22 Best Horror Movies to Watch for a Good Scare - Netflix Tudum

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    22 Horror Movies to Watch When You Want a Good Scare

    Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
    By Matthew Jacobs
    March 5, 2024

Horror never goes out of style, but the genre has become one of Hollywood’s most reliable moneymakers in recent years, lighting up the box office and giving viewers at home endless options for crowd-pleasing frights. It’s full of rich traditions that can be resurrected, reinvented, or subverted entirely. Some of the best directors working today are horror acolytes who have an uncanny ability to scare the masses. 

Whether you want a classic ghost story, a thought-provoking social thriller, or an unbridled adrenaline rush, we’ve got you covered. These 22 films are best watched at night with the lights turned off. Just be careful not to spill your popcorn everywhere when you leap off the couch in terror. 

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If you want to watch a found footage horror movie…

Creep

Mark Duplass and director Patrick Brice put an invigorating spin on the 2010s’ found footage craze with Creep, a two-hander about a videographer (Duplass) hired to record what he’s told is a diary meant for a dying man’s (Brice) unborn child. At first, the guy seems charming. Then his eerie eccentricities start to show, and a sense of dread takes over. Maybe he’s not who he says at all. In a taut 77 minutes, Creep becomes an ominous battle of wills between two strangers in a dimly lit house. (Its sequel, starring Desiree Akhavan, is also available on Netflix.)

Creep

2014   R   1h 17m

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If you want to a watch a classic horror movie…

Jaws

Nothing would be the same without Jaws — not summer blockbusters, not Steven Spielberg’s career, not the intense fear some people still have of the ocean. The two-note theme that signals the shark’s approach is still one of the scariest pieces of music ever written. But what’s most striking about Jaws all these years later is how withholding it is. The movie is a slow burn, concentrating on character building over cheap thrills. A lot of it is just three guys swapping stories on a boat. That makes it all the more startling. Like the worst fears, Jaws’ menace can come when you least expect it. 

Jaws

PG   2h 4m

If you want to watch a funny horror movie…

We Have a Ghost

Happy Death Day, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse and Freaky established Christopher Landon as one of the best directors of horror comedies working today. His ability to blend teen-friendly screams with sophisticated meta commentary about the genre makes him a perfect fit for We Have a Ghost, which Landon adapted from a short story by Geoff Manaugh. It’s about a family that moves into a home with a (mostly) friendly poltergeist (David Harbour) residing in the attic. Rising star Jahi Di’Allo Winston (Queen & Slim) plays the lead, with Anthony Mackie as his father, Jennifer Coolidge as a big-haired TV medium and Tig Notaro as a horror writer determined to capture the ghost. 

We Have a Ghost

2023   PG-13   2h 7m

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Day Shift

Jamie Foxx as a pool cleaner whose real calling is hunting vampires? Yes please. J.J. Perry, a mixed martial arts master and longtime stuntman with movie credits that include Mortal Kombat and Iron Man, made his directorial debut with this raucous romp. In order to get out of debt and pay for his daughter’s tuition, Foxx’s hard-up Bud Jablonski must return to his slaying ways. He recruits an old buddy (Snoop Dogg) to help him out, and from there, Bud’s anti-bloodsucking adventures escalate. By the time a vampire (Karla Souza from How to Get Away with Murder, also available on Netflix) captures his family, Bud means business. 

Vampires vs. the Bronx

 

If you want to watch a supernatural horror movie…

It Follows

It Follows helped to set off a wave of horror indies that made the 2010s a landmark decade for the genre. The premise came to writer-director David Robert Mitchell through a recurring nightmare, which he spun into a movie indebted to Night of the Living Dead and Halloween. Shape-shifting, zombielike specters stalk one college student after the next, passed along like an STI until their vulnerable targets can find a way to stave them off. The film has an edge-of-your-seat unpredictability that treats terror as an everyday menace. It Follows also provided a breakout role for lead actor Maika Monroe, who has since appeared in Honey Boy and Watcher. 

Crimson Peak

Guillermo del Toro has made monster movies his signature, but he went in a ghostlier direction with Crimson Peak. One of the most opulent haunted-house movies ever made, it’s a gothic saga in the style of Henry James. Mia Wasikowska plays an early 20th-century novelist whisked away by a handsome suitor (Tom Hiddleston) who lives in a spooky mansion with his demented sister (Jessica Chastain). Dark things have happened there, and they will continue to happen when Wasikowska arrives. As del Toro’s work tends to go, Crimson Peak is a parade of immaculate production design that emphasizes the romantic and the grotesque in equal measure. 

