Falling for the trickery of April Fools’ Day often leads to hurt feelings or anger at being duped. In horror, though, it can be downright deadly. Unless, perhaps, it’s a rare exception like the 1986 slasher April Fool’s Day, where the audience is the intended prank target.
With April Fools’ Day commencing this Friday, this week’s streaming picks serve as horror-fueled reminders that it’s often not the prankster who gets the last laugh.
As always, here’s where to stream these horror gems for April Fools’ Day!
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
Slaughter High – Roku Channel, Tubi
High school outcast Marty is subjected to sexual humiliation through a vicious prank. But it doesn’t stop there. After a coach interrupts a bout of bullying, Marty is given a poisoned joint to distract him while other students set up a prank involving an exploding science experiment. Naturally, it goes horribly awry when a fire breaks out, and Marty bumps into acid, disfiguring him. Marty seeks revenge during a school reunion. Pranks are all fun and games until people get maimed and slaughtered, and let’s face it, Slaughter High shows how unpredictably the target can react.
The House on Sorority Row – IMDb TV, Roku Channel, Tubi
For the graduating group of sorority sisters who want to party, an uptight house mother who puts her foot down causes them to devise a prank that they hope will change her mind through fear. Instead, the house mother winds up dead. When the sisters forge ahead with party plans anyway, the body count starts mounting. For these gals, they learn the hard way that the house mother had their safety on her mind, and their irresponsible prank leads to certain doom. Same with the 2009 remake, Sorority Row; a brutal, bloody prank gone wrong leads to the destruction of the entire sorority house.
One Dark Night – AMC+, IMDb TV, Pluto TV, Roku, Shudder, Tubi
Julie wants to be friends with the popular trio of girls known as the Sisters. She’s unaware that one of them is jealous that she’s dating their ex, so she accepts their initiation task of spending the night in a mausoleum. Julie is shy and skittish, so the Sisters plan several gags and pranks to scare her so she’ll flee in terror. Too bad the mausoleum happens to be the burial place of telekinetic, psychic vampire Raymar, and Raymar doesn’t want to stay dead. The Sisters learn that ill-intentioned pranks come back around in the worst way, but poor Julie suffers greatly, too.
Scare Campaign – Prime Video
Scare Campaign refers to the fictional hidden camera prank show, where the cast and crew set up elaborate schemes to scare their targets silly on camera. However, the hijinks are becoming so involved that it’s getting dangerous. When a rival web series threatens to usurp their ratings, and they’re encouraged to up the ante, things get deadly quick. Writer/directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes first lean into the narrative expectations, then subvert them. More importantly, the film is a lot of fun, and the kills are delightfully bloody.
Joy Ride – Starz
“Candy Cane? Hey, anybody know a Candy Cane?” Playing a prank via CB radio during a road trip, college kids act as a seductive female truck driver, lure an unsuspecting male truck driver to a motel room, and find they’ve chosen the wrong victim to humiliate. That truck driver, Rusty Nail, spends the rest of the film hunting down his pranksters to enact vengeance. Pranking is usually an evil plan in horror movies, but Joyride teaches us that perhaps you should at least know your intended target. Pranking at random might put you in the crosshairs of a psycho.