The best horror movies on Netflix right now

Director: Tobe Hooper

Cast: Marilyn Burns, Paul A Partain, Gunnar Hansen

Chances are, if you saw Tobe Hooper’s horror milestone at a young age, you remember it being much more gory and explicitly violent than it actually is. It’s understandable: after all, ‘chainsaw massacre’ is right there in the title. Admittedly, it’s an odd thing to describe a movie about a disturbed mama’s boy (inspired, like Psycho, by serial killer Ed Gein) who wears a mask made out of a woman’s skin as ‘restrained’, but revisiting the film today, it’s truly a masterclass of suggestion over graphic shock. 

Director: Yeon Sang-ho

Cast: Gong Yoo, Jung Yu-mi, Ma Dong-seok

It’s zombies – on a train! Maybe that sounds almost too simple, but when it comes to movies about the undead, it’s always best not to overthink things. Besides, Korean writer-director Yeon Sang-ho brings the goods, meaning high-energy direction and a whole lot of splatter, to go along with a charismatic cast, led by Squid Game’s Gong Yoo. It’s earned justified comparisons to 28 Days Later, and not just because its braineaters are of the fleet-footed variety. 

Director: Remi Weekes

Cast: Wunmi Mosaku, Sope Dirisu, Matt Smith

Haunted house tales usually take place in the ‘burbs, the sticks or ancient European castles. By setting his in a dilapidated British housing project, first-timer Remi Weekes delivers a potent allegory for the horrors of the refugee experience. A pair of asylum-seekers from war-ravaged Sudan settle into a run-down tenement outside London, where they face racism, bureaucracy and something possibly even more sinister.  

Director: Parker Finn

Cast: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T Usher, Kal Penn

‘What if there was a curse that caused everybody to look like an Aphex Twin music video?’ seems to be the elevator pitch for this mainstream horror hit. If that sounds a bit one-note, well, it’s a pretty creepy note. Borrowing liberally from the likes of The Ring and It Follows, it features many familiar frights – and, like, a million jump scares – but the visuals, including the shocking climax, are nightmare fuel.

Director: Babk Anvari

Cast: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi, Bobby Nadei

Iran’s answer to The Babadook, this chilling, provocative horror film brings the terrors of war home – quite literally. A Tehran woman and her daughter find themselves trapped inside with something malevolent during the height of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. As the missiles rain down, it’s hard to know if it’s more dangerous to be inside or out. It’s directed by Iranian-born, British-based writer-director Babak Anvari, who has a canny knack both for social commentary (Iran’s repressive, sexist regime is a second villain here) and scaring you shitless. 

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw

A man-eating shark stalks the waters of a New England beach town on its biggest tourist weekend of the year. C’mon, it’s friggin’ Jaws, dude. Do we really need to write an essay here?

Director: Osgood Perkins

Cast: Ruth Wilson, Paula Prentiss

Oz Perkins broke through as a director with 2024’s Longlegs, but his mastery of slow-burning dread was evident years earlier in this gothic ghost story. A nurse (Ruth Wilson) is hired to care for a dementia-addled horror author (Paula Prentiss, in her first major role in three decades), and comes to believe her most famous novel may not be a work of fiction. Even if the narrative is a bit lacking, Perkins’ detailed mood-setting will still leave your spine tingling.

Director: Josh Ruben

Cast: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Devon Sawa

A serial killer targeting young couples on Valentine’s Day pops up in Seattle, where two newly partnered coworkers hatch a plot to stop the culprit for good. Director Josh Ruben (Werewolves Within) mixes and matches slasher and romcom tropes to surprisingly satisfying effect – and the killer’s heart-eyes mask is pretty cool-looking, too.

Director: Greg Jardin

Cast: Brittany O'Grady, James Morosini, Gavin Leatherwood

In this psychological horror comedy, a pre-wedding party devolves into chaos after a guest shows up with a device that allows users to switch consciousnesses. (Always that one friend with the damn Freaky Friday machine, right?) It marks a high-concept, high-energy and high-style debut from director Greg Jardin.

Director: Mike Flanagan

Cast:  Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood

In this Stephen King adaptation, a struggling couple look to reignite the flames of their flagging marriage with some kinky sex at an isolated lake house. Then he dies of a sudden heart attack while she’s handcuffed to the bed. It’s an anxiety-inducing scenario, and Carla Gugino’s impressive performance keeps you glued to the screen even as she spends much of the runtime lying on her back.

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega

Somehow, it took 36 years to get a sequel to Tim Burton’s goth-com classic, which seems like it should’ve been the easiest franchise play ever. Alas, the follow-up is a mild letdown, even with most of the original cast returning and Jenna Ortega perfectly cast as Winona Ryder’s sullen teen daughter. Still, not all is lost: it’s got some icky-cool practical effects and a game-as-ever Michael Keaton hamming it up as the titular supernatural huckster.

