The best horror movies on Netflix deliver the thrills across every subgenre: supernatural hauntings, psychological breakdowns, folk terrors, creature features, found-footage nightmares, and sly horror-comedies that end with a wink and a scream. This curated list balances acclaimed originals with international gems and cult favorites that reward a late-night watch. We focused on films with strong direction, memorable imagery, and stories that linger the next morning when the house feels a bit too quiet. Whether you want feral intensity or slow-burn dread, you’ll find carefully selected titles that show how inventive the genre has become on streaming. Dim the lights, silence your phone, and give these movies your full attention. Fear works best when you let it breathe.
The Best Horror Movies on Netflix
1. His House (2020)
- Runtime: 93 min
- Starring: Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Wunmi Mosaku, Matt Smith
- Director: Remi Weekes
- Genre: Horror, Thriller
- IMDb Rating: 6.5/10
His House braids refugee trauma and supernatural horror with startling confidence, turning a modest flat into a labyrinth of memory and guilt. Remi Weekes stages apparitions as confrontations with grief rather than mere boogeymen, so every scare lands with emotional force. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù and Wunmi Mosaku anchor the film with lived-in performances that keep the story human even as walls whisper and shadows breathe. The set-pieces are imaginative without feeling showy, using void-like corners and peeling wallpaper to suggest histories that refuse burial. Its politics are subtext and text at once; the couple is haunted by what they fled and what they did to flee. Sound design creaks and scrapes like the house itself remembering. When the film reveals the true shape of the haunting, the twist devastates rather than merely surprises. It’s a rare horror movie that chills, moves, and morally implicates the viewer in a single breath.
2. Gerald’s Game (2017)
- Runtime: 103 min
- Starring: Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood
- Director: Mike Flanagan
- Genre: Psychological Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.6/10
Mike Flanagan turns Stephen King’s “unfilmable” novel into a ruthlessly focused survival nightmare. Carla Gugino gives a career-best performance, playing a woman handcuffed to a bed who must outthink dehydration, a hungry stray dog, and her own weaponized memories. The editing externalizes inner voices with eerie clarity, staging an argument between past and present selves that becomes the film’s true battleground. Flanagan finds horror not just in potential intruders but in the psyche’s locked rooms, where childhood shadows still pace. Practical gore punctures the minimalism, making the few bursts of violence impossible to shake. The “Moonlight Man” sequences flirt with the supernatural while keeping ambiguity alive. By the end, the escape is physical, emotional, and cathartic all at once. Few single-location films feel this sprawling inside the mind.
3. The Ritual (2017)
- Runtime: 94 min
- Starring: Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier
- Director: David Bruckner
- Genre: Folk Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.3/10
Grief curdles into paranoia as four friends attempt a healing hike through dense Scandinavian forest and instead stray into myth. David Bruckner shoots the woods like a cathedral of antlers and ash, where every snapped twig becomes a message from something older than language. The creature design—revealed in patient, dreadful glimpses—earns a place in modern monster canon. Campfire camaraderie dissolves under the weight of survivor’s guilt, and nightmares invade waking hours in startling tableaus. Folk symbols carved into trees read like warnings the group refuses to understand. The camera often peers from behind trunks, adopting a predator’s perspective without cheap jump-scares. When ritual finally meets reckoning, the climax is both primal and strangely cleansing. It’s a campfire tale that feels dug from the soil rather than dreamed up in a room.
4. Apostle (2018)
- Runtime: 130 min
- Starring: Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen
- Director: Gareth Evans
- Genre: Horror, Thriller
- IMDb Rating: 6.3/10
Gareth Evans pivots from kinetic action to pagan dread without losing intensity, trading knife fights for threshers and iron contraptions. Apostle sends a damaged man undercover on a remote island where faith has rotted into ritualistic violence. The production design is tactile—mud-caked altars, creaking mills, and candlelit tunnels that feel sweat-slick with fear. Michael Sheen’s cult leader is chilling for his zeal’s bureaucratic polish, while Dan Stevens plays desperation like a fever. The mythology slowly unfurls, revealing a nature goddess bound and bled by human greed. Brutal set pieces puncture the slow burn, and the camera never looks away. Evans finds terror in systems, not just specters, suggesting the real horror is how quickly suffering becomes doctrine. It’s grim, gorgeous, and pointedly moral.
