David Bowie is a vampire in this terrifying and sexy gem

Is there anything better than Halloween season?

Sure, here at Polygon we cover horror year-round. We have our rolling lists of the best horror movies you can watch at home and the best horror movies on Netflix that are updated every month of the year.

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

For the past two years, Polygon has put together a Halloween Countdown calendar, offering a Halloween-friendly movie or TV show available to watch at home every day of October. We’re delighted to bring that back once again, with 31 spooky selections to keep the mood going all month long.

Every day for the entire month of October, we’ll add a new recommendation to this Countdown and tell you where you can watch it. So curl up on the couch, dim the lights, and grab some popcorn for a terrifying and entertaining host of Halloween surprises.

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Oct. 1: Audition (1999)

In Audition, Takashi Miike’s 1999 psychological horror-thriller, love is a consensual fiction. Years after losing his wife to a terminal illness, widower Shigeharu Aoyama is urged by his son to get back out in the world and find someone. Aoyama agrees to a proposal by his friend, a film producer, to take part in an audition for a nonexistent film in order to find a potential bride from the candidates. His search ultimately 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 caught deeper and deeper in a web of intrigue that threatens to tear him apart emotionally, psychologically, and yes — even physically. There is something dark inside Asami, yes, but there is a latent darkness inside of Aoyama too, arguably even darker. The only difference is that Asami has embraced that darkness and made it her own.

Miike’s film holds its cards relatively close to its chest for most of its run time, unspooling its tightly wound mystery like garrote wire before peeling back its skin of meet-cute artifice to reveal a pulsing mass of horrors roiling beneath. The film descends into a macabre fugue state of assumptions, misdirections, and cinematic sleights of hand, with dreams that feel almost real set against a reality too terrifying to be anything but. In the end, though, these are just words. Only pain can be trusted. —Toussaint Egan

Audition is available to stream on Arrow Video and Hi-Yah!, for free with ads on Tubi, and for free on Kanopy with a library card. It is also available for digital rental or purchase on Vudu and Apple.

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Oct. 2: The Vanishing (1988)

It’s not a horror movie, per se, and yet Stanley Kubrick said that The Vanishing was the most frightening film he had ever seen. This Dutch thriller from 1988 — often referred to by its original title Spoorloos, so as not to confuse it with an inferior 1993 American remake by the same director, George Sluizer — plays it cool, like a simple missing person case. Rex and Saskia are a young couple road-tripping through France. They are taking a break at a service station when Saskia abruptly, and completely, disappears.

Initially, the horror of the situation is in the banality of it: the feeling that it could happen at any time, to anyone. Sluizer underlines this with the matter-of-fact realism of his location shooting. Then, barely more than 20 minutes in, he wrong-foots the audience with an abrupt shift: We are following Raymond, a contented French family man who appears to be rehearsing a kidnapping. The mystery of what happened to Saskia seems already to be solved. What next?

The way the film — based very closely on Tim Krabbé’s novella The Golden Egg — skips so quickly past the expected structure of a mystery thriller ought to sap tension, but in fact it builds an almost philosophical unease. As Raymond, played with a chilling brightness by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, walks us through the “how” of his crime, the “why” becomes a gnawing, much more troubling question. We skip forward three years and find Rex obsessed with finding out what happened to his lost love. When an answer is offered, we share his hunger for it completely, and follow him to what might be the most plainly horrifying ending of any film, ever. This is a minimal masterpiece of existential dread. —Oli Welsh

The Vanishing is available to stream on The Criterion Channel, or for digital rental or purchase on Apple and Amazon.

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Oct. 3: Rampant (2018)

One of the great joys of horror is the array of subgenres it offers, and the subgenres within subgenres that spool out of that. Take the monster movie, for instance. It’s a subgenre of horror on its own, and within it you have the vampire movie, the werewolf movie, and the zombie movie, just to name a few. And then you can dive even deeper and find something like Rampant, which combines the zombie subgenre with an unlikely pairing: the historical court drama period piece.

