Every streamer worth their salt has a video-store-style section prepped for Halloween, spotlighting a range of spooky-season viewing options. But even within those sections, viewers might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices. How to choose between so many different ghost stories, slashers, horror comedies, creature features, and other seasonal offerings? Decider is here to help, and this time we’re focusing on Hulu. These are the 13 best Halloween-appropriate movies currently streaming on Hulu; they’re not all set on the holiday itself (in fact, only a few of them are) but in addition to being satisfying genre movies, they also feel particularly autumnal or otherwise October-y. These are also mostly R-rated; if you need more family-friendly fare, there’s always Disney+. Happy horror-watching!

1. RATING: R
   DIRECTOR: Fede Alvarez
   CAST: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci

   There are a lot of Evil Dead iterations out there, and it’s the rare series where all five movies stand alone pretty easily, even the original Sam Raimi-directed trilogy (Evil Dead II is more remake-plus than traditional sequel, for example). Hulu only has the two most recent versions that attempt to reclaim the series intensity from the splatstick horror-comedy of the sequels. Of those, the Fede Alvarez Evil Dead feels truer to the spirit of the gonzo original, with a cabin in the woods (fall foliage from hell!), buckets of blood, a nasty dismemberment scene, and an eventually feral turn from final girl Jane Levy.

   Stream Evil Dead on hulu

2. RATING: R
   DIRECTOR: Richard Kelly
   CAST: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell, Maggie Gyllenhaal

   Technically, Donnie Darko is more science fiction than horror. But it’s an uncommonly eerie and psychological sci-fi story, involving a teenager (Jake Gyllenhaal) who avoids a freak accident only to find himself stricken with hallucinations (or are they?) and various coming-of-age ennui (that stuff is real). The movie takes place during October 1988, and has major scenes set on Halloween (there’s even an Evil Dead viewing!). It’s more specifically atmospheric and evocative of autumn in the suburbs than plenty of more hardcore horror offerings.

   Stream Donnie Darko on Hulu

3. RATING: PG-13
   DIRECTOR: Kenneth Branagh
   CAST: Kenneth Branagh, Tina Fey, Michelle Yeoh

   The final-for-now film in Kenneth Branagh’s series of Agatha Christie adaptations that cast the filmmaker as detective Hercule Poirot isn’t quite as starry as Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, but this Halloween-set chamber piece is Branagh’s most accomplished Poirot mystery in terms of pure style, atmosphere, and pulpy delights. It’s spooky enough for the season (and engages in a neat investigation of haunting trickery) while being more or less appropriate for kids ten and up who have grown out of Halloween cartoons.

   Stream A Haunting in Venice on Hulu

4. RATING: R
   DIRECTOR: David Prior
   CAST: James Badge Dale, Owen Teague, Marin Ireland

   This underseen deeply unsettling supernatural horror-mystery became a film-geek object of obsession during the pandemic, when it was belatedly released following a long time on the shelf. (The movie was shot in 2017 but released quietly in fall 2020, in a version director David Prior considered more of a rough cut.) The slow-burning story of a grieving ex-cop (James Badge Dale) conducting a search for a neighbor’s missing child digs deep features a lengthy prologue that helps stretch its runtime well past the two-hour mark, and the movie’s grimness won’t be for everyone. But anyone looking for the next filmmaker-driven “elevated” horror indie might do well to fill that hunger with a bigger-budget, but no less freaky, studio baffler.

   Stream The Empty Man on Hulu

6. RATING: R
   DIRECTOR: Guillermo del Toro
   CAST: Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Norman Reedus, Ron Perlman

   What’s Halloween without some vampires? Blade II may come across more like an action movie, but where Guillermo del Toro goes, creatures follow, and that’s the case with the super-vampires Blade fights in Blade II. No mere humanoid variety, they have gigantic super-gaping maws and many rows of fearsome teeth, adding some extra spice to the vampire-slaying formula. Del Toro’s presence assures that this is the most horror-centric Blade movie, despite third one having Dracula. (But if you want to marathon ’em all, Hulu has the full trilogy hand.)

   Stream Blade II on Hulu

7. RATING: R
   DIRECTOR: Karyn Kusama
   CAST: Amanda Seyfried, Megan Fox, Johnny Simmons, Adam Brody

   Cast out of the multiplex for its strange tone and, presumably, not enough teen-boy salaciousness, then welcomed back into the fold for its perceptive story of teen-girl friendship gone bloody; Jennifer’s Body has performed a classic horror-movie turnaround over the past 15-plus years. Screenwriter Diablo Cody was knocked for her slangy punchlines post-Juno, but as with that Oscar winner, the snark masks the genuine wit and feeling just beneath it. Amanda Seyfried (as an unlikely nerd) and Megan Fox (as a likely, well, fox, but also a possessed succubus) perform a terrific duet under the stylish direction of Karyn Kusama. This isn’t just a movie that got the short shrift, but one of the better studio horror movies of the century so far.