5. Bird Box (2018)
- Runtime: 124 min
- Starring: Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich
- Director: Susanne Bier
- Genre: Post-apocalyptic Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.6/10
“Don’t look” becomes a philosophy in Susanne Bier’s tense survival thriller where unseen entities weaponize human despair. Sandra Bullock delivers steel and tenderness as a mother guiding children down a lethal river—blindfolded and resolute. The film crosscuts between early collapse and the river journey, sustaining dread while withholding just enough. Production choices keep the creatures abstract, letting our brains do the ugliest work. Group dynamics offer miniature morality plays: community, paranoia, and the fragile etiquette of apocalypse. Set pieces—the car guided by GPS, the bird-box alarms, the fog-choked rapids—are inventive and tightly staged. The movie ultimately argues for hope as a discipline as much as a feeling. It’s a cultural phenomenon that remains gripping on rewatch.
6. The Platform (2019)
- Runtime: 94 min
- Starring: Iván Massagué, Antonia San Juan
- Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
- Genre: Sci-Fi Horror
- IMDb Rating: 7.0/10
A brutal allegory served cold, The Platform imagines a vertical prison where a banquet descends level by level until it’s scraped bare. The premise is elegantly nightmarish; the execution is savage without nihilism. Each character reads like a thesis on self-interest, charity, or revolt, and the film shifts from satire to sacrament with disorienting ease. The production’s concrete geometry is oppressive, a maze without corners to hide in. Gore arrives in shocking bursts that feel inevitable rather than gratuitous. Dialogue doubles as interrogation of our own appetites, forcing uneasy laughter to die in the throat. By the final descent, it’s become a parable about redistribution and faith. You’ll think about it whenever you watch leftovers go to waste.
7. The Perfection (2018)
- Runtime: 90 min
- Starring: Allison Williams, Logan Browning
- Director: Richard Shepard
- Genre: Psychological Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.2/10
Part rivalry thriller, part revenge symphony, The Perfection keeps flipping the record just when you think you’ve learned the melody. Allison Williams and Logan Browning duel with violins and secrets, playing characters tuned by an elite institution’s corruption. Rash tonal shifts become the point; trauma rarely moves in straight lines. Body-horror detours test stomachs while visual motifs—hand positions, bow grips, scars—accumulate ominous weight. The film courts audacity, occasionally stumbling, yet lands with righteous fury. Its moral universe clarifies as the frame widens to name systemic abusers. The final movement is operatic, bloody, and weirdly triumphant. You won’t predict the path; you will feel the destination.
8. The Babysitter (2017)
- Runtime: 85 min
- Starring: Samara Weaving, Judah Lewis
- Director: McG
- Genre: Comedy Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.3/10
Campy, candy-colored, and proudly R-rated, The Babysitter splashes satanic-pact mayhem across suburbia. Samara Weaving radiates chaotic charisma as the cool sitter whose sleepover turns sacrificial. The humor plays like a dare, undercutting gore with punchlines that actually land. Kinetic camera moves and needle drops lean into the pop-horror vibe without drowning the stakes. Underneath, it’s a sincere story about a timid kid discovering agency the hard way. Set pieces escalate with Home Alone ingenuity and splatter. The tone shouldn’t work, and yet it sings. Sometimes horror’s sharpest knife is laughter followed by a gasp.
