Every day is Halloween on horror genre video streaming services Shudder and Screambox. The pair delivers screams and scares with a variety of films mostly unseen by anyone but hardcore horror fans. Both platforms offer vintage films and independent movies that will send a chill down your spine. Which should you use to scare up some fun this Halloween season?
Which Horror Streaming Service Has the Most Exciting Library?
The horror genre has a long history of churning out slasher flicks with anemic budgets, and Shudder offers a lot of them. From well-known and beloved classic films like the original Halloween movie to 80s cult classics like Sleepaway Camp, Shudder has all the jump scares and final girls you can handle. These older films coexist alongside newer films on the platform. You’ll find both Edgar Allen Poe/Roger Corman/Vincent price collabs like Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and Masque of the Red Death (1964), as well as newer bloodbaths, like Damien LeVeck’s The Cleansing Hour (2020) and Glen Danzig’s Verotika (2019).
There are also original horror series and films on Shudder and not all of them are scary. The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula: Resurrection is a Halloween-themed drag competition where the contestants are equal parts ghoulish and glamorous. There’s also a wide variety of comedy offerings that include movies like Elvira: Mistress of the Dark or the Shudder original movie, Scare Package.
Just as Shudder has many familiar offerings, competitor Screambox offers horror movies you won’t see anywhere else. It has Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein from 1910 and the 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera alongside modern, subtitled foreign language thrillers like What the Waters Left Behind. Don’t bother looking for many well-known classics on Screambox—it’s a service for the hardcore horror fan who is looking for obscure films and short interviews with creators.
Like Shudder, Screambox has exclusive content, including docuseries like Welcome to Daisyland and the terrifying clown film It’s Here. For fans of a lot of blood and gore, there’s a category on Screambox entitled Extreme, which features plenty of bloodletting and otherwise disturbing content that you just won’t find on other platforms. Screambox’s library is highly curated and smaller than most other video streaming platforms. It’s also cheap, as you can see in the next section.
Winner: Shudder
Pricing and Platforms
Shudder costs $5.99 per month with the option for a $56.99-per-year annual subscription. Screambox undercuts that price substantially with a $4.99-per-month monthly option and a $35.88-per-year annual plan. $4.99 brings Screambox down among the lowest fees for paid streaming services. There are free streaming services, but they mostly show ads. Screambox doesn’t, nor does Shudder.
In addition to watching Shudder on the web, you can download a dedicated Shudder app on mobile platforms (Android and iOS), streaming devices (Apple TV, Fire TV, and Roku), and the Xbox One. an also watch Shudder via a web browser. Missing from this list are Nintendo and PlayStation consoles, Chromecast devices, and smart TVs. Screambox offers an app for mobile platforms (iOS and Android) and media streaming devices (Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire TV, and Roku). Your decision may come down to which service supports the devices you own.
Winner: Screambox
Which Offers the Better Viewing Experience?
Both services have all the basics: the ability to stream movies from a phone or TV in HD quality; movies divided up by genre and sorted into collections for easy binge-watching; and the ability to search for titles. Screambox also adopted Netflix’s Continue Watching feature that’s incredibly helpful for keeping track of your scary movies when you need to pause and take a break from the terror.
You can stream movies from your phone with both services, but with Screambox, you can also download the movies for offline viewing whenever you can’t connect to Wi-Fi or don’t want to use up cellular data. Shudder does not offer this option. Screambox also supports three simultaneous streams, whereas Shudder does not allow for concurrent streams from the same account.
The closed captioning system for both services is limited to English-language options, and you can’t change the color or font like you can on other platforms. Both services also lack any kind of parental control features, which may be a big issue for some viewers. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Max all provide extensive parental control options for their platforms. An ability to create separate user profiles for family members on the services would go a long way to helping parents keep an eye on what kind of horror their kids are viewing.
Winner: Screambox
What About Extra Features?
Shudder and Screambox both have platform-exclusive content and original content. However, only Shudder has ShudderTV, a streaming channel dedicated to horror content. There is content available to watch 24/7. You can view channels like Slashics, which are old slasher flicks, and others that offer premium curated content to watch around the clock.
Shudder also features horror podcasts on their platform, which is an interesting addition. You can watch or listen to the podcasts just like you would watch movies on your TV or mobile phone. In the spirit of Halloween, Shudder has a collection of 21 titles that are vital viewing for horror fans, including their riff on Netflix’s Yule Log called the Ghoul Log which is an hour-long static shot of a lit jack-o-lantern.
Screambox also has a Halloween themed collection called 13 Screams to Halloween featuring 12 movies with Halloween connections including films like The Terror of Hallow’s Eve and The Barn.
Winner: Shudder
Scare Up a Good Time
We recommend both Shudder and Screambox for hardcore horror fans this Halloween. Both won two categories here, and both are worth a gorehound’s time. There isn’t a lot of overlap with the movies they offer, and you can broaden your horror horizons by watching films on both platforms. If you’ve never felt the need to look beyond the Scream franchise for scary movies, Shudder may be your best bet for more mainstream films and series, which (combined with its better viewing experience) gives it the edge when it comes to our ratings of the two services. However, both services have quirky, interesting horror-themed movies to deliver some spooks this Halloween season.
For additional thrills, you’ll want to check out the usual suspects: Hulu and Netflix both have extensive collections, and Peacock includes a huge collection of the Universal Classic Monsters movies if you’re looking for a truly old-school scare.