Director: Paco Plaza

Cast: Sandra Escacena, Claudia Placer, Bruna González

When this Spanish-language horror first landed on Netflix, people took to Twitter to admit that they found it so frightening that they had to turn it off. From director Paco Plaza, who also helmed the equally horrifying [Rec], the story is apparently based on a true story and follows the horrifying events after a group of friends decide to do a ouija board session together. Is it the ‘scariest film ever’, as many have suggested? Maybe so...

Director: David F Sandberg

Cast: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Peter Stormare

Among gamers, the 2015 Playstation title Until Dawn is well-regarded as a horror-influenced mystery in which the story shifts based on individual player decisions. Turning what’s otherwise a standard-issue cabin-in-the-woods slasher into a compelling film is another challenge altogether. But director David F Sandberg (Annabelle: Creation) incorporates a clever time-loop conceit into his adaptation, and the result is a gory survival thriller that plays as a love-letter to the horror genre.

Director: Richard Shepard

Cast: Allison Williams, Logan Browning, Steven Weber

In this bizarre blend of psychological thriller and body horror, Allison Williams and Logan Browning play rival concert cellists whose trip to China to visit the music school where they were both trained turns into a twisty, majorly screwed-up descent into hell. It’s something like Cronenberg directing Black Swan, with a twist of Whiplash. 

Director: Patrick Brice

Cast: Patrick Brice, Mark Duplass

Patrick Brice directs and stars in this found-footage two-hander about Aaron, a videographer who is hired to record a video diary for the eccentric and supposedly terminally ill Josef. When the pair meet, though, Aaron is distrubed by his subject’s increasingly bizarre behaviour, which in the end could rival Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Unsettling yet oddly humorous, this is one that’ll stay with you after the credits roll. 

Director: Tim Story

Cast: Dewayne Perkins, Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler

With an all-Black cast and the tagline ‘We Can’t All Die First’, this satire from Barbershop director Tim Story skewers horror’s racial politics, while still paying loving homage to the genre. A group of friends vacationing in the woods are forced by an unseen entity to play a board game judging their levels of ‘blackness’. What it lacks in legitimate scares it makes up for in being fun, funny and pointed.

Director: Xavier Gens

Cast: Bérénice Bejo, Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant

And you thought the water quality was the worst thing about swimming in the Seine. Released just prior to the Paris Olympics, director Xavier Gens’ addition to the ‘place where shark shouldn’t be’ canon unleashes a mutated mako into the City of Lights’ main waterway. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s right before a major triathlon the mayor steadfastly refuses to cancel. It’s a silly, fun B-movie whose topicality made it an unexpected hit.

Director: Pablo Larrain

Cast: Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro

It’s 2023, and Augusto Pinochet is ready to die. ‘Uhh, what?’ you’re probably asking. You see, in this bizarro blend of political satire and horror-comedy from Chilean provocateur Pablo Larrain, the former dictator is a 250-year-old vampire who faked his death in 1990 and retired to a farm, but who can’t quite outrun his past. And that’s not even the weirdest part. It sounds adjacent to historically-informed gimmicks like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but Larrain is an expert button-pusher, and the film was recently awarded Best Screenplay at Venice. Like its immortal old tyrant, it should live on.

Directors: Adam Schindler and Brian Netto

Cast: Kelsey Asbille, Finn Wittrock, Moray Treadwell 

Yet another riff on the old DOA formula, this Sam Raimi-produced horror-thriller involves a woman (Kelsey Asbille) who encounters a madman on an isolated hiking trail. Stuck with some kind of paralysing agent, she only has 20 minutes to attempt escape before her body shuts down completely. Are your palms sweaty yet?

Director: Daniel Goldhaber

Cast: Madeline Brewer, Patch Darragh, Melora Walters

In this knotty techno-thriller, an internet cam girl suddenly finds herself competing for views with her own doppelganger. On the surface, it sounds like something from Black Mirror, but the smart script and strong lead performance from Madeline Brewer give it an identity all its own – and in the era of increasingly convincing A.I. deep fakes, its central idea is seeming less metaphorical with each passing year.

Director: Leigh Janiak

This teen-focused horror trilogy is based on Goosebumps scribe RL Stine’s other book series, and plays like a sister series to Stranger Things – one of the films even stars Sadie Sink. Spread across multiple decades (and centuries), the movies follow a group of kids attempting to figure out why their small US town is cursed, and what they can do to bring it to an end. A fourth standalone film, Fear Street: Prom Queen, came out in 2025, though it's a notable downgrade from the first three movies.