The movie takes place during the 17th century, under the Joseon dynasty in Korea. The movie is filled with political intrigue: The protagonist is an arrogant young prince called back home after his brother’s death only to find political machinations already in progress when he arrives. The court is struggling to figure out how to deal with the nearby Qing dynasty in China (where our protagonist grew up), with different factions forming.

And then there are the zombies. Yes, a zombie outbreak arrives, recalibrating the importance of this royal conflict for some (but not all) of its players. Our protagonist discovers this on his way home, and attempts to convince his father (and his father’s advisors) to do something about it. That leads to some breathtakingly brutal swordplay action in a pitch-perfect genre mashup for the ages. –Pete Volk

Rampant is available to stream on Hi-Yah!, FuboTV, and Viki, or for free with ads on Tubi, Crackle, Plex, Pluto TV, and Freevee. It is also available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple, Vudu, and Google Play.

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Oct. 4: Seconds (1966)

Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and aliens have nothing on the unstoppable process of aging. All of us will get older, life will get exponentially difficult, and the only person waiting for us at the finish line is Death. John Frankenheimer built Seconds around such midlife terrors, granting New York banking exec Arthur Hamilton the opportunity to fake his own death, reconstruct his body in the form of Rock Hudson, and move to sunny Southern California as a hot, younger dude named Tony Wilson. Like a small animal tramped under the sunlamp of the Santa Barbara sun, we see Hudson spiral through paranoia and regret, replete with naked grape mashing and alcohol-fueled breakdowns. Needless to say, the grass is rarely greener, and the only thing scarier than getting old is staying young.

The film met boos at Cannes and puzzled critics who were accustomed to leading man Rock Hudson being just that — a traditional leading man. But the film has aged well, pun fully intended. James Wong Howe’s cinematography, nominated for an Academy Award, holds the viewer inches from Hudson’s face, bends reality through a fish-eye lens, and somehow makes beautiful young bodies into nauseating bundles of limbs and flesh. And Hudson, now detached from his Personal Brand for most viewers under the age of 70, undercuts his Hollywood good looks with a humble performance of a man in full collapse. —Chris Plante

Seconds is available to stream for free with ads on Pluto TV, or for free with a library card on Kanopy. It is also available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

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Oct. 5: Bride of Chucky (1998)

The fourth movie of the wickedly funny Child’s Play franchise takes the killer doll series in an exciting new direction. Bride of Chucky ditches Andy, the young boy followed by the murderous Chucky doll in the first three movies, and instead follows two clueless teenagers (Katherine Heigl and Nick Stabile) who unwittingly take two murderous dolls on a road trip and start to suspect each other when the bodies start dropping.

The sinister inversion of the teen road trip movie would be fun enough, but it’s the addition of Jennifer Tilly that really makes Bride of Chucky sing. For the uninitiated in the Child’s Play universe: The Chucky doll is possessed by the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif). Tilly plays Ray’s former lover and accomplice, Tiffany, who brings the doll back to life and becomes a murderous doll herself.

The result is two couples road-tripping together but unable to communicate with each other. Heigl and Stabile’s Jade and Jesse are your typical youths in love — still getting to know each other and not fully trusting yet — while Chucky and Tiffany’s bickering and subtle manipulations make this a joyous and twisted fun time. Add in some breathtaking imagery from director Ronny Yu (Freddy vs. Jason) and cinematographer Peter Pau (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Killer) and you have a franchise sequel well worth your time. —PV

Bride of Chucky is available to stream on Peacock. It is also available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

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Oct. 6: Dead Ringers (1988)

Visually, 1988’s Dead Ringers must be one of David Cronenberg’s tamest movies — with the exception of one extremely disturbing dream sequence around halfway through, and one grisly but out-of-focus long shot at the end. Otherwise, this is a film composed of talking heads in pristine, orderly spaces, and varnished in 1980s designer opulence: tearooms, operating theaters, penthouses. His usual body horror is more implied in the gleaming, twisted contours of medical implements than actually shown. Yet it might be his most devastating film.

