So, you say you don’t like Horror Movies(tm), do ya? The gruesome sight of Jason Voorhees hacking off camper’s heads gets a firm “No, thank you!” from you, does it? Michael Myers knocks at your door on October 31st. You push him away like a Bible-selling shopper.
Well, you don’t have to be left out of the greatest time of year just because you’re not a gorehound. Horror is one of the most stretchily adaptable of genres — there are horror comedies, horror musicals, and even horror for the whole fam. So, if you’re hunting for a festive Halloweenie feeling or two to help you celebrate the season, you don’t have to submit yourself to Eli Roth’s most twisted visions. There are many choices if you like scary or spooky. We narrowed it down to the top. Get your favorite treats and prepare for gentle tricks!
Here are our picks for the best streaming horror movies for folks who don’t like horror movies — or so they think!
1. Hocus Pocus
The infamously wicked witches of Salem, Massachusetts, known as the Sanderson sisters — Winifred (Bette Midler), Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker), and Mary (Kathy Najimy) — are on the hunt for fresh souls to regain their youth, and witchy hijinks ensue. Although it might sound silly, it is a great movie for anyone who has grown up with it. But the cult of ’90s kids around this movie is very real and very intense, and there’s nothing much scarier here than Bette Midler’s Bugs Bunny chompers. Get your vacuums on and have fun, maggoty malfeasances.
And if you’re in the mood for a double feature, well, Hocus Pocus 2Only debuted on Disney+, just a newt’s-eye short of 30 years after the first film us over. All the better to keep your Billy Butcherson’s (Doug Jones) straight from your Binx the Cats, wouldn’t you say?
What to Watch: Hocus PocusDisney+ now streaming.
2. Monster House
This list could easily be composed of animated films. They are often more safe than their live-action counterparts and manage to keep in the middle of Scary and Too-Scary. But I’ve restricted myself to only two animated movies for this list, and director Gil Kenan’s trick-and-treating rollercoaster ride from 2006 clearly had to be one of them.
Written by the people who brought you. Sarah Silverman ProgramAnd Community, Monster House is clever like those shows and funny like those shows, but it’s also a nonstop, gee-whiz, sugared-up imagination explosion. Beginning with a brilliantly simple conceit, “What if the haunted house was itself the monster?” their script then works to find a dozen ways to spin that off into brilliant little directions — “And what if the house had a uvula?!?” being my personal favorite. And then they hired Maggie Gyllenhaal, Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, and best-of-the-best Steve Buscemi to do the voiceover work? Classic.
What to Watch: Monster HouseHulu now streams the video.
3. Beetlejuice
Tim Burton movies are a great way to get spooked if you’re just mildly curious. BatmanFilms are more Halloween-themed than summer blockbusters.
From Mars’s stop-motion sandworms to Geena’s moment when she puts her eyes down into her throat, Beetlejuice is filled with oogie boogies of the giggly sort as it plots out what nonsense happens after we die — which in Burton’s hands is mostly the same nonsense we went through during life, only twenty degrees wackier. Show up for Michael Keaton’s single greatest film performance, and leave with Harry Belafonte stuck in your head. It’s heaven.
What to Watch: BeetlejuiceMax is streaming now.
4. ParaNorman
Laika’s stop motion animators are unfailing, and almost any of their films could have made the list. Some might’ve gone with the Neil Gaiman adaptation of Coraline (and that’s also streaming one Roku). However, directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell’s ParaNormanThis is a wonderfully realized little wonderment about an adorable little boy who sees dead people and idly chats to them.
By spinning a spooky story about a town’s terrible past as the site of witch trials and its enduring legacy, ParaNorman Balances heart and horror — and may gently jerk a few tears from your eyes along the way. No doubt the voice-casting of the incredibly talented Kodi Smit-McPhee as Norman a dozen years before he’d wrassle with Bronco Henry’s protegeeThere was something that had to do with it, but ParaNormanThis book is chock-full with prescience on every front. It even contains a message about the dangers associated with mob justice.
What to Watch: ParaNormanStreaming on The Roku Channel.
5. Haunted Hill: House
Like with Tim Burton’s filmography, you really can’t go wrong with any Vincent Price feature for the nimblest of spooks. It’s a good idea to watch all Vincent Price movies. But William Castle’s 1959 skeleton-in-the-box classic is probably the simplest and most straightforwardly fun of the bunch, using the time-honored tradition of getting a bunch of random people trapped inside of a haunted house together and then just slowly having things pop out at them, one howling sheet after another.
Here, Price plays the devilish millionaire Frederick Loren, who invites a group of strangers to his wife’s birthday party inside said haunted house, promising them each $10,000 if they can last the night. The bodies start piling up, but said corpses are regular skeletons that can’t compete with the metaphorical ones jumping out of every character’s closet, including Frederick and his wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), who plainly hate each other’s guts to hell and back. It’s a blast! (The 1999 remake is great, but it’s genuinely frightening — so maybe It can be saved for a sunny summer afternoon.)
