If you want to find good scary movies on Netflix to watch, the streaming service is a great platform for a meat-cleaving marathon. From ghosts to vampires, zombies, and monsters, just about every morbid fantasy your demented mind can conjure has representation in the scariest films available. 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-curling. Now, sit back, heat up some pizza, and ignore the ghoul standing ominously at the end of your driveway.
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20) 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.
19) Pontypool (2008)
This Canadian horror film traps several employees of a radio station at work as their broadcast shifts from entertaining the residents of a small Ontario town to trying to save them — and themselves. As a virus begins to spread through language itself, forcing the townspeople to commit horrific acts, host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) rushes to find a cure before everyone is consumed by it. Pontypool works as a clever low-budget film, a smart take on the zombie genre, and an allegory portraying the power of language and mass communication.
18) 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.
17) Honeymoon (2014)
Leigh Janiak (recently 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 the film’s haunting conclusion.
16) 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.
15) A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0k21yeVMbM
Wes Craven’s film about Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a boogeyman who invades the dreams of some unsuspecting small-town teenagers became a surprise hit in 1984 by giving horror fans a break from the slasher fare that had dominated the early ’80s. Instead, Craven offered a hallucinatory story that too full advantage of its central conceit via dream sequences that turned its dreamers’ everyday reality against them. Naps became deathtraps. High school hallways became portals to a hellish underworld. Falling asleep in the bathtub invited fates worse than drowning. Its many sequels featured more elaborate set pieces and made Freddy bigger and funnier. But he was never scarier than in this first visit to Elm Street.
14) V/H/S (2012) and V/H/S/2 (2013)
Found footage horror movies can be hit-or-miss, but when it works it really works. The anthology films V/H/S and V/H/S/2 pack several short films into each feature, drawing on a talent pool that includes everyone from Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest) Ti West (House of the Devil) 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.
13) Trollhunter (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 meetsJurassic 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.
12) Starry Eyes (2014)
Word-of-mouth has been building on Starry Eyes since it was released two 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.
11) 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.