How to Program the Perfect Throwback Halloween With Peacock

Christmas may reign supreme as the nostalgia holiday, with its family-focused entertainment and 1960s TV specials airing annually, but Halloween has just as much sentimental appeal. From the way a bowl of fun-size candy bars in the office break room can stoke memories of childhood to the wholesomeness of carving a gnarly face out of a pumpkin, Halloween knows how to stoke those holiday memories.

Of course, the best way to get nostalgic on Halloween has always been via scary movies. Some people will watch the original Halloween once a year, others will binge all the movies from their favorite slasher franchise (even the bad ones where they go to Manhattan). You really haven't lived until you've spent all of Halloween watching black-and-white horror movies from the '50s and dipping into the candy bowl.

This year, the streamer doing the most to celebrate Halloween the old-fashioned way is Peacock. The platform’s "Halloween Horror" selection runs deep, with franchise collections for Halloween, the Child's Play movies (plus the current series Chucky), a Blumhouse collection, and new-release movies like Five Nights at Freddy's. But hidden among headliners like Chucky and Michael Myers are some fantastic throwback options, from the masters of the genre like Alfred Hitchcock to some real '80s schlock. There’s enough here to easily program an entire day that takes you back in time to those Halloweens of old, the ones you spent watching cable TV marathons of classic, campy, thoroughly influential horror.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

Let's start with the classics. Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired on CBS and NBC from 1955 to 1965 and was an anthology series of mysteries and thrillers from various filmmakers (Hitchcock himself directed a handful). Peacock has all 10 seasons — including the three which were called The Alfred Hitchcock Hour — and because these were old-school TV seasons, that amounts to a whopping 349 episodes. It's a particularly classy way to do Halloween, especially if you use an episode guide to pick out the ones Hitchcock directed himself. Of particular interest: the Season 3 episode "The Perfect Crime," which stars horror legend Vincent Price as a murderous detective; and "Lamb to the Slaughter," where Barbara Bel Geddes (from Hitchcock's Vertigo) plays a woman who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb.

Hammer House of Horror

If Hitchcock's stories of suspense are a little too tame for your taste, you can move on to something more macabre but just as classic: Hammer House of Horror was a British anthology series created by the legendary Hammer Films studio. Hammer was well known in the 1960s and '70s for their visually stunning interpretations of classic horror tales like Dracula and The Mummy. The TV series lasted only 13 episodes, but Peacock has all of them, including the premiere episode, "Witching Time," which starred Patricia Quinn (Magenta from The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and The Silence Scream, which starred Succession's Brian Cox and the great Peter Cushing, who was a Hammer mainstay, though likely best known to mass audiences as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars.

Wes Craven’s Invitation to Hell

Hammer House of Horror aired in 1980, just around the time when Wes Craven was ascending through the ranks of horror directors. In 1984, the same year Craven introduced the world to Freddy Kreuger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, ABC aired Invitation to Hell, a made-for-TV movie directed by Craven about a family that moves to a suburban community and is drawn in to a country-club cult that is guarding a portal to hell. The divide between auteur theatrical feature horror and middlebrow TV horror couldn't be starker when you compare Craven's two 1984 movies. Invitation to Hell was essentially a work-for-hire project for Craven after ABC had developed the project as a vehicle for All My Children star Susan Lucci, who plays the cult leader. Peacock has miraculously unearthed this film, and you can and should stream it as soon as humanly possible, if only to revel in Susan Lucci incinerating a limo driver with a finger gun within the first five minutes.

Elvira's Movie Macabre

There is truly no better tribute to throwback TV than Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. The sexy/spooky character created by Cassandra Peterson is the most memorable purveyor of B-movies that late-night TV ever produced, though she represents the countless local TV hosts who presented whatever cheap-to-acquire horror movies could be aired after midnight for the stoners, insomniacs, and truly dedicated horror freaks who were awake at that hour. The blessing of the horror genre is that even if a horror movie isn't good, there's still a chance it could be awful enough to get the Elvira treatment. Her obvious love for the genre shone through even as she was cheerfully dragging the movies through the mud.

Peacock has two Elvira series available to stream, but the most historically significant is Elvira's Movie Macabre, the 1980s series that aired on local access TV in Los Angeles and eventually launched her to fame. Peacock only has 11 episodes of Movie Macabre, but they're all worth checking out. The local TV aesthetic is a relic of a bygone era, and Elvira has the vibe of a knowingly ditzy drag queen hustling to put on a club show. Peacock also has the 13 Nights of Elvira anthology that Hulu produced in 2014. There's no recapturing the original Movie Macabre magic, but it's still fun watching Elvira do her thing while presenting movies like the notorious Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, the perfect movie if your ideal above-title stars are Adrienne Barbeau, Shannon Tweed, and Bill Maher.

'60s Classics

Peacock is also streaming 40 episodes of the original Dark Shadows, if spooky soap opera is more to your liking, and six seasons of Ray Bradbury Theater for those more into unsettling sci-fi stories. However you want to mix-and-match your throwback horror marathon, you definitely have options, thanks to Peacock (though, who knows how long that will last).

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.