August has a reputation problem. It sits in the dead air between summer and the good part of the year, everybody is hoarding their attention for October, and the working assumption is that nothing worth watching gets released into it.
That assumption does not survive the calendar. Warner Bros. is putting the newest Evil Dead on digital four days in. Blumhouse is finally letting go of a movie it yanked out of theaters in December. Shudder has a new film every single Friday, including an Ozploitation slasher that came out of Fantasia with critics arguing about it. There is also a Yeti picture starring Corbin Bernsen, which I did not have on my August card.
Everything below has a confirmed U.S. release date between August 1 and August 31. I have flagged what comes with your subscription and what you have to pay for on top of it, because those are two different things and the services would prefer you not think about it too hard. Counting down from ten.
10. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Streaming date: August 3, 2026
Platform: Netflix
Release type: Library addition, included with subscription
Emma Tammi’s sequel picked up a critical drubbing and $239.6 million worldwide, which tells you how little the first number mattered to the people buying tickets. Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio and Matthew Lillard all return, joined by Mckenna Grace, Wayne Knight and Skeet Ulrich. The animatronics are still animatronics. The lore is still lore.
It played Peacock back on April 3, and this is the standard four month rotation, so nothing here is new except the address. What makes it worth listing is the audience. If you have a teenager who has been quoting this franchise at you since 2023, August 3 is when it stops costing you anything to say yes.
I am not the target. That is fine. Every generation gets the mascot horror it deserves, and at least this one has Matthew Lillard in it.
9. Pearl
Streaming date: August 3, 2026
Platform: Hulu
Release type: Library addition, included with subscription
Ti West’s whole trilogy lands the same day, X and MaXXXine included, which makes this the single best value proposition on any streaming service in August.
Watch Pearl first anyway. It is the 1918 prequel, it is shot like a Technicolor musical that wandered into the wrong genre, and Mia Goth’s monologue near the end runs long enough that most actors would have blinked. She does not. If you have only ever seen X, you have seen the good slasher and missed the reason the trilogy exists.
For anyone who has done all three, the interesting exercise is watching them by production order and noticing how much of MaXXXine was already decided in 1918. West builds these things like a man laying track behind a moving train.
Newcomers, start with Pearl. Then X. Save the eighties one.
8. Buffet Infinity
Streaming date: August 21, 2026
Platform: Shudder, also available on AMC+
Release type: Subscription premiere, Shudder Exclusive, U.S. and Canada only
Simon Glassman’s film is the story of two restaurants going to war in the fictional Westridge County, and it is told entirely through their original low budget television commercials. Shudder’s own materials invoke SCTV, which tells you the comedy register without telling you a thing about where the horror comes from.
That gap is the whole appeal. A conventional feature has to walk you through a town’s decline. An ad break can just show you the same jingle six months later with different people in it and let you do the math. Thirty seconds at a time, a place curdles.
This is the biggest formal swing on the August slate and the one most likely to lose people in the first ten minutes. Go in expecting a comedy that turns. Horror comedy fans and anyone who watches local access television for fun should clear the evening.
7. The Strangers: Chapter 2
Streaming date: August 7, 2026
Platform: HBO Max
Release type: Subscription streaming premiere
Renny Harlin’s second installment opened theatrically on September 26, 2025, did $5.9 million on its opening weekend, and limped to roughly $21.9 million worldwide. Madelaine Petsch is back as Maya, with Gabriel Basso and Ema Horvath. A Chapter 3 teaser runs in the credits, because of course it does.
The trilogy was shot in one go and released in pieces, and the box office suggests audiences worked out that the pieces are not equally load bearing. Harlin can stage a home invasion. What he cannot do is make three of them feel necessary.
Here is the part that made me laugh. Chapter 2 hits HBO Max on the seventh, and Chapter 1 does not arrive until August 30, alongside Prey at Night. Somebody scheduled a franchise backward. Franchise completists and home invasion sickos, this is your month regardless.
6. George A. Romero’s Resident Evil
Streaming date: August 1, 2026
Platform: Shudder
Release type: Library addition, included with subscription
Brandon Salisbury’s documentary is about a film that does not exist. In 1998 Romero wrote a Resident Evil screenplay for Constantin Film, Capcom passed on it, and the version of the franchise we ended up with went in an entirely different direction.
Everyone who has spent time in horror message boards has heard a secondhand account of that script. Salisbury went and got the people who were actually there on camera, then dug into why the project collapsed, and the result is less a nostalgia piece than an autopsy. It went to digital in January 2025 and has been awkward to find since.
