From undisputed classics like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby to more under-the-radar options like Train to Busan.
With Halloween looming, we’ve officially reached the scariest time of the year.
There’s horror in the air, folks. So don’t go outside, where ghosts and goblins are surely ready to attack. Instead, spend your every free moment watching Final Girls flee monsters, murderers, and other creeps courtesy of the wealth of great horror movies currently available to stream. Below, we’ve compiled a list of the 31 most frightening flicks we could find on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, the horror-specific Shudder, and the classics-focused Filmstruck — add a few to your queue, pop open a bag of candy corn, and dig in.
Though we’ve embedded the Audition trailer above, we suggest you opt not to watch it; the film pays off even more tremendously when you know as little about it as possible. If you’ve never seen Takashi Miike ’s superbly chilling tale of romance gone awry, there’s no better moment than early October — the start of the month-long buildup to Halloween — to celebrate this admirably measured tale of a single man’s “audition” for a romantic partner that goes spectacularly, legendarily off the rails.
This story of a videographer who answers an ad to film a dying man’s testimonial in his wilderness retreat could have fallen completely flat, but for a pitch-perfect performance by Mark Duplass ( The League, The Mindy Project) as the titular Creep. Duplass balances jocularity with chilling intent, all while growing steadily more menacing, until a movie that first seemed like a typical first-person shaky-cam deal has become utterly nightmarish. This one will stick with you like few horror movies can.
This film technically falls under the Korean revenge genre rather than the realm of pure horror, but there’s a reason it wound up on Shudder. Stunning in its level of intensity and its abundance of gore, and unparalleled in its utter commitment to unhinged nihilistic frenzy, I Saw the Devil pits an ingenious serial killer ( Oldboy ’s brilliant Choi Min-sik) against the grieving fiancé ( Lee Byung-hun) of one of his victims — a secret agent who devotes every resource he has to exacting the perfect, terrifying vengeance. The result is spellbinding, almost physically exhausting viewing. In other words, it’s sublime horror.
The sheer unpredictability and occasional full-on betrayal of the human mind is the villain at the heart of this movie. Though it was marketed mainly as a horror film, They Look Like People somehow manages to balance a story about the bonds and challenges of friendship against a taut and suspenseful tale of complete psychological breakdown. Utterly suspenseful and deeply scary, it’s perhaps the best film study in paranoia since Requiem for a Dream.
There’s something completely anarchistic and deranged about the horror in the original Texas Chain S aw Massacre, which seems so unmoored from sanity that a radio shrieking dire political warnings in the film’s opening moments is our only cue that this film’s famous villain, Leatherface, is a truly American nightmare. His family of cannibalistic psychopaths may have come to personify the redneck serial killer trope, but he remains the incarnation of our deepest fears and our darkest excesses. This is as scary as it gets.
Long before The Walking Dead or Guardians of the Galaxy, Michael Rooker made an astonishing film debut in this pitch-black portrait of a serial killer. Frequently comic and surprisingly sympathetic, Henry manages the feat of humanizing a terrifying sociopath as he toys with depravity and falls deeper through the cracks of Chicago’s underbelly. Considered too shocking for release until nearly four years after it was made, the film has since become a horror classic.
Jonathan Demme ’s masterpiece of cat-and-mouse suspense is still just as powerful today as when it electrified audiences in 1991 and became the only horror movie to win the Best Picture Oscar. Not only are the performances of Anthony Hopkins (as Hannibal Lecter) and Ted Levine (as Buffalo Bill) each timelessly creepy, but the famous night-vision climax never gets less scary.
What could be better than a movie where the score intermittently shouts, “WITCH!” at you and the art direction is a giant blood-soaked collage of color? Dario Argento’s Giallo masterpiece about a ballet studio serving as a front for a coven of witches is a smorgasbord of fantastic horror set pieces and bloody deaths; it features more red than Argento’s movie Deep Red, and it boasts one of the best scores in horror film history, one of the best animal kills, and the most badass group of dancing sorceresses ever.
More has been said about Stanley Kubrick’s claustrophobic triumph than we could ever sum up here, so we’ll stick to pointing out how many incredibly weird elements this film manages to imbue with utter malevolence, from that creepy-as-fuck bear costume to Danny’s talking finger and the boy living in his mouth; from those terrifying twins to the ominous bartender and the ghost in the bathtub; from objects that move, shift, and vanish in the middle of scenes to the TV set that functions while unplugged; from corridors that are physically impossible to vanishing hedge mazes with Jack Torrance as the minotaur at the center. You can watch The Shining endlessly and come away deeply disturbed and confused and fascinated and shivering every time. It’s not just great horror; it’s the greatest.
