Although you may have originally subscribed to Peacock for The Office, or even to check out a football game, you may have realized once you got into the app that it has a surprisingly deep bench of great TV shows and movies that are well worth exploring.
Among the many great titles that the service has to offer, there are some genuinely excellent horror movies on offer. While you’ll definitely find plenty of masterpieces of the genre on the service, there are also some underrated horror movies on Peacock that are definitely worth checking out. Here are three of our favorites.
Freaky (2020)
Body swap comedies are a genre unto themselves, but no one has ever approached the subject quite the way that Freaky does. The movie tells the story of a serial killer and teenage girl who switch bodies, leading to plenty of grisly kills, and some truly excellent comedy from Vince Vaughn. Freaky is a horror comedy in the best sense, and it maximizes both of those elements from start to finish.
The movie might not have seemed like a sure-fire hit on paper, but it’s one of the best horror movies of recent years, in part because it’s equally interested in terrifying its audience and making them burst out in laughter.
The Exorcist: Part III (1990)
The original Exorcist may very well be one of the very best horror movies ever made, so it would seem rather foolish to suggest that any of the sequels could live up to it. The Exorcist: Part III might not be quite as good as the original, but it’s pretty close. At the very least, it ranks high on the best movies and TV shows in The Exorcist franchise.
Following a police captain as he attempts to solve a series of horrific murders in his town, The Exorcist Part III digs into the themes of faith and death that fascinated the first film, and is also pretty perfectly directed until its rather perfunctory final sequence. Add in a committed, hilarious, riveting performance from George C. Scott, and you’ve got yourself a great movie.
The Black Phone (2022)
Ethan Hawke is great in basically whatever role you want to put him in, but he doesn’t get to be a creep nearly enough. In The Black Phone, Hawke plays a killer of children who has kidnapped a child. The child discovers that he can use the phone in his captor’s basement to contact the killer’s previous victims and uses the knowledge from them to plan his escape.
The Black Phone is deliberately small-scale but genuinely tense from start to finish. It’s exactly the kind of great small-budget horror film that we don’t get to see in theaters often enough these days, and Hawke is truly great in it.
