[Ghostface voice] Do you like scary movies? [Slightly less Ghostface voice] Do you, like 300 million other human beings on the planet Earth, have a Netflix account? Then, logically, you’ve probably found yourself scrolling around, looking to find the best horror movies on the service. Unlike Jamie Kennedy in Scream, we have answers.
But rather than wade through that ever-shifting glut of films pouring in and out of the service every month trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve got you covered with a list of our own written and curated by Polygon’s own resident horror aficionados. (And if you’re looking for a list of the best horror movies to watch across multiple streaming platforms, we’ve got you covered there, too.)
We’ve slashed our way through the horror offerings on Netflix to find you a heap of movies worth an evening… alone… with the lights off… and surely… no one watching you… through the window… right now…
Image: Netflix
Fans of the classic 1973 horror movie The Wicker Man (let us not speak of the 2006 Nicolas Cage version and its beeeeeees) should be warned: The Raid director Gareth Evans’ 2018 movie Apostle deliberately starts in the exact same place, and then takes the same scenario to much bloodier and more graphic ends. Set in 1905, it opens with addled addict Thomas (Legion and The Guest star Dan Stevens) getting a letter that says his sister is being held prisoner by a cult on a distant island. So he fakes his way into what looks like a quaint religious community, but is actually the kind of place where people routinely leave bowls of their own blood in front of their doors at night and something is audibly crawling around under the floorboards. Tense, gory, and in places almost ludicrously over-the-top, Apostle has a lot to say about the nature of religious fanaticism, both for the obedient flocks doing whatever their leader says God wants, and for the manipulators that weaponize whoever they can find who’s willing to be led. But this isn’t just Wicker Man redux — it’s a creative, relentless spin on the same idea, leading to its own unique horrors. —Tasha Robinson
Image: Netflix
Any movie where a team of misfits, led by Dave Bautista, has to rob a Las Vegas vault is automatically great. Army of the Dead adds zombies to the equation. The movie takes place in a near future in which a deadly virus creates zombies, but the outbreak ends up contained inside Las Vegas, which becomes infected territory. This is among the biggest and loudest heist movies on this list, blending the zombie-killing of later Resident Evil movies with all the tension of safe cracking. The real key to this movie’s greatness and fun, though, is Bautista, who is without question the most interesting and sensitive of the giant-man action stars. He counterbalances the bombastic premise with genuine heart and is endlessly watchable as a zombie-killing, one-man army. —Austen Goslin
Image: Netflix
Madeline Brewer stars in Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam as Alice, an ambitious camgirl trying desperately to reach the coveted number one spot of the site she streams for. After a particularly intense show, she wakes to find that her account has been taken over by a mysterious doppelganger, one who will seemingly go to any and all lengths to achieve what Alice herself could not. As Alice fights to regain control of her show and expose the identity of her impersonator, she’ll have to deal with the consequences of her offline and online identities blurring into one. Cam is a chilling psychological horror that leaves the audience wondering at every turn how, if at all, its heroine will manage to overcome and survive the horrors that assail her life. —Toussaint Egan
Image: The Orchard
Leave it to indie darling Mark Duplass and his regular collaborator Patrick Brice (The Overnight) to keep the found-footage horror movie kickin’ 15 years after The Blair Witch Project. In Creep, Josef (Duplass) recruits Aaron (Brice), a videographer, off Craigslist with the intention of filming a goodbye letter to his unborn son. Josef is dying… at least, that’s how he convinces his new buddy Aaron to spend the night in the woods drinking whiskey with him. The batshit revelations are best left unsaid, and just how Creep 2 picks up the story, with Girls actress Desiree Akhavan front and center as a hopeful YouTube star, is even more of a hoot. Creep is the deranged, internet-friendly horror franchise we deserve. —Matt Patches
Image: Focus Features
The world is full of zombie movies, and there are always more on the way, but few of them are as entertaining and odd as Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. The legendary indie filmmaker’s take on the genre is full of unsurprisingly offbeat jokes, bizarre plot points, and far more heart than you might be expecting. Alongside Jarmusch’s excellent script, The Dead Don’t Die also sports an unreal cast that includes Tom Waits, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Bill Murray, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Carol Kane, Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, Austin Butler, and more — including Adam Driver giving one of the funniest line readings of his entire career. —AG
Image: A24
Over the past decade, arguably no other filmmaker has had a more consequential role in establishing what a so-called “A24 movie” looks and feels like than Ari Aster. Alongside films like Moonlight and Uncut Gems, Aster’s 2018 feature debut Hereditary is a touchstone in the aesthetic trifecta of what audiences expect from the “brand” that is A24.
