This October, Peacock will be going all out during Halloween season with "Peacoctober." The streaming service will be releasing original content such as Unidentified with Demi Lovato and Snoop and Martha's Very Tasty Halloween along with making countless horror and Halloween-themed movies and TV episodes available.
With so many horror movies coming to Peacock at once, it's going to be very difficult to cherry pick the best options from the long list. So here are some of the best horror films the service will have available this October.
There have been many cinematic interpretations of Count Dracula over the past century, but Bela Lugosi's turn from the 1931 Universal film Dracula remains the most iconic. Although Dracula doesn't have the most lavish production, nor have much music played throughout, it's still essential viewing for horror historians and vampire fans. Lugosi's performance as the Count is still mesmerizing nine decades later and transcends a decent adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel into a classic.
No genre has inspired as many sequels as horror, but 1935's The Bride of Frankenstein is not only one of the genre's best sequels, it's one of the best horror movies -- period. Four years after his star-making performance as The Monster in Frankenstein, Boris Karloff returns and this time has the ability to speak -- a key trait of The Creature from Mary Shelley's famous novel. A part from the book that was suggested but didn't come to fruition was the potential of The Creature to have a companion, a storyline that was the main focus of the film sequel. Actor Elsa Lanchester actually plays Shelley herself in the prologue and then the titular bride in the infamous climax.
If there's one movie to thank for the zombie subgenre becoming a cultural phenomenon, it's George A. Romero's groundbreaking 1968 masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. This small-budget feature was the little engine that could and perfected the zombie apocalypse formula that would be used for decades to come. It also broke new ground in having an African-American as the main protagonist of the film, something that wasn't commonplace in horror films at the time. Actor Duane Jones made his character Ben as one of the genre's most memorable heroes.
Although Halloween gets credit for pioneering the slasher genre, it may not have existed at all had it not been for Black Christmas, in which a mysterious killer given the nickname "Billy" invades a college sorority house during Christmas break and takes most of them out one by one. Bob Clark's film provided the blueprint of a slasher with an unstoppable killer who can't be seen but whose presence is felt constantly, leaving behind many victims and narrowing it down to the final girl.
Friday the 13th is one of the longest running horror franchises of all time, and the mascot for the series is the large, hockey-mask wearing and machete wielding Jason Voorhees. So when watching the original Friday the 13th from 1980, that iconic appearance is notably absent and replaced by someone less intimidating, but just as sinister: his mother. Somewhat of a role-reversal on Norman Bates and his mother's relationship from Psycho, Jason's mother serves to avenge her son's presumed death by drowning at Camp Crystal Lake by going after the camp's new inhabitants.
Horror and comedy may seem like opposite genres, but when combined they can actually make something endlessly rewatchable. That was the case with An American Werewolf in London, about two American college students who are exploring Britain but suddenly encounter a werewolf and deal with the consequences. The MVP of the movie is makeup artist Rick Baker, whose work on An American Werewolf is still stunning to watch today and a big reason why he's synonymous with horror makeup in general.
Before A Nightmare on Elm Street, the villain of a slasher was usually a silent superhuman, but that all changed with the talkative and superpowered being Freddy Krueger. Writer and director Wes Craven was inspired to create Krueger and Elm Street after reading a story in the LA Times about a teenager dying in his sleep. The paranoia of trying to stay awake and avoid the all-power dream monster that is Krueger spawned one of the definitive '80s slashers.
Saw is arguably the most popular horror franchise to begin in the 21st century, and a big reason why is because they knocked it out of the park with the first entry. Unlike the franchise's sequels, which relied heavily on torture gimmicks until Spiral came out this year, the original Saw is more of a mystery nail-biter that culminates in a shocking ending. It's also interesting to see actor Cary Elwes -- best known as Westley in The Princess Bride -- play one of the two men fighting for their lives in Jigsaw's twisted game.
It's odd to recommend a film where the less said about the movie's plot the better, but that's exactly the case with the horror cult smash The Cabin in the Woods. While released in 2011, this was filmed a couple of years before Chris Hemsworth broke into mega-stardom as Thor. What starts out as a standard horror setup of a group of young friends traveling to a cabin in the middle of the woods for a quick getaway abruptly changes genres as it goes along. By the end it feels like a totally different movie, but better than anyone could have expected.
The trope of teenagers suffering violent consequences for having sexual intercourse seemed like a tired horror cliché by the 2010s, but It Follows managed to take a more mature and progressive spin on the trope. When 19-year-old Jay Height has what was thought to be harmless sex, she later gets odd visions and the sense that something is following her. Director David Robert Mitchell was inspired to create It Follows after receiving recurring nightmares about being constantly stalked by a predator.
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