October gets spooky at the movies with Michael Myers, the Addams Family, and Venom

The multiplex was a ghost town last Halloween. One year later, it’s bursting with Hollywood horror offerings. Even if one excludes the bona fide fright fare (including another Michael Myers rampage, a seventh round of Paranormal Activity, and a ’90s themed entry in the V/H/S franchise), this October boasts monsters of super-heroism, super-villainy, and organized crime. Meanwhile, those who find something a little too scary about the thought of returning to a theater just yet can get their seasonal fix of thrills and chills from Shudder, Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount+. Keep reading to find out everything that’s coming to theaters and a (haunted) house near you this spooky season.

For better or worse, the felt like a transmission from a different, lumpier universe of comic-book movies—or maybe just from the days before Marvel smoothed out all the idiosyncratic bumps in the superhero cinema formula. That’s true, too, of this sequel directed by mo-cap master Andy Serkis, which runs just 90 minutes, a fraction of the length of your average, present-day superhero spectacular. Tom Hardy reprises the role of parasite-hosting investigative journalist Eddie Brock, pitted this time against escaped serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) after the madman bonds with his own alien symbiote. Our reviewer a “faster, funnier, and still underwhelming” entry in the Spidey-adjacent franchise.

Fourteen years after he waved goodbye to his most famous creation with a basket of onion rings, a Journey song on the jukebox, and an abrupt cut to black, David Chase returns to mob-controlled Jersey with a ’60s- and ’70s-set prequel. Michael Gandolfini steps in to play a teenage Tony Soprano, the role his late father originated on HBO, though the future mob boss is just one character in a sprawling ensemble that includes Alessandro Nivola as hotheaded kingpin Dickie Moltisanti, Leslie Odom Jr. as a rival gangster, and Ray Liotta as two members of the extended Family. Expect cameos galore (the film is a Muppet Babies parade of de-wrinkled Sopranos regulars) but precious little of the dark-comic personality that propelled Chase’s series to the all-time upper echelons of televised drama.

Despite the Snoop Dogg lyrics and trite lessons about being yourself, the that hit the big screen two years ago was altogether okay. Let’s hope, for the sake of America’s accompanying parents, that the same can be said for this inevitable sequel, which reunites the directors and main voice cast, and sends the ooky-spooky TV clan on a cross-country road trip. The inclusion of a Progressive ad and Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’” in the latest trailer are less than encouraging on that front.

Five years after her cannibal coming-of-age debut premiered in the Cannes sidebar festival Critics’ Week, French writer-director Julia Ducournau picked up the main fest’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or, for her sophomore feature. Lest one think she’s gone soft to earn acclaim, Titane is an even wilder ride: a body-horror whatsit about the strange relationship that develops between a deeply damaged dancer (Agathe Rousselle) and an almost equally fucked-up fireman (Vincent Lindon). That a sex scene with a car is among the less shocking elements here should give readers some sense of what to expect from the outré sensation Spike Lee and his jury applauded back in July.

Part , part farm league for Blumhouse’s theatrical division, the Amazon fright package Welcome To The Blumhouse enters its second season of streaming thrillers. This year’s crop includes Bingo Hell, about a group of senior citizens who fight back against a sinister gambler played by Richard Brake, a.k.a. The Night King; the New Orleans-set vampire thriller Black As Night; ’70s supernatural period piece Madres; and The Manor, a gothic ghost story starring the legendary Barbara Hershey. The films were, on average, neither particularly scary nor otherwise effective; at least the movies lumped together in this second round actually appear to all qualify as horror.

If this summer’s didn’t satiate your appetite for 1994-specific horror, the V/H/S series has returned to scratch that nostalgic itch further with five seasonally appropriate found-footage shorts set in the year of the white bronco, Forrest Gump, and the Power Macintosh. David Bruckner, who made the best segment of the , wrote all five stories; the directing team this time includes Simon Barrett, Jennifer Reeder, Ryan Prows, Chloe Okuno, and Timo Tjahjanto (who co-directed this series’ finest entry, the ’s insanely intense “Safe Haven”). At the very least, the whole thing has to be better than the previous installment, .

Patrick Brice, writer-director of small-scale chronicles of stalking (the ) and social awkwardness (), takes a crack at Netflix retro-horror with There’s Someone Inside Your House, which appears to revive the teen-slasher-whodunit form of the late ’90s. (There’s even an joke in the trailer.) Sydney Park from anchors the teen (or, okay, teen-ish) cast, playing a recent transplant to small-town Nebraska whose classmates are pursued by a masked killer. But will viewers in a post- world even accept a scary movie without a minimum of 35 expensive soundtrack cuts?

The undying James Bond franchise reaches its 25th entry, a year and a half later than originally planned, with what Daniel Craig swears will be his final turn in the tuxedo. (He means it this time, folks.) It’s another Bond-returns-to-action story, with a retired 007 reentering the field to help his replacement (Lashana Lynch) stop a dangerous new terrorist adversary (Rami Malek). Lea Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Ralph Fiennes, and Christoph Waltz all reprise their roles for the closing chapter of this atypically serialized, continuity-minded era of the superspy’s history. It may not be the most exciting of Bond movies, but it’s definitely among the most sentimental—and at a little shy of three hours, the longest.