9. Cam (2018)
- Runtime: 94 min
- Starring: Madeline Brewer
- Director: Daniel Goldhaber
- Genre: Tech Horror
- IMDb Rating: 5.9/10
Identity becomes a glitch in Cam, where a camgirl discovers her channel hijacked by a flawless doppelgänger. Madeline Brewer’s performance balances steel and vulnerability as she hunts for the source of the theft while watching her livelihood and self-image erode. The film refuses moral panic about sex work, focusing instead on platform power and algorithm cruelty. Neon lighting and mirrored compositions sharpen the theme of self as commodity. The mystery’s lack of tidy explanation feels right for a digital uncanny we all sense but can’t name. Horror here is losing control of your face, your voice, your “you.” By the final frame, the question isn’t “Who am I?” but “Who owns me?”
10. Veronica (2017)
- Runtime: 105 min
- Starring: Sandra Escacena, Bruna González
- Director: Paco Plaza
- Genre: Supernatural Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.2/10
From [Rec] co-creator Paco Plaza, Veronica channels a famous Madrid case into a séance-gone-wrong story with pulse and heart. A teenager shoulders adult duties for younger siblings, then invites something into the apartment she can’t dismiss. Plaza’s camera loves doorways and hallways, spaces that look safe until sound design convinces you otherwise. The eclipse-set Ouija scene is a nervy standout, but it’s the day-after dread that really curdles. Domestic details—breakfast cereal, school uniforms, cramped balconies—ground the terror in recognizable life. Performances from the child actors sell the stakes without sentimentality. By the end, you’ll swear the apartment absorbed the family’s fear and learned to speak it back.
11. Cargo (2017)
- Runtime: 105 min
- Starring: Martin Freeman, Simone Landers
- Director: Ben Howling, Yolanda Ramke
- Genre: Post-apocalyptic Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.3/10
Cargo swaps siege tactics for tenderness, following an infected father racing an invisible clock to secure his infant’s future. Martin Freeman plays weariness with quiet ferocity, while the Australian outback spreads like a wound under blazing sky. The script treats zombies less as antagonists than as inevitabilities that force moral choice. Indigenous characters and traditions provide pathways the protagonist must learn to respect, complicating the “savior” arc. Small gestures—a handmade carrier, a lullaby, a shared sign—register as acts of resistance against a collapsing world. The film’s best scares are emotional, landing like aftershocks rather than jump jolts. It asks what love looks like when time is the enemy. Bring tissues; fear isn’t the only thing leaking.
12. Fear Street Trilogy (2021)
- Runtime: 107–114 min per film
- Starring: Kiana Madeira, Olivia Scott Welch
- Director: Leigh Janiak
- Genre: Slasher, Supernatural Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.2–6.7/10
Leigh Janiak’s three-part saga time-hops through 1994, 1978, and 1666 to map a town cursed by generational rot. The trilogy honors slasher grammar—killer POVs, propulsive needle drops, summer-camp carnage—while weaving a surprisingly tender queer love story at its core. Each entry shifts texture: neon mall mayhem, sepia-scorched folk dread, and sun-dappled camp terror. Masks and legends reappear like trauma’s reruns, showing how communities mythologize pain to avoid accountability. The kills are gnarly, the humor sharp, and the mythology coherent without over-explaining. Watching all three feels like a weekend-long haunted sleepover. By the finale, destiny gives way to choice, and the curse blinks first.
13. Under the Shadow (2016)
- Runtime: 84 min
- Starring: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi
- Director: Babak Anvari
- Genre: Supernatural Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.8/10
Sirens wail, windows rattle, and a djinn slips between bomb blasts in Babak Anvari’s elegant chiller. Set in wartime Tehran, the film binds political repression, motherhood, and folklore into a single tightening knot. Narges Rashidi plays a mother banned from her medical studies, fighting for agency as much as safety. The apartment becomes a chessboard of absent fathers, suspicious neighbors, and a child whose drawings decode the haunting. Practical effects and minimal CGI make every fluttering sheet and ceiling crack feel tactile. The djinn’s rules echo societal ones: invisible, punitive, omnipresent. When possession threatens, it looks like depression, grief, and rage—recognizable, then terrifying. This is horror as parable and portrait.
