Whether you only like them close to Halloween or you’re a year-round fiend, Netflix is packed with great scary movies. After a lot of time in front of the TV—and a few times scaring ourselves—we’ve compiled this list of the best scary movies on Netflix.
Don’t blame us if you can’t sleep after watching them!
As Above, So Below (2014): Best Supernatural Found Footage
A group of friends (headed up by Ben Feldman, from Mad Men and Superstore, and Perdita Weeks) decide to explore the catacombs beneath Paris—a real-life thing, which are, among other things, gigantic ossuaries (creepy!). Needless to say, people get lost, things go very, very wrong, and the group discovers increasingly distressing terrors beneath the City of Lights. Found footage, so if you have an aversion to that sub-genre, you may want to give this a miss, but it’s fun, scary film with a cool ending.
IMDb rating: 6.2
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016): Best Feminist Fakeout
A Jane Doe is delivered to the offices of a father-son coroner’s business late one night. The pair, played by Brian Cox (Succession) and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild), discover quickly that this body is more than just unidentified. As they perform the autopsy, they inadvertently dig themselves deeper into a mystery and a centuries-long tale of oppression, persecution, and revenge. Not only is Autopsy a cracking mystery with cool ideas, it’s also got a lot to say about patriarchy, feminism, and the history of both.
IMDb rating: 6.8
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015): Best Demonic Horror
Getting stuck at your boarding school over winter break is never good, but in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, it’s even worse when there’s a demonic horror lurking on campus. Wrap in an escaped mental patient and rumors of satanist nuns, and stars Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Mad Men) and Emma Roberts (American Horror Story) will be lucky to make it to the next semester in one piece. Directed by Osgood “Oz” Perkins, the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins (and director of another movie later on this list).
IMDb rating: 5.9
Candyman (1992): Best Socio-Political Horror
Increasingly relevant in the era of Black Lives Matter, Candyman adapts a Clive Barker short story into a meditation on the horrors of U.S. racism through the centuries. Virginia Madsen, a graduate student studying urban legends in the Chicago housing projects, runs across the hook-handed, all-too-real mythic figure of Candyman (Tony Todd) and discovers a tragic tale of love, hate, and vengeance. One of the few horror movies to focus on the American Black experience in the ’80s and ’90s.
IMDb rating: 6.6
A remake of Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta, and co-written by Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us), comes out late in 2020.
Creep (2014): Best Ultra-Indie Psycho
A dying man posts a Craiglist ad seeking someone to come to his remote home for a day and record his final words. When the videographer (Patrick Brice) responds, he meets a pretty odd guy (Mark Duplass; Room 104) who—big surprise!—turns out to be much more, and much more dangerous, than he appears. This two-hander is as much mumblecore American indie crossed with found footage as it is classic horror movie, but its atypical aesthetics and Duplass’ high-energy performance make this all the more effective.
IMDb rating: 6.3
Dark Skies (2013): Best Alien Creeper
Think movies about aliens visiting Earth are strictly science fiction fare and don’t belong on a list of horror movies (the original Alien notwithstanding)? Dark Skies will make you think again. In it, an American family led my mom Keri Russell (The Americans), is plagued by strange occurrences focused on their on young son. While that sounds like the set up for a ghost or possession movie, the explanation here is otherworldly in a totally different, very entertaining way.
The Endless (2017): Best Mindbender
Better if you’ve seen Resolution, the Moorehead and Benson movie that this is a sequel to, The Endless is nevertheless a thrilling movie about cults, time loops, mysterious video clips, ancient unseen creatures, and rural California. Probably more eerie or unsettling than truly scary, if you like your horror nuanced and packed with ideas, you’ll love all of Moorehead and Benson’s work
IMDb rating: 6.5
The Evil Dead (1981): Best Gut-Churning Indie
The first major film from Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell was one of the original shoestring-budget horror indies. Built around classic tropes like a cabin in the woods, a cursed book bound in human skin, and a bunch of horny young people, Raimi puts the pedal to the metal and never lets up, delivering a gory, no-holds-barred splatterfest. Forget the comedic sequels and the 2013 remake, the original is still the best (and the only one to be at the center of the UK’s ’80s-era “video nasties” controversy).
IMDb rating: 7.5
The Girl With All the Gifts (2016): Best New-Wave Zombie Story
A dystopian, post-apocalyptic zombie film, Girl puts a different spin on zombies. In this case, the flesh-eaters, called “hungries,” are created by a parasitic fungal infection. After the outbreak has destabilized the world, a group of kids—half-human, half-hungry hybrids—are being raised in England as the world’s best hope for a vaccine. This requires killing them. When one of the doctors chooses to protect one special girl, they set out on a mission of survival and, hopefully, rebirth.
