As the weather gets cooler and the pumpkin spice starts to flow, spooky season has arrived. With Halloween on the way, it’s the perfect time to indulge in scary movies, and Netflix has a wide selection of horror offerings. The truth is that a lot of what Netflix labels as horror isn’t particularly scary, though, and it can be tough to know which movies will truly inspire your nightmares.
These five picks are not only likely to make you hide under a blanket or cling to your loved ones as you watch, but they’re also great movies on their own, using fright and terror in service of accomplished storytelling and layered character development. These are some of the scariest movies on Netflix, and also some of the best.
It Follows
Someone walking steadily toward you at a leisurely pace doesn’t sound all that scary, but when that person could come from any direction and will never stop until they reach you and kill you, the prospect is a lot more alarming. That’s what happens to the characters in writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s eerie film about a curse that can only be lifted by passing it along to someone else via sexual contact.
Maika Monroe stars as a young woman who receives the curse from a man she thinks is her boyfriend, leaving her to be stalked by a dangerous entity that can look like anyone. Mitchell builds a sense of unending dread, making the viewer constantly aware of a threat that could arise at any time. The dreamlike tone gives the movie the feel of a waking nightmare.
Watch on Netflix
Us
Lupita Nyong’o gives two outstanding performances in Jordan Peele’s disturbing movie about doppelgangers taking over the lives of ordinary people. Two families on vacation are attacked by people who look and behave like twisted reflections of them, as strange doubles seem to be rising up around the country. Nyong’o plays both protective wife and mother Adelaide and her diabolical counterpart Red, making her both the hero and the villain of the movie, at alternate moments.
As usual, Peele combines social commentary with scares, although Us is less overt in its messaging than his other films. Mostly, Peele just wants to freak the audience out, and he creates plenty of unsettling images, led by the so-called Tethered in their blood-red jumpsuits, carrying gold scissors. Their arrival is just the first sign that nothing will ever be right again.
Watch on Netflix
The Strangers
In basic terms, the plot of writer-director Bryan Bertino’s debut feature sounds like a standard home-invasion thriller. But Bertino’s approach to the material makes it absolutely terrifying, with unrelenting tension and fear, both for the characters and the audience. Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler play a bickering couple staying the night at an isolated vacation home, where they’re assaulted by a trio of masked strangers.
There’s no motivation or purpose to the strangers’ actions, which means that it’s impossible to reason with them or drive them away. Bertino maintains the heightened terror and anxiety for the entire running time, and Speedman and Tyler give powerful performances that remain grounded even as the characters are fighting for their lives. When the strangers eventually explain how they chose their victims, it’s one of the most chilling lines in horror history.
Watch on Netflix
Jaws
Steven Spielberg famously had to keep the marauding great white shark offscreen for most of Jaws because the animatronic prop wasn’t working properly, but the result is a masterful escalation of suspense, as characters are killed by a vicious unseen animal. Between Spielberg’s point-of-view camera and John Williams’ iconic musical score, Jaws is scariest when its title character remains hidden.
Jaws is still plenty scary once the shark appears in the frame, though, thanks to the way Spielberg has built up its menace. The peaceful coastal town of Amity Island is terrorized by shark attacks, and the local sheriff (Roy Scheider) joins with a visiting oceanographer (Richard Dreyfuss) and a grizzled sea captain (Robert Shaw) to take out the ravenous beast. Jaws launched an entire subgenre of shark-attack movies, but nothing else comes close to its visceral, heart-pounding thrills.
Watch on Netflix
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
The scares in Oz Perkins’ film are more atmospheric than immediate, but that doesn’t make the movie any less frightening. The woozy cinematography captures a setting that seems to exist outside of time, despite taking place in the present. The florid narration, which sounds like it could come from a Henry James or Edgar Allan Poe story, adds to the feeling of displacement, as if main character Lily Saylor (Ruth Wilson) simultaneously inhabits multiple different eras.
It’s possible that she actually does, since Lily shares some kind of connection with the former inhabitant of the creaking old house where she’s been hired as a caretaker for an ailing elderly horror writer (Paula Prentiss). The lines blur between the past and present, fiction and reality, the living and the dead. The creeping rot of the house soon overtakes everything.
Watch on Netflix
