The best Halloween films and shows on Netflix in 2025

Creator: Charlie Brooker
Cast: Jon Hamm, Hayley Atwell, Rupert Everett, Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Forget ghosts, witches and vampires, the real world is much more terrifying than the supernatural. Charlie Brooker’s dark and disturbing TV series will change the way you look at the world around you, specifically the technology we’re all hooked on. You’ll end up questioning reality and morality – and feeling pretty damn scared of your phone.  

Director: Tobe Hooper
Cast: Marilyn Burns, Paul A Partain, Gunnar Hansen

Modern gorehounds are likely to watch Tobe Hooper’s grindhouse masterpiece and feel a bit cheated. You see that title, hear how terrifying it is and expect a bloodbath, and instead get a movie relying more on atmosphere and suggestion than graphic shock. Well, if gore is what you want, there are several iterations that take the ‘chainsaw massacre’ part more literally, including Netflix’s own lamentable 2022 sequel. But you’ll notice none of them stick in the imagination like Hooper’s relatively restrained original, which is still grimy, grotesque and – yes, kids – scary as hell.

Creator: Mike Flanagan
Cast: Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas

Adapting Shirley Jackson’s already much-adapted 1959 novel into a streaming miniseries seems, on paper, like a pointless endeavour. In practice, it’s one of Netflix’s standout horror projects. What largely makes it work is the twin-timeline structure: one documenting the supernatural event itself, the other the long-tail after-effects on the family who experienced it. Both Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino have sung the show’s praises, which should be endorsement enough. 

Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes

Half survival thriller, half poignant meditation on loss, Danny Boyle’s return to a world gone stark-raging mad is as likely to make you weep as curl into the fetal position from fear, but it’s a nerve-jangler all the same. In the quarantined British Isles, entire generations have grown up in the shadow of the rage virus, and coming-of-age rituals now include off-island zombie hunts – which is where one young man’s childhood illusions begin to erode. If you’re looking for purer scares, albeit still bearing Boyle’s humanist touch, the original 28 Days Later is also streaming.

Creators: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
Cast: Winona Ryder, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard

If you haven’t lost a week bingewatching all four seasons of Netflix’s spookily retro TV show, Halloween is the perfect time to get hooked. Inspired by ET, Stephen King and all things ’80s, the story started as a group of kids in search for their missing friend in small town Indiana, and has gone in all sorts of wild ‒and increasingly horrifying ‒ directions since.

Creators: Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan
Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Suzanna Son, Vicky Krieps

His name is less known today than the films his crimes inspired, including Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Ed Gein truly was a monster. In the 1950s, the mentally disturbed mama’s boy killed and mutilated two women in his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, while also exhuming corpses and fashioning their body parts into clothing and household items. The third season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, which previously covered Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers, digs into the psychosexual fixations that have long made Gein a subject of fascination for filmmakers and true-crime aficionados alike, with an effectively chilling Charlie Hunnam stepping into his skin-masks.

Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss

It made an entire generation scared of the ocean and forever smeared the reputation of the great white shark, but Spielberg’s inaugural blockbuster is still absolutely perfect after all these years – and damn scary, too. Admit it: you still jump when poor Ben Gardner makes his surprise cameo during Hooper’s underwater reconnaissance mission. And the iconic ‘you’re gonna need a bigger boat’ scene, where get our first good look at ol’ Bruce? Forget the ocean – you’ll think twice about getting into the bathtub.

Creator: Mike Flanagan
Cast: Kate Siegel, Hamish Linklater, Zach Gilford

A critical and cult favourite upon release, this unsettling miniseries focuses on a young man returning to his small, vaguely New England-y island hometown after a four-year prison stint for manslaughter, who arrives at the same time as an enigmatic priest – which happens to be when strange happenings begin going down. The show unfurls slowly, but stay with it, and it’ll stay with you.   

Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Cast: Gong Yoo, Jung Yu-mi, Ma Dong-seok

And you thought your morning commute sucked. In this modern K-horror classic, a divorced workaholic investment banker boards a light-rail train with his daughter the day a zombie outbreak rapidly spreads through South Korea. It’s simple stuff made uniquely energetic by Yeon Sang-ho’s kinetic direction and surprisingly emotional by the charismatic turn from Squid Game’s Gong Yoo as an absentee father fighting for redemption. Did we mention the zombies are fast, too?

Director: Leigh Janiak
Cast: Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Gillian Jacobs

If Stranger Things sounds a little too intense, this adaptation of Goosebumps author RL Stine’s teen-focused book series is, despite the name, a few degrees lower in fear factor, and has a similar premise. (It even shares cast members Sadie Sink and Maya Hawke.) Spread across multiple decades, the trilogy follows 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.