SCARY PICKS

Bad Hair Remind Like List
A woman's new weave takes on a life of its own and terrorizes all who cross its path in this Hulu original horror-comedy from Dear White People's Justin Simien. "This movie builds its fright night around the oppression Black women face in the form of discrimination against their natural hair. But despite the potentially heavy (or heavy-handed) material, Bad Hair is self-consciously and pleasingly campy, and it delivers a new cinematic monster: the sew-in weave," writes Teo Bugbee for the New York Times.
Hulu

The Fly
No matter how many times you plead with Jeff Goldblum to stay out of his little science pod and just go have a romantic picnic with his girlfriend, he does it anyway, and he becomes a disgusting human-sized bug. This '80s remake of the 1956 horror sci-fi, the progenitor of the famous line "Be afraid. Be very afraid," is terrifying, but Geena Davis's pantsuits are inspiring. 
Hulu, Amazon Prime, and other platforms

Ganja & Hess Past Event Like List
In Bill Gunn’s classic 1973 Blaxploitation horror, the protagonists combat racist cultural stereotypes through vampirism after Dr. Hess Green, an anthropologist (played by Night of the Living Dead’s Duane Jones), gets accidentally stabbed with an ancient cursed dagger by his assistant. "If horror reflects our terrors and traumas, it can also embody our best hopes—albeit sometimes in a negative cast," wrote former Stranger staffer Joule Zelman. 
Hollywood Theater (streaming)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Just when you thought there was no gas left in the tank of revisionist vampire cinema, along comes A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a tale billed as “the first Iranian vampire western.” Though it’s unlikely to become a crowded field, this black-and-white Farsi-language gem is rich in allusive metaphor (blood-oil-sex-religion) and deep, dark texture. First-time writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour comes by her genre bona fides honestly, via a palette of cinematic and literary influences—Jim Jarmusch most strikingly, but also Leos Carax, Jim Thompson, and Raymond Chandler—not usually seen in horror films of any nationality. And while Amanpour doesn’t deliver the visceral scare factor of Let the Right One In, she does manage to out-Jarmusch Jarmusch’s recent vampire inversion, The Only Lovers Left Alive. In the opening scene, a lean, rockabilly-styled kid rescues a stray cat and walks languidly through the sun-blanched streets of the deserted desert town Bad City. As he crosses a small bridge, oil derricks pumping savagely in the distance, you only casually notice the ravine full of corpses below his feet, and understand that you’re in for a smart, super-creepy film that demands and rewards close attention. SEAN NELSON
Hollywood Theater (streaming)

GuignolFest
The 12th annual GuignolFest, Portland's original horror movie contest, will return with "deranged, bloody designs on burning indelible fear onto our city’s vulnerable retinas" with short horror films, all made in just 72 hours. 
Clinton Street Theater (streaming)

The Haunting of Bly Manor Remind Like List
Fans of 2018's truly terrifying The Haunting of Hill House will ease into this new anthology about a ghost-ridden manor, likewise inspired by Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. 
Netflix

Memories of Murder
Three detectives search for South Korea's most notorious serial killer in Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho's (Parasite) chilling true-crime film. 
Cinema 21

Monsterland
Rooting for the vulnerable human in the horror movie is usually standard procedure, but Hulu's new psychological horror anthology series puts creepy characters—blood-drooling monsters, zombies, vampires—in the role of the underdog. Based on Nathan Ballingrud's 2013 short story collection North American Lake Monsters and adapted for TV by Mary Laws (The Neon Demon), this looks like a fun and freaky diversion from your usual Halloweentime binge. 
Hulu

Nightmare on Elm Street Past Event Like List
The Wes Craven original about a man named Freddy with a stripy shirt, funny hat, gross face, and scissor hands who visits you in your dreams.
99W Drive-In (Friday-Sunday); also streaming on Fubo

Possessor Remind Like List
Definitely leave your impressionable offspring at home for this private in-person screening of writer/director Brandon Cronenberg's terrifying-looking new sci-fi thriller, which follows a corporate assassin who takes control of people's bodies using brain-implant technology. We're terrified of what this "uncut" version has in store. 
Cinema 21 and Living Room Theaters (private screenings)

