If you’re on the hunt for some suitably scary Halloween viewing and don’t fancy the infinite scroll through Netflix’s catalogue of frighteners, head for the best free streaming platform out there.
BBC iPlayer has a small but expertly curated library of horror movies to sink your teeth into – all, of course, free and ad-free for license fee-payers. A few of them, including Halloween, The Blair Witch Project and Robert Wise’s 1963 masterpiece The Haunting, even feature on our pantheon of all-time great horrors.
Dig a bit deeper and you’ll find another, more recent horror movie – one, perhaps, with its own debt to The Haunting – that was once on Netflix but is now flaunting its freakiness on the BBC site.
Writer-director Remi Weekes’ debut film His House came out in 2020 to rave reviews, and still sits on a rare perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. ‘Imagine Mike Leigh’s Paranormal Activity and you’re halfway there’ was Time Out’s own verdict.
Never more topical, it follows two South Sudanese asylum seekers, played by Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku and Gangs of London’s Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, into a council house in which dark forces reside. It’s both a pin-sharp metaphor for PTSD and the migrant experience and properly scary.
When it came off the Netflix UK platform in 2022, there were worries that it would be lost to viewers for good. But His House, a BBC Films co-production, now has a home of its own on iPlayer.
Our advice? Pay a visit this weekend.
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