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

Oz Perkins is best known as Dorky David from Legally Blonde, but he’s also a gifted horror director — a fitting career path for the son of Anthony Perkins, aka Norman Bates himself. His second feature, after 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter, follows a live-in nurse (Ruth Wilson) caring for a novelist (Paula Prentiss) who spends her final days in a large, remote house. During her stay, the caretaker discovers ghostly secrets nestled throughout the estate. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, which Perkins wrote while processing his relationship with his own father, is an atmospheric slow burn brimming with gothic tension. 

Under the Shadow

Under the Shadow debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, after which it became one of the most celebrated horror movies of 2016. It’s a politically conscious supernatural story about a former medical student (Narges Rashidi) in war-torn Iran. When her young daughter (Avin Manshadi) insists that she senses some sort of insidious spirit in their house, things start to go bump in the night. Blending Islamic mythology and real-world terrors, Under the Shadow is guaranteed to induce chills with its nightmarish take on oppression. 

His House

Another splashy Sundance title with political undercurrents, His House follows a Sudanese family who seek asylum in Britain. The home where they take shelter is a decaying shanty on the outskirts of London, surrounded by racist neighbors and paranormal sights. Wunmi Mosaku received a BAFTA nomination for her performance as a mother striving to preserve her native culture while assimilating within a community that doesn’t want her there. Her character’s fear is palpable, with possible terrors lurking in every corridor. This is a haunted-house movie with grand thematic significance that never skimps on the subgenre’s creeping pleasures. 

If you want to watch a slasher horror movie…

Fear Street Part 1: 1994

Sink your teeth into the first entry in Netflix’s trilogy based on R.L. Stine’s popular book series. Leigh Janiak directed all three movies, winning praise for her invigorating take on the paranormal frights Stine unleashed upon the fictional town of Shadyside. An ancient witch’s curse plagues the city, where a group of teenagers must ward off resurrected killers in between mall hangouts. Fear Street Part 2 winds back to 1978, and Part 3 returns to Puritan times to explore the black magic that was a prelude to Shadyside’s murderous murk. 

The Strangers

If you’ve seen the slasher classics — Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street and the like — you’ve more or less seen them all. Try as they might, movies have struggled to reinvigorate this grisly subgenre. The Strangers is a key exception. Where most slasher films focus on the body count, this one is all about quiet suspense. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a strained couple spending time at a remote cabin where three masked intruders come a-knockin’ late at night. Over 85 terrifying minutes, these perpetually calm killers stalk the pair through their property simply because, well, they can. The Strangers twists the notion that anyone is ever truly safe behind closed doors, and what’s scarier than that? 

Ma

Sue Ann Ellington is not your average serial killer. She’s really just an opportunist with a highly specific vendetta dating back to high school. So she befriends a group of teenagers, insists they call her “Ma,” hosts ragers in her basement, and then slowly uses the kids to enact an elaborate revenge scheme best left unspoiled. As the eponymous villain, Octavia Spencer plasters on a smile that’s frightening in the way it conceals the simmering rage that emerges as things escalate. Ma was directed by Spencer’s longtime friend Tate Taylor, who also cast her in The Help and Get on Up. 

There's Someone Inside Your House

After establishing his horror bona fides with the Creep movies, director Patrick Brice went full-throttle on the slasher genre. The aptly titled There’s Someone Inside Your House, adapted from a 2017 novel of the same name by Stephanie Perkins, follows an exchange student (Sydney Park) who’s still adjusting to life in a new town when her classmates start getting slaughtered left and right. High school, with its pent-up emotions and impressionable teenagers, has always been the perfect backdrop for a serial-killer showdown. These particular murders contain an added bite because the assassin wears masks that resemble the faces of the victims. 