Toni Collette stars in the psychological horror film as Annie, a miniature artist and mother of two who is grieving the death of her mother, Ellen. Not long after the funeral, Annie’s family is hit with a second inexplicable tragedy, one that threatens to tear them apart and usher forth a darkness unlike anything they could have ever imagined. Macabre, unsettling, and pitch-black in its occasional comedicism, Hereditary was the highest-grossing film ever produced by A24 until the release of Everything Everywhere All at Once. All that being said, you’ve likely already seen it, but even if you have, it’s a film worthy of rewatching and reappraising on the merit of its production quality and editing alone. —TE
Photo: Aidan Monaghan/Netflix
His House turns the trials of immigration into a shock-filled ghost story. Gangs of London’s Sope Dirisu and Lovecraft Country’s Wunmi Mosaku play a Sudanese couple seeking asylum in Britain, where they encounter supportive but not exactly friendly social workers (including House of the Dragon star Matt Smith) who can’t accept that the home they’ve been given is haunted. Caught between the ghosts at home and an inflexible system ready to send them back to a war-torn country, the couple struggle with their past and their highly questionable future. —TR
Photo: Vlad Cioplea/Netflix
Even in our post-Cabin in the Woods world, there are still opportunities for clever filmmakers to spook us with creepy-shack-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-why-the-hell-would-you-go-in-there-what-was-that-in-the-shadows-no-no-no-no-no stories. The Ritual follows four friends who trek along northern Sweden’s Kungsleden trail as a tribute to a fifth friend, who was recently murdered in a convenience store. The death especially weighs on Luke (Prometheus’ Rafe Spall), whose drunken belligerence put his buddy in harm’s way in the first place. Luke is also the member of the group who realizes that, after discovering a wooden deer altar in an abandoned house along their unadvised detour, the group is being haunted by more than memories. Like a unique mix of Euro-horror and The Hills Have Eyes, The Ritual twists a familiar journey with creature-feature instincts to keep the genre fresh. —MP
Image: Sony Pictures
First, a word of caution. If you have difficulty with gore in movies, you are better off with just about any other movie on this list. Go ahead, there are plenty of great ones for you to choose from here… just not this one.
Now, for the rest of you freaks (I say that with love), you are in for a treat. Thanksgiving is unofficially the best Scream movie since Scream 4, Wes Craven’s final entry in the franchise. It’s a delightful slasher with a firmly tongue-in-cheek tone and some extremely gnarly holiday-themed kills.
The movie has the kind of twisted kills you’d want from a holiday-themed slasher, and while the dialogue is occasionally uneven, I was particularly impressed by the character work. Thanksgiving has the perfect mix of characters you really want to see get killed and characters you want to survive. That’s a hard balance to strike in the genre, but a vital one. —Pete Volk
Image: Vertical Entertainment
During a string of Iraqi airstrikes in late-1980s Tehran, the Iranian government bars medical student and political activist Shideh (Narges Rashidi) from continuing her studies. She retreats to her family’s apartment, and despite her husband’s wishes, remains with her young daughter in the war-torn capital — this is her home, and she’s not leaving. But when a missile blasts directly through her building, the normal life Shideh and her daughter knew becomes marked by an invisible, nefarious presence. Is it a djinn? Much like in The Babadook, first-time director Babak Anvari allows the question of the supernatural to orbit the action of Under the Shadow as he captures the erosion of his plain main set and Shideh’s very existence. —MP