14. Hush (2016)
- Runtime: 82 min
- Starring: Kate Siegel, John Gallagher Jr.
- Director: Mike Flanagan
- Genre: Home Invasion Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.6/10
Stripped-down and surgical, Hush turns silence into strategy. Kate Siegel’s deaf novelist processes danger visually, forcing the audience to scan frames for threats like she does. Flanagan weaponizes negative space; a blank window becomes a character. The killer’s casual cruelty is scarier than theatrics, and the cat-and-mouse tactics escalate with crisp logic. Foley work is immaculate—knife skitters, breath fogs, phone vibrations—each amplified by absence of dialogue. Resourcefulness becomes choreography as household objects transform into lifelines. The film never cheats geography or physics, making victories feel earned. When the final gambit arrives, it’s both clever and character-true.
15. The Old Ways (2020)
- Runtime: 90 min
- Starring: Brigitte Kali Canales
- Director: Christopher Alender
- Genre: Supernatural Horror
- IMDb Rating: 5.6/10
Exorcism narratives often pit science against faith; The Old Ways complicates that binary with culture, diaspora, and inheritance. A Latina journalist returns to rural Veracruz chasing a story and finds a community that believes her soul is compromised. Rituals unfold with detail—herbs, bindings, chants—that feel studied rather than exoticized. The jungle presses in, lush and suffocating, while family history becomes the true site of possession. Brigitte Kali Canales brings skepticism that curdles into surrender, then transforms into agency. Practical makeup and restrained effects keep the sensation grimy and close. The ending reframes belief as responsibility, not submission. It’s small, sincere, and sticky.
16. Cadaver (2020)
- Runtime: 86 min
- Starring: Gitte Witt, Thomas Gullestad
- Director: Jarand Herdal
- Genre: Psychological Horror
- IMDb Rating: 5.2/10
Set after a nuclear disaster, Cadaver invites a starving family to a “theater” where the performance bleeds into reality. The mansion’s gold-leaf decadence contrasts with the city’s ash-gray ruin, making hunger itself a character. Audience members don masks; boundaries vanish; appetites sharpen. The film stages moral compromise as choreography—follow the actor, ignore the missing, swallow the doubt. Gitte Witt’s wary mother navigates a maze of doors that always lead to worse offers. Herdal’s direction favors fairy-tale framing that curdles into cannibal logic. While polarizing, the allegory lands with sickening clarity: in scarcity, spectacle eats us first. You’ll eye buffet tables differently for a while.
17. The Invitation (2015)
- Runtime: 100 min
- Starring: Logan Marshall-Green, Tammy Blanchard
- Director: Karyn Kusama
- Genre: Psychological Thriller, Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.6/10
Karyn Kusama turns a Hollywood Hills dinner party into an autopsy of grief and groupthink. The wine flows, old wounds reopen, and a “movement” is pitched with predatory serenity. Logan Marshall-Green’s shell-shocked ex-husband reads danger in every smile, inviting the audience to second-guess him until it’s too late not to. Blocking and framing isolate characters even in open rooms, a visual grammar of polite alienation. Monologues about pain carry the ring of cult recruitment, where vulnerability is mined for obedience. The sense of doom builds quietly, then detonates with shattering economy. The final shock cut to the outside world reframes everything as pattern, not anomaly. It’s a masterpiece of social terror.
