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Last Updated: January 3rd
Horror movies have evolved throughout the years (and we ranked the best of the ’80s and the ’90s here), but sometimes you just want to binge whichever good scary movies on Netflix has to watch on a dark, stormy night. From ghosts to vampires, zombies, and Babadooks, just about every morbid fantasy that your demented mind can conjure has representation in the scariest films available to stream. Forget Googling all the horror film choices in the overcrowded menu — we’ve already watched the best horror movies on Netflix right now, and here they are ranked from beastly to blood-curdling. Now, sit back, heat up some pizza, and ignore the ghoul standing ominously at the end of your driveway.
Related: The 30 Best Movies On Netflix Right Now, Ranked
Netflix
20) Hush (2016)
Mike Flanagan, who directed Oculus and Ouija: Origin of Evil, expertly directs this simple tale of a deaf woman being menaced by a masked (and later unmasked) killer in her remote home. This is nothing you haven’t seen before, but Flanagan brings real panache and visual energy to a film that could have easily felt redundant in the hands of a lesser filmmaker.
20th Century Fox
19) The Fury (1978)
Brian De Palma’s post-Carrie telekinesis film is far from the great achievement its predecessor was, but it is nonetheless pulpy good fun that delivers one of the most literally explosive climaxes in horror history. Be prepared for some very, very ’70s moments, including the sight of an orange-colored Kirk Douglas in short-shorts on a beach, firing a machine gun. Amy Irving’s giant eyes have never been put to better use.
Collective Digital
18) V/H/S/2 (2013) and V/H/S/ Viral (2014)
Found footage horror movies can be hit-or-miss, but when it works it really works. The V/H/S anthology films pack several short films into each feature, drawing on a talent pool that includes everyone from Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest) and Jason Eisener (Hobo With a Shotgun). Not all the entries are great, but the weak entries don’t last very long and the strong ones are tough to forget. The 2012 original was unfortunately removed from Netflix, but the sequels still pack a punch.
Cannes Film Festival
17) Train To Busan (2016)
Zombie movies have been done to death, brought back to life, and repeated a few more times. But that doesn’t mean there still aren’t entertaining stories to be found in the genre. Train To Busan doesn’t bring anything exceptionally original to the walking undead, but it’s no less of a thrilling ride. An overworked dad is riding the rails with his neglected daughter when a Z-word outbreak strikes, causing savagery from corpse and living alike. Its fast-moving, contorted foes are genuinely freaky in the movie’s cramped setting, making the story feel like a zombified Snowpiercer. It’s a fun action flick with a slightly heavy-handed but solid emotional core that’s unsurprisingly getting an English remake.
Entertainment One
16) The Hallow (2015)
Corin Hardy made his feature directorial debut with this tale of a young married couple who move into a charming rural home in Ireland — only to be stalked by a race of vicious forest-dwelling creatures who have designs on their infant son.The Hallow is a gloomy tale punctuated by a series of brutally effective sequences of horror in the final 45 minutes, but there’s real feeling beneath the frights, making it clear why Hardy was chosen to direct Relativity’s continually delayed reboot of The Crow.
Magnolia Pictures
15) Honeymoon (2014)
Leigh Janiak (hired to co-write and direct a remake of The Craft) made her directorial debut with this low-budget film about a recently-married couple (Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway) honeymooning in the woods who begin to unravel when the wife begins exhibiting increasingly-bizarre behavior. Leslie and Treadaway have great on-screen chemistry, and the central theme — “do you really know the person you’re sleeping next to?” — is smartly explored all the way up to the film’s haunting conclusion.
14) The Bar (2017)
A varied group of people is stuck in a bar after a man is gunned down outside. As the paranoia spreads and they turn on one another, they discover a mysterious sickness could be the culprit. It’s a bottle-type plot that has been done before — locking a bunch of frenzied folks in a cage and let instincts take their course — but this Spanish thriller injects its own dark comedy and keeps the answers to a minimum, making an entertaining story that unfortunately favors the “dark” over the “comedy” in its final act.
The Orchard
13) Creep (2014)
One of the better found-footage movies to come down the pike in Paranormal Activity‘s wake is this creepy gem about a videographer (director Patrick Brice) who answers a strange Craigslist ad from a man (Mark Duplass) who requests to be followed around with a camera for 24 hours. There are a few points late in the narrative where suspension of disbelief becomes an issue (a not-atypical problem for the genre), but if you can look past that, you’ll be treated to a very scary turn by Duplass and a supremely-unnerving epilogue.
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
12) The Sixth Sense (1999)
Hijinks-y teen movies and all, 1999 was an impressive year for movies. Magnolia, Fight Club, The Green Mile, Being John Malkovich, The Matrix… The list goes on and on. Among those entries is M. Night Shyamalan’s first big release, and one of his best (behind Unbreakable, of course). This was a simpler time, before seeing his name in trailers garnered skepticism. Centered on a boy who can’t separate the dead from the living and his child psychologist with issues of his own, The Sixth Sense remains one of four horror movies to ever be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. It’s endlessly tense, driven by strong performances from the two leads over jump scares. It’s held up well, even if it’s established a tough hurdle for the director’s future efforts to clear.
SF Norge A/S
11) Troll Hunter (2010)
Norwegian director Andre Ovredal’s 2010 horror-fantasy merges scrappy found-footage cinematography with truly astounding visual effects in this story about a group of university students who discover a race of giant, man-eating trolls while making a documentary about a suspected bear poacher. Think Blair Witch meets Jurassic Park, shot through with a liberal dose of sharp satire as the young city-dwellers come up against a rural world that’s far more alien than they ever could have imagined.
