Weekend Watchlist, 10/30: Halloween

Happy Friday, PV Guide readers! I hope you have a great weekend ahead of you.

I’ve been quite sick all week, which meant I had to scrap my planned subscriber-exclusive review. But I did conduct a fun interview I’m excited to publish next week, and we’ll resume the subscriber-exclusive reviews in November.

Here are this week’s picks – all recent spooky season favorites you may not have seen.

The Vourdalak

Where to watch: Kanopy, Hoopla, Tubi

Tristan and I have a monthly movie night with friends, and this time we watched The Vourdalak,  a French horror movie from a few years ago that looks like it was made in the 1970s (this is a high compliment). The Vourdalak is about a French nobleman who gets stranded in a village in 18th century Eastern Europe and pulled into a family drama with (im)mortal stakes. I love the texture of the movie – the sets, the costumes, the grain of the images, all the way down to the puppet that plays a very prominent role. It’s a pure delight.

Dead Talents Society

Where to watch: Netflix

This Taiwanese gem was one of my favorite surprises of 2025. It’s a horror-comedy about the ghost afterlife, where ghosts compete to stay undead by haunting the living. It follows a shy young ghost who is struggling to make her mark in this cutthroat world and teams up with a fading ghost diva to shore both of their scare games up. As critic Sean Gilman aptly put it, it’s “a kind of Scream meets Monsters, Inc. meets All About Eve, deeply steeped in the aesthetics of 21st-century East Asian horror.”

Atlantics

Where to watch: Netflix

Atlantics is a gorgeous, hauntingly romantic ghost story by the great French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop. It’s about a young woman engaged to a wealthy man but in love with another – a construction worker who hasn’t been paid for months and is one of many young men who leaves Senegal for Spain in hopes of a better life. There’s a particular scenethat continues to stick with me years after watching it – the two lovers, in a bar, dancing intimately as the rest of the world and all the problems that come with it dissipates for just a moment.