25 Best Horror Movies on Netflix (2024)

netflix Updated May 17, 2024

By the Cut

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Everett Collection

In a scary world, getting lost in some fake scares can actually be comforting for some people. If you’re one of those people, here’s a little treat. We’ve rounded up the 25 best horror movies Netflix has to offer. Below, everything from classic slashers to psychological freak-outs to the occasional horror-comedy (an elite pairing, we promise). Enjoy!

1.His House (2020)

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This ghost story centers on a young refugee couple who have arrived in the U.K. from South Sudan. They’re placed in a government-sponsored rental home in a state of disrepair that is horrifying enough on its own, as are the various manifestations of racism, classism, and xenophobia they face in their new home. They are both haunted by the terrors they faced on their journey from Sudan, particularly the loss of their daughter, and soon after settling in, the haunting of their home begins. It’s viscerally frightening, but it’s as thoughtful as it is disturbing. With excellent performances throughout, its surprise ending makes you rethink the whole movie, and its commentary on the ways trauma impacts our psyche feels endlessly relevant.

2. Malevolent (2018)

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Technically this is far from being one of the best horror movies on Netflix thanks to an extremely jarring tone shift halfway through the movie. It is, however, one of the strongest horror performances you’ll find on the streamer; it stars a pre-Midsommar Florence Pugh who really commits to her role as Angela, a reluctant scammer messing with the supernatural in ways she very much shouldn’t. It’s worth watching just to see her slay.

3. Things Heard & Seen (2021)

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The cast of this one is excellent: Amanda Seyfried and James Norton are Catherine and George Claire, a couple who relocate from 1980s Manhattan to a small town in upstate New York after George lands a teaching gig at a liberal-arts college. Not sure why he couldn’t simply commute, but all right. Anyway, they obviously move into a creepy farmhouse; the townspeople are super weird to them; freaky supernatural occurrences abound. What’s more interesting about the film is actually its depiction of a marriage falling apart, which eventually is tied into the spirits that are being heard and seen.

4.Under the Shadow (2016)

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This Iranian horror film, set in the ’80s against the Iran-Iraq War, got tons of critical acclaim and accomplishes something the horror genre can do very well: use the supernatural as a vehicle for social commentary. Narges Rashidi stars in Under the Shadow as a young woman attempting to deal with oppression both outside and inside her home; the latter being of the more demonic variety.

5.Cam (2018)

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6. Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

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This iconic horror movie is kind of the “It” girl of ’80s slasher films, and you can watch the original, all four sequels, and the 2010 remake on Netflix. In case you’re not familiar, A Nightmare on Elm Street follows a group of teens who have terrifying nightmares in which the ghost of a child murderer named Freddy Krueger appears — and has the ability to actually kill them in their sleep. Very scary stuff!

7. Thanksgiving (2023)

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This is a good old-fashioned slasher film made expressly for horror buffs. It’s the feature length manifestation of a fake trailer the director, Eli Roth, made for 2007’s Grindhouse. It’s fairly predictable and lacking in development of the character and plot varieties, but that’s all part of the fun. There are a million references and easter eggs to catch instead. And Addison Rae is in it!

8. Cargo (2018)

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Cargo is another, slightly different take on zombie movie genre. Martin Freeman is stranded with his baby in rural Australia after being infected during a zombie-creating pandemic. Before he succumbs, he has to find a way to keep her safe.

9.Gerald’s Game (2017)

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A rare case in which the movie is better than the book, this Stephen King adaptation manages to keep up the suspense and horror without much movement. The genuinely chilling premise is that Jessie (Carla Gugino) and her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) are spending a weekend at an isolated cabin to “reconnect.” He handcuffs her to the bed but dies of a heart attack soon after, collapsing on top of her and leaving her trapped and entirely alone. Gugino’s gripping performance makes this the furthest thing from a slog, and even the famously terrible ending of the novel is handled with as much grace as humanly possible.

10. #Alive (2020)

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And now, a horror movie for the girls who aren’t that into horror movies. If you have a low tolerance for gore and a high tolerance for pandemic content, this Korean film is for you. It centers on a young gamer, played by Yoo Ah-in, living in an apartment with his parents and spending much of his time with his PC. But he’s home alone when a deadly zombie virus hits, and decides to shut himself inside his apartment and attempt to survive. Unlike the typical zombie movie, this one really zeroes in on the effects that extreme isolation has on one’s psyche, with minimal zombie fighting and a lot of heart.

11. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

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If there is such a thing as a family-friendly horror movie, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is it. With a pleasantly nostalgic aesthetic and a Goonies-style crew of adventuring teens, this movie will bring you right back to the feeling of sitting around a campfire, getting unreasonably freaked out by some kid with a flashlight under their chin.

12. Creep (2014)

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An underappreciated but truly excellent (and mostly improvised) found-footage-style portrayal of how our fear of social discomfort can put us in dangerous situations. Mark Duplass stars as Josef, a certified weirdo whose penchant for making people uncomfortable is apparent almost the moment he greets Aaron (Patrick Brice), who has come to film him for the day. Josef tells Aaron that he has terminal brain cancer and wants to create a video diary for his unborn son. He slowly and methodically pushes at Aaron’s boundaries until you find yourself screaming at him to leave. Best of all, this movie is a clean 82 minutes long.

