31 Best Horror Movies to Stream This Halloween

House on Haunted Hill

Available on: Amazon Prime

What would you do for $10,000? How about surviving a night in a mansion haunted by murder victims and owned by a psychotic millionaire? Seems like a party trick until people actually start dying.

Vincent Price is the master and mastermind of a house that suddenly makes everyone homicidal—but the real pièce de résistance is what dances out of a vat of flesh-eating acid.

Some vintage horror never dies, and this 1959 classic is immortal.

Hush

Available on: Netflix

In his follow-up to the cult classic Oculus, Mike Flanagan makes one of the cleverer horror movies on this list. Hush is a thrilling game of cat-and-mouse with the typical nightmare of a home invasion occurring, yet it also turns conventions of that familiar terror on its head. For instance, the savvy angle about this movie is Kate Siegel (who co-wrote the movie with Flanagan) plays Maddie, a deaf and mute woman living in the woods alone. Like Audrey Hepburn’s blind woman from the progenitor of home invasion stories, Wait Until Dark (1967), Maddie is completely isolated when she is marked for death by a menacing monster in human flesh.

Further, like the masked villains of so many more generic home invasion movies (I’m looking square at you, Strangers), John Gallagher Jr.’s “Man” wears a mask as he sneaks into her house. However, the functions of this story are laid bare since we actually keep an eye on what the “Man” is doing at all times, and how he is getting or not getting into the house in any given scene. He is not aided by filmmakers who’ve given him faux-supernatural and omnipotent abilities like other versions of these stories, and he’s not an “Other;” he is a man who does take his mask off, and his lust for murder is not so much fetishized as shown for the repulsive behavior that it is. And still, Maddie proves to be both resourceful and painfully ill-equipped to take him on in this tense battle of wills.

All of this inversion and shrewdness makes Hush one of several excellent horror movies to come out of 2016.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Available on: Amazon Prime, Hulu

Invasion of the Body Snatchers features a concept so primal and terrifying it’s no surprise the movie has been made no fewer than three times. The 1978 version is the one on Hulu and probably the best. This Body Snatchers takes place in San Francisco and deals with a gelatinous pod of aliens that falls to Earth. Slowly but surely the aliens literally take the place of actual human beings across the city and replace them with copies.

Health inspector Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) is one of the few humans to realize the truth and fight and fight back. Many other movies have tried to capture the feelings of isolation and terror that Invasion of the Body Snatchers instills but very few of them are able to capture the terrifying totality of an alien takeover.

The Invitation

Available on: Netflix

Seeing your ex is always uncomfortable, but imagine if your ex-wife invited you to a dinner party with her new husband? That is just about the least creepy thing in this new, taut thriller nestled in the Hollywood Hills. Indeed, in The Invitation Logan Marshall-Green’s Will is invited by his estranged wife (Tammy Blanchard) for dinner with her new hubby David (Michael Huisman of Game of Thrones ). David apparently wanted to extend the bread-breaking offer personally since he has something he wants to invite both Will and all his other guests into joining. And it isn’t a game of Scrabble…

Intense, strange, and not what you expect, this is one of the more inventive thrillers of 2016.

It Follows

Available on: Netflix

Independent horror has been enjoying a wonderful renaissance over the last three years, and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows has been right at the forefront of this, hypnotically swaying away in its perverse delirium. Here is a movie that most forcefully makes the connection between death and sex, sin and punishment, which has haunted the genre for decades. And by setting its deconstructionist fairytale in a dreamlike amalgamation of the 1980s and the 21st century, it proves that Reagan era suburbia is our generation’s windswept European castles.

But above all else, it’s just an unnerving viewing experience that makes the relentless sensation of dread and death as inescapable for youth as the ticking crocodile is for a middle-aged Captain Hook. Maika Monroe’s Jay is a young woman who finds peace in illicit rendezvouses, but is then cruelly punished when her new boyfriend spreads a kind of supernatural STD: it’s a curse where once you have it, a ghost will slowly but eternally chase you until it can rape you to death… lest you pass the curse to someone else, who in turn must spread it farther afield. Cynical feminism or regressive exploitation? It’s an ongoing argument, but either way this movie is scary.

Jaws

Available on: Netflix

Oh sure, summer might be over but there is never a bad time to watch Jaws. As one of the all-time great achievements in cinema, this Steven Spielberg classic successfully welded the auteur-fueled creativity of 1970s Hollywood with the burgeoning blockbuster commerce that would killed it. The movie also remains scary as hell.

