Polygon Releases 2026 Halloween Horror Watch and Play List

Halloween season is back, and so is Polygon’s annual Halloween Countdown.

Horror hardly needs October’s help in 2026. Obsession, Backrooms, Resident Evil, Camp Miasma, and Shudder’s monthly drop mean the year is already overflowing with nightmares. For the sixth annual countdown, Polygon will chase cult favorites, forgotten films, strange discoveries, and a strain of horror that gets under your skin. Movies and television are only part of the mix this time. Games, books, internet oddities, and anything else capable of delivering a real jolt are on the table.

Get your fill of horror all month long and check back daily. For 31 recommendations right away, check out the 2025 edition.

Oct. 1: The Beyond

There’s gross, there’s sick, and then there’s goremaster Lucio Fulci’s horror masterpiece

By Matt Patches

The average human body contains around 1.3 gallons of blood. But what if it actually contained 10 times as much blood, and that blood came geysering out of a person when their flesh, soaked to gelatinous consistency, was ripped open by a zombie? Lucio Fulci asks this essential question in his 1981 film The Beyond.

Much like Leonardo da Vinci sketched cadavers to better understand the nature of man, Fulci uses goopy special effects to understand what a melting face or a dislodged eyeball would look like up close. That splash-zone approach to horror requires a refined taste that not all moviegoers possess. Roger Ebert notoriously hated The Beyond, so much so that he singled it out in his appropriately titled book, I Hated Hated Hated This Movie. Ebert wrote, “It’s the kind of movie that alternates stupefyingly lame dialogue with special-effects scenes in which quicklime dissolves corpses and tarantulas eat lips and eyeballs.”

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Source: Polygon