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Is there something higher than Halloween season?

Sure, right here at Polygon we cowl horror year-round. We have our rolling lists of the greatest horror motion pictures you possibly can watch at house and the greatest horror motion pictures on Netflix which are up to date each month of the 12 months.

But even for year-round horror followers, Halloween is a particular time of 12 months.

For the previous two years, Polygon has put collectively a Halloween Countdown calendar, providing a Halloween-friendly film or TV present accessible to observe at house day-after-day of October. We’re delighted to deliver that again as soon as once more, with 31 spooky choices to maintain the temper going all month lengthy.

Every day for your complete month of October, we’ll add a brand new suggestion to this Countdown and let you know the place you possibly can watch it. So curl up on the sofa, dim the lights, and seize some popcorn for a terrifying and entertaining host of Halloween surprises.

Oct. 1: Audition (1999)

Image: Arrow Films

In Audition, Takashi Miike’s 1999 psychological horror-thriller, love is a consensual fiction. Years after shedding his spouse to a terminal sickness, widower Shigeharu Aoyama is urged by his son to get again out on the earth and discover somebody. Aoyama agrees to a proposal by his buddy, a movie producer, to participate in an audition for a nonexistent movie with the intention to discover a potential bride from the candidates. His search finally leads him to Asami Yamazaki, a wonderful former ballerina with a murky previous.

As Aoyama grows nearer to his new love curiosity, he finds himself caught deeper and deeper in an online of intrigue that threatens to tear him aside emotionally, psychologically, and sure — even bodily. There is one thing darkish inside Asami, sure, however there’s a latent darkness within Aoyama too, arguably even darker. The solely distinction is that Asami has embraced that darkness and made it her personal.

Miike’s movie holds its playing cards comparatively near its chest for many of its run time, unspooling its tightly wound thriller like garrote wire earlier than peeling again its pores and skin of meet-cute artifice to disclose a pulsing mass of horrors roiling beneath. The movie descends right into a macabre fugue state of assumptions, misdirections, and cinematic sleights of hand, with goals that really feel nearly actual set in opposition to a actuality too terrifying to be something however. In the top, although, these are simply phrases. Only ache might be trusted. —TE

Audition is out there to stream on Arrow Video and Hi-Yah!, totally free with advertisements on Tubi, and totally free on Kanopy with a library card. It can be accessible for digital rental or buy on Vudu and Apple.