• “Mr. Crocket”: If you watch only one new horror film this Halloween, make it this demented but deeply humane meditation on fathers and sins.

If Freddy Krueger and Mister Rogers got together in the 1990s and said “Let’s make a VHS tape,” it would look like “Mr. Crocket’s World,” the song-and-dance singalong children’s show that Summer (Jerrika Hinton) pops into her VCR one day to help calm her young son, Major (Ayden Gavin), who’s struggling to cope with his father’s death.

The show’s host is Mr. Crocket (Elvis Nolasco), a wide-smiling dweeb with furry sidekicks, chirpy kid co-stars and a catchphrase song with echoes of the “Diff’rent Strokes” theme. But Mr. Crocket isn’t a boy’s best friend — he’s a soul-sucking boogeyman who kills parents, kidnaps their kids and transports those kids to the set of his show as part of a twisted quest to make sure despair never skips a generation.

Director Brandon Espy brilliantly upends Generation X children’s television conventions — “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”-like puppetry, “Electric Company”-era animation styles — to tell a fast-moving and crushing story about parenthood and inherited trauma. The protagonist is a strong mother-protector, but Espy and Carl Reid’s probing script — my favorite this year — centers on failed fathers and their failed fathers and the messes these flawed men leave behind. It’s a knockout. (Stream it on Hulu.)

• “Daddy’s Head”: Benjamin Barfoot’s ice-cold supernatural thriller begins as Laura (Julia Brown) and her shy young stepson, Isaac (Rupert Turnbull), mourn the untimely death of James (Charles Aitken), the boy’s father. As much as Laura cares for Isaac, she has her own demons and doesn’t feel ready to become a single mother. To keep the boy out of foster care she agrees, despite feeling that Isaac hates her.

But Isaac has someone else watching over him: The creature who whispers to him at night in a rusty voice and lures him to a massive wooden lair in the woods. (James was an architect.) Are these conversations in Isaac’s head? Or does his father’s embrace really exist beyond a darkened threshold in the forest?

Barfoot seamlessly blends folk horror, creature feature grotesquerie and science fiction in his sinister but heartfelt examination of unresolved grief. (Cinematographer Miles Ridgway is an equally elegant storyteller.) Barfoot’s taut script calls to mind “The Babadook” but with one very big and startling difference: Mom isn’t sure she wants to be a mom, and the devil knows it. (Stream it on Shudder.)

• “I Saw the TV Glow”: Two years ago, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun knocked my socks off with the disturbing but profoundly poetic found-footage oddity “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Schoenbrun returns with this more polished but equally unnerving supernatural drama that uses nostalgia for the ‘90s to drive a story about the perils of looking back.

The film is set in 1996, and centers on two young misfits — Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) — who bond over their affection for “The Pink Opaque,” an “X-Files”-like show about two girls with monster-battling superpowers that aired Saturday nights on a WB-ish channel called the Young Adult Network. For those of us who found our tribe through weird television — for me it was “Tales From the Darkside” — theirs is a comfortingly familiar friendship.

But as fiction and reality blur, otherworldly dangers threaten Owen and Maddy’s kinship, and it’s there — in an uneasy fusion of recollection, sexual and gender awakening and tenderness — that this heartbreaking and visually arresting film bears terrifying fruit. (Stream it on Max.)

• “The Funeral”: It’s a mystery why this devastating zombie drama from Turkish writer-director Orcun Behram hasn’t made more of a splash. Now that it’s streaming, fans of international undead cinema are in for a treat.

The film begins as Cemal (Ahmet Rifat Sungar), a loner hearse driver, gets hired to deliver the body of a young woman, Zeynep (Cansu Turedi), to her funeral. The circumstances surrounding her death are shady, but the money is real. Cemal doesn’t get far before he discovers that Zeynep is actually alive, barely, and has a strange symbol carved into her chest that may have something to do with her thirst for human blood, a hankering that Cemal, sensing in Zeynep a kindred misunderstood spirit, feeds with his own body.

A less confident director might have risked stumbling into comedy territory, going for a gender-swapped “Lisa Frankenstein.” But Behram plays it mostly straight, and the result is an absurdist, ultra-gory and defiantly feminist trip. When the final stretch takes a darkly fantastical turn, it’s no spoiler to say that the funeral of the title doesn’t go as planned. (Stream it on Screambox.)

• “Come Home”: Like “The Strings” and “Falcon Lake,” this indie ghost story is slow-burn horror that’s so talky, some people might not even consider it a horror movie. But it is, and it’s an unassuming doozy.

It’s set at a cabin in the Adirondacks, where Mel (Caitlin Zoz), whose family owns the property, and her new husband, Ikenna (Chinaza Uche), escape the city with another interracial couple, Arjun (Sathya Sridharan) and Taylor (Paton Ashbrook). The area is said to be haunted by a woman who summons her dead lover by calling out “come home” — a warning, not a folk tale, says Sam (Audrey Hailes), a local who, like Ikenna, is Black. When Ikenna and Arjun go missing, let’s just say it’s not to go on a hike.

The film was directed by Zoz and Nicole Pursell and written by seven people, including the actors — usually a sign of a messy, catchall script. But while the film’s racial concerns are too unclearly articulated — too many cooks, too many directions — it still kept me hooked and guessing, using time and silence to ponder ghosts and the evil unseen. (Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video.)