The 26 Scariest Movies on Netflix: ‘Hereditary,’ ‘Fear Street,’ and More

“Thanksgiving” (2023)

A festive slasher about a pilgrim-masked killer haunting Plymouth, Massachusetts sounds more goofy than frightening. What makes Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” his best movie is that the director finds a way to have his turkey and eat it too, serving up buckets of cranberry sauce-colored gore and dark humor along with some real frights. Based on Roth’s fake trailer from 2007’s “Grindhouse,” “Thanksgiving” fits into the spirit of that throwback double-feature, evoking B-movie cinema in a way that’s over-the-top but affectionate, and shows real skill in bringing the genre back to life. It’s a nourishing feast of blood and kills. —WC 

“Cult of Chucky” (2017)

The most recent “Child’s Play” film aside from the 2019 remake, “Cult of Chucky” sees Don Mancini’s cult favorite in full gonzo mode. After the events of “Curse of Chucky,” the murderous doll returns to bust into an insane asylum to further torment his latest victim, disabled Nica (Fiona Dourif), who has been framed for the murder of her family. Like most late stage “Chucky” films, the result is more silly and darkly fun than scary, but there’s still plenty of murder and mayhem to sate a horror fan’s blood lust. —WC 

“Hereditary” (2018)

Pretty much a modern horror classic, “Hereditary” has been memed so hard on the internet that it should no longer have much in the way of genuine terrifying power. And yet! What’s remarkable about Ari Aster’s domestic drama is, after all the ink that’s been spilled about it and all the theorizing that’s been done, it still feels raw and shocking, a domestic drama so intense and outrageous that it can still get under your skin. Toni Collette’s should-have-been-Oscar-nominated performance is a key part of the equation, capturing the fear and heartbreak of a woman fighting through her grief and demons; a similarly phenomenal supporting turn from Alex Wolff as her son helps as well. What really makes “Hereditary” so scary six years after its release, though, is Aster’s commitment to putting the viewer through the emotional wringer, dropping them in fights so charred and personal that you can feel them in your gut. There’s some camp value to the film, which it gleefully indulges in, but by the time you finish watching the click of a tongue is liable to give you goosebumps. —WC

“I Know What You Did Last Summer” (1997)

One of the biggest hit slashers during the genre’s ’90s post-“Scream” renaissance, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” is a slick and wildly entertaining work of mainstream horror that still has plenty of scares. Based loosely on a 1973 novel by Lois Duncan, the film features a veritable embarrassment of ’90s teen matinee idols — Freddie Prinze Jr.! Jennifer Love Hewitt! Ryan Philippe! Sarah Michelle Gellar! — as the four teens hiding a dirty secret that comes back to bite them when a mysterious killer begins stalking them. It can be a little corny and histrionic, but director Jim Gillespie and screenwriter Kevin Williamson understand how to build tension and terror, and there are plenty of gnarly kills that’ll satisfy any horror fanatic. —WC

“The Watchers” (2024)

The directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night, “The Watchers is like many first features, in that it falls apart at the finish line. Still, Shyamalan shows enough talent behind the camera, and enough ability to conjure a chilling energy, that the underrated 2024 film is worth a watch. Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré and Oliver Finnegan star as four strangers who get lost in the woods of West Ireland and end up trapped in a bunker known as “The Coop,” their only protection from a strange race of magical beings known as “The Watchers” that haunt the forest. The reveals at the end are a bit groanworthy, but Shyamalan makes a film that will disturb anyone who has ever had a fear of being watched. 

“A Quiet Place Part II” (2020)

The sequel to John Krasinski’s hit “A Quiet Place,” “Part II” is more action-based and less tension-filled than the effective haunted house alien invasion original. Still, it can be plenty scary when it wants to be. With Krasinski’s father from the original dead, Emily Blunt takes the lead as the matriarch of the family that survived the attack from aliens that see with their hearing as she shepherds her children across the apocalyptic landscape. Some great setpieces, and a genuinely unpredictable turn from a game Cillian Murphy, makes the journey an edge-of-your-seat watch. —WC

“Scream” (2022)

The “Scream” franchise has always been more fun than it’s been scary, gleefully lampshading and riffing on the conventions of its chosen slasher genre even as it follows the old tropes to the letter. But the best entries in the venerable series from Wes Craven find a way to meld the meta-narratives with some genuine terror courtesy of the ever-shifting roster of Ghostfaces that plague and stalk the heroes. A soft reboot (that of course comments on its status as a soft reboot), 2022’s “Scream” isn’t quite as brilliant as the original Craven movies. Still, it’s a solid continuation of the legacy all the same, as directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
and Tyler Gillett introduce a new group of teens and young adults struggling to survive against a new generation of Ghostfaces. Solid scares and an intelligent script that riffs on modern legacyquel movie-making (you better believe that the opener that emulates the iconic Drew Barrymore scene from the original has a trick up its sleeve) ensures the film has plenty of fresh surprises and tension to mine. —WC

