Looking to settle in with a good movie? Me too. That's why I've pored over release schedules to bring you the best original and new-to-streaming movies you can watch on Netflix, Prime, Max, Hulu, and other streaming platforms this week.
It's October, so horror flicks are leading the pack, including M. Night Shyamalan-produced Caddo Lake on Max, Hulu's kinder-horror original Mr. Crocket, and big-ass-spider movie Sting. If that's too scary, you can check rom-com Lonely Planet on Netflix, ya baby.
Caddo Lake
HBO original movie Caddo Lake tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of an 8-year-old girl at spooky Caddo Lake. The search uncovers a series of past deaths and disappearances that shakes the girl's family to their core. Directed by Celine Held and Logan George, Caddo Lake was produced by horror auteur M. Night Shyamalan.
Where to stream: Max
Mr. Crocket
Set in the 1990s, Mr. Crocket digs into the horror of childhood and the weirdness of kids' TV. The title character is the star of Mr. Crocket's World, a kiddie TV show that hides a dark secret: It seems the host, Mr. Crocket, likes climbing out of the television, into your living room, and taking your children. The mother of a victim is forced to face her own demons to rescue her child from this TV-based monster. Maybe it's a metaphor?
Where to stream: Hulu
Sting
If you want to confront your deeply buried (or surface-level) arachnophobia, check out Sting; it features one scary-ass spider. Alyla Browne plays Charlotte, a rebellious tween who discovers a tiny spider and raises it as a pet, but the little guy doesn't stop growing and soon becomes a huge flesh-eating monstrosity that targets her family. If you're a fan of creature-feature flicks that don't take themselves too seriously, well, here's one of them.
Where to stream: Hulu
Lonely Planet
Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth star in a thoughtful-but-steamy movie with a May/December romance at its center. Dern plays Katherine, a novelist who travels to Morocco to get over her writers' block. Love is the last thing she's looking for, but when she's thrown together with Owen (Hemsworth) on a roadtrip across North Africa, it finds her anyway. Lonely Planet is the perfect movie if you want to squeeze just a little more heat out of summer before autumn gets too chilly.
Where to stream: Netflix
See for Me
This is a good month for taut, high-concept thrillers on Netflix. See for Me is a home invasion movie in which Skyler Davenport plays Sophie Scott, a blind woman who is cat sitting at an isolated home. When murderous thieves break in, Sophie's only hope comes via an app designed to help sight-impaired people by letting strangers see through their camera phones. Sophie's survival depends on letting a stranger from across the continent be her eyes.
Where to stream: Netflix
Tuesday (2023)
Put on your crying shoes for this one (if you don't have special crying shoes, I recommend something plush and soothing). In Tuesday, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays a single mother whose teenage daughter has a terminal illness. Death and dying are given the magical realism treatment, as Death itself shows up in the form of a sentient parrot. There aren't many quirky movies about the death of a child, but there is now at least one of them.
Where to stream: Max
Last week's picks
It’s What’s Inside
Freaky Friday, 17 Again, Rob Schneider's The Hot Chick; I'll watch literally any movie where people switch bodies, so I'm totally jazzed for It's What's Inside. The high concept in this sci-fi/horror/comedy is a group of friends at a pre-wedding party all switch bodies. There's some machine or something; doesn't matter. Body-switching movies are often critically maligned, but this one is even getting decent reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
Where to stream: Netflix
Salem’s Lot
This reimagining of Stephen King's 1975 novel takes us back to the haunted town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, which has a long-running problem with vampires. Lewis Pullman plays Ben Mears, a writer who returns to his hometown to learn about himself. Instead, he learns that a blood-sucking freak and his familiar just bought a notoriously haunted house in town.
Where to stream: Max
House of Spoils
If The Bear had a female lead and was a horror movie, it might be something like House of Spoils. Ariana DeBose plays a hungry young chef who scores a potentially career-making gig: the chance to run her own high-end restaurant. While her spot has the usual new eatery hurdles—a remote location, a less-than-perfect-staff, a questionable investor—the biggest problem is supernatural. It seems the "farm" part of her farm-to-table menu comes from a witch's garden, and haunted food makes a Michelin star much harder to earn.
Where to stream: Prime
Doctor Sleep (2019)
If you don't judge 2019's Doctor Sleep against 1981's The Shining, it's an effective, scary, and interesting movie that somehow manages to be respectful to both Kubrick's movie and King's novel. It's one of those sequels that feels like seeing relatives at a family reunion: "There's the elevator full of blood! There are the spooky twins saying 'hello, Danny! Oh my god! Room 237!" The "new elements" are pretty good too.
Where to stream: Max
Hold Your Breath
In this psychological horror film, Sarah Paulson plays Margaret Bellum, a mother trying to guide her children through the dustbowl disaster in Oklahoma in the 1930s. If the Great Depression wasn't scary enough, the Bellums are visited by "The Grey Man," a supernatural entity that travels through the dust and causes its victims to commit horrific crimes. Hold Your Breath pits a mother against the forces of nature, evil, and madness, just in time for Halloween!
Where to stream: Hulu
The Platform 2
The Platform was pure cinematic madness and this sequel looks like more of the same. Like the original, The Platform 2 is a horror/sci fi movie set in a tower prison where the people who live on the top floor get an opulent spread of food every day. The inmates on the floor below get what's left over, and the inmates below them get the left-over left-overs, and so on, down to the starving wretches hundreds of levels deep who are killing each other over table scraps. It's not the kind of story that begs for a sequel, but I'm still curious where it's going.
Where to stream: Netflix
Nightmare on Elm Street mania!
It's not October in my house without a screening of 1984's Nightmare on Elm Street and 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. This year, I'm having a Freddy Krueger festival because Max is streaming the first five Elm Street movies, plus Freddy vs. Jason. Sadly, the final movie of the original run, 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is not available on Max. Happily, the 2010 remake isn't either.
Here are all the Elm Street movies streaming on Max in October:
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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
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A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
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A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
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Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
Where to stream: Max
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