What to watch: The new movies to stream this weekend from The Wolf House to Poltergeist

Wondering what to watch this weekend? There are considerably more season-appropriate films to catch up on this week, as a variety of horror films suitable to audiences of various ages are released across streaming services this week.

Leading the pack is The Wolf House coming out on MUBI. A bewitching stop-motion film that filters real life horrors of Pinochet’s dictatorship through classic fairytales, Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s is as bewildering and hypnotic as it is visually unique. Meanwhile on Netflix, the streaming service releases its own fairy tale in the form of The School for Good and Evil, a new feature film directed by Paul Feig in adaptation of a young adult novel by Soman Chainani.

Read more: Everything new on Disney+ in October

On iPlayer, there’s the classic 80s American horror film Poltergeist, from the duo of Steven Spielberg and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, as well as Aardman’s charming horror parody Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

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The Wolf House (2018) - MUBI (pick of the week)

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s idiosyncratic animated feature The Wolf House is an astonishing, surrealist typhoon of mixed media techniques and constant metamorphosis. Taking on a Grimm-fairy tale style, it warps the story of The Three Little Pigs through the real life horrors of Colonia Dignidad, a sectarian enclave run by Paul Schäfer, a depraved man who sheltered Nazis and turned the place into a torture centre for dictator Augusto Pinochet’s enemies.

Read more: Everything new on Prime in October

The film follows María, a girl from Colonia Dignidad, punished for having lost three pigs. She instead runs away and takes refuge in an abandoned house hidden in the forest. The subject matter begins incredibly heavy but the directors pare it down to something that’s not too difficult to manage.

León and Cociña’s construction of the house itself is astonishing as the walls themselves seem to be constantly moving, reality morphing and shifting around its characters at all times as it constantly deconstructs and reconstructs itself. It can be overwhelming even with a fairly brief running time, but it feels safe to say that there’s nothing that looks like The Wolf House.

Also on MUBI: The White Reindeer (1952)

Poltergeist (1982) - BBC iPlayer

A film that terrified many a millennial child back in the day, today Poltergeist reads as a deconstruction of late 20th century capitalism under Reagan and how it reshaped the middle class family unit — less scary than it is family drama filtered through a ghost story.

It follows the Freeling Family, the patriarch Steve, his wife, Diane, and their three children, Dana, Robbie, and Carol Anne. Steve is selling suburban houses in California for a company that constructed them.

Read more: Everything new on Sky and NOW in October

Steve soon realises that the home is haunted after discovering objects moving by themselves, and calls in a team of parapsychologists to help combat the ghost. A collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper the sensibilities of the two clash somewhat, perhaps leaning more in favour of that of the former as it covers the American director’s usual thematic interests.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) - BBC iPlayer

Another stop motion feature from industry legends Aardman, the claymation adventures of Wallace & Gromit take on a (marginally) more spooky bent as the duo run a business ridding the town of garden pests, catching them and adopting them rather than exterminating them.

The two are called upon to investigate a giant rabbit that is terrorising their town's vegetable patches, putting the annual vegetable-growing contest in jeopardy. In other hands the horror parody might make audiences roll their eyes but director Nick Park directs with plenty of expressive charm, its higher budget utilised for maximum absurdity as it clashes quaint countryside charm with familiar horror tropes - not least of all when Wallace turns into a giant rabbit.

Also on iPlayer: Queen of Katwe, The Awakening

The School for Good and Evil (2022) - Netflix

The latest film from Bridesmaids director Paul Feig imagines classical fairy tale roles as something that needs to be learned in a Hogwarts-like school: The School For Good and Evil. The school exists behind a veil, between the world of the “Storians”, those who become the figures of famous fables, and the “Readers”, those who experience them.

Read more: Everything new on Netflix in October

The film is based on a series of novels by Soman Chainani, and follows best friends Sophie and Agatha as they navigate that enchanted school for aspiring young heroes and villains. They find themselves on opposing sides of the divide — Sophie on the side of evil, Agatha on the side of good, in opposition to their temperaments — and try to get out of their respective assignments.

The playfulness with fairy tale logic and sometimes pantomime tone can sometimes be fun, but the film’s production is ugly, stifling and washed out. Even with its cast of legendary performers (Lawrence Fishburne and Michelle Yeoh among them) it feels stretched so very thin over an unjustifiably long running time.

Also on Netflix: The Stranger

Watch the trailer for The School for Good and Evil