“Annabelle” (2014)

Chucky is one of the most beloved slasher villains of all time, but past his “Child’s Play” debut, Don Mancini’s murderous dolly has rarely actually been scary. “Annabelle,” the first spinoff in Atomic Monster’s sturdy “Conjuring” franchise, plays a bit like a gender-reversed Chucky, and handily out-terrors its obvious inspiration. The prequel follows Mia (the aptly named Annabelle Wallis), a pregnant wife who receives a beautiful porcelain doll from her husband. But when devil worshippers attack their home, the doll becomes the conduit of an evil spirit. “Annabelle'”isn’t a perfect horror film, with a very formulaic screenplay and sometimes cheap production value, but it succeeds at building a tense, gothic atmosphere, and its scares are among the best of the “Conjuring”-verse. —WC 

“The Perfection” (2019)

After getting famous for playing Type A perfectionist Marnie in “Girls,” Allison Williams started bringing that same tense, controlling energy to the horror genre, in breakout hits like “Get Out” and “M3gan.” In between the two films that earned her an unexpected scream queen reputation, she starred in “The Perfection,” one of the weirdest horror movies Netflix has ever released. Richard Shepard’s 2018 film follows Williams’ Charlotte, a talented former cellist who reconnects with her mentor Anton (Steven Weber) and romances his new student Lizzie (Logan Browning). It quickly becomes obvious that Charlotte is hiding secrets, but the film cleverly uses Williams’ reputation from past roles as a front to hide much darker twists from plain view. To say more would spoil, but the film goes to truly gruesome and unpredictable places. —WC

‘The Perfection’ Is a Gayer, Gorier, Goofier ‘TÁR’ — and Fringe Netflix at Its Finest

“The Platform” (2019)

“Cube” meets “The Menu” in this chilling contained horror movie about inmates fighting over gourmet food in a massive vertical prison. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s twisted allegory for the dangers of human greed and individualism boasts one of the most unique horror concepts we’ve seen in years, and finds a way to make its dystopian morality play believable with stunning production design. Come for the creepy premise, stay for some of the most unique sets you’ll find on Netflix. —CZ

“Apostle” (2018)

Gareth Evans proved he can direct action as well as just about anyone with “The Raid: Redemption,” but with “Apostle,” he showed audiences that horror is firmly within his wheelhouse as well. This stellar folk horror effort tells the story of a man (Dan Stevens), who infiltrates a religious cult on a remote island in an attempt to extract his sister from it, but what he finds is more horrifying than anything he could possibly imagine. —CZ

“Blood Red Sky” (2021)

One of the more fun Netflix original horror movies in recent memory, Peter Thorwarth’s “Blood Red Sky” gets more mileage out of its “vampires on a plane” story than it had any right to. While the German hijacking thriller may never get as gory as its wild logline suggests, it makes up for it with enough psychological drama to make for a highly entertaining viewing. While the idea sounds like pure camp, it takes itself more seriously than one might think and delivers some real scares in the process. —CZ

“Veronica” (2017)

“[REC]” filmmaker Paco Plaza caused a stir in 2017 when his horror movie ”
“Veronica” became a viral sensation on Netflix. The film is a fictional account of an alleged true story which occurred in Madrid in 1991, where a young woman died suddenly a few months after using her Ouija board. In Plaza’s film, a teenage girl tries to make contact with her dead dad using an Ouija board during a solar eclipse. The girl’s friends join her, but soon all three realize that their plan to reach the dead has had horrific consequences. Social media erupted in 2017 when the film hit streaming, with many subcribers saying they had to turn off the movie midway through its runtime because it was just too terrifying. —ZS

“Cargo” (2019)

Martin Freeman must protect his daughter from a zombie outbreak in “Cargo,” a Netflix horror offering that also tackles environmentalism and colonialism. Taking a page from “A Quiet Place,” which also explored parenting under unique apocalyptic circumstances, “Cargo” stands out from the pack by asking viewers to imagine what they might do if they knew their life was doomed but they could still offer their child hope. As the world continues to become a dark and unrecognizable place, that seed of hope just might be the key to overcoming insurmountable odds, whether it’s a zombie infestation or the chance to right the wrongs of the past in the hopes of a better future. —ZS

“1922” (2017)

