Best Free Binges: We Have Paranormal Activity at Home

You don’t need to pay a dollar or subscribe to anything to watch great TV shows and movies. Free streaming services offer plenty of variety, from absolute classics to hidden gems. Here we highlight some of the top content you can binge for free.

That Paranormal Activity series was pretty popular for a hot minute, right? Low-fi, found-footage horror that uses spooky things happening in a house to build tension while really giving a sense of what the characters are like? It was a clever idea until it ran away from its own premise and then settled into mediocrity. It’s a shame for a series that started with a clever, low-budget concept (and didn’t have the decency to flare out with glorious stupidity like Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2).

Anyway, imagine a horror movie series with more chapters, that stays with the found footage premise, and is done on approximately one-tenth of the budget of the first Paranormal Activity, consisting entirely of Best Buy gift cards. That’s Bad Ben, Nigel Bach’s passion project as both series creator and star.

The first Bad Ben is about Tom Riley (Bach), a shlubby guy who buys a house at a police auction and intends to flip it. The house is haunted, and there are security cameras in every room to capture how haunted it is. Tom, acting reasonably as a New Jerseyite dealing with the house he just sank all of his money into being threatened by ghosts and demons, picks a fight with them. It goes about as well as you would expect.

Bad Ben 5: The Crescent Moon Clown
(Credit: Breaking Glass Pictures)

That’s just the first movie, released in 2016. There are nine now, and almost all take place in the exact same house and share the same threadbare, low-fi aesthetic that gave the original so much charm. It helps that Bach is relatable and often hilarious as Tom Riley.

If you’re a fan of Let’s Play videos, you might have heard the name Bad Ben before. Developer Corpsepile on Itch.io made a Bad Ben(Opens in a new window) PC game, with the voice of Bach. It’s completely amazing, and the Game Grumps (Arin “Egoraptor” Hanson and Leigh Daniel “Sexbang” Avidan) made one of their funniest videos(Opens in a new window) playing through it. It’s also one of the few games that has a dedicated swearing button.

Bad Ben: The Game
(Credit: Game Grumps)

You can watch Bad Ben 1-8 on Tubi, and Bad Ben 9: Benign (Eh? Ehhhh?) on Vudu. In a world of countless terrible low-budget horror movies, it’s nice to find an entire series that, on paper, should be among the worst but is actually pretty fun.

Where to Watch