Halloween: A Definitive Guide to Must-Watch Horror Films for Halloween

Pull the curtains, light the pumpkin and turn the lamps down low. From a silent vampire who still casts the longest shadow in cinema to the Oscar-winning shocks of 2025, here are 15 must-watch horror films for Halloween, each one reviewed, with exactly where to watch it in the UK this week.

There is a particular kind of hush that settles over a living room on Halloween night. The doorbell has stopped ringing, the last trick-or-treaters have taken their sweets home, and someone reaches for the remote. What comes next matters. Pick the right film and the evening becomes a memory; pick the wrong one and you are scrolling until midnight.

So we have done the scrolling for you. This guide gathers 15 horror films that have earned their place on any Halloween list, from the expressionist nightmares of the 1920s and the blood-red glory of Hammer to John Carpenter’s autumn masterpiece, the modern masters who reinvented fear for a new century, and the two films that ruled 2025. There is a family section too, because Halloween belongs to everyone, including the viewers who still watch the scary bits from behind a cushion.

Every film comes with a short review, a note on who it suits best and where you can watch it in the UK right now, whether that is a free stream on BBC iPlayer, a subscription service, a digital rental or, for a lucky few, a seat in front of a cinema screen. Streaming catalogues change quickly, so the details below are correct as of Wednesday 28 October 2026. Age ratings are from the BBFC.

The Guide at a Glance

• Nosferatu (1922, BBFC PG): Prime Video; free with adverts on Tubi, Pluto TV and Plex
• Bride of Frankenstein (1935, BBFC PG): rent or buy digitally
• Dracula (1958, BBFC 12A): in selected UK cinemas (4K restoration); Prime Video
• The Wicker Man (1973, BBFC 15): BBC iPlayer
• Halloween (1978, BBFC 15): BBC iPlayer; Shudder
• The Exorcist (1973, BBFC 18): HBO Max
• The Shining (1980, BBFC 15): HBO Max; NOW; BFI IMAX
• The Thing (1982, BBFC 18): Prime Video; MUBI
• The Babadook (2014, BBFC 15): Prime Video; HBO Max; NOW; ITVX
• Get Out (2017, BBFC 15): BBC iPlayer; Disney+; Prime Video
• Hereditary (2018, BBFC 15): rent or buy digitally
• Sinners (2025, BBFC 15): NOW; HBO Max via Prime Video Channels; BFI IMAX
• Weapons (2025, BBFC 18): HBO Max; NOW
• Coraline (2009, BBFC PG): ITVX
• Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005, BBFC U): NOW

The Classics: Where the Shadows Began

Before blood came in Technicolor, horror lived in shadow and silhouette. These are the films that taught cinema how to frighten us, and they remain startlingly effective on a dark night.

Nosferatu (1922)

• Director: F. W. Murnau
• Starring: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder
• BBFC: PG

More than a century on, Count Orlok is still the most unsettling vampire ever put on film. Murnau’s unauthorised take on Dracula swapped Stoker’s aristocrat for something closer to vermin: bald, rat-toothed, with fingers like dead branches, and Max Schreck plays him with a stillness that feels genuinely unnatural. The story barely matters. What lingers are the images, from the ghost ship drifting into port with its cargo of coffins and plague to the famous shadow creeping up the staircase, an image that has been borrowed by just about every horror film since.

Stoker’s widow sued, and a German court ordered the prints destroyed, which makes every surviving frame feel like contraband. Watch it with a good restored score, switch off every light, and let its strange, dreamlike rhythm work on you. If you enjoyed Robert Eggers’ lavish 2024 remake, this is where its heart came from.

Best for: Purists, film students and anyone who believes the old ones are the scariest.

How to watch in the UK: Included with Prime Video; free with adverts on Tubi, Pluto TV and Plex; also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store and Apple TV.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

• Director: James Whale
• Starring: Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger
• BBFC: PG

The rare sequel that outclasses its original, Bride of Frankenstein is wittier, stranger and more moving than anything Universal made before or since. James Whale brings back Boris Karloff’s Monster, now able to speak a few broken words, and lets him find a moment of grace with a blind hermit before the villagers come with their torches again. It is one of the most tender scenes in all of horror.