Thomas Jane gives his best performance in ages in this poetic take on the Stephen King novella of the same name. In “1922,” a guy kills his wife and feels guilty about it. That’s the gist of its premise, and while nothing groundbreaking, the story mines a degree of profundity out of the traditional supernatural thriller tropes at its core. As directed by Zak Hilditch (whose 2013 debut “These Final Hours” was an expressionistic apocalyptic tale), “1922” has the merits of a solid “Tales From the Crypt” or “Masters of Horror” episode, with a straightforward story that folds the delicate visual language of a rural Terrence Malick drama into the mold of existential horror. The result suggests what might happen if Malick took at stab at “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with a mentally disturbed male protagonist straight out of King’s ‘The Shining.’ So while not the most original or surprising King story, it hits a lot of the right notes. —ZS

“His House” (2020)

This tender but terrifying Netflix movie tells the story of two Sudanese asylum-seekers who arrive in Britain with their demons in tow. One of the best debut films of 2020, Remi Weekes’ shrewd, tender, and often terrifying “His House” begins with a clever premise — the immigrant experience as a horror movie — and expands on that idea in knowing and unexpected ways. Whereas a lesser film might have condescended to these characters and mined easy scares from the indignities of the assimilation process, Weekes’ dingy chiller implicitly recognizes that life would be difficult for a grieving Black couple who show up in England with nothing but each other and a few trinkets to their names, and it never stops using its genre as a torch to illuminate the specific forms those shadowed difficulties might take. —ZS

“The Ritual” (2018)

Horror favorites like Guillermo del Toro and Mike Flanagan took to social media in 2018 to champion David Bruckner’s lost-in-the-woods chiller “The Ritual.” The film stars Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, and Sam Troughton as four friends who get together to honor the memory of one of their late pals by setting out on a hiking trip through Sarek National Park in northern Sweden. The forest, however, is hiding some dark secrets, and it doesn’t take long for the group to be put in jeopardy after they discovery something terrifying is lurking about. Del Toro “highly recommended” the movie to his followers and called it “amazing and scary.” Flanagan, meanwhile, said the film was “seriously great” and “dripping with tension.” —ZS

“Creep” (2014)

Just when you thought the found footage horror genre had hit its limit, Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass dropped “Creep” to get fans excited about the subgenre all over again. Brice plays a down-on-his-luck filmmaker who answers an online ad to film the eccentric Josef (Duplass) for an entire day. Filming around Josef’s family cabin in Northern California, the director soon realizes that not everything is as it seems. The first part of “Creep” has an oddly hypnotic quality, with Duplass starring in what feels like a performance art piece. As the day goes on, the dynamic between the two characters gradually mutates and becomes more imbalanced until Josef makes a startling revelation late at night and things become unrelentingly creepy. The revelation forces the director to flee the cabin, and that’s when “Creep” goes from hypnotic chiller to scary good horror movie. —ZS

“Under the Shadow” (2016)

Jump scares and a frantic parent shielding her child from ominous supernatural forces: These tropes are hardly new to the horror genre, but they receive a fresh spin in “Under the Shadow,” the feature-length debut of Iranian director Babak Anvari. The Tehran-set story takes place in 1988, as Iraqi bombs rain down at the height of the two countries’ war, an enticing historical backdrop for things that go bump in the night. On the face of it, the setting of “Under the Shadow” may call to mind 2014’s black-and-white Iranian vampire tale “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” but the similarities stop with the nationality and demonic presence. Instead, “Under the Shadow” bears a closer similarity to “The Babadook,” which also focused on a mother protecting her kid from an an eerie, largely unseen figure who may or may not be a metaphor for psychological duress. —ZS

“Cam” (2018)

“Handmaid’s Tale” star Madeline Brewer and “The Love Witch” breakout Samantha Robinson lead this eerie mind-fuck about our online personas. Brewer plays Alice, an ambitious camgirl who wakes up one day to discover she’s been replaced on her show with an exact replica of herself. This early twist sends the movie even deeper into Lynchian territory, but “Cam” would have been plenty effective without it. Director Daniel Goldhaber, resisting the urge to confine the entire film to a computer screen (à la “Unfriended”) creates a thoroughly credible live-stream community. Lola’s web chamber is slathered in a neon pink light that turns everything it touches into the stuff of pure creepiness. “Cam” is able to reflect the strange house of mirrors that we’re all lost in whenever we log on, and it’s able to viscerally convey the panic of trying to find a way out. The ultimate solution that Alice devises is too simple to be dramatically satisfying, but it’s believable enough to scare you off social media… if only for a couple of minutes. —ZS

“Gerald’s Game” (2017)

