Movies
Five New Year’s Eve Horror Movies to Stream This Week
Show of hands if you’re ready to leave 2025 in the dust. It’s time to make way for 2026 in style: with themed horror, of course. Who needs crowds or overpriced food and beverage when you can stay comfortable on the couch with horror movies that remind you why that’s the safer plan anyhow. This week, we’re celebrating the holidays with New Year’s Eve horror movies that highlight how scary fresh starts and change can really be.
Here’s where you can stream them this week.
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
Cronos – Criterion Channel, HBO Max
The holidays, and New Year’s Eve, play a role in Guillermo del Toro’s unique vampire tale. Antique dealer Jesús Gris (Frederico Luppi) finds a 450-year-old mechanized scarab hidden within a statue in his shop. It stings him, injecting him with a mysterious substance, and he soon finds himself growing young again. Albeit with a thirst for blood. Gris’ new-found hunger for blood creates a path of destruction, and really rears its ugly head at a New Year’s ball that he attends with his wife, when he finds a man bleeding from an injury and loses control. You can also check out this gem on the big screen on NYE.
The Signal – Fandango at Home, Hoopla, Kanopy, Prime Video, Roku Channel
Set over New Year’s Eve into New Year’s Day, a mysterious signal that invades radio, TV, and cell phone transmission turns anyone who hears it into rage-fueled killers. What makes The Signal so much fun and special is that it’s one cohesive story with central characters, but it’s told in three parts by three difference directors. This gives it varying tones, from serious to black comedy, and an anthology feel despite not actually being an anthology. A.J. Bowen plays Lewis, the infected husband to lead character Mya (Anessa Ramsey), who spends most of the film chasing her down as she attempts to escape him with her lover Ben (Justin Welborn).
The Substance – HBO Max
Coralie Fargeat’s body horror movie takes the “New Year, new you” concept to wild new levels, with a blood-soaked finale set over New Year’s Eve. Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging starlet facing forced retirement. The pressure spurns her to try a secret new treatment that gives her exactly what she wanted, a younger version of herself ready to take Hollywood by storm. Failure to abide by the treatment’s new rules leads to disastrous consequences, though. Fargeat embraces absurdist humor, and The Substance is as funny as it is revolting. This is one raucous horror-comedy you can set your clocks too; ring in the New Year right as Monstro Elisasue takes the stage.
V/H/S/99 – Hoopla, Kanopy, Pluto TV, Shudder
The fifth installment in this found footage anthology film series parties like it’s 1999, including a segment centered on New Year’s Eve that reimagines the Y2K scare. Deadstream writers/directors Joseph and Vanessa Winter deliver a mischievous descent into Hell with the segment “To Hell and Back”, featuring Deadstream scene stealer Melanie Stone as Mabel. That this segment plays last means another fun way to ring in the new year when the clock strikes midnight. Also watch for segments by Johannes Roberts, Maggie Levin, Tyler MacIntyre, and Flying Lotus.
Y2K – HBO Max
Comedian and actor Kyle Mooney makes his directorial debut here with an irreverent comedy-horror movie that imagines what would’ve happened had the millennium bug actually crashed our infrastructure. What ensues is a nostalgic teen comedy that finds itself trapped in Maximum Overdrive as tech turns murderously against humankind. Weta Workshop brings the various murder bots to life via exquisite practical effects that choke, stab, maim, and set aflame their human prey. Be warned, though, the horror fares much stronger in the first half, with the comedy taking center stage (along with Fred Durst) in the back half. This is for those seeking a party vibe on New Year’s Eve.
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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