Then there is Ernest Thesiger’s gloriously camp Dr Pretorius, who keeps tiny people in jars and toasts “a new world of gods and monsters”, and Elsa Lanchester, who plays both Mary Shelley in the prologue and, in the final minutes, the Bride herself: lightning-bolt hair, bird-like movements and a scream of horror at the creature she was made for. She is on screen for only a few minutes and has haunted pop culture ever since. Franz Waxman’s soaring score is the cherry on top.

Best for: A Gothic double bill with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (read our review of del Toro’s Frankenstein), and anyone who likes their monsters with a heart.

How to watch in the UK: Not on a subscription service at the moment. Rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV or Sky Store.

Hammer and British Horror

In the late 1950s a small British studio based at Bray, near Windsor, dipped the old monsters in vivid colour and sent them round the world. A decade and a half later, a policeman flew to a Scottish island and folk horror was born. Britain has been very good at frightening people.

Dracula (1958)

• Director: Terence Fisher
• Starring: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling
• BBFC: 12A (cinema) / 12 (home video)

This is the film that made Hammer, and it still moves like a coiled spring. Jimmy Sangster’s script trims Stoker to the bone, and Terence Fisher shoots it all in rich reds and deep shadows, with James Bernard’s pounding score announcing every attack. Christopher Lee’s Count barely speaks, but when he does appear, tall, handsome and suddenly bloodshot and snarling, he gave the vampire a sexual menace that had never been seen so openly before.

Peter Cushing matches him beat for beat as a brisk, brilliant Van Helsing, and their final confrontation, a leap across a table, curtains torn down, sunlight and two candlesticks held up as a cross, is one of the great climaxes in British cinema. The new 4K restoration from Hammer adds footage once thought lost for more than 60 years, seen only in the film’s original Japanese release. There may be no better way to spend Halloween weekend than seeing the Count on a big screen.

Best for: A proper British Halloween, ideally in a cinema with a bag of sweets.

How to watch in the UK: Back in UK cinemas in a new 4K restoration from Hammer, with screenings around Halloween weekend at selected venues, including Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast and the David Lean Cinema in Croydon. At home, it is included with Prime Video and free with adverts on Plex, and to rent or buy from the Prime Video store and Rakuten TV. Hammer’s new 4K Limited Collector’s Edition came out on 26 October.

The Wicker Man (1973)

• Director: Robin Hardy
• Starring: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento
• BBFC: 15

Not strictly a Halloween film, more of a May Day one, but no list of British horror is complete without it. Edward Woodward is perfect as Sergeant Howie, a devout, buttoned-up mainland policeman who flies to the remote island of Summerisle to look for a missing girl and finds a community that smiles, sings and simply will not give him a straight answer. Anthony Shaffer’s script plays like a mystery, and for much of its running time the film is oddly sunny, full of folk songs, maypoles and bawdy humour.

That is the trick. The dread creeps in through the cracks, and Christopher Lee, who often said this was the best film he ever made, is magnificent as the charming, terrifying Lord Summerisle. The ending is one of the most famous in British film, and it still lands like a punch. Paul Giovanni’s songs will be stuck in your head for days. For what the film meant to the families who made it, read our Children of the Wicker Man Super Review.

Best for: Folk horror fans, and anyone who thinks horror needs darkness to be frightening.

How to watch in the UK: Free on BBC iPlayer, and with a Studiocanal Presents subscription through Prime Video Channels or Apple TV. Also to rent from BFI Player, the Prime Video store, Apple TV, Sky Store and Rakuten TV.

The Slasher and the Seventies: Horror’s Golden Age

From 1973 to 1982, American horror grew up fast. Directors with real ambition made films that were frightening, beautifully crafted and impossible to forget, and they set the rules everyone still follows.

Halloween (1978)

• Director: John Carpenter
• Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, Nancy Kyes (credited as Nancy Loomis), P. J. Soles
• BBFC: 15 (cinema re-release; older home video editions carry an 18)

If you only watch one film on 31 October, make it this one. John Carpenter, who co-wrote it with Debra Hill, made it on a tiny budget and turned the limitation into style: long, gliding camera moves, wide frames with too much empty space, and a killer who simply stands and watches from behind a hedge or a washing line. Michael Myers, in that blank white mask, has no motive and no speech. He is just there, and that is far worse.

