This Halloween, the Monsters Came to Your Couch

WOODBURY — When I was a kid, Halloween meant a dark theater, a sticky floor, and a screen the size of a barn wall. You went with your friends, you screamed at the same moment as a hundred strangers, and you walked out into the October cold feeling like you’d survived something together. This Saturday is Halloween again, and here’s the state of the holiday in 2026: the monsters no longer wait for you at the multiplex. They’re already inside the house, living in your streaming queue, waiting for you to press play.

What’s in the queue

Look at what has landed on streaming this fall and tell me I’m wrong. Shudder alone has been running a haunted house of its own — the ninth V/H/S anthology, V/H/S Mixtape, with music-themed segments from RZA and Flying Lotus, landed October 9, and a gleefully stupid slasher called Big Baby arrives October 30, just in time to ruin your holiday in the best way. HBO Max gave us Evil Dead Burn, the latest chapter of a franchise that refuses to die (fitting), plus Backrooms — the A24 hit directed by Kane Parsons, who is all of 20 years old and already better at dread than filmmakers three times his age. Hulu has Hokum, with Adam Scott playing a novelist stuck in a haunted inn, from Damian McCarthy of Oddity fame. Paramount+ revived Scary Movie for a sixth go-round and handed Luc Besson a Dracula. Pluto TV, bless its free-with-ads heart, dumped a pile of horror movies on-demand. Freeform is running its “31 Nights of Halloween” like it does every year.

That is a staggering amount of horror. It is also, if you’re a certain kind of film lover, a little sad.

What we traded away

Because here’s what we’ve traded. The streaming buffet is convenient, it’s cheap, and it’s bottomless — and it’s also solitary. You pause it to answer a text. You watch half, fall asleep, finish it Tuesday. The thing that made horror horror — a room full of people too scared to admit they’re scared, the collective flinch, the nervous laugh that breaks the tension — you can’t stream that. South Jersey used to be thick with places to feel it. The drive-ins are mostly memories now. The grand old single-screen houses got chopped into multiplexes or turned into churches and CrossFit gyms. What’s left, we should be guarding like treasure.

So do both this weekend. Yes, queue up Big Baby and let Shudder wreck your Saturday night. But if there’s a theater near you still brave enough to screen Halloween or The Thing on actual film, or a repertory night at one of the independent houses still fighting the good fight, go. Buy the overpriced popcorn. Sit with strangers. Scream on cue. The algorithm will never love a movie the way a packed room does.

The algorithm will never love a movie the way a packed room does.Vinny Vinci

The monsters found their way to your couch this year. That’s fine. Just don’t let them make you forget where the real scares live — in the dark, with the rest of us.

Happy Halloween, South Jersey. Watch something that bites.

Based on reporting from TV Guide, Bloody Disgusting, TV Insider, and Cord Cutters News.