Directed by Ingmar Bergman, Hour of the Wolf finds common ground with Bergman’s Persona (which is also available on Filmstruck) in that it’s also a study in doubles — in this case protagonist Johan Borg’s double life as he attempts to battle a host of possibly imaginary demons as well as a mental breakdown that may or may not have turned him into a real killer. Johan is played by Max von Sydow, a regular in Bergman’s films, and Sydow and his fellow Bergman vet Liv Ullmann are magnificent in this story of psychosexual repression exploding into madness. Hour of the Wolf is often forgotten in discussions of seminal horror films, but it’s horror at its finest — a raw look at a man consumed by self-loathing and fear.
The Host might just be the greatest monster movie ever made. At bare minimum, it’s the greatest entry in the “chemical spill causes a thing to come out of the water and terrorize a city” category. Though the film was marketed like a fun action-adventure movie in 2006, spurring it to become the then-highest-grossing Korean picture to date, it’s also excellent horror, perfectly blending suspense, scares, fantasy, sci-fi, and quiet trepidation. The monster is fascinating and fast, but it’s the tense, nearly silent moments you’ll remember the most.
He may be gay now, but the Babadook is still the most bone-chilling monster of the modern age. A slinking, screeching metaphor disguised as a children’s nightmare, he’s imbued with unholy scare powers thanks to the actors who embody the fractured family upon whom he preys. Noah Davis is mesmerizing as a troubled kid battling behavioral disorders and very real monsters. And as his beleaguered and exhausted mother, Essie Davis (a.k.a. Miss Fisher — yes, that Miss Fisher) turns in the messy, furious performance of a lifetime.
Another metaphorical monster, the titular It of It Follows is a deeply disturbing, unkillable, shape-shifting entity that you can only escape by passing to someone else through sexual contact — and hoping it doesn’t kill them and return its attentions to you. If that concept isn’t jolting enough, the film’s treatment of it is a John Carpenter-esque study in slow, inexorable building tension and dread, backed by a killer soundtrack and a sumptuous ’80s aesthetic.
Featuring a coterie of beloved indie outsiders like Imogen Poots and Alia Shawkat, as well as the now-late Anton Yelchin, Green Room packs a wallop of high-octane viciousness into the “teens versus rednecks” subgenre. A punk band travels into the Pacific Northwest wilderness to play a gig that turns out to be the start of a night of carnage and mayhem when they inadvertently witness a murder committed by neo-Nazi skinheads. Equal parts humanizing and violent, Green Room is fantastically visceral, seesawing relentlessly between tension and shock until its final moments.
The power of The Thing lies in John Carpenter’s masterful ability to make the sweeping isolation of the Antarctic feel palpable through careful world building and a slow ratcheting up of tension. When the paranoia sets in among the crew of researchers who discover an alien shape-shifting being that could be posing as any one of them, you feel it in your bones.
No one mixes the fantastical and the horrific like writer and director Clive Barker. Hellraiser sends reality sliding off the rails into demented, gory abandon as hell itself bursts through the foundations of one unlucky house to claim its residents. The film’s chief villains — the Cenobites, with Pinhead as their leader — remain among horror’s all-time greatest. But equally fascinating is the transformation of femme fatale Julia ( Clare Higgins) as she evolves from proper suburbanite housewife to a serial murderer clearly having the time of her life.
David Lynch’s surreal nightmare recasts the most familiar and celebrated aspects of American family life — parenthood, child rearing, sex, and more — as horrific, repulsive ordeals fraught with uncertainty. Protagonist Henry ( Jack Nance) is reluctantly settling into life as a family man, caught in his own personal dystopia. But his subconscious repulsion at the prospect of fatherhood manifests itself through perverse, weird, frightening symbology — most notably in the deformed monster he fathers. Eraserhead is the epitome of a film that’s not for everyone, but if you can stomach it, it’s wonderful.
A n A merican Werewolf in London had to pull double duty in 1981 as one of the first modern comedy horror movies and the first major werewolf movie in decades. Thankfully, writer-director John Landis (then fresh off Blues Brothers) didn’t skimp on the gore, and the film remains surprisingly scary even by today’s standards. The story of two backpacking buddies who are attacked by a wolf in England combines frequent hilarity and shocking acts of violence to create the perfect tale of a man trying to fight fate. It’s still arguably the best werewolf film ever made.
