The Best Horror Movies Streaming This Month Are Ghost Movies (October 2024)

It’s finally here! October, the best month of the year, especially if you’re a horror movie fan. Any time of year is the right time to watch a horror movie, but there’s something extra special about watching horror movies as we draw closer and closer to Halloween. And to help you get into the spirit of the season, this month’s horror streaming roundup is all about ghost movies! Not just haunted house movies, mind you — but movies about ghosts and all their spooky antics. I like all horror subgenres. Vampires? Hell yes. Slashers? Absolutely. Monsters? Yep! But of all the various types of horror movies, movies about ghosts are my personal favorite. I can’t say that I believe in ghosts, but like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. Until some sort of ghostly evidence presents itself to me, I’ll stick with the movies. So grab your candy corn, carve a pumpkin or two, and follow along with me as I highlight 10 ghost movies you can stream this spooky season. 

Streaming on Hulu, Max.

I love The Conjuring Universe, a series of spooky films that kicked-off with 2013’s “The Conjuring” and expanded from there. Sure, some of the films in the ever-growing series are underwhelming (I’m looking at you, the first “The Nun”!), but as a whole, I enjoy returning to this universe again and again. While I think the main entries — “The Conjuring” films focused on Ed and Lorraine Warren, as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga — are the best the series has to offer, Gary Dauberman’s “Annabelle Comes Home” is the movie I find myself wanting to revisit the most. There’s just something delightful about this non-stop spookshow; it’s simple but effective, and it delivers on what it sets out to do. This is third “Annabelle” movie, and in my opinion, the best (the first “Annabelle” movie is awful; the second, the prequel “Annabelle: Creation,” is better). In “Annabelle Comes Home,” the Warrens bring the demonic Annabelle back to the little cursed museum they keep in their home. Then they skip town to investigate a case, leaving their young daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace) in the hands of babysitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman). But when Mary Ellen’s friend Daniela (Katie Sarife) stops by, she inadvertently unleashes Annabelle’s power. As a result, all of the haunted items in the Warren’s museum come to life and start tormenting the three girls with spooktacular results. It’s a total blast from start to finish. “Annabelle Comes Home” is like a Halloween haunted house in movie form. 

Streaming on Max, Prime Video, The Criterion Channel, Tubi, Kanopy.

In the 1960s, Herk Harvey, a Kansas filmmaker who specialized in making short educational films, was driving by an abandoned waterfront resort in Salt Lake City named the Saltair Pavilion, when he suddenly dreamed up the idea for a feature film. The end result was “Carnival of Souls,” a low-budget shocker that has since become a classic. The striking Candace Hilligoss plays Mary, a young woman who is the only survivor of a car accident that claims the lives of a group of her friends. Haunted by the experience, Mary moves to Salt Lake City, where she begins to experience strange, scary visions that slowly drive her crazy. Even if you’ve never seen “Carnival of Souls,” you can probably guess where all of this is headed, but that doesn’t change the fact that the movie is mighty effective and kind of brilliant. Even after all these years, it still has the power to creep you out. 

Streaming on Prime Video.

Ever since the film hit theaters, director Guillermo del Toro has devoted lots of time explaining that “Crimson Peak” is not a horror movie, it’s actually a gothic romance! And while I get where he’s coming from, I’m just going to come out and say that yes, it’s a horror movie, too. And it’s a damn great one. A swooning, gothic story about love and ghosts, “Crimson Peak” introduces us to Edith (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman in the 1800s who dreams of being a writer. One day, Edith is swept off her feet by the extremely pale Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who whisks her away to his crumbling haunted mansion in England. Accompanying them is Thomas’ miserable sister Lucille, played by a deliciously hammy Jessica Chastain. Playing out like “Jane Eyre” meets “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Crimson Peak” finds Edith in serious danger and dealing with ghosts and other dark secrets. “Crimson Peak” flopped when it hit theaters in 2015, but it’s developed a devoted cult following in the years since its release, and rightfully so: it’s wonderful. 

Streaming on The Criterion Channel.

John Carpenter followed-up “Halloween” with 1980’s “The Fog,” an old fashioned ghost story. Set in the seaside town of Antonio Bay, “The Fog” is about ghost pirates who come out of a supernatural fog and start killing people. The film follows a wide cast of characters — a hitchhiker (“Halloween” breakout Jamie Lee Curtis) and the man who picks her up (certified sex symbol Tom Atkins), a radio DJ (Adrienne Barbeau), a drunken priest (Hal Holbrook), and more — all of whom find themselves in danger from the pirate ghosts. Carpenter, once again working with Debra Hill, keeps things pretty simple here, and that’s part of the movie’s charm. Yes, there are a few gruesome kills (most of which were added during reshoots), but “The Fog” is mostly all about building a spooky atmosphere. It’s no coincidence the movie opens with an old timey sea captain (John Houseman) telling a group of kids a scary story by a campfire late at night.

Streaming on Prime Video, Tubi, Shudder.

