For some, spooky season begins sometime in late August—at least, that’s when Target puts out the animatronic skeletons and ghost projectors, and when your favorite vacant retail space are possessed by Spirit Halloween outlets. For others, it's after Labor Day. A quick check of the calendar reveals both of those deadlines have no passed, which means it's time to queue up something with chilling fall vibes.
Leading into the holiday and beyond, here are the creepiest, goriest, and overall best horror movies you can watch on Netflix right now.
The Deliverance (2024)
Any cheapo movie can be weird, but with big name talent, a weird movie can really enter the cultural conversation—to whit, The Deliverance is helmed by Precious/The Butler director Lee Daniels, and stars Andra Day, Glenn Close, Mo'Nique, and Omar Epps. And the discourse here? It's mostly centered around the age-old question: what the f*ck did I just watch? Based on a true story (which: sure), it stars Day as a struggling single mom with a prison record who is raising three kids by herself while paying for cancer treatments for her mom (Glenn Close). It hits many typical exorcism-movie beats, but by the time you get to EGOT nominee Close sprouting fangs and screaming about what body parts she can smell from across the room, it's clear we've been in high camp territory all along.
It Follows (2014)
It may just be the film that launched the modern idea of "elevated" horror, but don't hold that against writer/director David Robert Mitchell's breakthrough. The story of a sexually transmitted curse, it plays on very primal fears and anxieties while also delivering genuinely creepy, if not downright scary, visuals involving a force that takes the form of a person who...follows you. Slowly. Forever. Until it wears you down and you die. (It also might also be a metaphor for election season, but IDK.)
Pearl (2022)
The middle chapter of Ti West's trilogy (which started with X, released only months before this secret sequel) takes us back to 1918 and the young adulthood of Pearl (once again played by Mia Goth), a young woman living on a remote farm under the thumb of her restrictive German immigrant parents. Her husband's away at war, and all Pearl can do is daydream about the glamorous lives of the characters in the movies she sees in town. If you've already seen the first movie, set decades later, you'll know that Pearl is definitely not well, and that her starstruck dreams are soon going to turn to horror. In the meantime, West and Goth have a lot of fun recreating the look and feel of technicolor movies of days past, and then bloodying them up real good.
Under Paris (2024)
You might want to rethink those Paris travel plans after this one—an aggressively fun (and very French) update on Jaws that sees a killer mako shark loose, first in the Seine and later in the famous catacombs. An Olympic qualifying event (timely!) is about to occur in the city, which, of course, the mayor won't call off in spite of the growing body count. There's some stuff here about environmental catastrophe being the cause, but mostly it's just a bone-chomping good time.
Thanksgiving (2023)
Eli Roth dropped his first straight-up horror movie since 2013's The Green Inferno in this funny, but bleak satire. When an unruly mob storms a Walmart (ahem: "RightMart") on Black Friday, violence and bloodshed ensue, leading one of the victims of the incident to seek revenge. Patrick Dempsey stars in this bit of wild and gory holiday fun.
Blood Red Sky (2021)
German widow Nadja is taking a flight to New York with her kid, Elias. She seems sick—we and her fellow passengers are meant to think that she has cancer, which makes her an easy mark for the terrorist hijackers who board the plane and shoot her out of pique. Big mistake. The vampires-on-a-plane high concept at work could have been silly, but at no point does the movie forget that we're seated for gory bloodsucking action.
Bride of Chucky (1998)
Most any slasher franchise will start to get a bit dodgy by the fourth installment, but this 1998 forth-quel in the Child's Play series feels like the moment when Chucky came into his own. Written by erstwhile series mastermind Don Mancini and directed by Ronny Yu, best known at the time for his Hong Kong martial arts epics, Bride is a perfectly distinctive blend of camp, horror, and action, with Jennifer Tilly's diminutive Tiffany joining Brad Dourif's Chucky for a bloody romp that sends the franchise one the path to achieving the queer icon status for which it was always destined.
Nightbooks (2021)
So, Nightbooks is technically for kids, and therefore might not provide quite the volume of scares that a grown-up horror audience might be hoping for. That being said: There are some legit frights here, frankly a little beyond what you’d expect from a kids’ movie. It’s the old story of kids kidnapped by a witch (Krysten Ritter), with the added twist that one of the kidnapped, Alex (Winslow Fegley) writes scary stories, and has to tell one each night that he’s trapped in the witch’s apartment in order to stay alive. There’s imagery here to creep out just about anybody.
The Conjuring (2013)
James Wan and company kicked off the horror movie version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with this old-school haunted house thriller. You might not love every movie that's spun off from it, but there's a reason The Conjuring was so successful: After a decade or so of horror that leaned toward either found footage or dank basement torture, this spooky ghost story was a welcome throwback. Smart and effective. The first sequel, also on Netflix, is pretty good, too.
