There are a lot of horror movies out there in the streaming world, even if you limit yourself to what’s available on your various subscriptions. (That goes double for Shudder subscribers.) That means there are tons of great obscurities, oddities, and freak shows at your disposal. But sometimes you just want to watch an absolute classic – a building block of the genre, rather than a sideshow.
With that aim in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the 13 best horror movies streaming right now, from throughout film history and across various subscription services. There’s at least one title from each decade of the past century of cinema, in hopes of offering a fuller, wider-ranging picture of what the best horror movies can look like. To that end, no directors are repeated across this baker’s dozen of horror movies. (Sorry to John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, George Romero, and James Whale, who were particularly affected by this rule.) Monster movies, slashers, ghost stories, found footage, alien invasions, sex demons – they’re all here, ready to scare the hell out of you. Here are the 13 best horror movies streaming right now, in chronological order by original release date, with some “see also” titles for similar decades or genres, in case, like so many horror fans, you can’t get enough.
Before the Robert Eggers remake drops this Christmas (?!), catch up with the original silent masterpiece which is, in what would become a great horror tradition, also a brazen, unsanctioned ripoff of another work. Nosferatu adapted the Bram Stoker novel Dracula by another name, and beat the 1931 movie to screens by nearly a decade. Much of the story is similar to Stoker’s novel, but its approach to vampirism is decidedly different from the book and most of its famous adaptations, presenting a more overtly monstrous, rodent-like Nosferatu (played with indelible physical originality by Max Shreck). This spindly, shadowy production is still a not-quite-Dracula like no other.
Stream nosferatu on prime video
SEE ALSO: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is another silent-horror gem.
Countless horror sequels have failed to live up to the original. But there’s also a rich tradition of horror sequels that are weirder, more complicated, and richer texts than the movies that inspire them. This occasional miracle arguably originated with James Whale’s follow-up to his 1931 Mary Shelley adaptation, which plays up the pathos of the Monster (Boris Karloff) while adding dark comedy and bizarre new characters to the mix, including two played by the unforgettable Elsa Lanchester, double cast as the monster’s unwilling bride and, in a framing device, Shelley herself!
Stream Bride of Frankestein on Peacock
SEE ALSO: The Invisible Man (1933), another terrific James Whale Universal Monster movie made in between his Frankenstein outings.
The horror genre has always generated anthologies, and anthologies in movies, rather than TV, have often been dismissed as inherently uneven and unsatisfying. But Dead of Night, which predates the likes of The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt (or, for that matter, the majority of American households owning a television set), brings together five ghostly stories that vary in style, length, and tone, in a way that feels unified and coherent. The most influential segment is probably the one about the ventriloquist dummy, which has become a creepy-movie staple – though a short early section also pre-visions aspects of Final Destination. It’s a lot of horror lineage packed into an entertaining 100 minutes.
Stream Dead of Night on Kanopy
SEE ALSO: The even more dreamlike Cat People (1942) might actually be the best horror movie of the 1940s, but it’s currently not on any subscription services. It’s well worth a rental, and it turns up on the Criterion Channel and TCM semi-regularly.
Many of the most famous and beloved horror movies of the 1950s are monster pictures, creature features, things of that nature – horror starting to cross-breed with sci-fi, often remade into gnarlier versions like The Thing (1982) and The Fly (1986). Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes a different approach to sci-fi horror, with a noir-style story of citizens being quietly replaced by emotionless copies. (“Pod people” is the phrase that entered the vernacular, though it’s not precisely uttered in the movie itself.) Siegel would go on to direct and mentor Clint Eastwood, and his no-fuss efficiency is all over this 80-minute chiller; one of the scariest scenes simply involves trucks full of pods pulling into the town square and distributing them to be planted in surrounding towns. The film can be read as either a manifestation of anticommunist paranoia, or a reaction against the 1950s conformity that McCarthyism fed upon – a sign less of ideological slipperiness than the potency of its ideas. More evidence: The movie was repeatedly remade, officially (as with 1978’s movie of the same name) and not (as in 1998’s The Faculty).
Stream Invasion of the Body Snatchers on The Roku Channel
SEE ALSO: The Blob (1958), which also got a cool decades-later remake.
The master of suspense helped invent the modern slasher movie with Psycho, a perfect bridge between eras of horror. Ahead of its time for 1960 and still plenty scary today, Hitchcock starts with a crime picture starring Janet Leigh until a famous mid-movie pivot that places the audience in the uncomfortable position of identifying with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the seemingly mild-mannered motel proprietor with cinema’s most pronounced mommy issues. Though it has Hitchcock’s formal chops, it’s also stark and stripped-down in a way that also pivots from the lavishness of some of his 1950s capers.
SEE ALSO: Rosemary’s Baby (1968) focuses on a different form of a woman in trouble.
A lapse in copyright means that this may be the single most accessible classic horror movie of all time, the Halloween equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life. Almost every streaming service carries it; it’s currently available on Max, Peacock, Criterion, Shudder, Tubi, Pluto, Freevee, and the Roku Channel, among others. It’s for the public good, really; George Romero redefined zombies for all time via this low-budget shocker, where the dead rise from their graves and slowly but inexorably stalk and consume the still-living. His later Dawn of the Dead is bigger, gorier, and funnier, and Day of the Dead is grimmer. But more than likely your whole concept of what a zombie is, and how it compares to the shuffling around we do as humans, is a nightmare that Romero helped invent.