Green Room (2015): Best Survival Horror
So many horror movies come about because of the economic-desperation-driven choices of their protagonists. In Green Room, those protagonists are a punk band, touring the country in their van, sleeping on floors, and looking for gigs. When they take one in rural Oregon based on a sketchy tip, they find themselves on a white supremacist compound run by Patrick Stewart (!!!) and witnesses to a crime. Trapped in a club’s titular green room, they must fight their way out if they want to survive. Truly one of the most harrowing films of recent decades, it’s not necessarily fun, but it’s unquestionably excellent.
IMDb rating: 7.0
Hold the Dark (2018): Best Quasi-Werewolf Thriller
Directed By Jeremy Saulnier, who also helmed Green Room, Hold the Dark is questionably not a horror movie at all. Read one way, it’s a story about PTSD, soldiers, racist oppression of Native Americans, and a naturalist (Jeffrey Wright) who’s lost his way. Read another, it’s about werewolves and skin walkers. Either way, it’s a strong film with a spectacular gunfight in the middle. If you like Saulnier, it’s a must-watch.
IMDb rating: 5.6
Hush (2016): Best Home Invasion Horror
Rising horror auteur Mike Flanagan masters the home-invasion film with Hush, a thriller about a deaf woman being menaced by a mask intruder. Think home-invasions are scary as is? Imagine what they’re like when the main character can’t hear creaking boards, breaking glass, or the other things that will keep her safe. A white-knuckle thrill-fest.
Also available on Netflix is Flanagan’s 10-part adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016): Best Mood Piece
What might be the most divisive film on this list. To some, it will be slow, boring, lacking real scares, and without a satisfying resolution. To others, it’s a terrific mood piece, a meditation on loneliness and haunting, and a welcome stylistic departure from most mainstream horror movies. Ruth Wilson (The Affair, His Dark Materials) stars as a woman starting a new job as a live-in hospice caretaker for an elderly writer, who discovers something amiss in the house. Directed by Oz Perkins, who also did The Blackcoat’s Daughter earlier on this list.
IMDb rating: 4.5
Insidious (2010): Best Franchise-Starter
The first of many, massively successful collaborations between director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell has spawned three sequels (Wan is also one of the originators of the Conjuring series, which is approaching double-digit entries). Here, parents Patrick Wilson (The Conjuring) and Rose Byrne (Bridesmaids, Spy) begin to explore the supernatural—and Wilson’s mysterious past—as a means to help their comatose son. Fun, gripping, scary, and featuring a really cool concept for the spirit world.
The Invitation (2015): Best Cult Chiller
This totally gripping thriller starts off like a realist take on an awkward dinner party/multilevel marketing pitch. Will (Logan Marshall-Green; Quarry) brings a date to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife, who he hasn’t seen since their marriage fell apart after the death of their son. Instead, it’s not just dinner: it’s a come-on from his wife, her new boyfriend, and others to join the cult, The Invitation, that has helped them through the grief. As the dinner goes on, the situation becomes more strange and tense, until The Invitation’s true philosophy becomes chillingly clear. The last shot is a jaw-dropper.
Paranormal Activity (2007): Best Found Footage Haunter
Far from the first found-footage movie, and not even the first major success in the sub-genre (hello, Blair Witch Project), Paranormal Activity is the watershed movie that revitalized the subgenre and made it the horror powerhouse its been for the past nearly 15 years. A somewhat straightforward story of a haunting accentuated by the found footage aspect, Activity’s marketing campaign—showing theater audiences jumping and screaming at every turn—is perhaps as good as, if not better than, the movie itself. Still, it’s good fun and spawned 5 sequels, at least two of which are better than the original.
It Comes at Night (2017): Best Post-Apocalyptic Headscratcher
Studio A24—which brought us The VVitch (later on this list) and Midsommar, among others—gets a bit of a bad rap in the genre for releasing “elevated” (i.e, allegedly more artistic and sophisticated than standard horror) films. We don’t buy that criticism, but those who do might point to It Comes at Night as an example. This post-apocalyptic tale of a family trying to survive the unexplained breakdown of society and—maybe?—a supernatural threat is a little hard to parse, but it’s also extremely effective and really scary. If you like post-apocalyptic stories, survival horror, and don’t need the story neatly wrapped up, this is absolutely worth a watch.
The Perfection (2018): Best Revenge Thriller
What price do we pay for achievement? And when we realize that the price we’ve paid is too high, where do we get a refund? Those are some of the questions animating The Perfection, a deceptive film with much more bite and perversity than the standard, mediocre made-for-Netflix movie. Allison Williams (Get Out, Girls) stars as a one-time musical prodigy who’s fallen away from her art and is drawn back in by her former teacher and his new star pupil. Packed with twists, switchbacks, and did that really just happens?, it’s a surprising and satisfying watch.
IMDb rating: 6.1
Poltergeist (1982): Best Classic 80s Blockbuster
A true ’80s horror classic about a family troubled by a haunting in their new home. One of the touchstones of ’80s horror themes—ex-hippie parents who are now Reagan voters, rapacious businesses unleashing horror, vengeance from the past visited on innocents in the present—despite its PG rating, Poltergeist is good, scary fun. Steven Spielberg had a large hand in the creation of this movie, though exactly how much has never been clear.
