October has rolled around, and that means only one thing: Spooky season is here! And what better way to celebrate Halloween than with some of the finest fright fests of the last 50 years?

We’re bringing you a more retro-tinged selection of the best films on streaming this month, but the mix of crowd-pleasers and cult classics offers something for horror fans of all tastes. For instance, David Cronenberg’s grotesque revamp of The Fly, buzzing onto Hulu, and Ken Russell’s Altered States materializing on The Criterion Channel, both bring uniquely visceral takes on body horror to your screens, while sleeper hit Under the Skin on Netflix offers slow-burn sci-fi scares, and Midsommar on Prime Video takes to the hills for a sun-drenched approach to folk horror.

If you fancy something a bit newer, fear not. Well, fear lots actually—Zach Cregger’s shockingly original horror debut Barbarian smashes its way onto Hulu, while Netflix brings the final chapter in the sumptuously scary Mononoke trilogy, an anime extravaganza that looks like nothing else. Plus, there’s even one post-credits stinger of an entry that’s too scary to mention here …

Here are WIRED’s picks of the best movies to watch right now.

Barbarian

When Tess (Georgina Campbell) finds her Airbnb in a sketchy neighborhood double booked with Keith (Bill Skarsgård), you’ll probably think you know where Barbarian is headed. You don't—and you should brace yourself for everything that follows. Written and directed by Zach Cregger (in a seismic departure from his early comedy background), Barbarian constantly flips the script, regularly subverting viewer expectations of horror movie clichés at every turn.

Smartly written, brilliantly shot, and psychologically disturbing on multiple levels, Barbarian is a genuinely terrifying entry in the modern horror canon. If you’ve discovered Cregger’s work from the Academy Award–winning Weapons or his recent horror-comedy reboot of Resident Evil, this is where he first made his mark on the silver screen.

Under the Skin

Under the Skin almost defies explanation. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien in human form, roaming Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, luring isolated and lonely men to their doom, drowning them in an inexplicable oily abyss that seems to exist in a null space. All the while, she’s observed by a motorcyclist, trailing her from victim to victim.

No names are given, no purpose explained (not even to the cast; director Jonathan Glazer shot many of the alien’s initial encounters with humans using hidden cameras, only explaining and asking for their involvement afterward), but it’s far better to watch this blind and make your own mind up. Be warned, though—Johansson’s performance is truly unearthly, and in conjunction with Glazer’s bizarre imagery and a soundscape that maddeningly claws at your nerves, this is a deeply unsettling slice of sci-fi.

Midsommar

This acclaimed indie horror movie stars Florence Pugh as Dani, an American student struggling to deal with a family tragedy, who joins her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends on a trip to Sweden. The vacation sounds like the perfect escape—nine days of communing with nature at a festival held only once every 90 years; a true once-in-a-lifetime experience. The problem? The festival is a front for a pagan cult, and things get rapidly, wildly out of hand.

Midsommar is a deeply effective and distressing folk horror film, with none other than Jordan Peele, director of the smash hit Get Out, declaring it has "the most atrociously disturbing imagery I've ever seen on film." Perfect date night material for Halloween season, then.

Train to Busan

South Korean cinema seems to love combining the end of the world and trains. Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer got things on track in 2013, but director Yeon Sang-ho really left the station with this 2016 zombie horror masterpiece.

Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) starts his journey on the express train from Seoul to Busan just wanting to drop daughter Su-an off with her mother. Unfortunately, the last passenger to board might be a teensy bit infected with the zombie plague that’s kicking off outside, turning the ride into the express train to hell. The tight confines allow for some incredibly inventive action choreography, while genre fans are treated to a revolting twist on the undead themselves, a misshapen, juddering, ravenous horde that moves like a liquid mass of corpses.

Like all the best zombie films, though, it’s the social commentary that really elevates Train to Busan, with its exploration of class and status standing alongside Romero’s work at his peak. A decade on from release, this is still one of the freshest takes on zombies you’re likely to find—look up animated prequel Seoul Station and stand-alone sequel Peninsula if it leaves you wanting another bite.