Snowfort Pictures/Parallactic Pictures/Dark Sky Films
10) Starry Eyes (2014)
Word-of-mouth has been building on Starry Eyes since it was released three years ago, and it’s not just talk. Alex Essoe is excellent as the struggling Hollywood starlet who hides an increasingly disturbed lust for recognition beneath her girl-next-door exterior, and in the third act writer-directors Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch deliver several queasy moments of body horror that will satiate the bloodlust of slightly-more-discerning gorehounds.
Drafthouse Films
9) The Invitation (2016)
After back-to-back big studio bombs, Karyn Kusama returned to her scrappy indie roots with this contained, brilliantly suspenseful study of the darkness that can arise when people don’t allow themselves to feel. The Invitation isn’t a perfect film, but Kusama does a lot with the scant resources she had to play with here, and you have to appreciate her willingness to tackle grief so directly in a genre that tends to have little time for genuine human emotion.
Lionsgate
8) Saw (2004)
The movie that kicked off the “torture porn” resurgence in the U.S. — and a long line of sequels that continue to this day — actually covers interesting grounds beyond the elaborate death traps it became known for. In the same vein as Cube and plenty of others in the horror/thriller category, two strangers awaken to find themselves trapped in a mysterious location, not knowing how they got there or how to escape. Meanwhile, an ex-police detective hunts for the gruesome Jigsaw killer that imprisoned the two men. Shot on a relatively low budget, Saw went on to become one of the most profitable horror films of all time, not only due to the twisted nature of the kills but because of the twisted psychology that motivates them. It’s got just the right amount of gore to be a staple of the genre.
Netflix
7) Gerald’s Game (2017)
Stephen King’s 1992 novel transpires mostly in one isolated lake house’s bedroom where its protagonist, Jessie, lies bound to a bed after her husband dies in the midst of a sex game. That makes it a tough story to film, which may explain why it took 25 years to get turned into a movie. But the wait was worth it: director Mike Flanagan delivers a resourceful, disturbing adaptation anchored by a great Carla Gugino performance (with some fine supporting work from Bruce Greenwood). Forced to find a way out of her situation, while confronting her own past, Gugino’s Jessie is made to go to extremes, which leads to, among other things, one of the squirmiest scenes in recent memory.
Trimark Pictures
6) Cube (1997)
The genius of Cube is in its simplicity. A group of strangers awakens to find themselves in a complex system of identical rooms, many of which contain hidden, lethal traps for anyone clueless enough to enter them. With no knowledge of where they are, how they got there, or why they’re there, they have to work together to escape and/or — usually and — die trying. As it all pretty much takes place in a single room, it’s a prime example that the only things needed are a solid idea, a little money, and the stomach to depict people getting their faces melted or their bodies diced by razor-sharp wire. The follow-up installments go a little further out there in ideas and the world outside the Cube, but the original can’t be topped thanks to its unnerving score and tense, claustrophobic nature.
Universal Pictures
5) Jaws (1975)
Interestingly, the first modern summer blockbuster isn’t a high-flying action movie or science-fiction epic but a relatively small-scale horror movie about a resort town menaced by an enormous Great White shark. Spielberg’s 1975 classic is both pure popcorn and one of the most frightening movies of all time, not least for the armrest-clutching opening scene that remains one of the most effective moments of pure, primal terror in cinema history.
RADiUS-TWC
4) It Follows (2014)
Sometimes the best horror movies have the simplest of concepts: A nearly unkillable thing is on its way to kill you. It worked for The Terminator, Halloween, and so many others, but It Follows takes a novel approach to the concept. The story centers on a girl who catches a sexually transmitted monster (STM) that’s only goal is to slowly follow its current victim until it can brutally execute them. No one who hasn’t been the monster’s prey can see it, it can take any human form it wants, and the only way to escape it is to pass it along to another sexual partner. The eerie cinematography and retro score push this thriller into terrifying territory to the point where you might not trust anyone walking toward you for a few days after watching it.
Gravitas Ventures
3) The Nightmare (2015)
One of the scariest movies on this list also happens to be a documentary, albeit one that aims to frighten audiences in the way of a typical narrative horror film. Director Rodney Ascher’s (Room 237) rumination on the terrifying phenomenon known as sleep paralysis plays like a more artful and particularly unnerving episode of Unsolved Mysteries, but what makes it even scarier is that everything described by the film’s subjects happened in their in their own tortured minds.
Entertainment Film Distributors/New World Pictures
2) Hellraiser (1987)
Barker’s directorial debut captures the nightmarish qualities of his literary efforts. Based on The Hellbound Heart (a novella so unsettling no film could do it justice), Hellraiser mixes disturbing imagery with sexual undertones, in the process introducing Pinhead and a panoply of sadistic, multidimensional beings who would return for several sequels.
Screen Australia
1) The Babadook (2014)
Starring Essie Davis (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mystery) and directed by Jennifer Kent, The Babadook is a bracing psychological horror film grounded in the terrors and frustration of parenthood. Davis plays a mother who lost her husband in a car accident on their way to the delivery room. She loves and resents her troubled 6-year-old son, feelings that seem to take supernatural form when a creepy pop-up book, Mister Babadook, mysteriously shows up on his shelf. Kent’s stylish film makes excellent uses of its creepy interiors. but it’s Davis’ committed performance that drives the horror home.
I paid off my student loans early
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