Curate Your Own Horror Fest With the Best Spooky Movies on Peacock
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You Won’t Be Alone
Peacock streams new episodes of Chucky the day after they premiere on Syfy and USA—and any fans who’ve been lurking ‘round those parts have probably noticed the streamer has an excellent library of horror movies. Here are 10 to get you started at the height of Halloween season.
Prince of Darkness
While John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams is unfortunately worth skipping, Peacock has several of the horror master’s feature films available in its library, including standouts like The Thing and They Live—and one of his most underrated titles, Prince of Darkness. The cast boasts faces familiar to Carpenter fans, as well as a memorable cameo from Alice Cooper, and while the plot—about a jar of liquid evil, or Satan juice, or something along those lines, discovered in a crumbling Los Angeles church basement—doesn’t fully hold together, the movie is its own level of freaky. Read io9's Retro Review here.
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While completely unrelated to the same-named recent Apple TV+ series adapted from the Victor LaValle novel, this 1980 feature does draw on certain similar themes of fatherhood and profound grief. It follows a composer who relocates to a ramshackle mansion after a family tragedy, only to realize his new home is haunted by a restless spirit—with a mystery he’ll need to solve to help everyone under its roof, living and dead, get the closure they desperately need. Oscar winners George C. Scott and Melvyn Douglas help elevate the drama, with Scott in particular using his formidable chops to make his character’s fright feel almost uncomfortably real.
Luther the Geek
From the classy Changeling to the carnival of sleaze that is Luther the Geek—Peacock truly covers all the bases. This ultra low-budget 1989 tale of a man obsessed with carnival geeks—sideshow performers who bite the heads off chickens—who goes on a revolting killing spree is as mean-spirited as they come, though it does boast some eccentricities (the killer clucks like a chicken) and a few scenes of near-unbearable suspense. The fact that it’s available on Peacock should now be considered among its most shocking details.
Prom Night
Two years after her breakout in Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis cemented her “scream queen” status with roles in Carpenter’s The Fog, New Year’s Eve nightmare Terror Train, and this high-school horror saga that owes as much to Carrie as it does any of the slashers that came before. Curtis brings gravitas to her role as a brainy yet popular high schooler whose prom is derailed by a vengeful masked killer—but not before there’s an extended disco dance sequence featuring the future Oscar winner.
The Visit
M. Night Shyamalan does found-footage horror in this surprisingly searing 2015 tale that functioned as a sort of career reset after ill-received releases like After Earth, The Last Airbender, and The Happening. There’s a twist, of course, but there’s also genuine jolts, allowing The Visit to join The Sixth Sense and that one scene in Signs—you know the one—among the director’s scariest creations. Read io9's review here.
Dead & Buried
“Co-written by Dan O’Bannon” is worth its weight in gold when it comes to cult cinema, and yet this 1981 release doesn’t have nearly the fame of O’Bannon’s other associations, including Alien and Return of the Living Dead. Future famous faces Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund and Lisa Blount (who also stars in Prince of Darkness) have supporting roles in this tale, but Oscar winner Jack Albertson (who also played memorable roles in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and The Poseidon Adventure) steals the movie as an eccentric coroner in a small seaside town that’s hiding a big secret.
The Beyond
The Beyond is one of Italian horror master Lucio Fulci’s signature creations, filled with lurid visuals and a plot that doesn’t need to be comprehensible for the viewer to realize that opening a portal to hell is a very, very bad idea (so be careful the next time you’re renovating, say, an old New Orleans hotel)! There are ghouls galore in this one, but the excruciatingly creepy spider scene takes all.
Pieces
Juan Piquer Simón, the Spanish director who gave us easy-to-dismiss but surprisingly enjoyable and stylistically interesting movies like Slugs: The Movie and The Rift, is rightfully best known for Pieces. This 1982 crowd-pleaser has just the right blend of ludicrous plot, uneven acting, relentless energy, jaw-dropping gore, and quotable lines you’ll be shrieking at your friends until the end of time. Bastards!
You Won’t Be Alone
Here’s a recent entry, and a more cerebral one than some of these other picks, but still absolutely worth singling out as one of Peacock’s more offbeat genre selections. Noomi Rapace—a performer notably fond of picking uniquely weird projects—is the most recognizable face in the cast. Goran Stolevski’s 2022 blend of folk horror, body horror, and fairy tale follows a young witch in 19th century Macedonia coming to terms with her shape-shifting powers—while also learning about the human world and rising above her domineering mentor.
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