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For some, spooky season begins sometime in late August—at least, that’s when Target puts out the animatronic skeletons and ghost projectors, and it’s not long after that your favorite old retail spaces are possessed by Spirit Halloween outlets. For others, spooky season runs throughout the year, with maybe a little time off for spring break. So, leading into the holiday and beyond, these are some of the creepiest, goriest, and overall best movies that Netflix has blessed our creepy little hearts with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hunger (2023)
This one isn’t billed as a horror film, but good luck finding a more harrowing psychological thriller on the streamer. Whether it’s The Bear, The Menu, or Triangle of Sadness, some of the most intense dramas on TV and in film are centered around preparing or eating food. Restaurant-related anxiety is deep in the zeitgeist right now, perhaps reflecting our deep understanding that the food is running low, whether we care to acknowledge it or not. Here, Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying plays Ayo, a young woman working in a family noodle shop who finds a mentor in the dictatorial Chef Paul (Nopachai Chaiyanam). It’s worth it, she figures, even as her climb exposes her to a world for which she’s not prepared.
1922 (2017)
Another Stephen King adaptation (this one from a novella) and another reminder that, while they aren’t all winners, there’s still plenty of gold to be mined from the King canon. Here, farmer Thomas Jane convinces his son to help him kill wife and mother Molly Parker (she wants to sell the family farm and move to the big city), leading to a solid example of the one-thing-leads-to-another genre of horror film, wherein the lead character just keeps getting deeper and deeper into a crime with increasingly wild and horrific results.
In the Tall Grass (2019)
Okay, one more King adaptation (this one from a novella co-written with his son, and one heckuva horror author in his own right, Joe Hill): In the Tall Grass...and, admittedly, it’s probably the least successful of Netflix’s King-adjacent works. Still! It’s an ambitiously bonkers premise (essentially, a couple of people get lost in a cornfield from which there is no escape) with solid core performances, and a ton of inventive visual flair from director Vincenzo Natali (Cube). It overstays its welcome a bit, but generates enough chills to qualify.
Bird Box (2018)
This high-concept thriller might be horror-lite in some regards, but the clever premise generates a ton of tension throughout—and there’s no questioning the impact of the Sandra Bullock movie, it having had a pop culture moment when it came out a couple of years ago (I paid good money to eat brunch while drag queen Darienne Lake walked around in a red puffer coat and a blindfold). The premise here is that, if you see the creatures that have descended upon the world, you die. So Bullock and co. are forced to navigate by sound alone, and the invisible threats are almost certainly more scary than anything Netflix might have visualized. The sequel, Bird Box: Barcelona (also a Netflix original), is somewhat less effective, but still entertaining.
The Ritual (2017)
What do you do when one of your best friends is murdered in a botched liquor store robbery? Go to Sweden and tromp around in the woods, obviously! The four friends here do just that in this effective film that blends don’t-get-lost-in-the-woods horror with some genuinely mythological frights that play to the best traditions of folk horror.
The Babysitter (2017)
It’s not terribly original, but, that’s kind of the point. In the film, 12-year-ole Cole finds out that his hot babysitter (Samara Weaving) is part of a murderous satanic cult. It’s a bloody, gory, high-energy comedy from director McG (Charlie’s Angels), and one with a really game supporting cast having fun playing with, and against, the usual tropes. The 2020 sequel, Killer Queen, feels like more of the same—but worth a look if you enjoy this one.
Calibre (2018)
It’s more of a thriller than a straight-up horror movie, but there’s enough of a body count here to qualify, and an ending that goes pretty hard (there are Scottish townies involved, so the folk-horror vibes are well-earned). On a hunting trip in the highlands, two posh and obnoxious friends accidentally kill a child, and then his father. The two men figure they can just cover up the crime and get on with their lives which, of course, they absolutely cannot.
May the Devil Take You (2018)
Indonesia has been a particularly fertile ground for the development of horror movies for a long time (decades, anyway), and Netflix has hosted a few recent bangers. This one’s a pretty straight-up story of demonic possession and being-very-careful-what-you-wish-for involving a man who sells his soul for wealth and success, only to release a demonic presence that brings goopy, gory harm to his loved ones. It might not be the most visually explicit in terms of its body horror, but it’s up there. The 2020 sequel, May the Devil Take You Too, is approximately as good.
Malevolent (2018)
It goes off the rails a bit (quite a bit, actually) in the final act, but Florence Pugh (as Angela) gives a great performance of one half of a scammy brother-sister team of ghostbusters in the 1980s. In Scotland. In the course of the movie, Angela discovers that her mom’s supposed ability to communicate with the dead wasn’t a lie, and that she also has the ability—complicating their lives, especially when the siblings learn more than they should about a house where a group of children were killed.
Fear Street (2021)
Doing three movies at once here, as each film in the trilogy, adapted from the R. L. Stine books, shares a tone, quality, and director (Leigh Janiak, best known for Honeymoon prior to Fear Street). Fear Street Part One: 1994 kicks off the films by introducing the town of Shadyside, which the local kids call “Shittyside,” and has a dark history of multiple murders, most of them covered up. A group of teens upsets the grave of a witch, kicking off the revival of a murderous cult. The vibe here is a little bit Stranger Things, with some legit gore and scares (it’s YA, but definitely not kids’ stuff) as Janiak pays homage to a wide range of horror movies past. The series continues in Fear Street Part Two: 1978 and concludes with Fear Street Part Three: 1666.
The Perfection (2018)
A short synopsis, involving Charlotte Willmore (Allison Williams) returning to her prestigious music academy after an absence and finding that another woman (Logan Browning) has taken her place at the head of the class, might make it seem as though we’re entering Black Swan territory, at worst—but the intentionally disjointed narrative here quickly careens into wildly claustrophobic body horror. It might not be the first film to mine dark thrills and gore out of arts education (Suspiria, anyone?) but it goes as far as any of them, and even beyond.
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