As Werner Herzog recently said about a certain beloved, green-skinned, big-eared , “I would like to see the baby.” That was the collective response when the trailer for Valdimar Jóhannsson’s debut feature Lamb dropped back in July. A24’s latest genre acquisition promises the usual cocktail of festival-friendly elements, like stunning cinematography, foreboding atmosphere, and a woman losing her grip on reality in an isolated setting. Oh, and also Noomi Rapace caring for what appears to be human-sheep hybrid, prompting us to once again say: Let us get a good look at that thing!

Fran Kranz, best known for his roles in Joss Whedon projects like and , trades science fiction for sobering reality with his theatrically contained directorial debut. The eternally timely premise: a tense meeting between the parents (Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton) of a school shooting victim and the parents (Ann Dowd and Reed Birney) of the perpetrator. The film earned strong reviews at this year’s digital Sundance, with much of the praise centered on its four character-actor leads.

Before became a mid-pandemic sensation, Jason Sudeikis shot this decidedly less cheerful-looking crime thriller about a post-incarceration criminal trying to go straight and care for his dying love (Evangeline Lilly). Unfortunately, as with all contemporary crime movies, there’s Shea Whigham to contend with, among other one-more-job and/or get-me-my-money obstacles. Director Aharon Keshales has worked on horror projects in the past, which accounts for the sense of foreboding that builds throughout the trailer.

David Gordon Green’s to the original Halloween was billed as the exciting conclusion to the Laurie Strode and Michael Myers story. But no slasher-movie heavy is ever truly dead—especially not when his most recent rampage raked in $150 million. So The Shape is back, along with Green and all-time scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, for the second in what’s now a full trilogy of legacy installments. (Halloween Ends, a film whose title will inevitably prove to be misleading should it also make a lot of money, opens next October.) Like the first Halloween sequel, Kills picks up right where its predecessor left off, on the same night as the last movie. Reviews from Venice were mixed; our own Leila Latif “fun if inconsequential.”

Ridley Scott returns to the muted blues and chaotic swordplay of , , and with this adaptation of an Eric Jager novel about the final legally sanctioned duel in French history. Matt Damon is the knight Jean de Carrouges, who challenges his best friend, Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), to a fight to the death after his wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer), accuses the latter of raping her. Despite the wattage of the onscreen talent, the real draw here might be the byline: The Last Duel’s reportedly Rashomon-inspired take on events was penned by Damon and his old Good Will Hunting cowriter, Ben Affleck, along with Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said). Our correspondent in Venice the final showdown “thrilling.”

Todd Haynes has made some of cinema’s most distinctive rock-and-roll biopics through his willingness to just make stuff up, whether amalgamating glam icons in or refracting Bob Dylan through a variety of lenses in . The Velvet Underground will presumably be a bit more beholden to the facts; it’s an outright rock documentary about the seminal band, featuring interviews with surviving members John Cale and Maureen Tucker. Sadly, the late Lou Reed will have to be represented by copious performance footage. Early reactions from Cannes have been positive, befitting a critics’ darling making a movie about critics’ darlings.

Did you know that Fårö island, where the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman lived, died, and shot many of his classic movies (not in that order, obviously), has been turned into a kind of tourist destination for cinephiles, complete with guided tours and a museum of trivia? The island serves as the setting for the latest picture from French director Mia Hansen-Løve (, ), who casts Vicky Krieps as a loosely fictionalized version of herself, embarking on a scenic holiday with her husband, a fellow filmmaker played by Tim Roth. The film was a hit at Cannes, go figure; our critics, meanwhile, were .

If a franchise falls on demand, does it make a noise? Somehow, within just a couple of years, the absolutely terrible movie After has gone from to , possibly never-ending film series, saga-fying the unremarkable relationship between controlling bad boy Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and publishing neophyte Tessa Young (Josephine Langford). The new third installment (shot back-to-back in Bulgaria with the YA-obligatory fourth movie) finds Tessa and Hardin starting a new cycle of hot sex and less-hot demands that Tessa give up her career and/or any contact with other men.

The last time Megan Fox ripped open some men’s throats, the results (belatedly) clawed their way to cult-movie status. Netflix’s Night Teeth doesn’t quite have the pedigree of —its director, Adam Randall, has a handful of little-seen indies under his belt, not an Oscar or Sundance win. What he does have additionally, though, is Fox, Alfie Allen, and Lucy Fry as bored, beautiful, fabulously wealthy vampires in search of kicks over one bloody night in the City Of Angels. What more do you really need?

Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated adaptation of the Frank Herbert sci-fi touchstone has already survived its first major hurdle, emerging from its Venice Film Festival premiere with critics suitably impressed by the film’s arid sprawl. (Our own Leila Latif called it “engrossing and spectacular” in , praising both the movie’s visual ambitions and its tackling of the novel’s loftier ideas.) But we’ll have to wait to see whether theater audiences—to say nothing of the HBO Max hordes—will be as receptive to Villeneuve’s vision, which places Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya at the center of a vast universe of ringers, including Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Stellan Skarsgård, and more.

