Do Yourself a Favor, and Scare Yourself Reelgood This Halloween!
We know. It’s kinda weird. But we just can’t help ourselves. It’s Halloween, and we all want to subject ourselves to the creepiest, grossest, most anxiety provoking movies and TV shows we can our bugged out eyeballs on.
So where’s the best streaming destination to get your scare on? Reelgood wondered about that, too. So we analyzed the libraries of each of the major — and not so major —streaming services to find out.
Here’s what we came up with:
Prime-al fear
Amazon is far and away the scary movie leader across its meshed Amazon Prime Video subscription and Freevee free-to-watch catalogs, with a library of 1,066 terrifying terrifying titles.
Within this killer library, there are plenty of recent scary theatrical blockbusters, including M. Knight Shyamalan’s ‘Old,’ which made fun summer trips to the beach a little more dreadful for all of us, and ‘Forever Purge,’ the sequel that tried to make its franchise’s strange, bloody national home invasion holiday a deadly year-round thing.
There are creepy obscure finds, too, including 1988 cult-movie hit ‘Killer Klowns From Outer Space,’ as well as filmmaker William Crane’s early ‘70s “blaxploitation” classic ‘Blacula.’
And there are plenty of supposedly scary titles you’ve never heard of … and might just scroll on by, including 2012 ultra-low-budget Canadian film ‘Jurassic Shark’ and 1982’s more sexploitation-oriented ‘Slumber Party Massacre 2.”
Indeed, of the vast bounty of horror titles Reelgood found within the cobwebs of the Amazon vault, only 134 of Amazon horror titles, just 12.5%, have a “quality” score of at least “6” on IMDb’s 1-10 scoring system based on 300 user ratings. And of those titles, only 9 have a “high quality” rating, meaning an IMDb score of 7.5 or higher.
Shudder to think…
The “scaring percentage” goes way up on AMC Networks’ streaming platforms AMC+ and Shudder.
According to Reelgood’s scary October plunge into movie darkness, AMC+ has the second biggest horror library with 631 titles overall, 184 ranking as “quality” and another 12 ranking as “high quality.”
Not only does AMC+ deliver the full episodic range of ‘The Walking Dead’ TV series and its associated spin-offs, the $8.99-a-month subscription service also features a robust lineup of bonafide horror movie classics, including the original ‘Hellraiser,’ ‘Halloween,’ ‘The Thing,’ ‘Children of the Corn’ and many more.
Indeed, AMC+ is a go-to Scary Season platform in that it includes access to Shudder, the niche horror-genre speciality service. If you just want the scary stuff and can do without classic series including ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad,’ as well as AMC gems like IFC Films, Shudder offers the most robust lineup of quality scare fare and is available as a standalone service. By itself, Shudder is priced at $5.99, but it features a more curated cross-section of the AMC+ horror catalog, listing 418 titles, with 124 ranked as “quality” and six ranked as “high-quality.” And yes, Shudder also includes the full ‘Walking Dead’ franchise.
Peacock, meanwhile, flaunts its own rich selection of frights, with 408 scary movies, many of them recent and semi-recent notable theatrical release, including ‘Get Out,’ ‘The Black Phone’ and John Carpenter’s 2018 ‘Halloween’ reboot.
Big subscription platforms like Hulu (191 terrifying titles) and Max (163) are also good ghost-and-goblin options. Notably, however, the biggest and priciest streamer of them all, Netflix, isn’t the place to go to get those clammy-cold hands and that pounding in your chest.
Netflix supports a horror lineup of just 149 scary titles, according to Reelgood’s audit, and only 42 of those rank as “quality” or “high-quality.”