The Shining Past Event Like List
Charles Mudede's aversion to Stanley Kubrick films notwithstanding, The Shining towers over every film made before or since about hauntings, possessed children, beleaguered wives, and psychotically murderous ax-swinging lunatics. (And there are a lot.) There's something beautifully, coldly opulent about its portrait of American violence, with Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott's inexorable tracking shots rushing us toward overwhelming evil.
Shudder and Amazon Prime Video

Us Past Event Like List
The first thing that flashes on-screen in Us, from Get Out writer/director/producer Jordan Peele, is a creepy little tidbit of information: There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the United States with “no known purpose at all.” The anxiety that line triggers—that anything could be happening right under our feet—courses throughout Us. Us is a movie about doppelgängers—our evil twins that, according to folklore, must be killed, lest they kill us and assume our identities. But Us is also about shadows emerging from their own darkness; the illusory depths of mirrors; the fear we project onto the “other” instead of examining our own brutality; and, more abstractly, the barbaric history of slavery and mass genocide that America has unsuccessfully tried to bury, how the country is actively destroying itself, and what it’ll look like when its chickens finally come home to roost. CIARA DOLAN
HBO Max

VILLAINY: H.H. Holmes' Own Story Past Event Like List
The Portland Horror Film Festival presents this exclusive screening of John Strysik's original play about the crimes of America’s first known serial killer, H.H. Holmes. The playwright will join the Hollywood Theatre for a virtual Q&A after Friday's screening. 
Hollywood Theatre (streaming)
Friday-Saturday

The Witch Past Event Like List
"If you like your horror smart, slow-burning, and suffused with allegorical dread, then you can’t do better than this dark folktale of colonialism, religion, family, and nature gone amok in 1630s New England," wrote Sean Nelson about Robert Eggers's excellent 2015 horror The Witch.
HBO Max and Kanopy

SPOOKY PICKS

A Clockwork Orange
Remind Like List A ruthless, violence-addicted gang-rapist is transformed into a docile, brainwashed member of society in this film by Stanley Kubrick.
Netflix
Opening Saturday

Collide-O-Scope: Best of Halloween Past Event Like List
Spend the holiday experiencing a delightfully freaky, swirly montage of music and mayhem made of found-footage phantasmagoria from the archives of Collide-O-Scope's past Halloween screenings.
EverOut
Friday only

The Craft Past Event Like List
Chase Burns once proclaimed, "There are many reasons you are/should be/will be obsessed with The Craft, Andrew Fleming's cult '90s-era film about telekinetic wannabe witches. I will list four of them. One, Nancy's studded choker. Iconic! Two, Neve Campbell's fake cries. Horrible! Three, Laura Lizzie losing her hair for being a racist piece of shit. Satisfying! Four, LIGHT AS A FEATHER, STIFF AS A BOARD!" You can absolutely stick to the classic and forgo the reboot. 
Amazon Prime Video

Extra Ordinary Past Event Like List
This Irish supernatural comedy pits a middle-aged driving instructor with underused magical powers against a failed rock star (Will Forte) who's made a deal with the devil. Former Stranger staffer Leilani Polk wrote, "Everything about this movie is done subtly right. The vague retro atmosphere, the quasi-horror soundtrack, the mildly distorted PSA-like videotape breaks—it could be the late 1970s or early '80s à la Stranger Things, though the era is never actually specified. The unexpected plot, the hilariously gross comedy—Extra Ordinary doesn't feel like it's trying too hard to get laughs, but manages to draw them out with regularity—and, most importantly, the excellent casting." 
Kanopy and Amazon Prime Video

Hubie Halloween Remind Like List
In an unexpected but ultimately fine move following Uncut Gems, Adam Sandler puts on a slapstick lisp and rides around town on his bicycle protecting his Salem neighbors from a Steve Buscemi werewolf and other small-town Halloween threats. 
Netflix

