Best Halloween Movies to Watch on Amazon Prime Video

The Wisdom of Algorithms and Aggregated Data

I want to find some new films to watch this Halloween.

I’m a horror writer but none of my friends are horror fans so I can’t rely on word-of-mouth recommendations. And I want to make the most of the subscriptions I’m already paying for rather than rent or buy any new films.

I decided to do an experiment using data from Amazon Video and Rotten Tomatoes to see if I could objectively work out the top ten horror films available this month on Amazon Prime Video.

I collected some data and threw it into this visualisation which looks like a demented spider’s web. Click on the image to view it in its full glory.

I created two lists ordering the films by audience popularity and critic popularity, cross-referenced them and came up with my Top Ten.

Top Ten Best Reviewed Halloween Films on Amazon Prime Video (filtered through Rotten Tomatoes)

1. Shaun of the Dead
2. The Devil’s Backbone
3. Annabelle Creation
4. Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
5. What We Do In The Shadows
6. Dead of Night (1945)
7. K-Shop
8. Evil Dead (2013)
9. Blade 2
10. Black Sheep

The first seven movies on the list were actually popular with both audiences and critics. The final three films placed highest in the top fifteen on both lists.

Selecting the Data

I found Amazon Prime Video’s Halloween Movie Picks list which was promoted across my subscription home page. It initially ran to 70 results. I selected Average Customer Reviews of four stars and above and sorted the results by ‘Featured’. This returned 26 results.

According to its website, Amazon has a complex way of working out what makes a featured product. This includes many variables such as frequency of purchases, whether the item is new – they consider newer items to be of greater interest to consumers – and things like title and description. Amazon usually includes price and postage costs, but as Amazon Prime Video items are free-to-view digital products with a Prime subscription, these variables won’t currently apply to Featured Movie selection.

When I filtered the Halloween Movie Picks results, the first listed films looked like this:

1. The Rite (2011)
2. Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
3. Ghost Ship (2002)
4. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
5. Eight Legged Freaks (2002)
6. Annabelle Creation (2017)
7. Carrie (2013)
8. The Purge (2013)
9. Dark Shadows (2012)
10. Mirrors (2008)

None of these movies, with the exception of Annabelle Creation, is recent. They’ve been around for quite some time. I’ve seen eight of them. It’s likely that they’re heavily featured because they’ve been frequently viewed, rented or bought during their digital lifetime on Amazon, not because they’re the best on the list.

I decided to filter the Amazon results against another source: Rotten Tomatoes scores. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates TV and movie reviews from professional critics. Audience ratings are collected from users of the Rotten Tomatoes website.

We all know that critics and audiences can respond very differently to the same movie, especially in the horror genre, so I decided to use both sets of ratings. I think this gives a more reliable list of Halloween movies to watch. I’ve seen exactly half of the films on my list, so at least I have some heavily crowdsourced recommendations to see me through October.

If any horror fans out there have any good movie suggestions for me, do let me know!