   Stream Jennifer’s Body on hulu

8. RATING: R
   DIRECTOR: Zach Cregger
   CAST: Georgia Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long

   Before Weapons went supernova, Zach Cregger made his horror debut with a smaller-scale but no less effective horror movie: Barbarian, a terrific girl-don’t-go-in-there horror thriller that makes several hairpin turns through social thriller, Hollywood satire, and body horror. It’s not a horror comedy, which makes it all the more impressive how scary and how funny it is in turn. It starts with a potentially double-booked Airbnb rental; if you’ve managed to avoid learning anything more about it, just stop and watch.

   Stream Barbarian on hulu

9. RATING: R
   DIRECTOR: Wes Craven
   CAST: Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Mathew Lillard

   There are plenty of sequels of varying quality (mostly good!) but it’s hard to beat Wes Craven’s fiendishly clever original slasher, which brought the subgenre back to life after nearly a decade-long coma, and introduced a whodunit element that proved influential while remaining particularly well-executed (pun intended) by this series. There’s also, of course, a whole mess of movie references, as characters who actually watch slasher movies are made the potential victims of a masked killer.

   Stream Scream on Hulu

10. RATING: R
    DIRECTOR: David Gordon Green
    CAST: Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Judy Greer, Will Patton

    The original 1978 Halloween is the best, no question. But if you’re looking for more Michael Myers, David Gordon Green’s legacy sequel slash reboot slash trilogy-kickoff from 2018 revisits the characters while wiping away all of the previous sequels, remakes, retcons, etc. This means that Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode is still alive and awaiting a rematch with Michael Myers (who is not, in this telling, her secret brother). He’s just a townie from Haddonfield, Illinois, come home to do some horrific slashing, and Green fills the movie with his humanistic sense of humor as well as plenty of tension. It’s part tribute to the original, part new direction for some weirder (and very worthwhile) sequels to follow. Don’t listen to the naysayers; all of Green’s Halloweens are way better than H20.

    Stream Halloween (2018) on hulu

11. RATING: R
    DIRECTOR: Osgood Perkins
    CAST: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood
    
    Some horror fans got out of sorts when the advance hype on Longlegs called it the scariest movie to come along in ages; obviously these things are personal, but I can only say few horror movies from last year freaked me out more. Maika Monroe plays an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer (Nicolas Cage, hard to recognize and even harder to forget); there are shades of Silence of the Lambs in the movie’s ’90s setting, but it all winds up a bit more like a particularly horrific X-Files episode. All complimentary, obviously.

    Stream Longlegs on hulu

12. RATING: PG-13
    DIRECTOR: M. Night Shyamalan
    CAST: Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collete

    M. Night Shyamalan has gone on to make a lot of spooky and distinctive thrillers, but there’s something distinctly autumnal and chill-inducing about his hushed ghost story about a kid (Haley Joel Osment) who can see the dead and the therapist (Bruce Willis) who tries to help him through it. There aren’t a lot of big jumps to the movie; instead, Shyamalan builds a whole world out of just a few characters and their melancholic problems, supernatural and not.

    Stream The Sixth Sense on Hulu

13. RATING: R
    DIRECTOR: Jennifer Kent
    CAST: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, and introducing the Babadook as himself

    Speaking of kids seeing ghosts: There are a whole lot of variations on kids seeing ghosts, parents wondering if their kids are possessed, kids doing creepy scribbly drawings, kids looking at creepy scribbling drawings, things going bump in the night, and so on, and so on. But few movies have harnessed those familiar elements together with the vicious effectiveness of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, an allegory for the hell and self-doubt of parenting, as well as that old 2010s horror favorite, grief. But rather than get bogged down in metaphorror, The Babadook makes all of this stuff viscerally frightening, in a manner befitting its real-life subjects.

    Stream The Babadook on hulu

14. RATING: R
    DIRECTOR: David Cronenberg
    CAST: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz

    Sometimes a brilliant, thorny auteur comes across just the right material to make a near-perfect film. It happened with Brian De Palma when he made a film out of Stephen King’s Carrie, and it happened a decade later with David Cronenberg when he remade the 1950s monster-movie classic about a man who transforms into a gigantic human fly. As with De Palma, there are plenty of other great Cronenberg movies, and some of them are probably more personal to the filmmaker himself. But The Fly manages to be a mainstream horror picture that in no way compromises its maker’s instincts, with gruesome body horror, some dark humor, and plenty of human tragedy. Plus, maybe if lots of people watch a classic like The Fly, Hulu will feel inspired to license more movies from before the 21st century! This is the oldest of the merely three such movies on this list!

    Stream The Fly on Hulu

If you’re new to Hulu, you can get started with a 30-day free trial on the streamer’s basic (with ads) plan. After the trial period, you’ll pay $9.99/month. If you want to upgrade to Hulu ad-free, it costs $18.99/month.

If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the Disney+ Bundles, all of which include Hulu. These bundles start at $10.99/month for ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu and goes up to $29.99/month for Disney+, Hulu, and Max, all ad-free.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.