Written by John Squires

It’s the best damn time of the year.

Syfy’s annual 31 Days of Halloween celebration kicks off this coming Saturday, and in addition to countless horror faves that will be playing during the marathon, the network just announced that five brand new original genre films will have their world premieres. The first one, airing on Saturday, October 1st, is titled The Crooked Man and is based on the very same nursery rhyme that inspired one of The Conjuring 2‘s most memorable sequences; and that’s just the tippy top of this spooky iceberg.

Check out full details below!

The scare is everywhere during Syfy’s “31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN”! All October, the network will unleash a mix of spooky Syfy originals and nightmare-inducing horror movies in a cross-platform celebration of the most wickedly wonderful time of the year.

The 2016 “31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN” highlights include the premiere of Syfy’s original anthology series “CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE” on Tuesday, October 11, at 9/8c. Based on a popular “creepypasta” story shared on the internet, viewers will want to keep their nightlights on for this chilling tale.

The spook-a-thon also features the Syfy movie premieres of horror favorites Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Zombieland, The Strangers, The Cabin in the Woods, Wrong Turn, Maleficent, I, Frankenstein, and Drag Me to Hell.

Additionally, audiences will discover new scares with five original Syfy fright films airing Saturday nights, including THE CROOKED MAN, STAKE LAND 2, and THE NIGHT BEFORE HALLOWEEN. New episodes of “VAN HELSING,” “AFTERMATH,” and “Z NATION” will also continue to air throughout the month.

To accompany this terrifying cache of programming, Syfy will feature blood-curdling Halloween lore, as well as horror movie trivia on air throughout the month. The network will also plunge viewers into the middle of the action at Universal Studios’ “Halloween Horror Nights” with on-the-ground fan interviews. Syfy.com and its editorial arm, Blastr.com, will offer a veritable Halloween editorial graveyard with daily Top 13 lists, party tips to make your guests scream, and horror trope bingo cards, along with interviews with genre insiders. On the network’s social channels, viewers will be asked to submit their best costumes, screams, and holiday décor – and the most frightening entries will be featured on-air and on Syfy’s official Snapchat and Instagram Stories of the Week.

On Halloween itself, Monday, October 31, at 7/6c, fans can celebrate the holiday with Syfy’s social team as they take them inside the New York City Greenwich Village Halloween Parade on Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter.

Original programming airing as part of Syfy’s “31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN” includes:

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, at 9/8c – THE CROOKED MAN
Original Syfy Movie Starring Michael Jai White (Spawn) and Amber Benson (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) – Singing a nursery rhyme summons a demonic figure known as Crooked Man. Once you sing the rhyme, everyone in the house is cursed to die by his hands.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, at 9/8c – DAY OF RECKONING
Original Syfy Movie – Some years ago, the world experienced a “day of reckoning” when creatures came up from below and purged humanity of evil… now, it is happening again.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, at 9/8c – “CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE”
Syfy Original Anthology Series – “CANDLE COVE” centers on one man’s obsessive recollections of a mysterious children’s television program from the 1980s and his ever-growing suspicions about the role it might have played in a series of nightmarish and deadly events. From Universal Cable Productions (UCP), “CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE” is from showrunner and executive producer Nick Antosca (“Hannibal,” “Teen Wolf”), who wrote the CHANNEL ZERO pilot, and Max Landis (Chronicle, American Ultra). The six-part anthology series will continue on Tuesdays at 9/8c through November 22.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15 at 9/8c – STAKE LAND 2
Original Syfy Movie Starring Nick Damici (Stake Land) and Connor Paolo (“Gossip Girl”) – Vampires have evolved, and Mister must save a young woman from an evil brotherhood.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22 at 9/8c – SHADOWS OF THE DEAD
Original Syfy Movie – A group of teenagers try to escape a creature that lives among the shadows and is hunting them down one by one.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29 at 9/8c – THE NIGHT BEFORE HALLOWEEN
Original Syfy Movie Starring Bailee Madison (“The Fosters,” “Good Witch”) and Anthony Lemke (“Dark Matter,” American Psycho) – When a Halloween prank goes wrong, it unleashes a creature that will hunt each of the participants down and kill them, unless they can figure out how to transfer the curse to someone else.