By using John Williams’ menacing piano piece, the film returns viewers to a primal state of fear when our ancestors were not on the apex of the food chain. The happy accident of a broken electronic shark also means that we barely see the beastie, which makes his devastation all the more terrifying over 40 years later.

Jug Face

Available on: Amazon Prime

When a horror movie’s plot description mentions “backwoods” it’s almost a guarantee that you’re going to have a good time. Movies that are able to capture the all-encompassing dread of the middle of nowhere (with minimal to no condescension for rural audiences of course) are almost always worth your time. Thankfully, Jug Face is one of those movies. 

Jug Face concerns a backwoods community that worships an ancient pit. A leader of the community Dawai creates jugs out of clay with visages on them that match the face of a community member. That member then must be sacrificed to the pit. When the next jug resembles young Ada, she opts to get out of dodge.

Lights Out

Available on: HBO

Lights Out is a film from Swedish director David F. Sandberg adapted from his own 2013 short film of the same name. Lights Out is brilliant in its simple concept. It’s similar to the classic Doctor Who episode “Blink” in which monsters advance towards you when you’re not looking at them – only in Lights Out‘s case, a demonic-looking woman advances towards you when the lights are out. Horror that is able to corrupt objects or concepts that we encounter in day to day life and make them terrifying are almost always great. Lights Out does exactly that and somehow also wraps it in an extended metaphor for depression.

The Monster

Available on: Amazon Prime

It’s no secret that horror can work on a small scale with little other than the viewer’s imagination to generate fear. The Monster is about as small scale, yet still effective, as they come. The film features just two characters almost exclusively, a mother and a daughter, trapped in a car as a monster from the woods terrorizes them.

Night of the Living Dead

Available on: Amazon Prime

George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie classic The Night of the Living Deadmessed up the minds of late ’60s moviegoers as much as it messed with every horror movie that followed. Shot on gritty black and white stock, the film captures the desperate urgency of a documentary shot at the end of the world. It is a tale of survival, an allegory for the Vietnam War and racism and suspenseful as hell freezing over.

Night of the Living Dead set a new standard for gore, even though you could tell some of the bones the zombies were munching came from a local butcher shop. But what grabs at you are the unexpected shocks. Long before The Walking Dead, Romero caught the terror that could erupt from any character, at any time.

They’re coming to get you. There’s one of them now!

Nosferatu

Available on: Amazon Prime

Nothing beats a classic, and that’s exactly what Nosferatu is. As the unofficial 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this German Expressionist masterpiece was almost lost to the ages when the filmmakers lost a copyright lawsuit with Stoker’s widow (who had a point). As a result, most copies were destroyed…but a precious few survived

This definitive horror movie from F.W. Murnau might be a silent picture, but it is a haunting one where vampirism is used as a metaphor for plague and the Black Death sweeping across Europe. When Count Orlock comes to Berlin, he brings rivers of rats with him and the most repellent visage ever presented by a cinematic bloodsucker. The sexy vampires would come later, starting with 1931’s more polished vision of Count Dracula as legendarily played by Bela Lugosi, but Max Schreck is buried under globs of makeup in Nosferatu making him resemble an emaciated cadaver. Murnau plays with shadow and light to create an intoxicating environment of fever dream repressions. But he also creates the most haunting cinematic image of a vampire yet put on screen.

Check it out.

Open Water

Available on: Hulu

We live in a terrifying world. Sometimes it’s nice for horror movies to acknowledge that rather than resorting to the supernatural or strange for thrills. Open Water is loosely based on the real life story of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who were accidentally left behind on a scuba expedition.

In Open Water, a couple faces that same fate, only this time the movie adds sharks: because why not? Open Water is not so dissimilar to Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. The ocean is so vast and sparse that it might as well be the blackness of space. It’s terrifying.

Raw

Available on: Netflix

Raw is bloody and violent and weird and French and brilliant. It’s a French-Belgian movie from director Julia Ducournau about one young vegetarian woman and her sudden onset of…well, cannibalism. Justine attends a veterinarian school to continue her family’s tradition of animal care and vegitarianism. One day she is forced to participate in a hazing ritual in which she is forced to eat raw rabbit kidney. That triggers something deep within her that leads her on an all-consuming pursuit of human flesh. Raw is nowhere near as corny as that description makes it sound. It’s actually quite artful and interesting, being French and all. It’s also a deceptively complete feminist fairy tale. 