Stream Night of the Living Dead on max
SEE ALSO: The Haunting (1963), a very different approach to black-and-white horror from earlier in the 1960s.
Recently restored and rereleased in theaters for its 50th anniversary, fresh from its placement on Variety’s list of the best horror movies of all time, the original and best Texas Chain Saw is perpetually available on multiple streaming services. That’s as it should be; it’s the digital equivalent to a well-loved VHS being passed around horror circles. Tobe Hooper’s proto-slasher may seem relatively tame now, compared to the rococo gore of a Terrifier movie. What’s proven difficult to replicate is the raw wrongness of the film’s strange, horrifying beauty – the sense that you’re not just watching something scary (though you are!) but catching a glimpse of a forgotten, rotting American landscape and a grotesque parody of domesticity.
Stream The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on Peacock
SEE ALSO: Black Christmas (1974), a holiday-themed slasher from the very same year.
The best slasher movie is also one of the simplest, luxuriating in autumnal, suburban atmosphere as Michael Myers lurks in the background, waiting to strike. He’s returned to his hometown of Haddonfield after a decade-plus of institutionalization, following a brutal murder he committed as a small child. Later sequels and other iterations tied Michael more closely with designated Final Girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis); here, she’s just an everygirl pitted against a teen-slaughtering mad man. Come to think of it, Michael is sort of an everypsycho himself, a silent blank slate on which we can project all manner of fears and disturbed psychology. It’s what makes Halloween such an elementally chilling piece of work.
SEE ALSO: Carrie (1976), a different take on suburban-outcast horror.
Naturally, David Cronenberg’s most mainstream success still involves some of the grossest and most visceral body horror ever committed to the screen. Jeff Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, the ill-fated scientist working on a teleportation device who accidentally fuses himself with a housefly. In what plays now like a horror-flipped version of a superhero origin story, he gets stronger and gains unusual abilities – before his humanity eventually starts to fall away and his body becomes increasingly insect-like, much to the horror of his reporter girlfriend Ronnie (Geena Davis). Of course, don’t all of our bodies eventually turn against us after whatever passes for peak performance? In the Reagan-era 1980s, The Fly served as a reminder that exceptionalism doesn’t last – indeed, can lead to deterioration and collapse.
SEE ALSO: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), with a more weaponized form of grotesquerie.
Back in 1999, there was insane hype about The Blair Witch Project coming out of its Sundance debut – which also meant there was a ton of mainstream backlash when the movie became a wide-release hit. It’s easy to see how an audience not raised on found footage fiction might resist the movie’s handheld aesthetics and naturalistic wandering, but it’s also hard to picture a reaction other than abject terror to the movie’s slow build toward an agonizingly intense ending, where a jostling camera conceals plenty of horrors but still manages to catch bare-bones images that will haunt your nightmares. It’s a remarkable achievement, and the combination of multiple failed sequels and countless successful (but less scary) imitators offer a joint testament to its singular power.
Stream The Blair Witch Project on Peacock
SEE ALSO: Sleepy Hollow (1999), a more traditional haunted-forest movie from the same year.
Most of M. Night Shyamalan’s horror-tinged pictures are PG-13 affairs, and Signs even moonlights as a family drama about preacher questioning his calling; compared to some of the other movies on this list, it’s practically a faith-based entry, with ample Shyamalan humor. Yet early in the 2000s, the decade that would give us torture horror, a found-footage revival, and countless remakes of Japanese ghost movies, Shyamalan proved there was still room for a gentler story to scare the ever-loving hell out of you (and it doesn’t go off the rails like the similarly gorgeous and scary The Village). Mel Gibson gives a career-best performance as the adrift widower who must gather his strength to protect his family from creepy extraterrestrials – creatures that Shyamalan conceals so well that every glimpse of them brings a fresh shock.
SEE ALSO: 28 Days Later (2003), one of the best horror movies of the 2000s – if you can find it. It’s been off streaming and out-of-print on disc for a while, but used copies are around.
The idea of “elevated horror” is mostly nonsense, but vibes-based horror – that’s a real thing, and it’s encapsulated by David Robert Mitchell’s unnerving perpetual-autumn demon story, where a destructive figure slowly stalks its victim to death, unless the curse can be “passed” to another through sexual intercourse (and if the next person dies, you’re back at the top of the list). Many took it for an STD metaphor, but the movie is stranger and more beguiling than a mere sex-panic cautionary tale. (Again: vibes.) It feels more like a slow-motion tumble into an adult world the teenage characters at its center barely understand, hence the urban-legend-style rules around the ghost/demon/whatever that haunts them. Mitchell and scream queen Maika Monroe are said to be returning for a sequel; it’s hard to imagine any follow-up matching this one’s eerie power.
Stream It Follows on Prime Video
SEE ALSO: Jordan Peele’s similarly ambitious yet intimate Us (2019).
X (2022)
The best horror picture of the 2020s so far owes more than a little to the original Texas Chain Saw, with its remote location and 1970s setting. It differentiates itself in its bittersweet consideration of the aging process, and how we often define our agency through our desirability. For a movie featuring pornography and brutal murders, it has moments of strange, surprising tenderness (as well as plenty of bitter pills to swallow), beautifully performed by Brittany Snow, Jenna Ortega, Kid Cudi, and the MVP stunner Mia Goth, who would return to writer-director Ti West’s world twice more to complete a blood-soaked horror trilogy.
SEE ALSO: Titane (2021), which offers a different, stranger, and sometimes even more touching take on how we use our bodies.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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