Is there anything better than the Halloween season?
yes here at Polygon we cover horror all year round.There is a rolling list of best horror movies you can watch at home best horror movies on Netflix Updated monthly throughout the year.
But even for year-round horror fans, Halloween is a special time.
for the past 2 Year, Polygon has created a Halloween countdown calendar so you can watch Halloween-themed movies and TV shows at home every day of October. 31 spooky selections to keep you in the mood all month long.
Each day throughout October, we’ll add new recommendations to this countdown and let you know where you can watch them. Curl up on the couch, dim the lights, grab some popcorn and enjoy a frighteningly fun Halloween surprise.
October 1: Audition (1999)
of 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 return to this world and find someone. Aoyama agrees to an offer from his friend’s film producer to attend an audition for a non-existent film in order to find a potential bride among the candidates. His search eventually leads to Asami Yamazaki, a beautiful former ballerina with a dark past.
As Aoyama approaches his new love interest, he finds himself deeply entangled in a web of intrigue that threatens to tear him apart emotionally, psychologically, and even physically. There is something dark within, but there is also a latent darkness within Aoyama, and it is arguably even darker. The only difference is that Asami has accepted that darkness and made it her own.
Miike’s film keeps the cards relatively close to its chest for most of its run time, unraveling a mystery that’s wrapped as tightly as a choke-wire before peeling off the skin of cute artifice, Revealing a pulsating mass of terror swirling beneath it. The film slips into an eerie fugue of assumptions, misdirection, and cinematic sleight of hand, and the dream feels set against a reality too terrifying. After all, it’s just words. Pain is the only thing you can trust. — Toussaint Egan
audition is streaming on Arrow Video and Hi-Yah!, ad-supported free on Tubi, and free with a library card on Kanopy. Also available for digital rental or online purchase. budu When apple.
October 2: The Vanishing (1988)
It’s not a horror movie per se, but Stanley Kubrick said: Burnishing It was the scariest movie he had ever seen. This Dutch thriller from 1988 is often referred to by its original title Spoorloos, not to be confused with the inferior 1993 American remake by the same director George Sluiser, but like a simple missing persons case. I am acting cool. Rex and Saskia are a young couple traveling through France. They were taking a break at a gas station when Saskia suddenly and completely disappeared.
Initially, the horror of the situation lies in its banality. The feeling that it can happen to anyone at any time. Sluizer emphasizes this with the factual realism of its location shoots. Then, just over 20 minutes later, he knocked the audience off their feet with a sudden shift. We follow Raymond, a complacent French family man who appears to be rehearsing for his kidnapping. The mystery of what happened to Saskia seems to have already been solved. What next?
Based so closely on Tim Krabbe’s novel The Golden Egg, the way the film skips too quickly through the expected structure of a mystery thriller should defuse the tension, but in reality, it’s mostly As Raymond, played with the chilling luminosity of Bernard-Pierre Donadieu, explains to us the ‘how’ of his crimes, the ‘why’ gnaws, far away. becomes a thorny question. Skipping ahead three years, we find Rex obsessed with finding out what happened to his lost love. Share to and follow him to what could be the most overtly horrifying ending of any movie ever. —Ori Welsh
Burnishing Stream or digitally rent or buy on The Criterion Channel. apple When Amazon.