Now it is sitting in your subscription on the first of the month. Romero devotees, game adaptation obsessives, and anybody who enjoys watching an industry explain its own bad decisions on the record.
5. The Yeti
Streaming date: August 7, 2026
Platform: Shudder, also available on AMC+
Release type: Subscription premiere, Shudder Exclusive, U.S. and Canada only
An oil tycoon played by Corbin Bernsen and a famous adventurer played by William Sadler disappear into the winter wilderness of northern Alaska. A rescue team goes in. The weather turns out to be the least of anyone’s problems, because the territory belongs to something else.
Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta are directing, and the casting is the tell. You do not book Bernsen and Sadler for a movie that plans to keep its monster in the dark for eighty minutes. Cryptid horror lives or dies on nerve, specifically on whether the film will show you the thing.
There is also a seasonal argument for this one. Watching people freeze in August is its own form of air conditioning, and I say that as somebody who reaches for The Thing every July. Creature feature crowd, this is your Friday.
4. Hellcat
Streaming date: August 14, 2026
Platform: Shudder, also available on AMC+
Release type: Subscription premiere, Shudder Original, U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand
Lena wakes up in a moving camper trailer with a wound she cannot explain. The driver tells her she has one hour to reach a doctor or something unimaginable happens to her. The pain arrives on schedule. Reality does not hold.
Brock Bodell has built a countdown inside a metal box, which means Dakota Gorman is carrying the entire film on her face and the sound design. That is a brutal assignment and also the most reliable structure horror has. There is nowhere to cut away to.
The premise keeps its cards close, and the marketing has been careful about who the film thinks is actually in danger. I would not read further than the logline.
This is the only new Shudder title in August available across all of the service’s major territories, so it is the safe pick if your group chat has passports. Body horror people, block out the fourteenth.
3. Penny Lane Is Dead
Streaming date: August 28, 2026
Platform: Shudder, also available on AMC+
Release type: Subscription premiere, Shudder Original, U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland
Mia-Kate Russell’s debut takes place across one hot night in 1986 Australia. Seventeen year old Penny is celebrating her college acceptance with her girlfriends when a jealous cousin decides a spiked cupcake would be funny. It is not funny. What follows is a night of bloodshed and revenge in the full Ozploitation tradition.
It premiered at Adelaide Film Festival and had its North American premiere at Fantasia in July, and the response has been split in a way I find encouraging. RogerEbert.com came away calling it too cruel to enjoy. Cruelty is a strange thing to hold against a 1986 Australian revenge picture, but the disagreement is real, and it means the film is doing something.
Also worth saying plainly: this is a sapphic slasher, and 1986 gives Russell a world with no phones and no way to unsay a rumor before sunrise. Queer horror viewers, the twenty eighth.
2. SOULM8TE
Digital date: August 1, 2026
Platform: Digital retailers including Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home
Release type: Digital purchase and rental only. No subscription streaming date has been announced.
Kate Dolan’s M3GAN spinoff was supposed to open in theaters on January 2, then January 9, then it was pulled off the schedule entirely in December after M3GAN 2.0 underperformed. It is a nineties style erotic thriller about a grieving man, played by David Rysdahl, a grieving engineer, played by David Rysdahl, who is tasked with testing an AI android played by Lily Sullivan and attempts to program her as a sentient soulmate. She becomes capable of other things too.
Dolan has said she wants you to watch it the way people now watch Basic Instinct or Showgirls, meaning loudly and with a drink. A director telling you her movie is ridiculous before you press play is either honesty or armor. Given the pedigree of the delay, I lean honesty.
Pay attention to the release type on this one. August 1 is rental and purchase, not free with anything.
1. Evil Dead Burn
Digital date: August 4, 2026
Platform: Digital retailers including Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home
Release type: Digital purchase and rental. Physical media follows on September 22.
Sebastien Vanicek’s standalone entry opened in theaters on July 10 and is home in under four weeks, which is fast even by current standards. Souheila Yacoub plays Alice, a widow whose husband’s death lets the Necronomicon back into the world, with Hunter Doohan and Luciane Buchanan. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert produced, as they have since 1981.
Reviews came in on the positive side, with the recurring note from critics being that this is the nastiest film the franchise has produced. That is a genuine achievement in a series that once had a woman assault a man with a bathroom mirror. Vanicek proved on his last feature that he can hold dread without over explaining it, and Evil Dead has always given each director room to make the deadites their own problem.
Practical effects people, this is the one. Buy it, do not rent it.
