This Week in #TVNews: Spotify, Netflix and Halloween TV Recommendations

Every week, we recap the best in TV news for you. This week the news has a slight Halloween theme, from creepy retargeting to a Spotify ad deemed too scary for kids.

Your Halloween TV lineup. If you love TV as much as we do, and you love Halloween as much as we do, then you’re probably looking for the best new scary shows to fill your autumn evenings. For those who loved the witches of “Hocus Pocus,” we recommend “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” If you were into the remake of “It,” we think you’ll like “Castle Rock,” a Stephen King story from Hulu (with “It” actor Bill Skarsgård playing another terrifying King character). For those who like your scary TV with a side of drama, we recommend Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” which The Verge said was basically “This Is Us” wrapped in a ghost story.

Netflix gets scary-good subscriber bump. With about 7 million new subscribers for the quarter, the streaming company beat analyst expectations, and it’s on track for 9 million new subscribers in Q4. Netflix said it now has 137 million total global subscribers. Amazon Prime has about 100 million global subscribers, as of April earlier this year. Hulu said it has 20 million subscribers (U.S. only) in May.

Ad tracking is spooky to some. About 19% of Janrain survey respondents said digital ads “understand my interests and needs, but that’s creepy.” Forty-two percent of respondents said digital ads were too aggressive in following them around to different devices and browsers. (eMarketer)

Sinister Spotify ad gets banned in the U.K. Back in June, Spotify launched an ad featuring a weird doll with an egg-shaped head that appears when people play Camila Cabello’s “Havana.” The ad, which Spotify said was intended as a parody of a horror movie trailer, was banned by UK ad watchdog group the Advertising Standards Authority for being too scary for kids. The group concluded that the ad was “likely to cause undue distress to children.” See the full ad here.

See last week’s news roundup here.