13. The Platform (2019)

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If you appreciate cutting social commentary along with your horror, watch this Spanish language film. It takes place in a prison where inmates are assigned two to a floor. Every day, a platform descends through a hole in the middle of a building. At the top, it’s covered in food — theoretically enough to feed everyone, but it never works out that way because those at the top take more than their fair share. With several clever twists and a grisly conclusion, it’s worth a watch.

14. Apostle (2018)

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This one is for the gore-heads and the period piece fans. Set in 1905, it’s about a man who goes undercover, secretly joining a cult that has kidnapped his sister in order to save her. The vision is specific and strong, even if it doesn’t always totally make sense, and the bodily fluids are plentiful.

15. Don’t Listen (2020)

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Your classic haunted house film. A couple who makes a living flipping houses moves into a new one with their son, Eric, and some very creepy things start happening. The performances are strong even when the script isn’t always, but it’s a deeply immersive addition to the genre that keeps the tension going throughout.

16. Fear (1996)

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This cautionary tale warns against relationships between teenage girls and adult men, which is ultimately the correct take, although the way it arrives at that conclusion is at times troublesome. However! It stars a 19-year-old Reese Witherspoon and a 23-year-old Mark Wahlberg and has become something of a cult classic thanks to their star power. It should be noted, though, that Witherspoon told Harper’s Bazaar in a 2023 profile that while filming it, she requested a stunt double for one of the sex scenes and was denied. It didn’t traumatize her, she said, but it did make her want to be “an agent for change and someone who maybe can be in a better leadership position to tell stories from a female perspective instead of from the male gaze.” So basically, we have this movie to thank for Big Little Lies. Herstory!

17. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

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In this extremely Gen-Z horror-comedy, a group of teens having a hurricane party in a mansion play a lighthearted game called, you guessed it, “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” When one of them ends up dead, the party quickly devolves into a Clue-style real life murder mystery, and like Clue, it’s also very funny, featuring excellent performances from Rachel Sennott, Chase Sui Wonders, Myha’la, and Pete Davidson at his most Pete Davidson.

18. The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

Starring Russell Crowe as the super down-to-earth and relatable exorcist to the pope, this is technically a horror movie but has more of an action movie vibe, in which Crowe is the gun-totin’ cowboy — but instead of totin’ a gun he’s totin’ a crucifix. Anyway … there are exorcisms aplenty and a fun but skillful performance from Crowe. What more could we ask from an exorcism movie?

19. X (2022)

This A24 slasher features a perfect cast — Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow — and it is both an homage to the genre and a more modern, thoughtful take on it that at least attempts to say something about the impact of beauty and aging in our society. It revolves around the cast and crew of a p*rnographic film shoot in rural Texas, where the elderly couple whose guesthouse they’re using for the shoot turns murderous.

20. The Babadook (2014)

Despite its silly-sounding title, this visceral Australian psychological horror film has everything: a creepy, possessed child; a mother who’s seeing things; an evil object that can’t be disposed of; a terrifying monster; a dead father. It somehow manages to include all of these elements while still feeling very real and dealing with problems we can all, in some way, connect to: the horrible vulnerabilities of childhood alongside the horrors and pitfalls of parenting.

21. The Babysitter (2017)

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This satire, brought to you by McG of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle fame, takes all the generic elements of a home-alone horror movie and exaggerates them for comedic effect, with varying degrees of success. The movie is grounded in its star performance from Samara Weaving, who plays the titular babysitter with gusto.

22. The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

This stunningly creepy film takes place mostly in a morgue, where a father-and-son duo played by Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch works to uncover the horrific tale of their Jane Doe — the dead body of a woman found at a crime scene full of bloodied and dismembered dead bodies. While the interior of Jane Doe’s body is ravaged with various forms of abuse and violence, the exterior is strangely unmarked. The process of solving the mystery is nearly as terrifying as the crime itself.

23. Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021)

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The first in Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy, based on the book series by R.L. Stine, is a nostalgic slasher that is a bit kinder to its characters than the classics it references. Still, it delivers on sudden, violent deaths. It centers on a group of teens living in the historically gory town of Shadyside, being brutally haunted — and hunted — by ghostlike killers.

24. The Rental (2020)

Dave Franco’s directorial debut builds tension in the first hour with a slow-burning setup: Two couples decide to celebrate a career win with a weekend in the woods, at an Airbnb-style rental. Their relationship issues and the creepy environment build up to a psychologically scarring denouement.

25. El Conde (2023)

This gorgeously filmed, darkly funny film reimagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte as a vampire who has wreaked violence and havoc for centuries, always managing to escape and reinvent himself to work with various global oppressors, until he has to fake his own death and go into hiding. The ultimate horror of the film is its message that evil never really dies, it evolves.

25 Best Horror Movies on Netflix (2024)

1.His House (2020)

2. Malevolent (2018)

3. Things Heard & Seen (2021)

4.Under the Shadow (2016)

5.Cam (2018)

6. Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

7. Thanksgiving (2023)

8. Cargo (2018)

9.Gerald’s Game (2017)

10. #Alive (2020)

11. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

12. Creep (2014)

13. The Platform (2019)

14. Apostle (2018)

15. Don’t Listen (2020)

16. Fear (1996)

17. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

18. The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

19. X (2022)

20. The Babadook (2014)

21. The Babysitter (2017)

22. The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

23. Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021)

24. The Rental (2020)

25. El Conde (2023)

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