The best A24 horror movies to stream this October

A movie that is great because so many of its sequences are, Talk to Me follows a group of teenagers who discover a mummified hand that allows them to commune with the dead. What initially seems like a fun party game quickly turns into something far more sinister, though, when they realize that they don’t have as much control of the possessions they’re experiencing as they might have believed. Anchored by one particularly virtuosic sequence near the middle, Talk to Me is a down-and-dirty story about possession, and it’s excellent precisely because it knows what it is.

Mia Goth was great in X, but its sequel Pearl allowed her to show off her abilities to their fullest. This prequel to X follows the old couple from that film while they are still young and impressionable. Set against the backdrop of World War I, we see exactly how Pearl’s desires and her repression turned her into someone who eliminated any and all contradictions from her life. Pearl is less terrifying than X but more unsettling, and it’s great precisely because it’s much less of a straightforward genre exercise than its predecessor.

A period piece that makes it crystal clear why everyone was so afraid of witches, The Witch follows a family of New England puritans who are ex-communicated from their community because they are simply too religious. Building a new life for themselves near a patch of woods, the family quickly finds that they are beset by what appears to be a witch living somewhere nearby. As the family’s children are possessed, it becomes increasingly clear that the devil is at work on their land, and they must do whatever it takes to keep him away. It’s a brilliant, harrowing movie that features a star-making turn from Anya Taylor-Joy.