9 great horror movies currently haunting Netflix

[Ghostface voice] Do you want scary movies? [Slightly less Ghostface voice] Do you, like 203 million different human beings on the planet Earth, have a Netflix account? Then, logically, you’ve in all probability discovered your self scrolling round, trying to discover the perfect horror movies on the service. Not like Jamie Kennedy in Scream, we’ve solutions.

However somewhat than wade by way of that ever-shifting glut of movies pouring out and in of the service each month making an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve acquired you coated with an inventory of our personal written and curated by Polygon’s personal resident horror aficionados. (And should you’re in search of an inventory of the perfect horror movies to observe throughout a number of streaming platforms, we’ve acquired you coated there too.)

We’ve slashed our manner by way of the horror choices on Netflix to seek out you a heap of movies price a night… alone… with the lights off… and certainly… nobody watching you… by way of the window… proper now…

Our newest replace added Thanksgiving as an editor’s choose.

Editor’s choose: Thanksgiving

First, a phrase of warning. When you’ve got problem with gore in movies, you might be higher off with nearly another film on this record. Go forward, there are many great ones so that you can select from right here… simply not this one.

Now, for the remainder of you freaks (I say that with love), you might be in for a deal with. Thanksgiving is unofficially the perfect Scream film since Scream 4, Wes Craven’s remaining entry within the franchise. It’s a pleasant slasher with a firmly tongue-in-cheek tone and a few extraordinarily gnarly holiday-themed kills.

The film has the type of twisted kills you’d need from a holiday-themed slasher, and whereas the dialogue is often uneven, I used to be significantly impressed by the character work. Thanksgiving has the proper mixture of characters you actually need to see get killed and characters you need to survive. That’s a tough steadiness to strike within the style, however an important one. —Pete Volk

Annihilation

Picture: Common Photos

Think about a world marked by the absence of humanity. Or, somewhat, a world the place humanity and nature have been entwined in a horrific symbiosis by way of the intervention of an alien meteor that crashes to Earth.

Primarily based on Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel, Annihilation follows the story of Lena (Natalie Portman), a mobile biologist whose husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), has been lacking for over a 12 months after being deployed on a top-secret mission. When Kane mysteriously returns dwelling one night, now with a lethal virus, Lena learns he was despatched on an expedition into the Shimmer — an anomalous zone that has been regularly rising out of Florida following the aforementioned meteor strike. Determined for solutions and a doable remedy to her husband’s ailment, she agrees to embark on a reconnaissance mission into the Shimmer, solely to be confronted by wonders and horrors past her wildest creativeness.

Surreal and unsettling, Annihilation is a gorgeous horror film that explores the character of grief and the human propensity for destroying our personal surroundings. With a beautiful ethereal rating by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow of Portishead fame, to not point out an astounding cameo efficiency by frequent Alex Garland collaborator Sonoya Mizuno within the movie’s remaining act, Annihilation is a bracing and memorable odyssey into a deadly posthuman future. —Toussaint Egan

Apostle

Picture: Netflix

Followers of the basic 1973 horror film The Wicker Man (allow us to not converse of the 2006 Nicolas Cage model and its beeeeeees) needs to be warned: The Raid director Gareth Evans’ 2018 film Apostle intentionally begins in the very same place, after which takes the identical state of affairs to a lot bloodier and extra graphic ends. Set in 1905, it opens with addled addict Thomas (Legion and The Visitor star Dan Stevens) getting a letter that claims his sister is being held prisoner by a cult on a distant island. So he fakes his manner into what seems to be like a quaint spiritual group, however is definitely the type of place the place individuals routinely depart bowls of their very own blood in entrance of their doorways at evening and one thing is audibly crawling round underneath the floorboards. Tense, gory, and in locations nearly ludicrously over-the-top, Apostle has lots to say concerning the nature of non secular fanaticism, each for the obedient flocks doing no matter their chief says God desires, and for the manipulators that weaponize whoever they’ll discover who’s keen to be led. However this isn’t simply Wicker Man redux — it’s a inventive, relentless spin on the identical concept, resulting in its personal distinctive horrors. —Tasha Robinson