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown Remind Like List
The Peanuts gang disputes the myth of the Great Pumpkin, a benevolent gourd who gives candy to good children on Halloween, in this timeless 1960s special. Keep it on loop in your house to set that cozy fall mood. 
Apple TV+

The Nightmare Before Christmas Past Event Like List
A permanent fixture in the Halloween canon, Tim Burton's animated musical classic invents a fateful merge of All Hallows' Eve with its cheery winter counterpart, inspiring the pumpkin king—who genuinely wants to scare people but has become tired of his routine—to darken the spirit of Christmas by kidnapping Santa Claus.  
99W Drive-In (Friday-Sunday); also streaming on Disney+

Over the Garden Wall Past Event Like List
Two brothers, Wirt and Greg, are lost in a strange forest and are trying to get home. Their Peter Pan-like outfits hark back to olden times, but their modern vernacular suggests otherwise. It all becomes clear eventually, after encounters with a village of people with pumpkins for heads, talking bluebirds, raspy-voiced highwaymen, child-gobbling witches, several frogs, and at least two songs that will be stuck in your head forever. This Cartoon Network series is a beloved autumn rewatch for kids and adults alike. 
Hulu

The Rocky Horror Picture Show Past Event Like List
Rocky Horror star Tim Curry, whose fishnetted gams could make even a literal potato question its sexuality, will be joined by his former co-stars Barry Bostwick and Nell Campbell for a livestreamed screening of everyone's favorite picture show to benefit the Wisconsin Democrats. Expect live music from the likes of the Dresden Dolls, Miss Peppermint, Eiza González, Josh Gad, and Ben Barne.
Saturday only

SLAY Past Event Like List
From the freaks who brought you the HUMP! and SPLIFF Film Festivals comes something new, fun, and totally terrifying: SLAY! SLAY calls for filmmakers to send in homemade short horror films—eight minutes or less—capturing what scares them most. From classic ghost stories and slasher films to dystopian cults and political nightmares, SLAY dares you to show us your darkest fears. We know reality is scarier than fiction right now. Let’s purge our fears together.
EverOut
Saturday only

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Remind Like List
Sweeney Todd has everything—rape, murder, cannibalism, more murder. Tim Burton's film of Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical is by no means perfect; Helena Bonham Carter can't sing, for starters. But you couldn't ask for a better antidote to compulsory holiday cheer than Burton's nightmare vision. London is a grim and grisly grindhouse. It's hard to argue with Johnny Depp's Sweeney when he decides that the "lives of the wicked should be made brief, for the rest of us death will be a relief," or Mrs. Lovett's suggestion that they're going to "save a lot of graves, do a lot of relatives favors." DAN SAVAGE
Hulu
Opening Saturday

The Witches Remind Like List
If Guillermo del Toro and Robert Zemeckis stood at opposite ends of a movie and pulled as hard as they could in opposite directions, the output would likely not be dissimilar from the new adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, which has one of the most haunting, heartfelt, spellbinding first acts of a film I’ve ever seen before it dissolves into a generic cartoon. I’m glad it exists, I’m glad I watched, I’m glad to recommend it; but I wish my brain weren't so distracted by questions about how such a gorgeous film could derail so completely at the halfway mark. The first hour is an astounding improvement upon the original novel, which I didn’t believe was possible. Updating the setting to 1968 Alabama with a predominantly Black cast is an inspired idea. It creates an entirely new intent for the story, which at its outset is about human responses to unfairness and conflicting impulses to despair and to endure. A critique of American racism and class lurks as close to the surface as possible, and the movie’s strength is in what goes unsaid between weary, knowing glances, as well as some arresting touches of horror. Then the movie climaxes with a joke about a rat biting Stanley Tucci on the dick. And I don’t want to linger on this critique, but the cartoon elements of the film are distractingly uncanny, with every creature animated like someone pushing jello blobs through a pile of hair. Anne Hathaway, incidentally, is incredible. MATT BAUME
HBO Max

IN THEATERS: NON-HALLOWEEN