Jeremy Irons plays identical twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, who run a successful fertility clinic in Toronto. Beverly, quiet and sensitive, tends to the practice and the patients while the urbane Elliot climbs the medical establishment ladder. They live together and sometimes pretend to be each other, so shy Beverly can enjoy the fruits of Elliot’s womanizing. But their symbiotic relationship starts to fray and peel when Beverly falls in love with Claire (Geneviève Bujold), an actress and patient who can’t bear children because she has three chambers in her womb.

Beneath Dead Ringers’ glassy surface, feeling runs deep and cold. The intense psychodrama that develops between the three characters — but mostly between the twin brothers — builds to a conclusion that’s both appalling and moving. At the film’s heart are the incredible performances given by Irons and captured by Cronenberg with careful, unshowy craftsmanship. Without leaning too heavily on identifying makeup or tics, Irons not only innately distinguishes Bev and Ellie, but builds an intimacy between them that’s as tender as it is eerie. It’s like watching one person tear themselves in two and then clumsily try to seal the wound. Dead Ringers is the stuff of tragedy as well as horror. —OW

Dead Ringers is available to stream on HBO Max. It is also available for free with a library card on Hoopla and Kanopy, or for digital rental or purchase via Amazon and Apple TV.

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Oct. 7: The Keep (1983)

Michael Mann has a reputation as a slick, streetbound auteur. Films like Thief, Heat, and Collateral embrace the metropolis as a labyrinth, and crime as a psychological test. The Keep, his 1983 jump to more blockbuster fare, is really nothing like those films — except for an excessive amount of mood.

Set in 1941 Romania, around the time the Nazis invade the Soviet Union, the film finds a German battalion stumbling upon a mysterious structure dubbed “The Keep.” Two savvy soldiers hope to loot what they think is treasure inside. Instead, their heist unleashes Radu Molasar, a golem-like destroyer of worlds. Whoops!

When members of the infantry start winding up dead, a vile SS commander (played with ruthlessness by Gabriel Byrne) shows up to figure out what the heck is going on. Naturally, he starts killing people, too. Mann slides between more stark drama that one might expect from a film plunging headfirst into World War II geopolitics, while throwing supernatural curveballs that ensure every corner of the story feels haunted. Eventually, Scott Glenn shows up as a protector of the local village, which is being tortured by both Nazis and Radu Molasar, and the race is on to put an end to it.

Backed by Tangerine Dream’s ecclesiastic synth score and staged in some of the most beautiful, light-streaked stone sets ever made (can a Romanian temple be a liminal space?), The Keep is, no doubt, B-movie schlock. But in the hands of a master like Mann, it’s given the artful haze of a nightmare. —Matt Patches

The Keep is available to stream on The Criterion Channel, and for free with ads on Pluto TV. It is also available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon and Apple TV.

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Oct. 8: Samurai Jack — Episode XXXV: Jack and the Haunted House

Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack is a series that contains multitudes. The premise of the show, concerning a samurai prince who is transported into a dystopian future by his nemesis, a tyrannical shape-shifting demon, and forced to trek across a strange and alien new world in search for a way back home, is one that afforded a wealth of storytelling opportunities that ranged from epic and comical to somber and horrifying. Episode 35, “Jack and the Haunted House,” fits squarely in the latter category.

While traveling alone one night, Jack happens upon a little girl crying in a forest. Chasing after her in an effort to console her, he finds himself drawn to a mysterious house whose malevolent energy plagues him with starting visions of an evil force preying upon helpless family. Jack’s drive to rescue the girl and her family from mortal peril however threatens to ensnare himself in the clutches of a spirit who thrives on transforming the house into an impossible labyrinth from which there is no escape.

