It’s once again spooky season, which, for many, means it’s also time to cozy up on the couch, dim the lights—or turn them up to maximum brightness—and fire up a scream-worthy scary movie. Of course, with all the options out there, it can be difficult to determine which horror flicks are actually worth your time.
Luckily, Netflix currently has a wide selection of quality choices, from timeless classics like Psycho and Jaws to modern-day slashers like Pearl and Thanksgiving to franchise refreshers like Evil Dead Rise and 2018’s Halloween. Whether you find these films truly terrifying, hilariously campy, or somewhere in between, they’re guaranteed to at least make for an entertaining viewing experience.
So, without further ado, here are the 15 best horror movies to watch on Netflix right now.
Pearl (2022)
Writer-director Ti West’s prequel follow-up to his 2022 ’70s grindhouse homage X—and precursor to X‘s 2024 sequel MaXXXine—is widely considered the best of the critically acclaimed slasher trilogy. Mia Goth shines as the maniacal Pearl, a lonely farm girl trapped at home in rural Texas with her controlling mother (Tandi Wright) and infirm father (Matthew Sunderland) while her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), is serving in World War I. Pearl has fervent dreams of becoming a Hollywood star. Unfortunately, that means anyone she perceives as standing in the way of her big-city aspirations must die.
Halloween (2018)
Its two sequels, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, may have severely missed the mark. But when filmmaker David Gordon Green brought estranged brother-sister duo Michael Meyers (Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney) and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) back to the big screen for a reboot set 40 years after John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 classic, there was a reason it resulted in one of the highest horror movie openings of all time. A direct follow-up to the original that ignores all previous sequels, 2018’s Halloween sees the franchise’s unstoppable big bad escape from prison just in time to set out on a new October 31st killing spree in Haddonfield.
Psycho (1960)
Arguably Hitchcock’s most influential film, Psycho revolutionized the horror genre with a movie inspired by the case of real-life serial killer Ed Gein that delivered one of the most famous onscreen kills in cinematic history. The fundamental black-and-white thriller shocked audiences by—spoiler alert—butchering its apparent leading lady, Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, less than halfway through the story. The terrifying fallout from Marion’s murder at the Bates Motel popularized the idea that a seemingly normal human being harboring a monster within had the potential to be way scarier than vampires, aliens, or any other supernatural creature.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)
It may have taken until the release of Longlegs earlier this year for writer-director Osgood Perkins to get the mainstream recognition he deserves, but the actor-turned-filmmaker has been delivering quality fright flicks for nearly a decade. In his slow-burn gothic horror I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Perkins spins an unnerving tale about an easily-spooked live-in nurse (Ruth Wilson) who is hired to care for an ailing horror novelist (Paula Prentiss) who is suffering from dementia. Naturally, things soon begin to go bump in the night in the reclusive author’s remote home.
As Above, So Below (2014)
When archaeologist Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks) and her crew descend into the Catacombs of Paris in search of alchemist Nicolas Flamel’s Philospher’s Stone, a long-lost artifact that is said to grant eternal life, they soon come to realize they have actually entered an unspeakable hell. Writer-director John Erick Dowdle’s underrated found-footage offering is a claustrophobic thrill ride that will leave you with a palpable sense of dread.
Thanksgiving (2023)
Thanksgiving probably isn’t the first holiday that comes to mind when you think about horror. But Eli Roth’s festive slasher may convince you that Turkey Day deserves to play a bigger role in the modern scary movie pantheon. Based on Roth’s fake trailer of the same name that appears in 2007’s Grindhouse, the campy and over-the-top Thanksgiving chronicles the gruesome exploits of a serial killer dressed as Pilgrim John Carver who goes on a murderous rampage in Plymouth, Mass., in the wake of a fatal Black Friday riot at at the town’s local superstore.
The Babadook (2014)
Whether you see the Babadook as a metaphor for grief or an accidental queer icon, there’s no denying that the top hat-sporting monster of Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s feature directorial debut made an outsized impact on pop culture when it exploded onto the horror scene in 2014. The psychological thriller—which follows a widowed mother and her young son as they’re haunted by the titular boogeyman—has been praised as a “slam-bang scare-fest” and “the best horror movie so far this century.” It’s often also cited as a major jumping-off point for the rise of the popular subgenre known (sometimes controversially) as “elevated horror.”