What to Watch: Haunted Hill: HousePrime Video is streaming this video now.
6. The Old Dark House
Like House on Haunted HillThis is another movie about a group from different backgrounds trapped in a house full of cobwebs during a storm. James Whale directed this film. IsThe haunted home template. Everything after that is just ripping it off shamelessly.
HouseSeveral cast members have something in common with Bride of FrankensteinWhale’s classic horror-comedy comedy, . Boris Karloff is the first, as he plays another type of “monster”. House — in this case, a rampaging pervert named Morgan who keeps trying to drag the women off, which includes actress Gloria Stuart 65 full years before she oopsied that “Heart of the Ocean” off the side of that little schooner known as Titanic. Best of all, however, is queer horror iconErnest Thesiger appears in The Old Dark House to make lisping mincemeat out of lines such as “Have a potato,” and it is he who is my truest everything.
What to Watch: The Old Dark HouseTubi is streaming now.
7. Little Shop of Horrors
While Roger Corman’s original 1960 version of Little Shop is great, Frank Oz’s 1986 adaptation of the off-Broadway musical by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman based on Corman’s flick is far more fun, creating not only an epic movie monster but also an entire generation looking for ”Somewhere That’s Green.”
It will be hard to find movie-casting that is as perfect as Rick Moranis playing Seymour Krelborn as the orphaned owner of a plant shop and Audrey as his lover. When that “mean green mother from outer space,” the blood-hungry plant Audrey II, beams down and wreaks havoc on the unsuspecting denizens of Skid Row, there’s plenty of scary to be had — ax murders and a trip to a sadistic dentist played by Steve Martin chief among them.
But mostly it’s just one perfect song followed by another, and two of the great romantic leads of our age batting eyelashes at one another over trays of frozen TV dinners. Then, on top of all that, there’s a massive, man-eating puppet who’s got otherworldly charisma courtesy of the late, great Levi Stubbs, lead singer of the Four Tops. What could you want more?
What to Watch: Little Shop of HorrorsMax is streaming online.
8. Young Frankenstein
It’s alive! ALIVE!!! We didn’t want this list to be nothing but horror-comedies, but how can you not include the greatest one of those of all? (If we’re not counting Evil Dead IIHowever, you will want to avoid those who are not horror-lovers. Evil Dead II.) Not that there’s anything much scary at all in Mel Brooks’s 1974 spoof of the classic Universal monster movie Frankenstein, but it’s About horror enough that it’s earned its spot on this list. It’s also arguably Mel Brooks’ funniest movie; we dare you to watch Peter Boyle’s Monster “sing” his part of “Puttin’ on the Ritz”With a straight face.
With a cast that includes certifiable comedy legends like Boyle, Gene Wilder, Cloris Leachman, Marty Feldman, Gene Hackman, Teri Garr, and the one and the only Madeline Kahn, there’s not a pair of Toilet-poo undiesIn the whole bunch. [Horses whinny.]
What to Watch: Young FrankensteinMax is streaming now.
9. Paperhouse
Bernard Rose directed the frightening Clive Barker adaptation four years prior to his death. Candyman,A small and surreal British masterpiece was created by him called Paperhouse. The movie stars Charlotte Burke, a young actress in her first acting role. It tells the story about Anna, a little girl who falls asleep outside and starts to hallucinate. She forms a friendship with the boy who lives within her drawings. When Anna ventures into the pictures, everything she draws comes to life. This turns out to be as thrilling — free popcorn machines and bicycles! — as it can be terrifying, like how her drawing of Marc (Elliott Spiers) as just a sad face in a window leaves him with legs that don’t work. Co-starring the great Glenne Headly as Anna’s mom and Ben Cross (aka Barnabas Collins in the ‘90s Dark Shadows reboot) to be her absentee dad. PaperhouseThere were a few scares as a child that really wreaked havoc on my brain. But mostly it’s a gothic mood piece that’s the perfect stuff for a cold and windy October afternoon.
What to Watch: PaperhouseFreevee now streams the video.
10. Return to Oz
The scariest movie on this whole list isn’t really supposed to be a horror movie at all! But you tell that to the entire generation of now-adults whose entire bodies collapse onto the floor at the mere whisper of… The Wheelers
That’s not exactly unique for this property. Before Return to OzThe Flying Monkeys tore apart the Scarecrow and forced generations to go to bed with the lights on. But in 1985, when director Walter Murch’s sequel to the 1939 masterpiece The Wizard of OzReleased Return to OzIt was largely laughed at by audiences and critics alike, and dropped like a stone in the box office. Yet something funny happened along the Yellow Brick Road’s dark new branch, and the film’s cast of freaky figures drawn from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books — Gump, Jack Pumpkinhead, Tik-Tok, and the shudder-inducing Princess Mombi with her closet of detachable heads — wormed their way into our collective consciousness. Justice for Fairuza Balk’s Dorothy Gale!
What to Watch: Return to OzDisney+ now streaming.