“Jack and the Haunted House” is an especially impressive episode, not just for its explicit horror-centric premise, but for its depiction of the demon itself — a writhing mass of dark tendrils that coalesce into a ukiyo-e-style dragon with a leering jaw and piercing eyes. It’s a fantastic episode that strikes a keen balance between unnerving terror and the more action-focused emphasis of the series as a whole. —TE

Samurai Jack is available to stream on HBO Max. It is also available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon and Apple TV.

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Oct. 9: Steven Universe — Chille Tid

Steven Universe is no stranger to horror, and particularly body horror. A Crystal Gem’s body is the manifestation of their Gem — which itself is immutable — allowing them to shape-shift at will. It’s part of what makes the show beautiful; the Gem characters are all canonically nonbinary and can choose the body and gender expression that suits them. It also gives the show fertile ground to do terrifying things, like depict the consequence of Gem “experiments” that produce disgusting, roiling masses of animated disembodied limbs.

In this vein, “Chille Tid” gives kid-accessible visual language to serious concepts like power, consent, codependency, and martyrdom. The episode focuses on fusion, which up until this point has been depicted as incredibly beautiful. Fusion allows two Gems to morph together to create a larger Gem with the personality of their relationship. And the show treats this act with joy and reverence, building so much storytelling around the power of loving others. It also teaches the lesson that coercing another Gem into fusion is a deep breach of trust. (And by the way, in Gem World culture, fusing with a different type of Gem is a huge taboo — another bit of incisive real-world commentary from Steven Universe.)

In “Chille Tid,” Lapis, a depressed and incredibly powerful Crystal Gem, fuses with Jasper, a mercenary sent to destroy the Crystal Gems on Earth. The fusion is repugnant. Lapis martyrs herself — shackling herself to an abuser and sinking them into the ocean. You can see the large character they create fighting against water-created handcuffs that spring from the sea. This is only made worse when you know Lapis’ backstory: She only recently escaped imprisonment from an enchanted mirror. It’s a deeply frightening episode, especially for children’s television, but also as an adult — if you have ever escaped an abuser, you know the feeling too well. The imagery is unforgettable because it is real.

For those of you who worry, Lapis does break free. And she does eventually live in a renovated barn with Peridot, resulting in one of the best fanons of the show. —Nicole Clark

Steven Universe is available to stream on HBO Max and Hulu. It is also available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon.

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Oct. 10: The Last Winter

Larry Fessenden’s underseen 2006 horror masterpiece The Last Winter was way ahead of the climate-horror wave that the rest of the world is only just catching up on. The movie follows a hodgepodge mix of government officials, scientists, and researchers sent to the freezing wilderness of Alaska in hopes of finding oil. The team is most concerned with digging into a wildlife reserve, and while the government’s liaison, Ed Pollack (played with menacing cruelty and almost-cartoon levels of evil by Ron Perlman) is gung-ho about drilling, a few of the scientists aren’t so sure. After several warnings not to, the group digs into the ice and disrupts long-dormant spirits, causing, of course, all hell to break loose.

Fessenden’s movie is notable not just for how great and watchable (and scary) it is on its own terms, but also for how effectively it synthesizes so many of the greatest horror subgenres into one story. It’s one of the best climate change horror movies, one of the best native-spirits-and-disturbed-land movies, a fantastic addition to the classic horror canon of the arctic expedition gone horribly wrong, and even fits nicely next to other government-creep-in-way-over-their-head movies like Aliens.

But for all its time spent tapping into horror history, The Last Winter’s best feature is how unsettlingly it presents its own theme. As far as the movie is concerned, humanity is essentially a parasite to the natural world, and everything that goes wrong is the world simply fighting back to defend itself. Plenty of movies provide visions of the end of civilization, but few other than The Last Winter make it seem like the only reasonable option. —Austen Goslin

The Last Winter is available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon and Apple TV.

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Oct. 11: Near Dark

“Can I have a bite?”

A sexy vampire western positively oozing with “cool,” there is no other movie like Near Dark. Kathryn Bigelow’s remarkable solo directorial debut started an excellent streak, leading right into Blue Steel, Point Break, and Strange Days.