Middle schooler Barney (Jack Dylan Grazer) is desperate to get his hands on a “B-bot,” the hottest hyper-connected consumer gadget available. But when his dad gifts him one for his birthday, he winds up with Ron (Zach Galifianakis), a wonky personal-assistant robot who keeps malfunctioning his way into trouble (and, one assumes, eventual friendship). Appropriately, Ron’s Gone Wrong itself has off-brand vibes; the hapless Ron looks like a hybrid of broken-down and his sleek pal EVE, with a bit of Baymax from thrown in for good measure. Technically, Ron’s Gone Wrong is now a corporate sibling to those Disney-owned characters; it’s one of the last few 20th Century Fox projects predating that company’s 2019 sale to the Mouse.

Wes Anderson’s last live-action movie, , found the director ignoring his detractors and heading further into a meticulously crafted world of miniaturized sets, elaborate costumed ensembles, and shifting aspect ratios. At least some of that appears to remain intact for this anthology-style triptych of France-set stories from a New Yorker-like magazine. Most film fans already know where they stand on Anderson, and can probably guess that the sprawling cast includes (deep breath) Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Frances McDormand, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, and Willem Dafoe. But there are newcomers to Andersonville, too, including (deeper breath) Timothée Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, Christoph Waltz, Steve Park, Léa Seydoux, Benicio del Toro, and Jeffrey Wright.

If Jonathan Majors versus Idris Elba sounds like one of the acting events of the season, wait until you see the supporting cast: Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, and Delroy Lindo all take one side or the other in the grudge match between an outlaw (Majors) and the ex-convict (Elba) who killed his family. Making his feature debut behind the camera of this stylized pop Western is Jeymes Samuel, the musician-turned-filmmaker whose work as music supervisor on the soundtrack to suggests that the hip-hop heard in the trailer may anachronistically make it into the movie, too.

Benedict Cumberbatch is at it again: playing a mold-breaking, world-changing troubled-genius figure in a . The title of The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain even makes it sound like a companion piece to , but here Cumberbatch is playing Louis Wain, an artist known for anthropomorphizing and popularizing cats through a series of drawings, children’s-book illustrations, and comic strips. Claire Foy, herself no stranger to biopics, plays Wain’s wife, Emily, while BBC mainstay Will Sharpe co-writes and directs. Early reactions to the film’s Telluride premiere praised the film’s warmth and whimsy, even in the face of some biographical checkpoints.

Rebecca Hall makes her debut behind the camera with an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel about the friendship between two Black women (Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga) living in New York—one “passing” occasionally as white, the other doing so more permanently. Whether Hall is the right person to tell this story was a question raised by a few critics at this year’s virtual Sundance. Most seemed to agree, however, that she has a knack for working with fellow actors (the performances caught plenty of praise), and that the film’s elegant black-and-white imagery suggests a strong eye, too.

Last we heard from writer-director Edgar Wright, he was veering out of the parody of and into the jukebox, gear-head, not explicitly comedic thrills of . Last Night In Soho, which is finally hitting theaters right in time for Halloween after a series of pandemic-related delays, finds him drifting further: It’s a time-hopping thriller starring Thomasin McKenzie as an aspiring fashion designer teleported into the body of a young singer (Anya Taylor-Joy) in swinging-’60s London. Reviews haven’t been universally ecstatic—our own Leila Latif —but fans of this skilled genre remix artist probably won’t want to miss his doubtlessly energetic riff on and its ilk of psychological nightmares.

One of the first movies delayed because of the pandemic, the Wendigo-centric studio horror movie Antlers qualifies as a change of pace for Scott Cooper, director of decidedly less spooky award-season fodder like , , and . If the cast still screams respectability (it includes Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons), there’s plenty of midnight-movie appeal in the premise, which hinges on the potentially symbiotic relationship between a local boy (Jeremy T. Thomas) and the mythic creature he may be harboring in his small-town Oregon home.

Six years after spoiled the peekaboo fun by making the malevolent spirits visible, Paramount is ready to just straight-up reboot Paranormal Activity. Plot details for the seventh installment of the hit found-footage series remain under wraps, but the suggests a shift in location from sunny, suburban, poltergeist-infested California to some sort of religious community. Will director William Eubank, who made the solid January sci-fi thriller , revitalize the Paranormal brand or finally bury it? And while we’re asking questions, what is a perpetually running camera doing in what looks like Amish country?

It’s hard to resist the presumptuous audacity: Months before audiences had seen so much as a trailer for Zack Snyder’s , Netflix had already paid for a prequel spinoff about safecracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer)—who, sure, was one of the movie’s more enjoyable non-zombie-tiger characters, but didn’t exactly suggest a vast and complex backstory to explore. But Schweighöfer must take Dieter seriously; he not only reprises his role but directs and co-writes Army Of Thieves, which sounds like an Army Of The Dead-style heist movie with a more moderate, sensible amount of zombies. Sounds fun, but when does the zombie tiger get a movie?