Saturday Night Live comes back from a two-week break on Saturday, October 31, with a Halloween episode built around this year’s biggest horror breakout: Inde Navarrette, the 25-year-old star of Obsession, hosts for the first time, and Gracie Abrams is the musical guest.
NBC set the booking back on September 9, when it named the season’s first four hosts, so the lineup is not new. What is new is that it is now the next episode. The show has been dark since the October 10 broadcast, and Halloween falling on a Saturday this year means the live episode airs on the night itself.
Navarrette’s reaction on Instagram when the date went public was brief: “See you Goblins and Ghouls live from New York on 10/31,” she wrote. “Thank you, SNL!”
She says she wants to write her own material
The more telling comment came on a red carpet in September. Asked about the gig, Navarrette said she had grown up watching the show and had been noting down sketch ideas, and she pointed to Taylor Swift’s 2009 episode as her model. “I heard that Taylor Swift… wrote her own monologue, so I really, really, really want to come in with myself and my own ideas,” she said in the interview clip.
That is a high bar. Swift, then 19, both hosted and performed that night and opened with “Monologue Song (La La La),” an original number mocking her own tabloid coverage. Plenty of hosts lean on the writing staff instead; how much of Navarrette’s notebook survives the week of rewrites will be visible in the first ten minutes.
From Superman & Lois to Studio 8H
Navarrette was born Danielle Fabiola Navarrette in Tucson, Arizona, on March 3, 2001. Her mother gave her the nickname “Inde” because she was such a self-reliant child. Television viewers first knew her as Estela de la Cruz in the fourth season of 13 Reasons Why and then as Sarah Cortez across 47 episodes of Superman & Lois.
Obsession changed the scale. Curry Barker’s horror film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 and reached US cinemas through Focus Features on May 15, 2026. It has since taken more than $263 million at the domestic box office, seventh among this year’s releases, and won Navarrette the Critics Choice Super Award for best actress in a horror movie. Focus is now running an awards campaign for her in the best actress race.
The bookings followed quickly. In August she was announced as Rogue in Marvel Studios’ X-Men reboot, planned for 2028, and in September she signed to star in and executive produce The Waffle House Index, a science-fiction thriller for Apple.
Season 52 so far, and the second Abrams booking
Here is how the season has run before this week:
- September 26: Knicks guard Jalen Brunson hosts, Katseye make their debut as musical guest
- October 3: Dakota Johnson hosts, Turnstile perform, and Taylor Swift appears in the monologue
- October 10: Shane Gillis hosts for a third time, with Rosalía as musical guest
- October 31: Inde Navarrette hosts, Gracie Abrams performs
- November 7: comedian and online creator Druski hosts, musical guest not yet announced
Gillis’s October 10 monologue drew a backlash over a joke about how women dress, and Badiyaa covered how that episode played. The Halloween show is the first since then.
For Abrams, it is a return visit: her first SNL performance came on the Season 50 Christmas episode, making this her second holiday-themed booking in two seasons.
The episode goes out live from New York on NBC on Saturday, October 31, and streams on Peacock afterward.
Further reading
Image: Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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