Cam

Picture: Netflix

Madeline Brewer stars in Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam as Alice, an bold camgirl making an attempt desperately to achieve the coveted primary spot of the location she streams for. After a very intense present, she wakes to seek out that her account has been taken over by a mysterious doppelganger, one who will seemingly go to any and all lengths to realize what Alice herself couldn’t. As Alice fights to regain management of her present and expose the identification of her impersonator, she’ll must cope with the implications of her offline and on-line identities blurring into one. Cam is a chilling psychological horror that leaves the viewers questioning at each flip how, if in any respect, its heroine will handle to beat and survive the horrors that assail her life. —TE

Creep & Creep 2

Picture: The Orchard

Go away it to indie darling Mark Duplass and his common collaborator Patrick Brice (The In a single day) to maintain the found-footage horror film kickin’ 15 years after The Blair Witch Challenge. In Creep, Josef (Duplass) recruits Aaron (Brice), a videographer, off Craigslist with the intention of filming a goodbye letter to his unborn son. Josef is dying… no less than, that’s how he convinces his new buddy Aaron to spend the evening within the woods consuming whiskey with him. The batshit revelations are finest left unsaid, and simply how Creep 2 picks up the story, with Ladies actress Desiree Akhavan entrance and middle as a hopeful YouTube star, is much more of a hoot. Creep is the deranged, internet-friendly horror franchise we deserve. —Matt Patches

Crimson Peak

Picture: Common Photos

“Ghosts are real. This much I know.”

So says Mia Wasikowska within the opening scene of Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 Gothic horror romance concerning the spirits of the lifeless and the ties that bind them. Wasikowska stars as Edith Cushing, an aspiring author à la Mary Shelley and the daughter of a rich businessman, who’s haunted by a premonition of her late mom’s ghost to watch out for a spot generally known as Crimson Peak. Edith meets and falls in love with Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a baronet searching for buyers to revive his household’s clay mines.

After her father is brutally murdered, Edith weds Thomas and retreats to his ancestral mansion within the eponymous clay hills of northern England. Upon arriving, nonetheless, she realizes solely too late that her mom’s warnings have been true, and {that a} thriller on the coronary heart of the house threatens to take her personal life along with her father’s. With an exquisitely designed set, stunning costumes, ghoulish sensible results, and a memorable rating, Crimson Peak is a terrific ode to del Toro’s love of Gothic literature and a very good ghost story as well. —TE

His Home

Picture: Aidan Monaghan/Netflix

His Home turns the trials of immigration right into a shock-filled ghost story. Gangs of London’s Sope Dirisu and Lovecraft Nation’s Wunmi Mosaku play a Sudanese couple searching for asylum in Britain, the place they encounter supportive however not precisely pleasant social employees (together with Home of the Dragon star Matt Smith) who can’t settle for that the house they’ve been given is haunted. Caught between the ghosts at dwelling and an rigid system able to ship them again to a war-torn nation, the couple wrestle with their previous and their extremely questionable future. —TR

The Ritual

Picture: Vlad Cioplea/Netflix

Even in our post-Cabin within the Woods world, there are nonetheless alternatives for intelligent filmmakers to spook us with creepy-shack-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-why-the-hell-would-you-go-in-there-what-was-that-in-the-shadows-no-no-no-no-no tales. The Ritual follows 4 pals who trek alongside northern Sweden’s Kungsleden path as a tribute to a fifth good friend, who was lately murdered in a comfort retailer. The demise particularly weighs on Luke (Prometheus’ Rafe Spall), whose drunken belligerence put his buddy in hurt’s manner within the first place. Luke can also be the member of the group who realizes that, after discovering a wood deer altar in an deserted home alongside their unadvised detour, the group is being haunted by greater than recollections. Like a novel mixture of Euro-horror and The Hills Have Eyes, The Ritual twists a well-recognized journey with creature-feature instincts to maintain the style recent. —MP

Beneath the Shadow

Picture: Vertical Leisure

Throughout a string of Iraqi airstrikes in late-Eighties Tehran, the Iranian authorities bars medical pupil and political activist Shideh (Narges Rashidi) from persevering with her research. She retreats to her household’s residence, and regardless of her husband’s needs, stays together with her younger daughter within the war-torn capital — that is her dwelling, and he or she’s not leaving. However when a missile blasts immediately by way of her constructing, the traditional life Shideh and her daughter knew turns into marked by an invisible, nefarious presence. Is it a djinn? Very like in The Babadook, first-time director Babak Anvari permits the query of the supernatural to orbit the motion of Beneath the Shadow as he captures the erosion of his plain primary set and Shideh’s very existence. —MP