Bigelow wanted to make a Western, but studios weren’t exactly champing at the bit to fund those in the 1980s. So she and co-writer Eric Red set out to combine the Western with another genre nearly as old as cinema itself: the vampire movie. The recent successes of Fright Night and The Lost Boys didn’t hurt, either.

Near Dark has fantastic action set-pieces — a barroom brawl and a shootout in a bungalow stand out in particular for their tension building and use of light, respectively. It’s also darkly funny, and filled with biting dramatic irony (a vampire giving a hickey to an unsuspecting neck, some acute early wordplay where your knowledge that this is a vampire movie changes everything).

The costumes are pitch-perfect, and the makeup is out of control (the effects to create the illusion of burning skin are simply astounding). But I can only go so far without talking about Bill Paxton. Paxton, who plays the out-of-control vampire Severen, is a force of nature in Near Dark. He is an electric presence at every turn, equal parts menacing and sexy, and is the most memorable part of an extremely memorable movie. —PV

Near Dark is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.

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Oct. 12: Tetsuo: The Iron Man

There are a lot of creative ways to describe Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 body-horror masterpiece: “cult classic,” “visionary,” “incredibly fucked up,” to name a few. The description I’ve more or less settled on is “transhumanist body-horror supervillain love story.”

The first 15 minutes of Tetsuo hit like an adrenaline boost shot straight to the occipital lobe, chronicling the story of a salaryman and his girlfriend who accidentally run over a mysterious eccentric with a body-morphing “metal fetish.” Later, upon realizing they have both been infected with same affliction, the couple probes at the newfound physical, psychological, and sexual dimensions of their bizarre condition, all while their victim turned adversary plots his revenge from the shadows.

Tsukamoto’s magnum opus is horrifying, horny, and endlessly original, constantly reinventing itself with frenzied stop-motion montage and cackling quick-cut audio cues that keep the viewer at the edge of their seat. Chu Ishikawa’s score feels like the spiritual antecedent to electronic music acts like Nine Inch Nails and Portishead, with its droning industrial clamor and burst-fire drum loops searing into your eardrums like acid eating away at sheet metal.

While a natural precursor to contemporary films like Julia Ducournau’s Titane and David Cronenberg’s Crash, you’ll soon enough discover — even after more than three decades and two sequels — there still hasn’t been anything else quite like it since. If you don’t have the stomach for sadomasochistic body-modding or gore, it’s totally fine to give this one a pass. If you do happen to give it a chance, though, you’ll be treated to a visceral and unforgettable experience. –TE

Tetsuo: The Iron Man is available to stream on The Criterion Channel and Shudder, or for free with a library card on Kanopy. It is also available for digital rental or purchase via Apple TV.

Oct. 13: Rigor Mortis

Describing this Hong Kong vampire movie is an extremely complicated process. On its surface, Rigor Mortis is a vampire/demon/ghost action movie. But when you dig a little deeper, it’s also a mini time capsule and a tribute to the supernatural horror cinema of Hong Kong’s past.

The movie follows a man who arrives at a massive concrete apartment building that seems to be haunted by every spirit you could imagine. He’s a past-his-prime actor and intends to take his own life. When he tries, twin spirits attempt to possess his body, but then they’re stopped by a retired vampire hunter who now runs the apartment’s restaurant. What else would a vampire hunter do when there are no vampires left?

This entire sequence only covers the movie’s first 10 or so minutes, and is a perfect setup for the specific brand of knowing, in-on-the-joke supernatural action ever present in Rigor Mortis — which of course does eventually involve a vampire. It’s the kind of early-2010s movie where the entire environment is gray, just so the production has an excuse to paint it red when the fights come. All of this may sound ridiculous (and it definitely is), but somehow Rigor Mortis manages to strike the perfect balance of a so-serious-it’s-silly tone and modulates between the two moods with ease. It pivots from scenes of people trapping spirits in wardrobes to someone desperately trying to perform a spiritual ritual to resurrect their loved one, giving enough gravity to each that they can all come off as sincere.

