Horror Licensing: The Halloween Spike, and What Comes After
Every October, horror takes over the streaming schedules. Out come the marathons, the themed hubs and the orange-and-black carousels. Then, on the first of November, it is all quietly packed away, as though the genre were seasonal staff, taken on for the rush and let go before the mince pies arrive.
That framing undersells it. The October spike is real, and it is growing, if more modestly than the marketing would suggest. The more interesting story is the rest of the year, when horror keeps turning up in people's viewing without anyone having to put a banner on it.
This piece looks at what the data shows: how the spike behaves, what audiences actually choose once it starts, and what that means for anyone planning a horror slate.
How big is the Halloween spike?
Nielsen has tracked horror's share of October movie viewing, across linear and streaming, every year since 2021. The trend is upward, though Nielsen itself calls the gains small. Horror's share of October watch time rose by nearly a full percentage point between 2023 and 2024.
Nielsen puts that down to the ever-widening range of horror available to viewers. In other words, the more horror platforms offer, the more of it people watch. Supply, for once, appears to create its own demand.
Ritual does much of the rest. Horror belongs to Halloween the way fireworks belong to the fifth of November: nobody remembers deciding it, but everyone turns up. Platforms lean into the pattern with marathons and seasonal hubs, because the audience arrives already primed.
What won last October
The first week of October 2025 gives a fair picture of what audiences reach for once the season starts. M3GAN 2.0 topped Nielsen's horror chart with 115 million viewing minutes on Peacock. Close behind, with 113 million, was Scream. Not a sequel or a reboot, but the 1996 original, airing on Paramount Network and Showtime and sitting on several streamers besides. A film old enough to have a mortgage came within two million minutes of a brand-new release.
New titles held their own. Bring Her Back and 28 Years Later came third and fourth, and Sinners eighth. Halloween (2018) turned up at ninth on Hulu, as the franchise tends to. Some instalment of Halloween has nearly always been the most-watched horror film on linear TV each October, even in years it misses the combined top ten. Whatever else can be said of Michael Myers, he is reliable.
The more telling entries sit further down. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, from 1962, reached fifth on the digital broadcast network Comet. Tremors, from 1990, was seventh. Bounce pushed The Intruder into the top ten. None of these arrived with a campaign behind it. They were simply there, on channels that had licensed them, when the audience came looking.
Franchise recognition clearly helps, as M3GAN, Halloween and 28 Years Later show. But original titles such as Bring Her Back and Sinners charted too, and a 63-year-old Bette Davis film finished above Sinners, Tremors and Halloween. In October, being available appears to matter nearly as much as being new.
Exclusives win the headline, depth carries the month
October 2022 marked a turn toward streaming exclusives for the season's biggest titles. Halloween Ends on Peacock, The Curse of Bridge Hollow and Mr. Harrigan's Phone on Netflix, and Hellraiser on Hulu took the top four places. In 2024, exclusives held the top two again: Don't Move on Netflix and Salem's Lot on HBO Max.
But 2024 showed something else as well. No single title reached the heights of the year before, and Nielsen noted that viewing was spread more evenly across films. The exclusive gets the week's headline. The rest of the month is carried by whatever else happens to be on the shelf.
That changes the arithmetic for anyone building a seasonal slate. An exclusive tentpole still buys attention, provided it is secured well in advance. But one premiere covers a week at most. Thirty-one days of October, and the eleven months that follow, need a bench: a wide range of titles that can be scheduled, rotated and surfaced long after opening weekend.
The other eleven months
Horror's audience does not vanish with the costumes. Research from NRG across nine markets found that in eight of them, more than half of audiences either love or like the genre. The figure rises to 72% in the US and 64% in the UK, which is a lot of people for a genre supposedly reserved for one night a year.
A survey commissioned by Blumhouse, a studio with a professional interest in the answer, found much the same. 44% of American respondents said they watch horror year-round, and just 6% save it for Halloween. The habit starts early, too: 52% began watching before the age of 12, and many were introduced by a family member, including 42% of Millennials and 30% of Gen Z. Horror, it turns out, is a family tradition. Just not the kind that makes the Christmas round-robin letter.
Statista's 2023–24 survey ranks horror fifth among film genres in the US by share of viewers, behind action and adventure, comedy, drama, and thriller and crime. For a genre still scheduled as a seasonal novelty, fifth place all year is a respectable showing.
Planning for October, and for November
October is simply the loudest month for a genre that stays popular all year, and the two call for different kinds of content. The season rewards the exclusive and the headline title. Everything else rewards depth: the classics, the cult favourites, the international titles and the creature features that can be scheduled without a press release and still find an audience on a wet Tuesday in March.
The practical upshot is unglamorous. The tentpole is bought a year out. The depth that carries the rest of October, and the months either side, is better treated as a rotation than a one-off purchase: a mix of proven catalogue and volume, brought in for the season, kept where it performs and swapped out where it doesn't. That is how Allrites works, as a managed subscription rather than a shopping list. If you'd like to see how it would work for your channel, we're happy to talk it through.