18. Eli (2019)
- Runtime: 98 min
- Starring: Charlie Shotwell, Kelly Reilly, Lili Taylor
- Director: Ciarán Foy
- Genre: Supernatural Horror
- IMDb Rating: 5.7/10
Bubble-boy medical thriller meets ghost story in Eli, where a child with a rare condition enters an antiseptic mansion-clinic for experimental treatment. Sterility becomes sinister as fogged glass hides whispers and nurses glide like wraiths. The boy’s terror feels immediate; the film aligns with his perspective, making adult assurances sound like spells. Apparitions escalate from warnings to revelations, and each “cure” session deepens the mystery. Lili Taylor is chillingly ambiguous as the doctor-savior with secrets in the basement. The final twist recontextualizes genre itself, a gamble that will delight some and infuriate others. Either way, the ride is spooky, claustrophobic, and adhesive. Hospitals never look the same after.
19. Malevolent (2018)
- Runtime: 88 min
- Starring: Florence Pugh, Ben Lloyd-Hughes
- Director: Olaf de Fleur
- Genre: Supernatural Horror
- IMDb Rating: 4.8/10
Before international stardom, Florence Pugh anchored this lean ghost story about a sibling scam team that stages fake hauntings—until a real one insists on terms. The premise allows for guilt to metastasize into visitation; lies open doors smart locks can’t close. Pugh’s performance brings haunted gravity to even boilerplate beats, and the film’s second half turns unexpectedly grim. Sound cues scratch like fingernails on old wood, while a dilapidated mansion seems to expand behind the characters’ backs. The ultimate revelation is less twisty than tragic, framing vengeance as a demand for witness. It’s a compact tale that punishes exploitation with a cold, steady hand. Sometimes repentance requires more than apology; it needs action.
20. Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
- Runtime: 99 min
- Starring: Elizabeth Reaser, Lulu Wilson
- Director: Mike Flanagan
- Genre: Supernatural Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.1/10
Mike Flanagan rescues a lifeless IP with rich period texture and aching family stakes. Set in late-1960s Los Angeles, the film follows a widow running a séance con who invites something real into her home. Film-grain affectations and vintage Universal logos aren’t just nostalgia; they prime the eye for old-school composition. Lulu Wilson’s possessed-child work is unnervingly precise, a performance calibrated in half-smiles and thousand-yard stares. The scares escalate with structural elegance—voices first, then movements, then violations of space. Beneath the shocks, grief hums like a bassline. By its harrowing finale, the movie has earned a place beside superior prequels that outshine originals. It’s crafty, creepy, and unexpectedly tender.
21. The Conjuring 2 (2016)
- Runtime: 134 min
- Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson
- Director: James Wan
- Genre: Supernatural Horror
- IMDb Rating: 7.3/10
James Wan expands his haunted-house grammar with baroque confidence, staging the Enfield case as love story and demon siege. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson play the Warrens with warmth that sells the stakes beyond spectacle. Wan’s camera glides like a curious spirit, landing on crosses that flip and toys that see too much. The Crooked Man and the Nun become franchise icons, but quieter moments—an Elvis cover, a kitchen conversation—give the movie its soul. Set pieces are architectural: windows, hallways, and wallpaper turn into instruments. The film respects believers and skeptics while insisting evil loves attention. Even if you know the beats, the craftsmanship makes them hit like new drums.
22. Incantation (2022)
- Runtime: 111 min
- Starring: Tsai Hsuan-yen, Huang Sin-ting
- Director: Kevin Ko
- Genre: Found Footage Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.2/10
Incantation plays with the ethics of watching, inviting the audience to “repeat after me” as a curse metastasizes across formats. The found-footage language is inventive rather than tired, mixing vlog sincerity, documentary fragments, and ritual recordings into a collage of doom. A mother’s plea to save her daughter turns into a trap built from curiosity and clicks. Cultural specificity—temples, taboos, and talismans—grounds the mythology while the edit fractures time. The film’s fourth-wall pokes feel like fingerprints left on your own screen. By the end, you’ll wonder if participation is consent. It’s clever, unnerving, and designed to haunt the viewer’s home as much as the characters’.
