With Halloween on the horizon, horror movies are more relevant now than any other time of the year. On that day, a long list of horror classics – from Phantom of the Opera to Pumkinhead – will be on people’s streaming lists. Some, though, may be looking to enjoy a month’s worth of horror content to make the most of Halloween season.
For that reason, it makes sense to look to some of the great horror movie franchises that we’ve seen over the last several decades, or perhaps some that have slipped under the radar. Multiple horror movies experienced so much success and long-term popularity that they’ve yielded numerous sequels – of varying quality.
All things considered, there’s no shortage of long-running movie sagas to keep viewers entertained over the next weeks in the lead-up to Halloween, particularly since there’s an abundance of streaming services with rich catalogs of horror favorites.
5
Insidious
For those who enjoy the films in The Conjuring franchise, a perfect alternative is the Insidious series, which is also a creation of the critically acclaimed director, James Wan. Insidious comprises five movies and all are available on streaming; the first three are on HBO Max, the fourth film is Tubi, and the fifth and final installment is on Hulu.
Similar to Wan’s significantly more famous horror franchise, Insidious deals heavily with exorcisms and hauntings perpetrated by demonic spirits. The series is built around a psychic named Elise Rainer, who is depicted at multiple different periods of her life, with her starting out as an old woman and later installments going back to incidents she looked into during her youth.
The Insidious movies, including those made without Wan’s involvement, have their fair share of good jump scares and some truly menacing demons that aren’t easily forgotten, not to mention some surprising twists and turns.
4
The Exorcist
Four of the six Exorcist movies can be streamed online, thanks to HBO Max and Tubi, and that includes the original trilogy that ran between 1973 and 1990. The first movie, which focuses on an effort to purge a young child of a sinister, demonic spirit, features some of the most unsettling scenes in the history of the horror genre.
The Exorcist also had the extremely rare honor of being a horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, which says a lot about its quality. Admittedly, its sequels don’t live up to the lofty expectations set by their predecessors, but are more entertaining than their critical reception implies. The third movie, for its part, excels at balancing suspense and drama.
3
Paranormal Activity
All seven movies in the Paranormal Activity series are available to watch on Paramount +. Running from 2009 to 2021, the Paranormal Activity series are “found footage” films that revolve around psychics trying to help families rid their homes of demonic or ghostly presences.
While their investigations into hauntings regularly take them to different homes, the series does have a consistent and overarching villain that bridges all the stories together. The demonic entity called Tobi is the main characters’ principal antagonist.
This particular format may not be for everyone, but the combination of angles and cutaways has provided the franchise with a multitude of unique and innovative opportunities when it comes to jump scares over the years.
Naturally, it was difficult for this approach to remain fresh across seven movies, but the franchise maintained its ability to scare audiences longer than most, with Paranormal Activity 3 arguably being the scariest of them all.
2
Scream
The Scream series is home to one of the most recognizable horror villains of the 21st century – Ghostface. The series officially started in the late 1990s, but has been quite prominent throughout the 2000s, 2010s, and now the 2010s. Scream now encompasses six movies, with a seventh on the way on February 26. In the meantime, the first six can be watched during the Halloween season, as they’re all streaming on Peacock.
Scream was built on the premise of a masked serial killer known as “Ghostface” methodically hunting down high school students in a gruesome style that called back to classic slasher films like Halloween and Friday the 13th. Grisly killings and betrayals are key themes of all the Scream movies, as there’s always an element of mistrust when it comes to the cast of characters, which could hide the killer or an accomplice.
As the story develops from film to film, so does the cast. It was originally predicated on teenagers, but the main characters grow up with the franchise. And Scream has certainly been willing to kill off characters, allowing it to maintain a high degree of suspense and an ever-evolving cast to support its main protagonist, Neve Campbell’s Sidey Prescott.
All the Scream movies are currently streaming on Disney+.
1
Universal Monsters
In the 1940s, Universal Pictures produced a slew of black-and-white horror movies for creatures like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy, who have since become genre legends. The four monsters became the pillars of Universal’s horror initiative during this era. The Invisible Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon are also a part of it.
Universal was way ahead of its time in regards to how it utilized its creatures. Not unlike what Marvel and DC have done with their characters in the 21st century, Universal effectively created a shared universe for its creatures, allowing them to appear in crossovers, and even fight each other, which is what happened in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Dracula.
What’s more, these films enjoy a sense of continuity and a certain level of consistency when it comes to the actors. For instance, Lon Chaney, Jr. played the Wolf Man in five different films, four of which were all clearly set in the same continuity, with each covering a chapter in his story and advancing his character arc to a degree that was unprecedented in the 1940s.
Multiple installments in the classic horror franchise – retroactively known as the Universal Monsters series – can be streamed on Peacock, and make for perhaps the ideal binge-watch for Halloween month.
