The best Halloween films and shows on Netflix UK

Creator: Charlie Brooker
Cast: Jon Hamm, Hayley Atwell, Rupert Everett, Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Forget ghosts, witches and vampires, the real world is much more terrifying than the supernatural. Charlie Brooker’s dark and disturbing TV series will change the way you look at the world around you, specifically the technology we’re all hooked on. You’ll end up questioning reality and morality – and feeling pretty damn scared of your phone.  

Creator: Mike Flanagan
Cast: Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas

Adapting Shirley Jackson’s already much-adapted 1959 novel into a streaming miniseries seems, on paper, like a pointless endeavour. In practice, it’s one of Netflix’s standout horror projects. What largely makes it work is the twin-timeline structure: one documenting the supernatural event itself, the other the long-tail after-effects on the family who experienced it. Both Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino have sung the show’s praises, which should be endorsement enough. 

Creators: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
Cast: Winona Ryder, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard

If you haven’t lost a week bingewatching all four seasons of Netflix’s spookily retro TV show, Halloween is the perfect time to get hooked. Inspired by ET, Stephen King and all things ’80s, the story started as a group of kids in search for their missing friend in small town Indiana, and has gone in all sorts of wild ‒and increasingly horrifying ‒ directions since.

Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, Tony Moran

He couldn’t enter your dreams like Freddy Krueger and never went into space like Jason Voorhees, but Michael Myers has turned out to be the most enduring screen monster of the past 40 years. Directors from David Gordon Green to Rob Zombie have tried rebooting the character, but Carpenter got it perfect out the gate: he’s a blank void of evil, driven to kill simply because that’s what he’s meant to do. Having Jamie Lee Curtis, as a studious babysitter turned definitive ‘final girl’, also helps.

Director: Edgar Wright
Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Bill Nighy

Zomcoms existed before Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg made one, but Shaun of the Dead exudes such love for the genre they’re spoofing that it ends up one of the all-time great zombie movies itself. It’s also a heartfelt ode to friendship, family and the things we hold closest when calamity strikes (ie the local boozer). But most of all, it’s just extraordinarily funny. The last stand at the pub, with Queen playing incongruously on the jukebox? Perfection. 

Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss

It made an entire generation scared of the ocean and forever smeared the reputation of the great white shark, but Spielberg’s inaugural blockbuster is still absolutely perfect after all these years – and damn scary, too. Admit it: you still jump when poor Ben Gardner makes his surprise cameo during Hooper’s underwater reconnaissance mission. And the iconic ‘you’re gonna need a bigger boat’ scene, where get our first good look at ol’ Bruce? Forget the ocean – you’ll think twice about getting into the bathtub.

Creator: Mike Flanagan
Cast: Kate Siegel, Hamish Linklater, Zach Gilford

A critical and cult favourite upon release, this unsettling miniseries focuses on a young man returning to his small, vaguely New England-y island hometown after a four-year prison stint for manslaughter, who arrives at the same time as an enigmatic priest – which happens to be when strange happenings begin going down. The show unfurls slowly, but stay with it, and it’ll stay with you.   

Directors: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Cast: Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird

An instant addition to the Australian film canon, the impressive debut from Adelaide’s Philippou brothers involves arrogant teens messing with forces beyond their control, but the movie has more on its mind than just piling up bodies. It’s really a study of grief, centred on a 17-year-old (Wilde, excellent) whose means of dealing with her mother’s death involves willful demonic possession – which, it turns out, is not a particularly effective coping mechanism.

Director: Leigh Janiak
Cast: Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Gillian Jacobs

If Stranger Things sounds a little too intense, this adaptation of Goosebumps author RL Stine’s teen-focused book series is, despite the name, a few degrees lower in fear factor, and has a similar premise. (It even shares cast members Sadie Sink and Maya Hawke.) Spread across multiple decades, the trilogy follows a group of kids attempting to figure out why their small US town is cursed, and what they can do to bring it to an end.

Creators: Alfred Gough, Miles Millar
Cast: Jenna Ortega, Gwendoline Christie 

Every few decades the cobwebs get blown off The Addams Family, and this reboot may just be the coolest makeover the ooky-spooky franchise has ever received. All credit for that goes to the magnetic Jenna Ortega as the titular sullen teen, who goth-danced into 150 million homes, making it the second-most watched English-language show on Netflix. To be fair, she had the Cramps, and Christina Ricci had MC Hammer – it’s not an even competition.