The 5 Best New Movies Coming To Netflix In October

Netflix ushers in the spookiest month of the year with a lineup of films that have some bite to them. Literally.

There’s a horror flick about party-hopping vampires in L.A. and a slasher film that takes on cancel culture. For less genre fare, Jake Gyllenhaal’s crime drama and the Zack Snyder-produced heist adventure Army of Thieves should do the trick. Here are the best movies coming to Netflix this October.

(For the best new shows coming to Netflix this month, head here.)

Antione Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal team up again, this time for a crime drama with a storytelling twist. Gyllenhaal plays Joe Baylor, a police officer facing suspension after an on-duty incident. He’s relegated to the police dispatch center where he fields fairly mundane calls all morning long until a caller named Emily (Riley Keough in voice only) dials in claiming to be in grave danger. While Joe tries to save her over the phone, he comes in contact with people from his past and events he thought he’d forgotten. It’s an intense, emotionally-gripping cat-and-mouse game that puts Gyllenhaal square in the center of the action at all times — even if he never does leave his desk.

Netflix is doing its best to bring back the beloved 80s slasher flick — see its impressive Fear Street trilogy for proof — and this latest entry finds a way to marry the past with the present in surprisingly bloody ways. The film follows a young Hawaiian girl named Makani who moves to a small town in Nebraska just as a high-school student goes on a murderous rampage. Who the killer is and why they seem to be targeting peers deemed “cancelable” we still don’t know, but Makani and her friends work to find out before their own muddied pasts come back to, well, kill them.

This new doc for the Academy Award-winning filmmakers behind The White Helmets takes a look at how the COVID-19 pandemic inspired everyday people from around the world to commit acts of true bravery. From hospital volunteers in Wuhan to healthcare providers in Los Angeles, the film attempts to show how we can use this crisis to build better societal systems and adopt a less selfish worldview.

Yes, this is the Megan Fox vampire movie. Yes, it follows an unlucky Uber driver, who gets stuck ferrying two blood-sucking party girls around L.A. as they try to hit every worthwhile bash before the sun comes up. And yes, it’s a ridiculously fun as its premise sounds. The key here is Jorge Lendeborg, Jr. who plays Benny, a quirky college kid just trying to earn some extra cash as a chauffeur. Through him, we’re introduced to an underground world of undead criminals, including two young women (Debby Ryan and Lucy Fry having a deliciously good time) who have their own nefarious plans for him. It’s the kind of campy horror watch we need right now.

Zack Snyder realized the best character in his Army of the Dead flick deserved his own origin story so he’s delivered that with this prequel which follows bank-robbing German-stud Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer, also directing this time) on an all-together different heist. When a mysterious woman named Gwendoline (Game of Thrones star Nathalie Emmanuel) recruits a still-green Dieter for a job that tasks him with cracking a series of legendary safes across Europe, he’s thrust into an even more dangerous world of criminals.