The Birds (1963)
Those who suffer from ornithophobia, beware! Loosely based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story of the same name, this Hitchcock classic sees the birds of a coastal California community launch a massive, coordinated, and unexplained assault against the local townspeople. The film’s effects may be a bit hokey by today’s standards, but its chilling tale of nature in revolt—led by Tippi Hedren’s chic San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels and Rod Taylor’s suave defense attorney Mitch Brenner—stands the test of time.
Evil Dead Rise (2023)
More than 40 years after the release of Sam Raimi’s beloved cult classic—and a decade after Fede Álvarez’s gruesome 2013 soft reboot—the fifth Evil Dead movie marked a brutal new chapter in the long-running Book of the Dead saga that opened up fresh possibilities for the future of the franchise. The Lee Cronin-helmed gore-fest sees the parasitic demons known as Deadites possess struggling single mother of three Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) while her estranged sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) is visiting the family at their dilapidated high-rise apartment in Los Angeles. You’ll need a strong stomach for this one.
Annabelle (2014)
Before M3GAN, there was Annabelle. Not nearly as yassified as her AI-powered derivative, but several degrees spookier, the possessed doll of Conjuring universe fame got her own spinoff shortly after appearing in the original film in the franchise. Annabelle follows a couple whose vintage porcelain doll becomes a conduit for a demonic spirit shortly after their home is invaded by satanic cultists, resulting in a prequel story that strongly invokes elements of Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror classic Rosemary’s Baby.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
For many kids of the ’80s and ’90s, the visceral horror of the three folklore-inspired Scary Stories books is nothing new. But for anyone who ever wanted to see author Alvin Schwartz and illustrator Stephen Gammell’s haunting collaborations brought to life on the big screen, boy does André Øvredal have a film for you. The Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark movie takes six of the original stories—including iconic entries like “Harold,” “The Big Toe,” and “The Dream”—and unites them within an overarching plot that serves up a healthy does of nostalgia if not necessarily all-out terror.
Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
Forget about the dud that was the original Ouija. With horror maestro Mike Flanagan at the helm of the subsequent prequel, the spirit board-centric franchise got a new lease on life. Set in 1967 Los Angeles, Origin of Evil follows a recent widow (Elizabeth Reaser) and her two daughters (Lulu Wilson and Annalise Basso) as they introduce what they believe to be a harmless Ouija board into their family’s fraudulent medium act—to extremely sinister results.
Unfriended (2015)
The entirety of the action takes place on a single computer screen in director Levan Gabriadze’s jump scare-fueled online revenge thriller. A gory meditation on the perils of cyberbullying, Unfriended follows a group of six teens whose chatroom is infiltrated by a supernatural entity out to exact vengeance for the role the friends played in the death of a classmate who killed herself a year earlier.
Jaws (1975)
Duunnn dunnn… duuuunnnn duun…If you’ve ever seen Jaws, we’re willing to bet that even just reading the opening notes of John Williams’ iconic score sent a bit of a chill down your spine. Steven Spielberg’s haunting tale of a man-eating great white out for blood in the waters off the coast of the fictional tourist hotspot of Amity Island did its job so well that some scientists believe it caused a generation of people to develop an irrational fear of sharks. Going for a swim in the ocean hasn’t been the same since.
Creep (2014)
From the apparently twisted mind of Mark Duplass comes one of the most effectively unnerving entries in the horror canon in recent memory. The micro-budget Creep follows struggling videographer Aaron (Patrick Brice) in the days after he answers a Craigslist ad for a job at a secluded cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains filming the final messages of terminally ill cancer patient Josef (Duplass). While Josef claims to want to record a video diary for his unborn son, his increasingly alarming behavior soon begins to hint at a far more nefarious motive. The found-footage cat-and-mouse-thriller doesn’t need any gore to leave you feeling like you might need to sleep with one eye open.
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