IMDb rating: 7.3
The Ritual (2017): Best Creature Feature
A folk horror creature feature that starts out looking like a friends-lost-in-the-woods flick, The Ritual is a lot of fun. A group of British friends on holiday in Sweden get lost, then hurt, while hiking and find themselves trapped in a spooky house during a rainstorm. From there, things get much worse for the group and much better for the audience. Based on the novel of the same name by Adam Nevill.
Session 9 (2001): Best Indie Ambiguity
No one would have expected this film from writer/director Brad Anderson, after his first movie—Next Step Wonderland—was a realist indie romantic comedy. Here, a group of down-on-their-luck asbestos removal technicians have to complete a rush job to remove the toxic substance from a former mental hospital that’s going to be converted into luxury apartments (the hospital, in Danvers, MA, is a real place and the apartment conversion are real, but the buildings burned down in 2007). Needless to say, the abandoned mental hospital is haunted by more than just asbestos and the team starts to come apart quickly. The film’s original release was overshadowed by Sept. 11, robbing this great indie horror film of the audience it deserved.
IMDb rating: 6.4
The Silence of the Lambs (1991): Best Serial Killer Thriller (Part 1)
The only horror movie to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, The Silence of the Lambs is easily one the greatest serial-killer thrillers of all time. Featuring a career-defining, pop-culture shaping turn by Anthony Hopkins as the cannibal doctor Hannibal Lecter, fledgling FBI agency Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) must pair with Lecter to help catch one of his former patients, the serial killer dubbed Buffalo Bill. Creepy, psychological, gripping, and packed with endlessly quotable dialogue, Lambs is as good as it gets.
IMDb rating: 8.6
Netflix also has all three seasons of the TV series-prequel, Hannibal. It’s got a totally different cast, and is tied more to the earlier Lecter story Red Dragon than Lambs, Hannibal is nonetheless one of the goriest, and best, horror TV series of all time.
Sinister (2012): Best Supernatural Fiend
So much horror takes place in your new house after your family moves. Makes you want to just refinance that mortgage and stay put. Well, Ellison Oswalt (Hawke) doesn’t take that advice and moves his family into a new home where murders once happened. As he investigates the crimes, he comes across some disturbing film of murders and unleashes an ancient, supernatural terror.
Train to Busan (2016): Best Zombie Rampage
If you love a good high-concept premise, Train to Busan is for you. Forget Snakes on a Plane. This is zombies on a high-speed train hurtling its way through Korea. Packed full of action, brain-munching, and social commentary, Busan breathes fresh life into the slightly tired zombie subgenre.
IMDb rating: 7.6
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010): Best Horror Comedy
The only horror-comedy on this list—we don’t like those two genres mixed together—Tucker and Dale is so smart, so funny, and so good-hearted that it has to be recommended. Flipping the evil-hillbilly cliche on its head, Tucker and Dale trips from one hilarious misunderstanding to another gory accident to an actual sinister plot, along the way generating a lot of laughs thanks largely to stars Labine and Tudyk. If you want a few laughs mixed in with your gore, and are sick of horror’s anti-rural bias, don’t miss this one.
Under the Shadow (2016): Best International Haunter
Bringing a welcome international perspective, this Persian-language film set in Iran during the ’80s Iran/Iraq War certainly offers a setting never-before-seen in the horror genre. In Shadow, a woman is left behind with her daughter when her doctor husband is sent to the war. As they wait, the daughter becomes increasingly concerned about Djinns, Islamic mythical creatures. When a missile hits their apartment building, things take a turn for the worse.
IMDb rating: 6.9
The Wicker Man (1973): Best Folk Horror
Not to confused with the so-bad-it-spawned-1,000-memes Nicholas Cage remake from 2006, this is one of the founding documents of the folk horror subgenre, which is focused on isolated communities and strange beliefs. In it, Woodward plays a devout Catholic cop sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. As he investigates, he finds a slightly pagan community that has a disturbing, ritualistic plan for him.
The VVitch (2015): Best Modern Folk Horror
Forget the marketing hype that this is the scariest movie you’ll ever seen. It’s not—but it’s probably also not truly trying to scare you. Rather, this is a creepy film, packed with atmosphere, that’s really the study of a family that’s so inflexibly religious that they kicked get out of Pilgrim-era Massachusetts (which is saying something!). As they try to subsist on a failing farm, they must ask whether their troubles are just hard luck, a witch’s curse, or created by their goat (yes, really).
Zodiac (2007): Best Serial Killer Thriller (part 2)
In a career full of high points, Zodiac is perhaps director Fincher’s greatest work. Based on the non-fiction book by former newspaper cartoonist and reporter Robert Graysmith, the film recounts the real-life hunt for the Zodiac killer, a serial murderer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Featuring top-notch performances by Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal, and Mark Ruffalo, there’s not a slack moment or out-of-place shot in the film’s 2.5 hours a must-watch.
IMDb rating: 7.7
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