Crystal Lake, Carrie, Below, and Yaga are all competing in a very busy October.

Crystal Lake, Carrie, Below, and Yaga are all competing in a very busy October.

The Toronto International Film Festival is a place to go to see the future of film, but this year it also provided a glimpse at what is coming very soon in the realm of streaming. Four different streamers — Peacock, Netflix, Amazon, and AMC — all premiered early looks at upcoming horror-adjacent series that are dropping very soon. And by doing it at TIFF, they showed just how vital the month of October has become in the realm of streaming.

In a related development, perhaps the most high-profile is Carrie, which is coming to Prime Video. An adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel, which has already been turned into no fewer than three feature films, this version of Carrie is notable in particular because of who is helming it. Mike Flanagan has done a handful of King adaptations in the past — including Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck — but the director is perhaps best-known for his work on limited series for Netflix. That includes the likes of The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Those series came out on a near-annual basis between 2018 and 2023, making Flanagan’s particular blend of dramatic horror a staple of Netflix in October.

Then, in 2022, Amazon poached Flanagan to work on projects for Prime Video. The first of these is Carrie, which starts streaming on October 7th. It still tells largely the same story as its predecessors — a young girl’s destructive psychic powers awaken after getting bullied in high school — but it updates it in a few ways. For starters, the story has been thoroughly modernized, with much of the bullying happening in cyberspace. But since it’s a series instead of a movie, Carrie also stretches out the story, which gives it the space to explore the teen drama a little, and also adds plenty of opportunities for Flanagan’s trademark lengthy monologues. I’ve only seen the premiere episode so far, but early on it’s a combination of flavors that work really well together.

Netflix, meanwhile, has filled in the gap with a new series called Below, which premieres on October 8th, just a day after Carrie starts streaming. I saw the first two episodes earlier this week — there will be six in total — and while it’s a different kind of story compared to the likes of Hill House, it has a similarly dark and mysterious energy. Below is about what seems to be an ancient sea creature that begins terrorizing a limited fishing village in Newfoundland, on the east coast of Canada. From what I’ve seen, the show does a great job of steadily building the terror of the creature’s reveal, while also mixing the scares with a healthy dose of family drama, led by Josh Hartnett as a struggling fisher who is struggling to keep his family together.

Furthermore, then there’s Peacock, which is joining the fray with a prequel series. Fans of Friday the 13th will know that Jason’s mom plays a pivotal role in the very first film, and the new show Crystal Lake explores how she got to that point. It stars Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, a single mother who is thrown into a pit of despair and disbelief when her young son drowns to death.

I went into the show thinking that I didn’t really need to know much more about the backstory of Jason’s mother, but the first two episodes that premiered at TIFF — and Cardellini’s performance in particular — have me second-guessing that. Crystal Lake is surprisingly tense and dramatic, but, given its connection to Friday the 13th, it also has slasher-movie levels of gore and gross-out deaths, ones that are so brutal they approach comedy. If nothing else, it gets off to a very strong start. All episodes of Crystal Lake hit Peacock on October 15th.

Rounding out the list is Yaga, a supernatural detective series that’s coming to AMC Plus on October 23rd. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to catch the premiere screening for the show, but it does seem promising, with a cast that includes Carrie-Anne Moss and Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams, and a very intriguing trailer:

Additionally, what has become abundantly clear in 2026 is that horror is big business. The likes of Backrooms and Obsession have exploded at the box office, while Widow’s Bay had a dominating night at the Emmys. So it only makes sense that streamers are continuing to capitalize on the trend, and using TIFF as a showcase event. October is going to be a very busy month for horror fans.

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