Celebrate Sam Neill’s Macabre Filmography with a Sam Neilloween Streaming Party

The days are getting shorter, the air is getting crisper, and the coffees are getting pumpkinier. We’re in the throes of Halloween and that means we’re also in the throes of my favorite pop culture season: Sam Neilloween. Don’t be aghast if this is the first you’re hearing of this holiday, because I completely made it up. But if In the Mouth of Madness taught us anything, it’s that words have the power to completely warp realities—and declaring Sam Neilloween (#SamNeilloween) a holiday is a much less apocalyptic use of my writerly power. Sutter Kane I am not!

Sam Neilloween needs to exist, though, because not only is Sam Neill one of the greatest actors of all time, he’s also an unsung master of horror films. Unsung, I tell you! There’s the top-tier spooky legends (Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi), the midcentury masters (Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing), the scream queen (Jamie Lee Curtis) and scream king (Robert Englund), and the literal Scream Queens (Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox). Sam Neill has long deserved a spot in this canon, and Sam Neilloween is the holiday that corrects the record.

Celebrating this holiday is fairly simple: you just watch as many of the macabre masterworks featuring Mr. Neill as possible. These are the heavy-hitters: Possession, Omen III: The Final Conflict, In the Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon, and Daybreakers. Will watching all five of these movies in a row punch a hole in space and time right to the hellish edge of the unknown universe? Binge them all and find out!

And just know that if things get too scary during Sam Neilloween, you can always re-center yourself by looking at these delightful photos of Sam Neill being Sam Neill.

Seriously, though—Sam Neill is an actor of incredible range, and these films demonstrate just that in exacting detail. Neill doesn’t stick to just one lane in the horror genre. His performances run the gamut, from throat-shredding delirium (Possession) to laser-focused obsession (Event Horizon).

Like the performer himself, Sam Neilloween is also an adaptable holiday. Celebrate it whenever, preferably near Halloween but I’m not going to put limitations on when you can enjoy Sam Neill’s work. Here’s what to expect—and what you can pair each film with—when you embark on this journey!

1981’s Omen III: The Final Conflict is a weird little piece of horror franchise revisionism. Damien, the Antichrist, has aged decades in the five years since his debut, but this retcon works because it means we get to see Sam Neill play the fully grown son of Satan while sporting some truly excellent three-piece suits. True, Omen III doesn’t have the best reputation and Neill usually chuckles and groans when any interviewer mentions his turn as Damien. But! Sam Neill is great in this film! He is unflinchingly evil and repeatedly delivers monologues that make you, the viewer, feel like you’re in the presence of the son of Satan. Not only that, Neill also manages to make Damien into a bit of a charmer! And because Damien is the only character in the film with charisma and passion, you end up being totally #TeamAntichrist.

Pair Omen III: The Final Conflict with… some Two Paddocks wine (Sam’s own, of course!) and/or devil’s food cake.

If you’re able to track down 1981’s Possession, you may want to save it for the very end of a marathon. The film is notorious for numerous reasons: it horrified its debut audience at Cannes, had a third of its runtime cut out in order to be released in the United States, and it drove Neill and co-star Isabelle Adjani past the brink of exhaustion. As a viewer, Possession is liable to make you feel like you’re losing it, too. The less you know about Possession the better—just know that it’s Neill’s sweatiest, most extreme, and visceral performance in a filmography populated with many extreme performances.

Pair Possession with… uh, raw meat fresh from a meat grinder? Listen: you’re not going to want to eat or drink during this movie.

The pinnacle of Sam Neill’s horror work has to be 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness, a John Carpenter film whose power as a cult favorite only grows every spooky season. Neill plays the lead role of John Trent, an insurance investigator tasked with tracking down an M.I.A. Stephen King analogue named Sutter Kane. Trent tracks Kane down to the surrealist nightmare town of Hobb’s End, pulled straight from Kane’s own fiction. Once it gets going, In the Mouth of Madness delivers nonstop scares, monsters, and harrowing cosmic horror. But the real appeal of In the Mouth of Madness is Neill’s portrayal of John Trent. In a matter of seconds, Neill establishes Trent as a well-dressed, seen-it-all chainsmoker who greets every obstacle with skepticism and a smirk. He keeps a bike horn in his glovebox! He’s a professional and a total scamp at the same time! That’s why his descent into hysteria works so well; you’re rooting for John Trent well after he crosses the point of no return.

Pair In the Mouth of Madness with… gummy worms (sweet tentacles!), and make sure you have a bucket of popcorn ready for the ending!

The final two films of this marathon—1997’s Event Horizon and 2009’s Daybreakers—find Neill in similar reserved-yet-nefarious roles. Both are ensembles pitting the cast against the machinations of cerebral antagonists played with smoldering intensity by Neill. In Event Horizon, he’s a spacecraft engineer who’s haunted as hell by the death of his wife and the loss of his beloved masterwork, the Event Horizon. Like John Trent, Neill’s Dr. Weir is driven completely mad—understandable, considering the Event Horizon is now a floating haunted house that chews up and spits out astronauts. And in Daybreakers, a film set in a world taken over by vampires, Neill plays the greedy CEO of a blood provider. The film has much of what you’d want from a Neill role: dramatic monologues, wry delivery, body horror, and lots of suits.

Pair Event Horizon with… cherry freezer pops, since that’s essentially what the vacuum of space turns human bodies into.

Pair Daybreakers with… coffee and strawberry syrup so you can sip your own “blood latte.”

And if you want to switch up your Sam Neilloween celebration, he has plenty of movies in his filmography to swap in depending on your mood or audience. There’s a thriller (Dead Calm), a political thriller (Sleeping Dogs on Tubi), a romantic (?) thriller (Perfect Strangers on Prime Video), a bloody dark comedy (Death in Brunswick on Vimeo), a bloody fairy tale (Snow White: A Tale of Terror on Tubi), an upsetting true story (A Cry in the Dark on HBO Max), a monster story for kids (Under the Mountain on Prime Video), and whatever the hell MindGamers is (on Netflix). Have I seen all of these movies? Absolutely. He’s my favorite actor of all time—as if that wasn’t obvious by my creation of Sam Neilloween. After watching some of these movies, he’ll be your fave too.

No matter what you watch, you’ll be celebrating Sam Neill’s incredibly eclectic body of work—and that’s the reason for the Sam Neilloween season.

Where to watch Omen III: The Final Conflict

Where to watch In the Mouth of Madness

Stream Event Horizon on HBO Max

Stream Daybreakers on Peacock