Mike Flanagan directs this compelling, faithful Netflix treatment of Stephen King’s book and gets help from his committed actors Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood. “Gerald’s Game” centers on a woman chained to a bed after a kinky sex game gone wrong who is forced to wander the dark contours of her own mind. How do you make a movie out of that? Flanagan figured it out. It takes a specific kind of filmmaker to tackle the challenges of a single-set survival movie, whether it’s Danny Boyle in a canyon (“127 Hours”) or Rodrigo Cortés inside a coffin (“Buried”), but the closest cinematic comparison to “Gerald’s Game” is James Wan’s “Saw,” which also involves terrified people handcuffed against their will. Here, modern horror maestro Flanagan tackles the tricky proposition with a keen visual sense and plenty of disorienting twists. Just like King’s book, the film adaptation of “Gerald’s Game” is disturbing, grotesque, and absurd. —ZS

“Fear Street” (2021)

The kitschy genius of Leigh Janiak’s “Fear Street” trilogy, which the writer-director has adapted for Netflix from R.L. Stine’s young adult horror books of the same name, is that each of its three chapters offers its own full-tilt throwback at the same time as they all bleed together into a wholly modern story. That story — a frothy but fanged tale of cursed outsiders, cyclical violence, power-mad white men, and virtually every other evil that seems top of mind these days — is plenty of the moment in its subject matter, but even more so in its construction. At a time when the border that separates movies and television can seem like a relic from an outdated map, the “Fear Street” trilogy makes those divisions seem more irrelevant than ever. Here we have three feature-length titles, each of which belongs to a different tradition of horror cinema. —ZS

“I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” (2015)

Osgood Perkins broke out with his 2015 directorial debut “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and most recently earned strong reviews with “Longlegs,” but wedged in between those efforts is his sturdy Netflix original “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.” Ruth Wilson gives a commanding performance as a live-in nurse who comes to believe her elderly employer’s house is haunted. Perkins doesn’t waste a second in this 87-minute supernatural chiller that is further proof the writer-director is one of the most overlooked directors in the horror genre. —ZS

“Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: The Autopsy” (2022)

“The Autopsy” follows a simple-enough premise: A doctor is sent in to figure out what actually killed the victims of mining explosion. Without being bogged down by all the moving pieces of an hourlong plot, this becomes a showcase for the kind of precision you’d expect from a story told through precise incisions. Prior makes the most out of the tiniest details, be it Luke Robert’s menacing smile, the squelching sound of jostling organs, or the foot pedal controlling Dr. Winters’ (F. Murray Abraham) reel-to-reel recorder. And they’re all presented with the matter-of-fact confidence its protagonist has, even when facing his own death. Of all these stories, this is the one that perfectly harnesses that feeling of seeing something just slightly off, like looking into a stranger’s eyes and seeing them glow a little too brightly. It’s an episode built on tiny, controlled movements, setting the stage for a showdown for the fate of humanity that takes place in the cosmic battlefield of the mind. —SG

“Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Graveyard Rats” (2022)

Adapted from the 1936 debut work of author Henry Kuttner, the second in the “Cabinet of Curiosities” follows another man deep in debt. Having already made peace with betraying his grieving clients and stealing from their dead loved ones, an undertaker faces off with a pack of rodents he claims is stealing his stolen treasure straight off the corpses still underground. There’s a straightforward-enough message to Vincenzo Natali’s film and that’s “don’t mess with the dead.” Rather than picking apart the meaning in this perhaps no longer necessary cautionary tale (Are grave robbers working these days? Do people even get buried with jewels anymore?), the fun in this installment can be found by watching the writer-director and star David Hewlett surrender to the sinfully silly pitter-patter of rat-infested terror. From gross-out bouts of body horror (Rat! In! Mouth!) to a staggering underground environment reveal, “Graveyard Rats” takes the simple concept of its title to spooky extremes for an almost faultless one-off scare. —AF

“Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: The Viewing” (2022)

Most of “Cabinet of Curiosities” is following characters who have fatally bad ideas. One of the reasons that “The Viewing” works so well is that, for a decent chunk of its runtime, the characters invited to a private exhibition at the home of an eccentric gazillionaire believe they’re going to make it out of the experience with a rad story and nothing else to really worry about. Cosmatos and Stewart-Ahn whip up a central group of artists and scientists, gathered to take in a once-in-a-lifetime evening of ultra-rare booze, coke, and other…indulgences. Before things descend into chaos — when a room in a Cosmatos joint gets drenched in blood-red light, it’s only a matter of time — “The Viewing” is extremely careful about where and when to start dialing up the uneasiness. It’s not just the gory consequences or the way Peter Weller delivers the phrase “shit your mind” or what emerges from the Obelisk Room (or the greatest Michael McDonald smash cut in history). As with all great horror story transformations, it’s the sense that the world as it exists in this shiny, alternate version of September 1979 will never, ever be the same. —SG

Read IndieWire’s complete guide to “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.”