Jamie Lee Curtis, in her first feature film, is wonderful as Laurie Strode, a bookish teenager who notices things her friends miss, and Donald Pleasence’s Dr Loomis brings a haunted, almost Shakespearean doom to every warning. Then there is the music. Carpenter’s own piano theme, a simple pattern in an awkward five-beat rhythm, is arguably the most effective piece of horror scoring ever written. Gentle by modern standards, terrifying in practice, and as autumnal as falling leaves. It was one of our What to Watch Tonight picks when it played on BBC Two on 23 October.

Best for: Everyone. This is the Halloween film, so start the night here.

How to watch in the UK: Free on BBC iPlayer, and included with Shudder (also through Prime Video Channels); free with adverts on Pluto TV. Also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV and Sky Store.

The Exorcist (1973)

• Director: William Friedkin
• Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, Linda Blair
• BBFC: 18

Its reputation can make it sound like a fairground ride, all spinning heads and green bile, but the real power of The Exorcist is how seriously it takes everything. William Friedkin shoots William Peter Blatty’s story almost like a documentary: a frightened mother (Ellen Burstyn, superb) watching doctors fail her daughter, and a young priest (Jason Miller) losing his faith as his own mother falls ill. By the time Max von Sydow’s Father Merrin steps out of the fog under that streetlamp, you believe in all of it.

The possession scenes are still shocking, and Linda Blair’s performance, with Mercedes McCambridge’s voice, is the stuff of nightmares, but it is the grief and doubt underneath that make it great. It won Oscars for Blatty’s screenplay and for its sound, and it was not cleared for British home video until 1999. Approach with respect, and perhaps not alone.

Best for: Grown-ups who want the most intense film on this list.

How to watch in the UK: Included with HBO Max (also through Prime Video Channels). Also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV, Sky Store and Rakuten TV.

The Shining (1980)

• Director: Stanley Kubrick
• Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers
• BBFC: 15

Stephen King famously disliked it, and audiences were divided at first, but Kubrick’s cold, gleaming version of The Shining has grown into one of the most dissected films ever made. Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, a struggling writer who takes his family to look after the empty Overlook Hotel for the winter, starts on edge and goes completely off the rails, while Shelley Duvall gives a raw, frightened performance as Wendy that deserves far more credit than it got at the time.

Much of it was made at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, and the Overlook’s vast corridors, patterned carpets and lifts that pour with blood feel like a maze designed to swallow you. The smooth Steadicam shots following Danny on his tricycle remain hypnotic. Not everything is explained, which is exactly why it gets under your skin. Room 237 is best avoided.

Best for: A slow-burn, hypnotic Halloween, and anyone who loves a film to argue about afterwards.

How to watch in the UK: Included with HBO Max, and with NOW (Cinema Membership) and Sky Go. Also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV, Sky Store and Rakuten TV. On the big screen, it is part of BFI IMAX’s Halloween programme in London.

The Thing (1982)

• Director: John Carpenter
• Starring: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David, Richard Dysart
• BBFC: 18

John Carpenter’s second appearance here is a very different beast. A team of men at a remote Antarctic research station take in a stray dog and discover, far too late, that something has come with it: an alien organism that can copy any living thing perfectly. Nobody can trust anybody, and the paranoia builds until a single test with a hot wire and a few petri dishes becomes one of the most nerve-shredding scenes ever filmed.

Rob Bottin’s practical creature effects are still astonishing, a festival of stretching flesh and snapping jaws that no computer has bettered, and Kurt Russell is the definitive weary hero as MacReady. It flopped when it opened in the summer of 1982, a fortnight after E.T., but time has crowned it a masterpiece. The ending, cold and ambiguous, is perfect. Ennio Morricone’s heartbeat score helps.

Best for: Sci-fi fans, effects lovers and anyone who wants a different kind of chill.

How to watch in the UK: Included with Prime Video and MUBI. Also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV and Sky Store.

Modern Masters: Fear for a New Century

Horror in the last dozen years has been braver and more personal than at any time since the 1970s, with debut directors using the genre to talk about grief, family and race. These three changed the conversation.