Revisiting the first “Hell House LLC” movie every Halloween season has become an annual tradition for me. It just doesn’t quite feel like Halloween until I’ve watched Stephen Cognetti’s original low-budget found footage flick. There are four films total, but with the exception of the more recent “Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor,” the sequels are kind of disappointing. But the first film still packs a punch, and shows that you can conjure up a few scares with almost no real money. In “Hell House LLC,” we learn that a group of friends set up a Halloween haunted house in an old abandoned hotel — and then something went very, very wrong on opening night, resulting in the deaths of 15 people. As it turns out, the team that set up the house documented everything leading up to the tragedy, and now we’re watching their footage. Again, this is a low-budget affair, so don’t expect anything slick or over-polished. Still, “Hell House LLC” has some legit scares, thanks to some clever editing and the use of a trio of dummies dressed like creepy clowns. 

Streaming on Netflix.

Director Osgood Perkins is riding high right now thanks to the box office success of the Nicolas Cage horror pic “Longlegs,” but he’s been making under-the-radar fright flicks for a few years now. One of his earliest titles is the Netflix chiller “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.” This very slow-burning ghost story follows a nurse (Ruth Wilson) who moves into the home of an elderly writer (a character clearly inspired by “The Haunting of Hill House” writer Shirley Jackson) and begins to suspect the place is haunted. Perkins isn’t interested in traditional scares here, and the deliberately unhurried pace of the film might be too much for some viewers. But if you have a thing for slow-burning horror (as I do), you’re in for a treat here. 

Streaming on Shudder, Tubi, Prime Video, Kanopy.

Ti West, the filmmaker behind A24’s “X” trilogy, wrote and directed this underseen haunted hotel movie that’s somehow both funny and scary (it’s not a horror-comedy; it’s just a horror movie with some comedic moments). In “The Innkeepers,” the quaint Yankee Pedlar Inn is about to close down, which gives the joint’s two remaining employees — played by Sara Paxton and Pat Healy — an excuse to do some last-minute ghost hunting. The place is supposedly haunted by Madeline O’Malley, a young woman who hanged herself in the hotel after being abandoned at the altar. What I particularly love about “The Innkeepers” is how it juggles a tricky tone — so much of the movie feels fun and lighthearted, until things shift dramatically towards an unnerving, and yes, haunting finale. 

Streaming on Shudder.

As I said in my review, “Part of the pleasure of ‘Oddity’ lies in its simplicity. When you get right down to it, this is just a good old fashioned scary movie, and there’s something refreshing about that … ‘Oddity’ is scary in a way that’s fun — and when was the last time you had fun with a horror movie?” Damian Mc Carthy’s ghost story has a killer opening scene in which a woman, played by Carolyn Bracken, is alone in a secluded house when an unexpected visitor arrives. A year later, we learn the woman was murdered, and now her blind twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken) shows up at the same house, inconveniencing her dead sister’s husband (Gwilym Lee) and his new girlfriend (Caroline Menton). And oh yeah, Darcy has also brought along a giant wooden doll for … reasons. What follows is a delightfully creepy movie loaded with atmosphere, featuring one of the best jump-scares in recent memory. If you long to have fun some Halloween watching a movie about things that go bump in the night, look no further than “Oddity.” 

Streaming on Max, The Criterion Channel.

Death is eternal loneliness in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Pulse,” one of the greatest horror movies ever made. On paper, the premise — which involves ghosts entering the world of the living with some help from the internet (!!) — sounds incredibly silly. But Kurosawa is a filmmaker who understands how to build a sense of dread and milk it for all its worth. Many of his horror movies (see also: “Cure” and the recently released “Chime”) perfectly encapsulate the prevailing feeling of wrongness that seems to inhabit our current times. It’s not anything you can really articulate in words, or quite put your finger one. It’s just the sense that somehow, even in a ultra-modern world where technology easily connects us all, we’re still utterly alone. The film’s story follows a group of college students slowly becoming aware of ghosts seeping into the world — with apocalyptic results. The hopeless and very real feeling of loneliness is at the center of all it all, blanketing “Pulse” with a sense of melancholy that only makes the movie even scarier. There are numerous scenes within this film that will make your blood run cold, including a sequence involving a ghostly woman creeping out of the darkness with strange, unnatural movements. Watch this one late at night with all the lights off, I dare you. 

Streaming on Netflix.

If you, like me, were a kid obsessed with horror, there’s a good chance you grew up with Alvin Schwartz’s wonderful “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” trilogy. Schwartz drew on folklore and urban legends to tell genuinely creepy tales of terror, and the stories were further enhanced by downright terrifying illustrations courtesy of Stephen Gammell. In 2019, director André Øvredal teamed up with Guillermo del Toro to create a film inspired by the books, with pretty swell results. I really dig this movie, although I do have some issues. For one thing, I think an anthology film approach would’ve been better suited to the material. In addition to that, I’m actually pretty annoyed with how the film changes the details of some of the stories (“Harold,” one of the best and scariest tales from the three books, is completely altered here for reasons that absolutely baffle me). That said, the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” movie is a fun bit of gateway horror for younger viewers, filled memorable practical creature effects. 

Set in the 1960s, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” follows a group of kids unleash a curse surrounding a now-dead girl named Sarah Bellows. Sarah was accused of being a witch and died young, leaving behind a book full of scary stories in her old, spooky haunted house. Soon, the horrifying events of the stories begin to come to life, which, yes, is pretty much the same concept behind the “Goosebumps” movie starring Jack Black. While aimed at a young audience, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” tries to be genuinely scary, and that’s commendable — kids need scary movies, damn it!