Let’s be clear: you do not need to wait until October to watch horror movies. But it’s hard to think of a better time. Halloween is right around the corner, night falls earlier and earlier, and you’ve got all this candy in the house so you might as well eat it while watching something spooky.
Fortunately, Netflix - which doesn’t always have the best horror selection - has boosted their Halloween cred this season by adding a “Halloween Favorites” section, adding some new titles and highlighting several others that don’t get nearly enough attention the rest of the year. Some of these movies are slumber party classics, some of them rank among the scariest movies ever made, and some are relatively new, totally awesome horror films that haven’t officially become cult hits yet… but they will.
Take a look at the best Netflix has to offer this Halloween season. These films are so good, it’s scary.
The Babadook is half monster movie, half psychological thriller, half haunted house, and all anxiety-inducing. It’s the story of a single mother raising a troubled, high-maintenance young boy, who fights - and gradually loses - a battle with her own resentments, personified by a pop-up book monster with sharp claws and a top hat called Mr. Babadook. Is the monster real, or just an expression of her own deep-seeded, increasingly violent resentments? Jennifer Kent’s atmospheric and creepy film has it both ways, and excels as a disturbing character study and a crackerjack supernatural story.
A group of teenaged outsiders turn to witchcraft and find themselves literally empowered in The Craft, a slumber party classic from 1996 that plays like a John Hughes Halloween special. Robin Tunney plays a girl with magical powers that become amplified when she joins a coven, led by the fierce and unhinged Fairuza Balk, and everything goes great until it goes horribly wrong. The politics of The Craft haven’t aged well, as is the case for many teen movies of decades yore, but the cast is still great and the final, supernatural showdown is a barnburner.
Sexual roleplaying game goes bad in Gerald’s Game. Really, really, REALLY bad. Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood play a married couple who abscond to an isolated cabin to rekindle the magic, but he has a heart attack while she’s handcuffed to the bed, and she only has a few days to figure out how to escape, or she’ll die of thirst… if the wild dog in the house doesn’t get her first. Mike Flanagan’s sharp direction keeps a simple premise exciting throughout, but it’s Carla Gugino’s movie, and she gives one of her very best performances as a woman reliving her whole life in a desperate search for answers.
The first two Hellraiser movies are, still, the only great ones, and they’re very different movies. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser is a sick and twisted story about sexual temptation, as a housewife betrays her family and kills lascivious men to feed their blood to her sadist, skeletonized, undead lover. The acting can be mawkish but the effects are first rate and the overall seediness is off the charts. The sequel, Hellbound, finally delves into the fascinating mythology of the Hellraiser movies, taking the heroes and villains alike into a labyrinthine hellscape filled with monsters and pain. It’s even more gruesome, intriguing and imaginative than the original.
Something is following you. It’s slow, and only walks, but it will literally never stop until it grabs you and kills you. That would be scary enough but David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows adds another unsettling wrinkle: it’s sexually transmitted. What could have been just a cool idea for supernatural suspense takes on a whole new dimension as issues of guilt and shame and responsibility take hold of our protagonists. The only way to survive is to give their curse to somebody else. Is it really worth it? It Follows asks tough questions and features some truly pulse-pounding scares.
There aren’t as many truly great werewolf movies as there should be, but Late Phases is one of the most recent, excellent additions to the genre. Nick Damici stars as Ambrose, a blind veteran who moves to a retirement community on the edge of the woods. Every full moon, one of the residents dies. Nobody else believes in werewolves, so it’s up to Ambrose to kill the beast himself. Great suspense is amplified by genuine, emotional performances and a willingness to tackle larger questions about getting older and dealing with the choices you’ve made.
The Legend of Hell House is probably the best haunted house movie that most people haven’t seen. It’s the story of a scientist and two psychics who investigate an extremely haunted house, in search of irrefutable proof of the afterlife. What they find are horror and madness. John Hough’s film is eerily photographed from every angle, creating an inescapable, gothic atmosphere. It knows when to be subtle, it knows when to blow the roof off. It’s an underrated horror classic.
A vegan goes to veterinary school and discovers that one of the many disturbing hazing rituals involves eating raw rabbit kidneys. It’s completely gross, but it starts a chain reaction that leads to eating meat, eating raw meat, and eventually a hunger for human flesh. Julia Ducournau’s film is a banquet for horror fans, a rich allegory for uncontrollable appetites of all kinds, as well as a stomach-turning thriller about modern-day cannibalism.
If you’ve seen all of the Saw movies you know that the sequels are barely sequels at all. As time went on, this twisting, turning saga of a serial killer who challenges his victims to escape from death traps kept folding in on itself, revealing that it is truly one long narrative instead of a series of different installments. Fortunately, Netflix has all seven of the original Saw movies, so you can binge them at once, and get a full sense of this franchise’s scope. Maybe it’s crass, but’s ambitious, clever and gory as hell.
M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout, Oscar-nominated hit stars Bruce Willis as a child psychologist trying to help a young boy, played by Haley Joel Osment, who claims he can see ghosts. It’s a spooky supernatural drama, sometimes scary but mostly just ethereal, with fantastic performances across the board and an ending that became a phenomenon. But even if you already know where it’s going, The Sixth Sense still works, just in another way. It’s a sad, beautiful ghost story.
One of the best modern horror anthologies features ten scary stories from eleven filmmakers, all taking place on Halloween night. Most of the installments are great, but even the ones that aren’t flash by so quickly they don’t ruin the movie. Highlights include Dave Parker’s “Sweet Tooth,” about a freaky new urban legend, Darren Lynn Bousman’s mean-spirited trick-or-treat nightmare “The Night Billy Raised Hell,” and Neil Marshall’s man-eating pumpkin epic “Bad Seed.”
The zombie genre may never die if we keep getting films that feel as fresh and exciting as Train to Busan. Sang-ho Yeon’s breakout thriller is about a group of mismatched passengers who band together - and then turn on each other - as zombies take over their train. You’ll find some of the conventions of the zombie genre in Train to Busan but the film delights in coming up with new set pieces, unique to this very specific situation, that make the film feel unexpected. And that translates to the characters as well, most of whom are rich with personality, so that it tugs your heart strings when - inevitably - most of them die.
The old school horror cliché of city folks getting murdered by hillbillies is turned right on its head in Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Tucker and Dale are lovable southerners who just bought themselves a fixer upper cabin, but a group of phobic urbanites get the wrong idea and decide they have to kill Tucker and Dale or they’ll never make it out of the woods alive. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine play the title characters, who stare in wide-eyed fascination as the trespassers keep behaving strangely and, repeatedly, accidentally kill themselves. A smart, hilarious dissection of a familiar horror genre, and a surprisingly sweet ultraviolent comedy about two lovable guys.
It’s hard to pin The Wailing down to a single genre. It’s a story about an unremarkable police officer in a small South Korean community, investigating a series of mysterious murders. It’s also about his daughter being possessed by a demon. It’s absolutely terrifying and then, for several scenes at a time, totally silly. Then it goes back to being scary again. Hong-jin Na’s unpredictable film is totally engrossing but hard to wrap your head around, and it’s kind of a miracle that it works. But it does work, and it’s one of the most distinctive and intriguing horror movies of the last few years.
What are your favorite horror movies on Netflix?
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