The Babadook (2014)

• Director: Jennifer Kent
• Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall
• BBFC: 15

Amelia is a widow who has barely slept since her husband’s death, and her young son Samuel is convinced there is a monster in the house. Then a sinister pop-up book called Mister Babadook appears on his shelf, and things get much worse. Jennifer Kent’s debut feature, made in Australia, works brilliantly as a straight haunted-house film, with a creature built from top hats, long fingers and a croaking voice that you will hear in your sleep.

But it is really about grief, and about the frightening things exhausted parents sometimes feel and never say. Essie Davis gives a fearless, frightening performance, and young Noah Wiseman is extraordinary. The ending is not what you expect, and it is all the better for it. One of the best horror debuts of the century.

Best for: Viewers who like their scares with real emotion.

How to watch in the UK: Included with Prime Video, HBO Max and NOW (Cinema Membership); free with adverts on ITVX and Plex. Also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV, Sky Store and Rakuten TV.

Get Out (2017)

• Director: Jordan Peele
• Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, LilRel Howery
• BBFC: 15

Jordan Peele’s debut is a horror film, a satire and a pitch-black comedy all at once, and it never drops a ball. London-born Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a young Black photographer meeting his white girlfriend’s liberal parents for the first time at their lakeside home. Everyone is very welcoming. Far too welcoming. Something about the staff is off, the garden party guests stare a little too long, and Rose’s mother has a habit of stirring her tea in a very particular way.

The Sunken Place, where Chris falls helplessly into darkness while the world carries on above him, is one of the great horror images of its decade. Peele won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Kaluuya was nominated for Best Actor. It is clever, angry and very funny, and it builds to a hugely satisfying finale. LilRel Howery’s airport security officer steals every scene.

Best for: A crowd of friends who like to talk about a film afterwards.

How to watch in the UK: Free on BBC iPlayer, and included with Disney+ and Prime Video. Also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV, Sky Store and Rakuten TV.

Hereditary (2018)

• Director: Ari Aster
• Starring: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd
• BBFC: 15

Ari Aster’s first feature may be the most frightening film of the last ten years, and it is also one of the saddest. Toni Collette is Annie Graham, an artist who builds detailed miniature houses, mourning a difficult mother whose death opens a door the family cannot close. To say more would ruin it. The film has one moment, early on, that leaves audiences in stunned silence, and from there it never lets go.

Collette gives one of the great horror performances, ferocious and heartbreaking, and the dinner table argument alone is worth the price of a rental. Aster frames the real house like one of Annie’s dioramas, so the characters always look trapped. The last half hour goes to genuinely nightmarish places. Not one for a party, but if you want to be properly scared, this is it.

Best for: Seasoned horror fans who think nothing scares them any more.

How to watch in the UK: Not on a subscription service at the moment. Rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Sky Store or Rakuten TV.

The New Classics: 2025’s Oscar-Winning Horror

Horror rarely gets taken seriously at awards time. In March 2026 that changed: at the 98th Academy Awards, both of these films sent their stars home with Oscars.

Sinners (2025)

• Director: Ryan Coogler
• Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo
• BBFC: 15

Ryan Coogler’s Southern Gothic epic is a gangster film, a music film and a vampire film, and it is thrilling in all three modes. Michael B. Jordan plays identical twins Smoke and Stack, back home in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 to open a juke joint for one night only, with their young cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton) playing the blues so beautifully that something ancient hears it and comes knocking.

The centrepiece, a performance that seems to summon musicians from the past and the future onto the dance floor at once, is one of the most dazzling sequences of recent years, and Ludwig Göransson’s score is a marvel. British actor Jack O’Connell is a charismatic, unsettling vampire, and when the siege begins it is ferocious. Sinners went into the Oscars with a record 16 nominations and came away with four, including Best Actor for Jordan and Best Original Screenplay for Coogler.

Best for: Anyone who wants a big, bold, crowd-pleasing horror with a soul.

How to watch in the UK: Included with NOW (Cinema Membership) and Sky Go, and with HBO Max through Prime Video Channels. Also to buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV, Sky Store and Rakuten TV. On the big screen, BFI IMAX in London is showing it in IMAX 70mm as part of its Halloween programme.

