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Halloween
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Halloween being on a Wednesday is not ideal, it’s true. It’s the farthest possible distance from the closest weekend, which means you’re stuck throwing your All Hallows festivities either too early or in the middle of the week, and neither one feels quite right. But while a Wednesday-evening bacchanal might not be in the cards, you can still settle in with some scary movies to watch while the neighborhood kids clamor outside for candy. Amazon Prime Video is doing you a solid right now in making a lot of their horror-themed VOD rentals available for $1.99 (or cheaper), so that even if you can’t find what you want streaming for free, a Halloween-night double feature won’t cost you more than a bag of fun-size candy bars.
We went and scoured the Prime Video virtual shelves for the ten movies rentable for under $2 that would make for the best Halloween viewing. From vampires to giant beasts, Korean revenge to babysitters in peril, these movies will keep you up all night while barely making a dent in your wallet. Happy Halloween!
'The Witch'
Why does The Witch show up on nearly every list of recommended horror movies these days? Because it’s creepy as hell, features a star-making breakthrough for Anya Taylor-Joy, features another star-making breakthrough performance by Black Phillip the ram, and gave us such indelible catch phrases as “wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Well? Wouldst thou??
'Tucker & Dale vs. Evil'
As the movies have shown us in recent decades, there are almost as many ways to deconstruct the horror genre as there are to construct it. The Scream movies dissected the teen-horror tropes, Scary Movie and its sequel fully spoofed the genre, and then a movie like The Cabin in the Woods came around and pulled back the curtain on the entire enterprise. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, pretty much half of Bruce Campbell’s recent output. It’s a robust genre. Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is notable in that it takes a great idea — what if the stock rednecks who teens are always running away from in horror movies were just trying to help? — and then executes it simply and with an excess of charm. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are funny and likeable as the titular pair, and the ways in which the teens keep finding to a) misunderstand the situation, and b) get themselves killed anyway never stops being funny.
'Why Don't You Play in Hell?'
Eyebrows always get raised when violent action or horror movies end up as film-festival favorites, but it only makes sense. After watching serious dramas for days on end, the exhilaration of letting go with a well-made bonanza of kills must be palpable. So it was with Why Don’t You Play in Hell, a movie about yakuza trying to make a movie about yakuza that turned out to be a bloody great time.
'Let the Right One In'
A child vampire befriends a human child in this surprisingly sweet movie from director Tomas Alfredson, who would later make a little movie called The Snowman, a.k.a. Mister Police Man: The Movie. Anyway,Let the Right One In is a fabulous movie, full of creepy moods, sad kids, scary vampires, and cats in peril.
'Splinter'
Splinter is gross and terrifying! It borrows from movies like The Thing and The Crazies and The Mist to create something fully singular. It’s hard to come up with horror-movie monsters today that don’t feel recycled in some way, but the monster in Splinter is truly a nightmare you’ve yet to experience.
'The Host'
No, not the Saoirse Ronan one (the rare occasion when ‘the Saoirse Ronan one’ is the bad one). This is the one from director Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer; Okja) about a mutant sea creature who terrorizes a town and captures a young girl. The careless-pollution-leads-to-monstrous-sea-creature thing has been a manifestation of anxieties back to at least Godzilla reflecting the nuclear-testing anxieties of its era. Its status as a cult favorite is unassailable.
'The House of the Devil'
As a stylistic throwback to babysitter-in-peril movies of the ’70s and ’80s, House of the Devil deserves an A+ for getting the atmosphere, the film style, the film stock, and the feathered hair on Greta Gerwig (then a barely-known mumblecore actress who nevertheless nails the role of the snarky/concerned best friend until she … well, I shouldn’t say). But the film is so much more than an exercise in recreating old horror styles. The wire-taut tension that director Ti West creates is a rare thing, and it places this movie at the very top of this century’s best horror offerings.
'Monsters'
Before director Gareth Edwards got the gig rebooting Godzilla into a gorgeous bore or directing (most of) Rogue One, he made his name with this Mexico-set post-apocalyptic film where the human survivors try to stay alive in a landscape patrolled by giant … well, monsters. As we later came to expect of Edwards, the visuals are breathtaking, were the foreboding sight of fighter jets across the skylines and gas masks on travelers carries as much weight as when we eventually see the monsters … which also pays off.
'V/H/S'
This anthology of horror shorts comes with an all-star team of filmmakers behind it, including Adam Wingard (You’re Next; The Guest), Ti West (House of the Devil), David Bruckner (The Signal), and Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies). As with any anthology feature, there are ups and downs in the material, but it’s definitely horror that is ready and willing to please.
'I Saw the Devil'
Korean revenge thrillers don’t get bloodier or more terrifying than this movie from director Kim Jee-woon. Oldboy star Choi Min-sik stars as a vicious serial killer whose savagery presents as a tightly-coiled spring ready to get sprung. Lee Byung-hun plays the federal agent whose fiancee was murdered by Choi who seeks to bring the killer to justice. There are certain shocks in this movie that you won’t soon forget.
