There was a stretch of the late 90s when every Friday at the multiplex seemed to come with a guy in a mask and a cast pulled straight off the WB. If you grew up then, 90s slasher movies weren't just movies. They were sleepover currency. You watched them on a rented VHS with the lights off, then you watched them again when they hit cable, usually starting twenty minutes in because somebody's mom had the remote.
So here's the Halloween movie marathon I would have killed for (sorry) back then, and what a night on the SCREAM channels in Nostalgex looks like if these are sitting in your library. No planning, no playlists. Halloween 2026 lands on a Saturday, so nobody has school tomorrow. Every pick is a 90s horror movie you probably already own, maybe on a dusty shelf next to Titanic on two tapes.
What a Night on the SCREAM Channels Looks Like
Flip between FRIGHT NIGHT, SCREAM ADULTS, and NOSTALGEX HORROR on Halloween and these are the ones you hope to land on, from the doorbell hours to the stuff nobody should watch alone at 3 AM. Here they are in the order I'd want to catch them.
The Lineup
Early Evening: Bride of Chucky (1998)
The doorbell hours. Trick or treaters will interrupt you every eight minutes, and Bride of Chucky is the one movie on this list that doesn't mind. Ronny Yu leaned all the way into camp, Jennifer Tilly steals it as Tiffany, and the opening in a police evidence locker is a horror nerd's Where's Waldo: Jason's hockey mask, Michael's mask, Freddy's glove, Leatherface's chainsaw. Tiffany is watching Bride of Frankenstein in the bathtub when Chucky drops the TV in. Subtle, it is not.
Before Prime Time: Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)
Jamie Lee Curtis comes back as Laurie Strode, now hiding as Keri Tate, headmistress of a California boarding school, and she has had enough. It's lean at 86 minutes, with Josh Hartnett in his first movie, Michelle Williams in her Dawson's Creek era, and LL Cool J as a security guard reading his romance novel to his girlfriend over the phone. Janet Leigh, Curtis's real mom, drives off in the same kind of car she had in Psycho while that score plays. The axe ending still rules.
Prime Time: Scream (1996)
The one you want to flip onto at 9, because it started the whole revival. Wes Craven directed, Kevin Williamson wrote it, and the opening with Drew Barrymore and the phone ("What's your favorite scary movie?") is still the best cold open of the decade. Neve Campbell as Sidney, Courteney Cox as Gale Weathers, and Matthew Lillard doing whatever Matthew Lillard was doing. Jamie Kennedy's Randy reads out the rules while Halloween plays on the TV behind him.
Late Night: Scream 2 (1997)
If the sequel turns up later, stay put. Scream 2 opens in a movie theater full of fans wearing Ghostface masks at the premiere of Stab, the movie inside the movie, which might be the sharpest joke Williamson ever wrote. Sidney is at Windsor College now, Liev Schreiber gets more to do as Cotton Weary, and the reveal works better than people remember. Randy's fate still makes me mad.
After Midnight: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Williamson again (the man had a year). Four friends hit a guy on a dark road on the Fourth of July, dump the body, and a year later a fisherman with a hook disagrees with their choices. Jennifer Love Hewitt screaming "What are you waiting for?" in the street is the image everyone remembers, but Sarah Michelle Gellar's chase after the beauty pageant is the scariest stretch. Add Freddie Prinze Jr. and Ryan Phillippe and you have the most 1997 cast imaginable.
After Hours (If You're Still Awake)
The SCREAM channels never sign off. These are for the people on the couch who refuse to admit they're asleep.
Urban Legend (1998)
The college one. A killer in a parka acts out urban legends on a New England campus, starting with the backseat killer, with Brad Dourif as the stammering gas station attendant trying to warn Natasha Gregson Wagner. Robert Englund (Freddy himself) plays a folklore professor, Joshua Jackson does the Pop Rocks and soda bit, and Loretta Devine steals every scene as the campus cop who loves Pam Grier. Peak late night cable.
Candyman (1992)
The oldest and best made movie here, and the worst one to stumble onto when you're too tired to defend yourself. Bernard Rose turned a Clive Barker story into something sad and genuinely frightening: Virginia Madsen as a grad student chasing a legend at Chicago's Cabrini-Green, Tony Todd with the hook and the bees, and a Philip Glass score that gets under your skin. Don't say his name five times in the mirror.
Also worth catching
The Faculty (1998) is Robert Rodriguez doing Invasion of the Body Snatchers in a high school, with Elijah Wood and Jon Stewart as a science teacher. It is more science fiction than slasher. Whether it turns up on FRIGHT NIGHT depends on your library and how the file is tagged. Final Destination came out in March 2000, so it misses NOSTALGEX HORROR, which only runs horror from 1975 to 1999. It may turn up on another horror channel if the metadata lines up. It may not.
How It Works on Nostalgex
Nostalgex is a free, open source app for Apple TV, plus a free web tuner, that turns your own Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby library into live channels with a retro TV guide. It's plug and play. Connect your server and it builds the channels and the schedules from what you own, so the SCREAM channels are already airing when you open the guide. It doesn't come with movies, though. It plays what's on your server, so these films need to be in your library. (New to the idea? Here's how to make your Plex library feel like cable.)
SCREAM is on channels 137 to 140
Version 1.0.23 added SCREAM, a Halloween bundle with four channels: SCREAM KIDS (137), FRIGHT NIGHT (138), SCREAM ADULTS (139), and NOSTALGEX HORROR (140), which is built for 70s, 80s, and 90s horror. In October the Apple TV guide offers SCREAM right at the top (say yes and it's in your lineup), with the kids channel first. Handy while the doorbell's still going. It's available any month from Settings, too, if you watch Scream in July.
The channels keep airing even when nobody's watching, so when you tune in at 9:40, you land in the middle of something, like 1997.
Missing one? It's usually the metadata
The channels are built from your server's metadata. A title tagged only "Thriller," or carrying a rerelease year, can miss a horror channel or fall outside the 90s. Fix the genre or year on your server and Nostalgex catches up on its own.
Turn on retro mode
Retro mode gives you the CRT look. In the web tuner it adds scanlines, a vignette, VHS glitch, and a 4:3 frame. On Apple TV it lives in the Now Playing panel. Then swipe up and down on the remote to flip channels without leaving the picture, and see what's on next before you commit.
Start Tonight's Marathon
The fastest way to try it is the free web tuner at nostalgex.app. Connect your server, and the SCREAM channels are already on. One heads up: the web tuner needs your media server reachable over HTTPS. Plex usually handles that for you. If you'd rather have it on the big screen (you would), Nostalgex is free on Apple TV, too.
Lights off. Phone face down. And whatever you do, don't answer if it rings. If you survive, the buddy cop block is waiting next Friday.