Altered States

A bit of a deep cut, but director Ken Russell’s 1980 outing will really mess with your head. No, really—this tale of psychological horror and transformational terror is loosely based on real-world tests of the effects of psychoactive drugs and sensory deprivation on the human brain. The film sees researcher Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) subjecting himself to highly questionable experiments with hallucinogenics and isolation in an effort to tap into other states of being. Unfortunately, he’s wildly successful, not only opening his mind to genetic memories and shared consciousnesses, but seeing his physical body horrifyingly warp and devolve beyond recognition with each trip.

And what a trip—Russell masterfully creates a sense of psychedelic overload with a pioneering use of bizarre imagery and sound, the film shifting with each of Jessup’s transformations until you feel you’ve taken mind-altering substances yourself. An uncomfortably weird experience, Altered States will stay on your mind long after the credits roll.

Colossal

Anne Hathaway is literally a monster—at least she is in this darkly comedic crossover between kaiju flick and character study. After her life in New York falls apart, Gloria (Hathaway) moves back home to New Hampshire. At the same time, a giant monster starts rampaging across Seoul, destroying buildings and causing mass panic. Yet these two incompatible events aren't unrelated, as Gloria starts to realize that she can somehow control the beast from half a world away—but her heavy drinking and constant bad decisions may get in the way of saving the world. Director Nacho Vigalondo lovingly pastiches the likes of Godzilla, Gamera, and King Kong in this quirky film festival favorite.

Mononoke The Movie III: The Curse of the Serpent

A nameless Medicine Seller (Hiroshi Kamiya in Japanese, Crispin Freeman in English) traveling Edo period Japan may seem a humble figure, but his strange tinctures and concoctions make him one of the few capable of tackling mononoke—powerful spirits corrupting places and people alike. This trilogy-capping third movie takes the enigmatic traveler back to the cursed Imperial Palace visited in predecessors Phantom in the Rain and Ashes of Rage, seeking to uncover once and for all why it seems to attract so many dangerous monsters.

A master class in tension and otherworldly horror, Mononoke maintains its stunning visual approach of kaleidoscopic watercolors swirling on parchment, making for one of the most sumptuous and visually striking pieces of animation you’ll ever see. It’s worth noting that there is some real-world controversy over a returning voice actor embroiled in a scandal in Japan, so this might be a rare case where the English dub is the better option.

The Fly

Despite being a remake, David Cronenberg’s quintessential slice of 1980s body horror has almost completely supplanted the 1958 original in the public consciousness (although the original stars Vincent Price and is definitely still worth checking out on Prime Video).

This wholesale reimagining twists expectations away from mad science clichés—it almost feels like a superhero origin movie to start, with scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) accidentally splicing his genes with a fly during a teleportation experiment, and emerging with enhanced physical prowess in every respect. But with great power comes great personality shifts, wiry black hairs growing along his back, and the need to vomit acid onto his food before eating. And, as animal instincts take over, the self-proclaimed “Brundlefly” starts looking at science reporter Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis) very differently.

The groundbreaking effects work that marked Brundle’s slow metamorphosis into a repulsive hybrid monster won the film the Oscar for Best Makeup, but its ability to pack in some genuine emotion alongside the scares make it easy to see why this is the de facto iteration of The Fly.

The Social Network

Oh, you think this isn’t horror? Ask yourself: What could possibly be scarier than the deleterious impact social media has had on the human condition? Director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin’s biopic telling of the rise, and rise, and rise of Facebook, is the kind of film you watch through your fingers, too.

There’s an almost predatory hunger in Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, as he goes from a Harvard student whose hotness-ranking website was popular enough to crash the college’s whole network to a Silicon Valley darling attracting unheard-of sums of investment and power. Like most “based on a true story” horror films, it’s not entirely historically accurate and, true to genre norms, there’s a not-as-good sequel, with Sorkin returning to write and direct the newly released The Social Reckoning, but if you’ve been paying attention to reality the past few decades, this will definitely chill you to the bone.