The Top 10 Cable And Streaming Halloween Movies In 2023

New Halloween-themed movies abound in 2023, many of them very popular—but there’s always room for the old favorites.

The most-watched Halloween films on cable and streaming this year include a range of family films, slasher flicks and classics. A few are based on popular existing intellectual property, and a few are completely new ideas.

TV measuring platform Samba TV compiled this list for Forbes.com of the most-watched Halloween TV and streaming films airing from October 1 to 24 (plus one, Five Nights at Freddy’s, that was released October 27).

The No. 1 film is an oldie but apparently still a goodie. Disney+’s original Hocus Pocus drew 2.4 million household views during its live-plus-23-day window. The kids’ movie starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Bette Midler and Kathy Najimy was first released in 1993, and at the time it was a bit of a flop.

It grossed about $49.1 million worldwide (nearly all of it domestically), about half of what the more successful Halloween family movie The Nightmare Before Christmas brought in that same year.

But Hocus Pocus has had remarkable legs. It became a cult hit that attracted so many new fans over the decades that Disney released a sequel, Hocus Pocus 2, in 2022 that became one of Disney+’s most-watched films ever, shattering records held by Frozen 2 and Encanto.

The original remains the favorite of many viewers, though Pocus 2 still ranked as the No. 4 Halloween movie, with 624,000 viewers in the same period.

The No. 2 Halloween film, per Samba’s numbers, is also on Disney+. Haunted Mansion, which had a theatrical window over the summer, drew 1.8 million households during the same viewership window, following a disappointing performance in theaters, where it grossed $116.6 million worldwide and had the studio’s worst opening weekend of 2023.

The movie is based on a popular Disney World attraction, and Disney had obviously hoped to recapture the magic of another ride-to-big-screen success story, Pirates of the Caribbean, all but one of which ranks among the top 50-grossing films of all time. It’ll have to settle for mildly popular streaming film instead, though it can always hope for a Hocus Pocus effect to set in later.

The Top Streaming Halloween Films

Ranking third this Halloween, just ahead of Pocus 2, is Amazon Prime Video’s comedic horror film Totally Killer, in which a teen (Kiernan Shipka) takes a Back to the Future-esque jaunt to the ‘80s, if Doc were a crazed killer and Marty’s mom had been murdered.

In the three-week October window, it streamed in 655,000 households.

It wasn’t the only streaming original to rank highly. Rounding out the top five, Paramount+’s latest adaptation of Pet Sematary (Pet Sematary: Bloodlines) has racked up 512,000 household views in that same 24-day window. It is a prequel to Stephen King’s book and movie, set in the ‘60s about five decades before Pet Sematary.

And Peacock’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, the long-anticipated film adaptation of the popular video game, became an instant hit. In just three days of release, it drew 449,000 households and did particularly well among Hispanic households, overindexing by 44%. Millennials also overindexed on viewership.

The Classic Halloween Films Still Resonate

Of course, you can’t argue with a classic. The original Halloween, which is on video on demand, had 448,000 households watching, ranking seventh behind Freddy’s. And Max’s The Evil Dead Rise, the newest release in the long-running franchise, was ninth, with 150,000 households, behind Hulu’s The Mill (264,000).

Max’s Barbarian and Netflix’s Us ranked 10th and 11th, respectively.