Editorials
Stay Home, Watch Horror: 5 Monster Mash Movies to Stream This Week
Halloween season is now in full swing! That means it’s time to load up your already stacked watchlists with even more horror. This week we’re doing the Monster Mash.
A Monster Mash horror movie, like the song made famous by Bobby Pickett, must evoke a sense of fun, and it must include a wide variety of monsters. A monster mashup, if you will. Halloween parties may be out this year, so this week’s streaming selection aims to capture that Halloween party spirit in horror movie form.
Here’s to hoping this week’s streaming picks are a graveyard smash and bring some Halloween entertainment. As always, they’re all available to stream now.
The Monster Club – Tubi, Prime Video
There’s something about Vincent Price movies that are so perfect for October viewing. Shudder recently added a handful of Price’s Poe cycle films, which also work well for Halloween, but in terms of sheer cheeky fun, it’s hard to beat The Monster Club. In this 1981 anthology, Price plays Eramus, a vampire that offers an author a unique trade; if the author donates some of his blood, the vampire will take him into an exclusive monster club. It’s the wraparound tale intercut with three monster segments. Of course, the highlight is Price bopping along to the club’s music and explaining his monster pals away to the curious author.
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein – Peacock TV
This is the first of many movies in which the comedic pair encounter Universal Classic monsters, and it’s a delightful mashup all ages can enjoy. Here, Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot tries to warn Chick (Bud Abbott) and Wilbur (Lou Costello) that Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) has arrived in their town with nefarious plans to use Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) as a pawn. With help, the bumbling pair must find a way to stop Dracula. Wacky hijinks and spooky fun ensue, and expect monster mayhem as the Wolf Man engages in a battle with the other monsters. Look for (har har) Vincent Price as the Invisible Man, in an uncredited cameo.
House II: The Second Story – Tubi, Prime Video
If you haven’t seen the first film, that’s okay! There’s no connection between them, and House is also available on Tubi anyway. Jesse McLaughlin (Arye Gross) moves into the old house where his parents were murdered and finds himself drawn into an epic battle of good versus evil over a crystal skull. As far as wacky horror-comedies go, this sequel has it all. Aztec warriors looking to make sacrifices, a cater-puppy, a mummy grandpa, an undead outlaw, escaped dinosaurs, and more. There’s even a hidden Kane Hodder cameo- look for the Gorilla suit in the Halloween party scene.
The Cabin in the Woods – Hulu, Prime Video
Five friends opt for a weekend getaway at a cabin in the woods. Their party gets interrupted by a zombie redneck torture family, and they start dying one by one according to their archetypical horror role. Of course, there’s much more than meets the eye in this horror-comedy, and they realize there’s a much bigger plot afoot. In terms of entertainment and monster mashups, it doesn’t get much better than this. Just about every single conceivable monster is represented on screen in the Grand Guignol finale, from killer mermaids to werewolves to angry titans. The third act alone makes Drew Goddard’s feature debut worth revisiting time and time again.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark – Showtime
On Halloween 1968, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) and her two friends meet drifter Ramon (Michael Garza) while fleeing from bullies. They invite Ramon to explore a local haunted house, where Stella discovers a mysterious book containing horror stories that seem to write themselves in real-time. Director André Øvredal brings the nightmarish illustrations by Stephen Gammell and stories by Alvin Schwartz to life. Harold the scarecrow, the Pale Lady, the Big Toe corpse (Javier Botet), and the Jangly Man (Troy James) all terrorize the teens of Mill Valley in this recent Halloween treat. It’s the perfect October movie full of chills for the older kid or kid at heart.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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