As entertaining as Rigor Mortis is, it also has a secret. While not necessary to getting the movie, it does add another level of enjoyment. See, the protagonist is named Chin Siu-ho, which is also the name of the actor who’s playing him, who also happened to be the star of the legendary Hong Kong horror series Mr. Vampire. In other words, it’s a movie about a real-world retired actor/martial artist who once played a vampire hunter, now meets a fictional retired vampire hunter, and then joins in on the vampire hunting one more time. –AG

Rigor Mortis is available to stream on Peacock and Hi-Yah!, for free with ads on Plex and Tubi, or for digital rental or purchase via Amazon and Apple TV.

Oct. 14: Witchfinder General

Vincent Price is an icon of horror whose camp yet commanding presence defined so many of the lurid, theatrical British and American horror movies of the 1960s and ’70s. His 1968 star vehicle Witchfinder General looks like it’s going to be one of those films, but beware. This is a bitter, realist, historical kind of horror, and both the film and Price’s performance are deadly serious.

Witchfinder General was adapted from a novel, and loosely based on the exploits of a historical character: Matthew Hopkins, an English witch hunter who claimed, falsely, to have been awarded the title of “witchfinder general” by Parliament. During the English Civil War of the 1640s, a time of paranoia and lawlessness, Hopkins rampaged freely around the East Anglian countryside, sending over 100 people to the gallows on suspicion of witchcraft.

Although it plays fast and loose with the historical record, this grim, low-budget thriller doesn’t truck with the supernatural. It’s all about the evil of man. Price, in one of his iciest performances, plays Hopkins as a manipulative fascist and sadist; in a way, a kind of serial killer. When he targets a kindly priest and the priest’s niece Sara (Hilary Dwyer), he’s pitted against the niece’s betrothed, a valiant Roundhead soldier (Ian Ogilvy).

But there’s nothing heroic about the struggle in this film, which, playing out in an eerily becalmed country landscape, feels desperate and suffocated. Dwyer unleashes some of cinema’s most unnerving and memorable screams over the bleak final scenes. Director Michael Reeves was just 24 when he made Witchfinder General, and died of an overdose shortly after its release: a tragic early end to a promising career that has only added to the mystique of this unsparing movie. –OW

Witchfinder General is available to stream for free with a library card on Hoopla. Enterprising readers can also find the whole thing on YouTube.

Oct. 15: The Hunger

How many other vampire movies open with a subterranean goth nightclub scene set to Bauhaus’ “Bela Legosi’s Dead” featuring David Bowie, the Thin White Duke himself?

The late Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire horror film stars Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as Miriam and John Blaylock, two vampires living in New York who spend their time in relative leisure, playing the cello in their darkened mansion by day and stalking their prey at night.

As John inexplicably finds his vitality and youth sapped away despite his immortal body, he seeks out answers and aid in the form of Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a gerontologist studying effects of different blood types on the process of aging. It’s not long, however, that Miriam, who first sired John 200 years ago, sets her sights on claiming Roberts as the latest in her long line of lovers.

Shot with icy blue color grading and lighting juxtaposed with cavernous shadows shot inside John and Miriam’s luxurious New York penthouse, The Hunger is an absolute feast for the senses. Bowie delivers a characteristically phenomenal performance as John, equal parts charming and aloof in his brief yet memorable on-screen presence, and Deneuve is a sultry and tragic antagonist in her performance as Miriam. Sarandon gives an equally captivating performance as a scientist who yearns for immortality in the form of fame and recognition only to find it in the physical and spiritual form of vampiric longevity. If you’re looking for a horror film as terrifying as it is sexy, look no further than Scott’s horror classic. –TE

The Hunger is available to stream on HBO Max and Watch TCM. It is also available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon, Apple TV, Vudu, and Google Play.