in the mid-'90s to settle down and establish roots. At first, the neighbors seem welcoming, but soon disturbing things begin to happen.
Malik suspects it's all part of a larger plot to drive him and his family out of town, but there may be even something more sinister at play that threatens the lives of those he loves most. This movie is a creepy slow burn with an unexpected ending.
If you enjoyed Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, you're in for a treat with The Haunting of Bly Manor. This Gothic romance-influenced ghost story is based on Henry James' stories The Turn of The Screw, The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes and The Jolly Corner.
The Haunting of Bly Manor follows the lives (and possibly deaths) of the inhabitants of the stately mansion. Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) is a young American au pair hired to watch over the unusual young children -- brother Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and sister Flora (Amelie Smith) -- who live at Bly.
There's also housekeeper Hannah Grose (T'Nia Miller), house chef Owen (Rahul Kohli) and gardener Jamie (Amelia Eve). A mystery surrounds the deaths of the children's parents, as well as the previous governess Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), who drowned in the nearby lake. And what about the mysterious Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who keeps lurking in the shadows of Bly?
During a night of wild Saint Patrick's Day parties and drunken hijinks, three friends band together to save a college town from a vicious horde of body-switching aliens. This is more of a dark comedy than a seriously scary movie. But it's fun to see a horror film take place during a holiday usually reserved for celebrating green beer and leprechauns.
As part of the new Blumhouse horror movie series, Nocturne goes inside the halls of an elite music arts academy, where timid musician Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) wishes she could be more like her more accomplished and outgoing twin sister Vivian (Madison Iseman). When Juliet discovers a mysterious notebook belonging to a deceased classmate, she becomes obsessed with the scribblings and sheet music inside. Juliet starts to become more emboldened as she competes with her sister in both music and love -- with dangerous results.
In The Wretched, rebellious teen Ben (John-Paul Howard), who is struggling with his parent's imminent divorce, faces off with a 1,000-year-old witch living beneath the skin of the woman next door. No one will believe him when he claims the witch is out for blood and "feeds on the forgotten." So he takes matters into his own hands.
If you grew up watching horror films during the '90s then you know exactly who Joe Bob Briggs is. The comedic host of The Last Drive-In -- now on Shudder -- knows every tiny bit of behind-the-scenes trivia there is about movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Halloween.
With the sassy mail girl Darcy, Texan show host Joe Bob hosts regular horror movie marathons while revealing interesting tidbits about the actors, directors and special effects experts. He often goes on entertaining rants about the movie business and the horror film industry in general.
Italian horror film The Binding centers around Emma (Mia Maestro), who must fight the mysterious and malevolent curse intent on claiming her daughter Sofia (Giulia Patrignani) while visiting her fiance Francesco's (Riccardo Scamarcio) devout mother Teresa (Mariella Lo Sardo) in southern Italy. The movie pits the characters' modern lives and traditional values -- modern medicine versus herbal medicine, Emma's instinct versus Teresa's old world knowledge, etc. Fair warning: This the kind of horror movie you probably shouldn't watch while sitting next to your in-laws.
Encounters with mermaids, fallen angels, zombies and other strange beasts drive broken people to desperate acts in the horror anthology Monsterland, based on the collection of stories from Nathan Ballingrud's North American Lake Monsters.
The eight-part series explores the blurred lines between monsters and humans. In fact, it's not really the monsters themselves that are the true threat in many of these creepy stories, but the people they encounter.
The Taking of Deborah Logan is a found-footage supernatural horror film that follows a team of would-be filmmakers who want to make a documentary about Deborah (Jill Larson), an elderly woman who has Alzheimer's disease. As the film crew records her daily life, Deborah starts to exhibit increasingly bizarre and disturbing behavior such as speaking in French about sacrifices and snakes.
While her doctor assures the filmmakers that she is just suffering from an aggressive form of Alzheimer's, they think something supernatural is to blame. The movie starts out slow, but once the creepiness ramps up, the story delivers on plenty of scares and horrific visuals.
The premise is simple -- friends gather online to chat via video about the anniversary of their mutual friend Laura's death. Laura committed suicide after an anonymous user uploaded a video of her passing out and defecating at a party, and the video goes viral. The friends are suddenly caught off guard when Laura's Facebook profile starts invading their video chat and direct messages them disturbing comments and accusations of who is responsible for her suicide.
Soon the friends are being attacked one by one in their own rooms by an unseen assailant as they all look on horrified. Is it Laura's ghost back for revenge or someone else wanting the friends to come clean about their lies?
Famous horror author Emma Larsimon (Victoire Du Bois) discovers that the evil spirit Marianne, who has plagued her dreams since childhood, is real and threatening the lives of her friends and family. She must venture back to her hometown to put an end to the evil before it kills everyone she loves.
Little Monsters tells the hilarious and horrific story of a washed-up musician (Alexander England) who teams up with a kindergarten teacher (Lupita Nyong'o) and a children's TV show personality (Josh Gad) to protect young children from a sudden outbreak of zombies.
The horror-thriller The Perfection shows what happens when a once-promising music prodigy reconnects with her former mentors, only to find them taken with a talented new pupil. Jealousy and revenge dominate this creepy tale about what happens when you let the quest for perfection cloud your reality.
Wounds stars Armie Hammer as a bartender who finds a phone left in his bar by some college kids. He discovers some rather disturbing (and bloody) images on the phone and soon ends up in a nightmare he can't escape. The movie also stars Dakota Johnson as his girlfriend who falls victim to the mysterious evil lurking in the phone's mysterious photos.
Eli (Charlie Shotwell) is a young boy suffering from a rare disease that causes severe allergic reactions to the outdoors. But when he arrives with his parents at a mysterious clinic to undergo an experimental procedure to rid him of his painful condition, he suspects the place is haunted by the children who died at the clinic. Lili Taylor plays the clinic's mysterious Dr. Isabella Horn and Stranger Things' Sadie Sink plays Eli's only friend, Haley.
The Influence (La Influencia) is a Spanish horror film about what happens when a vindictive witch gets revenge from her deathbed. Sisters Alicia (Manuela Velles) and Sara (Maggie Civantos) return home to tend to their ailing mother who abused them as children. Now Alicia's daughter Nora (Claudia Placer) could be in grave danger.
Family vacations aren't always fun getaways. They Come Knocking tells the story of a grieving family who has ventured to a remote desert campsite to spread a mother's ashes, only to cross paths with a group of creepy children who want a lot more than a playdate. The movie stars Clayne Crawford, Josephine Langford and Lia McHugh.
After Native American teen Sasha (Sivan Alyra Rose) receives a heart transplant from recently deceased wealthy girl Becky (Lilliya Scarlett Reid), she begins to have unexplained visions about the her heart's previous owner, as well as a creepy cult. As the horror series Chambers unfolds, we see the dead girl's parents played by Uma Thurman and Tony Goldwyn take an unhealthy interest in and invite her to live with them. Soon more details of Becky's troubled family life come to the surface.
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