Weapons (2025)

• Director: Zach Cregger
• Starring: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan
• BBFC: 18

At 2.17 one morning, 17 children from the same school class get out of bed, walk out of their front doors and run into the dark. Only one child in the class is left behind. It is one of the great horror openings, and Zach Cregger, who made Barbarian, builds on it with a puzzle-box structure, telling the story in chapters from the points of view of the teacher everyone blames (Julia Garner), a furious grieving father (Josh Brolin) and several others whose lives collide.

It is frightening, very often funny and occasionally gruesome, which explains the 18 certificate, and every chapter shifts what you think you know. Then Amy Madigan arrives as Aunt Gladys, and the film finds a new gear entirely. Her performance, at once comic and chilling, won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, forty years after her first nomination. Go in knowing as little as possible.

Best for: Fans of twisty storytelling and dark humour, and anyone who loved Barbarian.

How to watch in the UK: Included with HBO Max (also through Prime Video Channels), and with NOW (Cinema Membership) and Sky Go. Also to buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV, Sky Store and Rakuten TV.

For a Family Halloween

Not everyone in the house wants to be terrified. These two are spooky enough for younger viewers to feel brave, and clever enough to keep the grown-ups smiling.

Coraline (2009)

• Director: Henry Selick
• Starring: voices of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Ian McShane
• BBFC: PG

Bored and ignored in a creaky new house, 11-year-old Coraline finds a small door that leads to a mirror version of her home, where her Other Mother cooks delicious dinners, the garden glows and everyone adores her. There is just one catch: everyone there has buttons for eyes, and they would very much like Coraline to have them too.

Adapted from Neil Gaiman’s novella by Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, and made frame by frame at the stop-motion studio Laika, Coraline is a handcrafted wonder, full of tiny knitted jumpers and impossible gardens. It is also properly creepy in places, which children tend to love. Teri Hatcher is superb as the Other Mother, and British viewers will enjoy Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French as a pair of eccentric retired actresses living downstairs.

Best for: Families with brave children aged around eight and over.

How to watch in the UK: Free with adverts on ITVX, and included with ITVX Premium. Also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV and Sky Store.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

• Director: Nick Park and Steve Box
• Starring: voices of Peter Sallis, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes
• BBFC: U

The most British horror film ever made. With the town’s Giant Vegetable Competition approaching, Wallace and his long-suffering dog Gromit are running Anti-Pesto, a humane pest-control business, until one of Wallace’s inventions goes wrong and a monstrous creature starts raiding the allotments by moonlight. Aardman’s first Wallace & Gromit feature is a loving spoof of the old Hammer and Universal monster movies, with a creaking church, a mob with pitchforks and a vicar who knows more than he lets on.

Peter Sallis’s Wallace is as warm as a cup of tea, Ralph Fiennes is splendidly villainous as the toupee-wearing Victor Quartermaine, and Helena Bonham Carter is delightful as the bunny-loving Lady Tottington. The jokes come thick and fast, many aimed squarely at the parents. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and it remains a perfect Halloween film for all ages. Gromit, as ever, says everything without a word.

Best for: The whole family, from grandparents to the very youngest.

How to watch in the UK: Included with NOW (Cinema Membership) and Sky Go. Also to rent or buy from the Prime Video store, Apple TV and Sky Store (buy also from Rakuten TV).

Building Your Perfect Halloween Night

If you are planning a full night, a few pairings work beautifully. Start with Nosferatu while the light fades, move on to Hammer’s Dracula and finish with Sinners to see how far the vampire has travelled in a hundred years. Or go for a John Carpenter double bill, with Halloween at nine and The Thing at eleven, when everyone is too tired to trust their own shadow. Families can start with Wallace & Gromit after tea and save Coraline for when the little ones feel brave.

Whatever you choose, give it the respect a good horror film deserves: phones away, lights off, sound up, and no talking through the quiet bits. That is when the best ones get you.

From all of us at Movieversalfilm, happy Halloween. Sleep well, if you can.

Which film is on your Halloween list this year, and which classic do you think we have missed? Tell us below.