Netflix’s Movies That Made Us Season 3 to Highlight Halloween, Friday the 13th, and More Genre Films

Coming in October, the third season of Netflix’s fan-favorite series The Movies That Made Us will center on a number of staples of the horror genre, with a couple of notable ’80s movies thrown in for those who aren’t into the blood and gore. The upcoming season will delve into four separate horror franchises — three different slashers and the world of James Cameron’s Alien — in addition to Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. Christmas movies will also get a little bit of love, with both Elf and The Nightmare Before Christmas getting a deep dive.

According to What’s On Netflix, the third season of The Movies That Made Us will include coverage of Aliens, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Coming to America, Elf, Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and RoboCop. Most of those movies were released in the 1980s, although Halloween came in 1978, The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993, and Elf in 2003.

Elf and The Nightmare Before Christmas were already covered in the 2020 special The Holiday Movies That Made Us. It isn’t immediatley clear whether that series will be merged into the current show, or whether it will continue to be listed separately. It doesn’t seem totally implausible to go the other way, and make the horror movie episodes part of a Halloween special for Holiday Movies, leaving the core show to focus on Coming To America, RoboCop, and Alien, although that would leave the core show feeling somewhat anemic. Another possibility is that the slasher movies — Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street — could be combined into one episode.

For a deep dive into the Halloween franchise, might we recommend Taking Shape: Developing Halloween from Script to Scream and Taking Shape II: The Lost Halloween Sequels, both from authors Dustin McNeil and Travis Mullins? McNeil also authored Slash of the Titans, a book that looks at the long development of Freddy Vs. Jason. 

Assuming the listing information on What’s On Netflix is accurate, this would be a significantly longer season than the four-episode outings Netflix did in 2019 and 2020. It would also have a broader scope than is usual for the show, since every episode so far has been about a movie from the ’80s or ’90s. With the addition of Halloween and Elf, The Movies That Made Us will now go back as far as 1978 and up to as recently as 2003.

The third season of The Movies That Made Us is set to debut on Netflix on October 12.