The 13 scariest horror movies on Netflix right now
THE 13 SCARIEST HORROR MOVIES ON NETFLIX RIGHT NOW
Netflix has done a fine job in recent years of stockpiling horror films — from established classics to newer pictures discovered at international film festivals. But which are the scariest? It’s a pleasure to watch a smart, artful and culturally relevant fright flick. But it’s even better when it spooks you into leaving the lights on after bedtime. Here are 13 devilish films that will have even the most stoic souls jumping at shadows.
THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER (2017)
Writer-director Osgood Perkins sets his atmospheric feature-filmmaking debut, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, at a mostly empty private Catholic girls’ academy, where a worldly senior played by Lucy Boynton reluctantly looks after a timid freshman played by Kiernan Shipka. While the two young ladies wait for their parents to pick them up, they investigate strange noises around the building. Meanwhile, in a separate storyline, a mysterious woman (Emma Roberts) races toward that same school. Perkins brings these pieces together for a gruesome final act, rooted in the idea that one bad choice in youth can haunt a person forever.
CANDYMAN (1992)
Based on a Clive Barker short story, this disquieting riff on urban legends has become a model for countless horror movies about supernatural monsters who emerge when their names are repeatedly called. Tony Todd plays the vengeful ghost of a man lynched by a racist mob. Virginia Madsen plays a graduate student who traces the Candyman legend to a crime-ridden Chicago neighbourhood and inadvertently becomes the killer’s accomplice. British writer-director Bernard Rose offers some sly comments here on superstition and prejudice in a complicated thriller with a sharp hook.
CARRIE (1976)
In director Brian De Palma’s gore-soaked adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel, Carrie, Sissy Spacek plays a misfit telekinetic teen who gets bullied by her classmates at school and abused by her Bible-thumping mother at home. De Palma plays up the adolescent angst in the film’s first half but cranks up the suspense in a shattering climax, which is set at a prom where a mean prank goes horribly awry. The innovative cinematic style — involving split-screens and slow-motion — gives this movie’s frightening finale the feel of an inescapable nightmare.
THE CONJURING (2013)
The most dominant horror subgenre of the 2010s has been a relentless take on the haunted-house picture, in which pleasant American families are tormented by objects and locations with tragic histories. The first film in the Conjuring franchise is one of the most effectively spooky of this lot, telling the loosely fact-based story of
two paranormal investigators (played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) who try to purge the ghosts from a Rhode Island farmhouse. A terrific cast (which also includes Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) and director James Wan’s crafty deployment of jump-scares make this movie as entertaining as it is spine-tingling.
CREEP 2 (2017)
Creep — the first found-footage horror collaboration between director Patrick Brice and his co-writer and star, Mark Duplass — is also available on Netflix, and is deeply unsettling. But it’s OK to jump straight to the superior Creep 2, in which Desiree Akhavan plays a YouTuber named Sara who agrees to spend a day shooting video of a man who claims to be a prolific serial killer. Duplass plays Sara’s subject, who may be lying for the sake of soaking up this young woman’s attention ... or who may be luring her to her doom.
THE EYES OF MY MOTHER (2016)
Writer-director Nicolas Pesce’s short but stunning debut feature opens with a sequence of stomach-turning violence, as a nomadic psychopath terrorises a farming family. What follows over the next hour is less visceral but is in some ways even more upsetting, as Pesce tells the story of a reclusive young woman (played by Kika Magalhaes) whose personality has been shaped by the horrors she witnessed as a girl. From its stark black-and-white imagery to its unflinching scenes of vivisection, this film is a sometimes strikingly beautiful study of a damaged soul, told with an unusual attention to visual texture.
HUSH (2016)
Netflix helped establish the reputation of smart genre filmmaker Mike Flanagan by providing a home for several of his features, along with the acclaimed horror series The
Haunting Of Hill House. Flanagan’s most pulse-pounding film is the home-invasion thriller Hush, co-written by his wife and leading lady, Kate Siegel. With minimal dialogue — but dynamic sound design — the movie follows a masked serial killer (John Gallagher Jr) as he stalks a deaf-mute writer in a remote country house. By shifting perspectives, Flanagan cleverly keeps the audience on its toes — and more aware than both the predator and his prey about what’s happening.
SCREAM (1996)
Here’s a rarity: a slasher parody as terrifying as what it parodies. In Scream, director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson affectionately pick at the clichés of the eternally popular “attractive teens get picked off by a costumed maniac” genre. The filmmakers set their violent murder-mystery among a group of hip high-school students who know the “rules” of horror movies. This likeable cast of youngsters keeps the film fun and energetic, making it all the more alarming each time Ghostface strikes.
TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016)
One of the more thoughtful and thematically rich films to emerge from the zombie glut, the South Korean post-apocalyptic action picture Train To Busan documents an epidemic of the undead right as it begins, as one infected passenger spurs an outbreak across a commuter train. What follows is an exciting monster movie. But like the similarly rail-bound Snowpiercer,
Train To Busan is a commentary on how social divisions can hasten the breakdown of order, as passengers quickly condemn their fellow citizens to a misery that eventually consumes everyone.
UNDER THE SHADOW (2016)
In writer-director Babak Anvari’s politically charged ghost story Under The Shadow, a doctor’s wife (played by Narges Rashidi) and her young daughter try to survive both missile attacks and an insidious evil spirit in a mid-1980s Tehran, Iran, apartment building. The film starts as a character study about an educated woman who put her dreams aside to play house in a conservative religious society. By the final 20 minutes, when mother and child are all alone and being chased around their home by a demon, viewers understand that the world outside the heroine’s door is in some ways as hostile as the one within.
UNDER THE SKIN (2014)
Like an art-house deconstruction of “alien predator” science-fiction movies like Alien and Predator, director Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of the Michel Faber novel Under The Skin stars Scarlett Johansson as a deadly hunter who uses her sex appeal to lure men into a bizarre extra-dimensional slaughterhouse. Glazer puts the audience in the antiheroine’s shoes, using a combination of gritty docu-realism and visual abstraction to illustrate what the world might look like to a curious creature who barely understands human behaviour — beyond what it takes to entrap her next meal.
THE WITCH (2016)
Colonial America’s lonely, haunted wilderness provides a backdrop for Robert Eggers’ dark folk tale about a deeply religious farmer (played by Ralph Ineson) whose family destroys itself after a baby disappears. Unsure whether God is punishing them for their sins or a satanic cult is to blame, they are left to punish each other. Add a suspiciously alluring teenage daughter (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) and a possibly evil goat, and The Witch has all the right elements for a nerve-racking creepshow.
WOULD YOU RATHER (2013)
A sick spin on a popular party game, Would
You Rather carries an idle thought experiment to its most wonderfully appalling extreme. When a group of cash-strapped folks accept a dinner invitation from an eccentric millionaire, they find themselves attempting gross, life-threatening dares. Will they slice open their own eyeballs? Hold firecrackers in their hands? Murder their fellow guests? In this provocative and wince-inducing shocker, director David Guy Levy and screenwriter Steffen Schlachtenhaufen expose the perversity of the American class system, which allows the decadent rich to buy the complicity of the needy.