Insidious: The Red Door (2023)
The fifth installment in the Insidious franchise returns to the family from the first two movies (and look: there's Patrick Wilson again). Here, the focus shirts to Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins) whose repressed memories of the events of previous films start to come roaring back when he heads off to college. It's not the strongest installment, but the conceit about "The Further" as an other dimensional realm where time moves differently remains clever, and the movie provides some solid closure for the series as a whole—at least until they decide to make another.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
What's that you say? You want even more Patrick Wilson in your horror movies? He joins this modern cult classic, led by Kurt Russell as Sheriff Franklin Hunt, in charge of a posse to rescue a young woman from a group of inbred cannibals in the old west. The "Weird" Western, in which we encounter ghosts, aliens, or, in this case, cannibals in the old west, is a venerable genre in literature, but rarely if ever done so well on the screen. This is old west horror done right.
The Wailing (2016)
A major commercial and critical success, this thriller tracks the spread of a rage-inducing extraterrestrial plague that impacts a remote village. Sounds like typical zombie-adjacent horror, but director Na Hong-jin manages such deft and wild shifts in tones that it feels little like anything you've seen before. Starting out as a police procedural involving a somewhat bumbling country cop, it quickly gives way to something far more evocative, and genuinely disturbing.
Apostle (2018)
If you’re familiar with the wild tower action spectacle The Raid, you might have some sense of the energy that director Gareth Evans brings to Apostle’s second half, even if the styles are very different. This one’s pure folk horror, with nods to The Wicker Man: Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey, The Guest) plays Thomas Richardson, a now-faithless missionary who returns home to discover that his sister has been kidnapped by a religious cult on a remote Welsh island. What starts out feeling a bit like a sleepy period drama evolves into a truly wild gorefest before it’s done.
Backcountry (2014)
With apologies to Cocaine Bear, a backwoods ursid needn't be all hopped up on coke in order to terrify. Sometimes they'll try to chase you down just because! Based very loosely on a true story, this survival thriller sees a couple (Missy Peregrym and Jeff Roop) trying to work out their relationship issues by going off-trail in a Canadian provincial park. Bad idea. It's a great debut for director Adam MacDonald, who went on to helm the justifiably acclaimed supernatural horror flick Pyewacket.
His House (2020)
As fraught (and snooty) as the term “elevated horror” has become, it’s good to remember that a movie can have deep emotional resonance and a social conscience, all without sacrificing the haunted-house chills. Here, Bol and Rial (Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku), with their daughter Nyagak, flee war-torn Sudan to find refuge in a quiet English town, only to find that there’s evil waiting there for them.
The Babadook (2014)
On the surface, The Babadook is about a monster terrorizing a grief-stricken family, and just on that level, he's scary as hell—brutal and entirely unrelenting, albeit with flawless goth style. But anyone who's experienced loss (and who hasn't?) will recognize him as an embodiment of grief itself, and a warning about the dangers of sweeping trauma under the rug. You can try to ignore him, but that only makes it worse. He's also, of course, an unlikely queer icon.
Gerald’s Game (2017)
Gerald’s Game, from the 1992 Stephen King novel, never seemed terribly filmable. The story is set entirely in an isolated cabin in the woods, and involves a single immobilized character for much of its page count. Enter director Mike Flanagan who, in addition to his successful miniseries projects (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club), did the impossible in crafting a killer adaptation of King’s lesser-loved Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep. Carla Gugino stars as a married woman trapped when her husband, played by Bruce Greenwood, dies after having handcuffed her to the bed. Increasingly delirious, she’s forced to face not only her past trauma, but the hungry dog that keeps sniffing around.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and Bee (Maria Bakalova) are a pretty normal couple who find themselves in the middle of a pretty fucked-up scenario when Sophia brings her girlfriend to a weekend-long party with her friends, including her ex-. The titular murder-in-the-dark-type game ensues, and takes a turn when someone actually turns up dead. It's a clever Gen Z whodunnit with impeccable style and a few things to say about friendship and connection (or lack thereof) in the digital age.
Creep (2014)
One of the better (maybe one of the best) found footage-style films of recent years, Creep takes place within the camera of Aaron (Patrick Brice, who also directed) and stars Mark Duplass (The Morning Show) as a dying man who hires the videographer to document his final days for his unborn son. The movie builds its tension around, initially, Aaron’s excessive friendliness—there are few better ways to create an atmosphere of unease than by offering up a character who’s a little too nice. Before long, the guy’s effusiveness curdles into an unpredictability that gets, well, creepier and creepier.