Scream

Available on: Hulu

Mixing horror and comedy is not necessarily an original notion, but few have done it better than this hilariously meta-slasher. The definitive horror flick of the 1990s, this kick-off to the Scream series proved that even that era’s scary movies had to be happily self-aware. But none were as funny—or menacing—as this first 1996 installment from Wes Craven. Featuring the genre’s first completely self-sufficient and heroic survivor girl (Neve Campbell), Scream also boasts a slew of other firsts, including the film nerd (Jamie Kennedy) who’s seen this all before at the multiplex and video store. Not that it will necessarily help him to look behind the couch at the most crucial moments.

The Silence of the Lambs

Available on: Hulu

Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter has roughly 11 minutes of screentime in The Silence of the Lambs. Still, it’s enough to create one of the most terrifying and enduring performances of a criminal mastermind of all time. Don’t forget, however, that’s there is a whole movie that happens around those 11 minutes. The Silence of the Lambs is the archetype for every true crime horror movie that came after it. The damaged, yet dedicated detective, the terrifyingly insane serial killer and the “we’re not so differnt, you and I” evil mentor – it’s all here. And it’s all fantastic.

The Sixth Sense

Available on: Netflix

The Sixth Sense is much more than a twist ending. The nearly 20-year-old movie has been meme’d to within an inch of its life even back before we had a term for internet memes. “I see dead people,” the twist ending, etc. On some level that’s a shame because M. Night Shyamalan’s first big budget film effort remains a surprisingly excellent horror movie to this day.

Haley Joel Osment stars as the young Cole Sears, a boy plagued by visions of dead people wandering around his day-to-day life. Bruce Willis steps in as therapist Malcolm Crowe to help Cole. Seeing dead people in the condition in which they died every day is a pretty horrifying concept. And no amount of twist ending surprises can rob the images of the dead that populate The Sixth Sense of some power. This is a movie that is certainly overdo for a rewatch. 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Available on: Amazon Prime

You’ve probably seen this one already, but this founding father of the slasher genre is a bit of a fairy tale when glimpsed at the right light. Some dumb kids wander into the wilderness, far away from the safety of civilization, on a trip to their grandparents’ home. But instead of reaching their destination, they wind up on the dinner table for the “Other,” who in this case is a redneck family of cannibals with a crossdressing serial killer who’s weapon of choice has an electric motor that makes a sweet hum as its blades tear into your flesh.

When viewed like that, it might be worth seeing all over again, eh?

Under the Shadow

Available on: Netflix

This recent 2016 effort could not possibly be more timely as it sympathizes, and terrorizes, an Iranian single mother and child in 1980s Tehran. Like a draconian travel ban, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) and her son Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) are malevolently targeted by a force of supreme evil. This occurs after Dorsa’s father, a doctor, is called away to serve the Iranian army in post-revolution and war-torn Iran. In his absence evil seeps in… as does a quality horror movie with heightened emotional weight.

V/H/S

Available on: Hulu

Anthologies seem to be the way of the future for television. Thankfully, movies are starting to understand the appeal as well. V/H/S is a wonderfully-executed horror anthology film with an interesting setup. The setup is that four criminals are tasked with breaking into a home to steal a VHS tape. So the gang goes about doing so and in the process they discover more than just one tape. The contents on those tapes represent the short horror films we the audience get to watch. V/H/S is interesting, novel and most importantly: scary.

The Witch

Available on: Amazon Prime

The most recent movie on our list is also one of the most disturbing. For if you let The Witch lure you into its cruel and malevolent headspace, you will immediately realize that you are watching something genuinely depraved and entirely forbidden due to its 17th century unholiness. After all, it didn’t get a thumb’s up from Satanists because it was a generic thriller stuffed with jump scares!

Be warned this is an art house chiller that drops you in the middle of early-1600s New England for the kind of witching campfire tale that would give Puritans nightmares. And it is there that Robert Eggers’ first film uses actual historic accounts from the local Calvinists about their real superstitions to give them life and heinous flesh (and an authentic Elizabethan accent). There is a witch in the woods in this story, to appreciate it, that must be clear. And her evil reach toward brief salvation or eternal damnation—depending on how you look at it—makes this a movie that will stick with you for days after the lights go up. It’s also made Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the young Thomasin, an instant star within the genre.

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