If you want to watch a psychological horror movie…

Gerald's Game

Like many who have read the Stephen King novel, director Mike Flanagan once called Gerald’s Game “unfilmable.” But he pulled off the impossible, adapting a book that largely takes place inside the protagonist’s head. That would be Jessie Burlingame (The Fall of the House of Usher’s Carla Gugino), handcuffed to a bed in an isolated lake house after her husband (Bruce Greenwood, also in Usher) has a sudden heart attack while attempting to spice up their sex life. Gerald’s Game is a riveting survival movie in which Jessie hallucinates a version of herself who’s capable of escaping her situation. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Cam

After career-making performances in Orange Is the New Black, Hemlock Grove and The Handmaid’s Tale, Madeline Brewer got the star vehicle she deserved. In Cam, she plays a performer on an OnlyFans–esque website where her online persona, Lola_Lola, is ascending in popularity — until a doppelgänger steals her likeness, her account and her sense of self. Cam, written by Isa Mazzei, a former camgirl who poured her own experiences into the film, doesn’t belittle sex work or internet culture. Instead, Mazzei scripted a gripping psychodrama about identity that set up a bright career for director Daniel Goldhaber, who also made this year’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline. 

Get Out

Six years later, it’s hard to overstate Get Out’s influence. A box-office juggernaut that made off with four Oscar nominations (and one win), it’s one of the most quoted blockbusters of the past decade. The movie also announced Jordan Peele as horror’s next great auteur, a turn that came as a surprise given his comedy roots. Then again, Get Out is very much indebted to Peele’s sense of humor. He brings a winky sense of satire to this unsettling psychological thriller about a young photographer (Daniel Kaluuya) who discovers his white girlfriend’s parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) are running a sinister scheme that preys on Black bodies. It’s still as entertaining, clever, and significant as it was in 2017.

Us

If Get Out anointed Peele one of Hollywood’s next big directors, Us confirmed that he was no one-hit wonder. His sophomore movie, released in 2019, is more conceptually ambitious, sketching an alternate reality full of doppelgängers and deception. It starts as a home-invasion thriller, with look-alikes stalking a family of four on vacation — and ends somewhere far loftier. Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, and the rest of the cast play dual roles, each of them deliciously inhabiting both hero and villain. Us didn’t get the same awards-season attention that Get Out did, but it ensured no one would ever doubt Peele again.

Run Rabbit Run

One month after HBO’s Succession came to a buzzy close, Sarah Snook was back with another master-class performance. In Run Rabbit Run, she plays a fertility doctor named Mia whose 7-year-old daughter (Lily LaTorre) develops supernatural fixations and claims she’s actually the sister Mia lost as a kid. Set amid a moody stretch of Australia, the movie’s atmosphere grows eerier as Sarah’s emotional state deteriorates. After seeing Snook play a cold-blooded shark on TV for so many years, it’s a wonder to watch her in a role this vulnerable. 

If you want to watch a horror movie with monsters…

The Ritual

You never know what you’ll find in the woods. The four friends in The Ritual certainly didn’t. After setting out on a Swedish hiking trail, they happen upon cryptic symbols in the trees and a human effigy that can’t bode well for their safety. Indeed, things get worse from there — extremely worse. Based on Adam Nevill’s 2011 novel of the same name, this suspenseful creature feature directed by David Bruckner (The Night House) blends supernatural mythology and plain old vacation terror for a feature-length wilderness freak-out. 

47 Meters Down: Uncaged

Shark thrillers made a comeback in the late 2010s, reminders of how petrifying open water can be. After the success of 47 Meters Down in 2017, director Johannes Roberts concocted another oceanic fright fest, this time involving teenage girls on an ill-advised dive to see ancient Mayan ruins. There they also discover hungry great whites — and naturally, not everyone survives the trek. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged’s bright young cast includes Sophie Nélisse, Corinne Foxx (daughter of Jamie) and Sistine Stallone (daughter of Sylvester). 

El Conde

This is a different kind of monster movie. There’s no shark, no aliens, no Godzilla — just Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who indicted, tortured, and executed thousands during his 17-year presidency. Director Pablo Larraín, best known for the unconventional biopics Jackie and Spencer, picks up after those events, during the period when Pinochet lived mostly in seclusion. Larraín presents the former leader (played by an imperious Jaime Vadell) as a 250-year-old vampire who’s finally decided it’s time for him to die. Blending Gothic black-and-white horror with dark comedy, El Conde is a macabre satire that finds Pinochet’s children angling for their inheritance as their father’s corruption is laid bare. 

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