The Platform (2019)
The metaphor might seem a little heavy-handed—but modern life has begun to teach us that even the direst of dystopian sci-fi is just around the corner. The titular platform is a large tower, euphemistically referred to as the “Vertical Self-Management Center,” in which food is delivered via a shaft that stops on each floor from the top down: those near the top get to eat their fill; those at the bottom get scraps. The Spanish-language thriller is wildly violent, but inventive, and it’s not as if real-life capitalism is particularly subtle in its deprivations.
Under the Shadow (2016)
In Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, a woman estranged from her husband is forced to protect her child from mysterious supernatural forces as the bombs continue to fall. Writer/director Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow invokes the jinn (neither necessarily good nor evil, but potentially threatening) as a way to talk about the strife and turmoil of war and political conflict, as well as about the anxieties of women in oppressive societies. The atmospheric film plays simultaneously as the story of a haunting, and also as one about women and civilians in times of war; each element serves to heighten the other.
The Call (2020)
I love a time travel horror movie (a tiny but venerable genre that includes movies like Timecrrimes, Triangle, and Happy Death Day). This one involves Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) visiting her childhood home in 2019, only to discover that an old cordless phone still works (never a good sign), and connects her to Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo), living in the house in 1999. The two bond over shared experiences, but things soon go very wrong when Seo-Yeon tells the other young woman about the future, and influences her to make changes. Some events, it seems, are best left alone. Clever and disturbing, with a solid high concept.
Cam (2018)
Director Daniel Goldhaber (the upcoming How to Blow Up a Pipeline) teamed up with writer Isa Mazzei, who based this Black Mirror-esque story partly on her own memoir. Madeline Brewer (Orange is the New Black) plays online sex worker Alice Ackerman, aka Lola_Lola, who once night discovers there’s another Lola out there—a cam girl who’s identical to Alice in appearance and general vibe, but whose willingness to go further puts her out in front in terms of viewership. It’s a horror movie with a lot to say about the dehumanization of sex workers, with a great central performance from Brewer.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)
Gurl, yeah you are! A brisk, chilling, and effective gothic horror film starring Ruth Wilson as a live-in nurse who comes to believe that the creaky old house where she works is haunted. This one’s less concerned with immediate shocks and scares than with getting under your skin, but there’s definitely a creepiness here that lingers. Director Osgood Perkins had similar success with The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel & Hansel.
Ravenous (2017)
Director Robin Aubert does the zombie genre proud by injecting a fair bit of George Romero-style social commentary into his story of a small Quebec town under siege. Here, the zombies have a society and culture of their own, and the threat they pose speaks to regional history and a variety of cross-cultural issues. Even without that specific context, it’s a smart and effective survival thriller that does what the best zombie movies always do: Namely, it reminds us that armies of the undead can’t do mush worse to us than we’re willing to do to ourselves.
The Block Island Sound (2020)
Strange doings are afoot on the title's Block Island, the most obvious being the vast numbers of dead fish that keep washing ashore. Almost as alarming, though, is the behavior of one of the local fishermen, Tom, who keeps waking up in strange places and generally losing time. His daughter Audry (Michaela McManus) works for the Environmental Protection Agency and is sent to investigate the mass fish deaths; she brings along her daughter and reunites with brother Tom (Chris Sheffield) along the way. Together, they discover that no ordinary environmental catastrophe is to blame (I guess it wouldn't be much of a horror movie if it were), as the film blends family drama and the eerie local events as it builds to a pretty chilling climax.
Cargo (2017)
With the always-welcome Martin Freeman in the lead, this is, okay, yet another zombie film, but one that still manages to do things a bit differently. An Australian import, this one tweaks the rules so that the infected have just about 48 hours of humanity before they turn, meaning that everyone has a bit of time to really contemplate their fates, and maybe even to think about how to make the best use of the time. It’s a more melancholic take on the zombie apocalypse, full of chilling outback atmosphere and some genuine scares. Don't get confused with the 2020 sci-fi movie of the same name, also on Netflix.
Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
We heard you like movies about toys? (Hey Barbie!) Hasbro brings you this sequel to the fairly by-the-numbers 2014 movie based on the company's "let's pretend to talk to the dead" board game thing. But there's a shocking twist: This one's actually good, or certainly better than it has any right to be, which probably has something to do with the involvement of co-writer and director Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House, etc.), who treats this like an actual movie rather than a bit of tie-in marketing. Set in 1967, the movie finds a mom/con artist running a fake medium business out of her home. "Let's add an Ouija board to the proceedings," she thinks. "It'll be fun." Spoiler: it is not fun, at least for her family. But it's a spooky good time for the rest of us.
Jigsaw (2017)
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