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Halloween Movies 2026: FreeForm

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The Freeform channel focuses on family friendly types of programming (well, it is a Disney channel, after all), so it’s no surprise that the annual kid-oriented 31 Nights of Halloween schedule has been stocked with perennial favorites like The Addams Family (starring Raul Julia, Angelica Huston, and Christina Ricci), Edward Scissorhands, Monsters Inc., and Hocus Pocus. This year it’s joined by the debut of the young adult witchcraft series Coven Academy. 

Scattered among the old standards—which tends to endlessly repeat the Addams Family/Hocus Pocus/Scissorhands grouping—were the original Ghostbusters as well as Ghostbusters: Afterlife (a really good sequel) and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (a…not so great sequel), plus the three Sam Raimi–directed Spider-Man films, and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Oh, and one showing of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, the animated feature best known for its stellar adaptation of Washington Irving’s classic story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

So what’s on the menu for Halloween?

The day kicks off at 8:30 am (EST) with Casper, the 1995 adaptation of the comic book character, starring the world’s Friendliest Ghost along with Christina Ricci and Bill Pullman. Keep an eye out for the cameo by Dan Aykroyd as Ghostbuster Ray Stantz. Is Ray’s appearance an official part of Ghostbusters lore? Fans are still debating that, thirty years later!

Following Casper are 2003’s The Haunted Mansion (starring Eddie Murphy); 1993’s Hocus Pocus (starring Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy as the three witchy Sanderson Sisters); the 1993 animated musical Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas; a repeat of Casper…and then a repeat of Hocus Pocus.

The night closes out with the sisters’ return in 2022’s Hocus Pocus 2, and another Tim Burton animated feature, 2012’s Frankenweenie, to carry you into the Day of the Dead.

What, no The Craft? (Well, maybe Coven Academy fills that niche. Kinda.) And looking at the “31 Days” schedule, it would’ve made far more sense to have loaded the big day with the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp marathon that Freeform offered on October 16: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Edward Scissorhands, Dark Shadows, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Sleepy Hollow. Now that’s a Halloween lineup!  

Oh, well…

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the programming for AMC’s FearfFest. See you then!

Halloween Movies 2022: Freeform

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Halloween is almost here! Sure, it might look like Christmas is almost upon us, what with stores already decorating their aisles for yuletide and the Spooky Season stuff relegated to the back shelves, but for the rest of us it’s still the time to celebrate all things macabre. So what better way than to watch horror movies?

Starting today, we’ll take a look at what some of the cable channels are offering for programming on that special day. We begin with Freeform…

There aren’t many surprises involved in Freeform’s annual “31 Nights of Halloween” programming schedule—it tends to be a handful of popular, not-very-scary, family-friendly movies that you’ve no doubt already seen, run over and over again and occasionally interspersed with episodes of The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror. The biggest shakeup this year came early in the month when they ran the very adult Get Out, Halloween (2018), A Quiet Place, Happy Death Day, and Happy Death Day 2U over two nights—and then quickly returned to the less stressful playlist.

So if you’re in the mood for “comfort food” spooky films, here’s what Freeform is offering for Halloween (all times listed are Eastern Time):

10:30 a.m.: Ghostbusters (1984): The original horror comedy starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Sigourney Weaver, Ernie Hudson, Rick Moranis, and Annie Potts. The GB crew deals with a New York City overrun with ghosts in anticipation of the arrival of the extradimensional goddess Zuul and her Destructor: the Staypuft Marshmallow Man!

1:00 p.m.: The Haunted Mansion (2003): Eddie Murphy, Marsha Thomason, Terence Stamp, Wallace Shawn, and Jennifer Tilly star in this adaptation of the spooky Disney ride.

3:00 p.m.: Beetlejuice (1988): Tim Burton directs Michael Keaton, Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin, and Winona Ryder in the tale of a recently deceased couple who simply want to spend eternity haunting their home, only to be forced to call in a disgusting “bio-exorcist” named Beetlejuice to scare away the new family moving in. And that’s when everything goes horribly wrong…

5:00 p.m.: Maleficent (2014): Angelina Jolie stars in this live-action reinterpretation of the Disney animated classic Sleeping Beauty, with Jolie’s fairy queen Maleficent not so much evil as in the original, but simply misunderstood. Hey, like the saying goes, every villain is the hero of their own story!

7:00 p.m.: Hotel Transylvania (2012): Adam Sandler is Dracula! Steve Buscemi is the Wolfman! Kevin James is Frankenstein’s Monster! Selena Gomez is Dracula’s daughter! And they all get together at…Dracula’s vacation resort? 

9:00 p.m.: Hocus Pocus (1993): With Hocus Pocus 2 now on Disney+, here’s the opportunity for folks not paying for a streaming service to catch up on the spooky comedy that stars Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy as the Sanderson Sisters, a trio of evil witches seeking immortality.

12:00 a.m.: The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episodes (Freeform doesn’t list what’s playing)

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at AMC’s programming. Stay tuned!