23. Raw (2016)
- Runtime: 99 min
- Starring: Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf
- Director: Julia Ducournau
- Genre: Body Horror
- IMDb Rating: 7.0/10
Julia Ducournau’s debut is a coming-of-age story with teeth—sometimes literally. A veterinary student’s forced hazing awakens an appetite that polite society has no language for. The camera is intimate but unsentimental, clinical in a way that matches the setting. Friendship between sisters becomes competition, then mirror, then lifeline. Body horror serves character, mapping desire and shame onto skin and muscle. Sound cues—chewing, clinking, retching—test boundaries like the protagonist herself. The film is transgressive without empty provocation, culminating in a final scene that reframes everything with cruel wit. It’s art-house horror that still knows how to bite.
24. The Wailing (2016)
- Runtime: 156 min
- Starring: Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee
- Director: Na Hong-jin
- Genre: Supernatural, Mystery Horror
- IMDb Rating: 7.4/10
Na Hong-jin’s epic of contagion and suspicion unspools like a curse that refuses to name itself. Police procedural rhythms collapse under superstition, then rebuild as ritual combat. Performances toggle between bumbling humor and bone-deep despair without tonal whiplash. The landscape—misty hills, muddy paths, rain-polished stones—feels complicit, as if the village were a body running a fever. Exorcism sequences rank among the most intense on film, edited like dueling sermons. The movie’s ambiguities invite competing readings about outsiders, faith, and the traps of certainty. Its final images are cruel, cosmic jokes. Some horrors are puzzles that punish you for wanting answers.
25. 1922 (2017)
- Runtime: 101 min
- Starring: Thomas Jane, Molly Parker
- Director: Zak Hilditch
- Genre: Psychological Horror
- IMDb Rating: 6.2/10
Stephen King’s Midwestern gothic crawls across fields chewed by wind and regret. Thomas Jane’s farmer narrates his own damnation with a dialect that feels worn like a coat. A crime meant to simplify life instead multiplies vermin, visions, and debts that breed in walls. Rats become messengers; cornfields become juries; the house becomes conscience with a staircase. The film’s patience pays off as guilt calcifies into haunting, less a single ghost than a colony. Molly Parker haunts in glances and stains, a presence as persistent as weather. This isn’t a shock machine; it’s a slow poisoning. By the final ledger, every gain has been paid for twice.
Why These Are the Best Horror Movies on Netflix
From folk dread (The Ritual, The Wailing) to psychological collapse (Gerald’s Game, 1922), tech anxieties (Cam), and apocalyptic survival (Bird Box, Cargo), these films chart the genre’s range with vigor. The best horror movies on Netflix aren’t just about jump-scares; they carry ideas that echo—about community, belief, guilt, and the stories we tell to survive. International voices broaden the palette, and Netflix originals keep experimenting with form, tone, and subject. Queue a few, vary the flavors, and let your nerves decide when to tap out. The platform’s horror bench is deep; this list gets you to the front of the line.
Conclusion: Why Netflix Is a Haven for Horror—And How to Watch Smarter
The best horror movies on Netflix prove the genre’s health on streaming: directors take risks, international titles travel easily, and audiences sample subgenres they might skip in theaters. Think of Netflix as a haunted library where each aisle whispers a different fear—folk curses, grief apparitions, siege thrillers, and existential parables. To get the most from it, curate your marathons like a tasting menu: pair a slow-burn mood piece (Under the Shadow) with a kinetic crowd-pleaser (Fear Street), or follow a possession story (Ouija: Origin of Evil) with a moral fable (The Platform) to reset the palate. Don’t binge only for jumps; watch for craft—soundscapes that unsettle, blocking that traps, and performances that make terror feel personal. As the catalog rotates, save lists and download favorites for offline nights when the weather cooperates with your nerves. For broader context on horror’s evolution and streaming’s impact, explore analysis from The New York Times Movies section and genre coverage from Rolling Stone, both trusted U.S. outlets that examine how fear on screen reflects the world off it. Whether you’re a completionist or a casual thrill-seeker, this list is a map—light the candle, pick a path, and see what looks back.
