(L-R:) Crimson Peak (Photo: Universal Pictures), His House (Photo: Netflix), The Conjuring (Photo: Warner Bors. Pictures)
Pick a film genre, any film genre, and Netflix is likely to have you more than covered in terms of viewing options—from the crème de la crème of cinema all the way down to the hate-watchingly bad. And, let’s face it, no genre spans such a gamut like horror does. For every award-winning prestige flick like It Follows, there’s a wildly unoriginal original like Death Note. That’s why The A.V. Club is here to guide you toward titles like the former, which has made this best-of list, and away from the latter, which you can bet didn’t. If you’re looking for filmmaking that will get your heart racing and your guts churning, avoid endless Netflix scrolling by sticking to the following titles, the best horror cinema available on the platform right now.
This list was updated on October 20, 2022.
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Before I Wake
Before I Wake
Before I WakePhoto: Netflix
Before I Wake
A horror fantasy about the worst fears of parents and children, Before I Wake imagines a married couple, Jessie (Kate Bosworth) and Mark (Thomas Jane), trying to move on after their son’s death by taking in an 8-year-old orphan who’s gone from foster home to foster home under mysterious circumstances. Waiting for the new arrival, Mark screws grab bars to the tub wall (their boy drowned in the bath, which is basically every first-time parent’s nightmare) while Jessie takes down the family photos from the living room, enacting an unwittingly creepy ritual of preparation; skewed in a horror movie’s exposition, the things adults think will make kids safe seem conspiratorial and sick. But slyly, the film keeps turning viewer sympathies about who might be the bigger threat to whom. As the new foster parents soon discover, the kid, Cody (Room’s Jacob Tremblay), possesses a dangerous supernatural power, and when he falls asleep, his dreams haunt the house—projections of a small child’s manias (butterflies are Cody’s favorite subject) and uneasy thoughts about grown-ups and themselves. Often, Cody dreams of the dead son, Sean (Antonio Romero), the little boy’s face unnervingly frozen in the rictus of the only photo of him he’s seen. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
For years now, I’ve found it strange that there were only two or three good movies about the internet, the most important thing in the world. My wish for a film truthfully capturing all the connection, gratification, desperation, and despair of living online came true with this sophisticated thriller, in which a cam girl (Madeline Brewer, making a convincing argument for herself as a bona fide star) discovers that an automated doppelgänger has taken over her channel. There’s a lot to love here, from the low-key sex-positivity to the cringe comedy to the delectable supporting turn from former love witch Samantha Robinson. But I like Cam best as our most ruthlessly honest film about the nightmares of full-time freelancing. [Charles Bramesco]
The main plot of The Conjuring 2 revolves around a real-life incident known as the Enfield Poltergeist, an extremely well-documented case of a supposed ghost who terrorized the Hodgson family of North London from 1977 to 1979 and was apparently a fan of the classics: knocking on walls, shaking beds, throwing furniture, and even the occasional haunted kid’s toy. And as malevolent spirits often do, it picked on one of the children in particular, 11-year-old Janet Hodgson (Madison Wolfe). Call it a collective delusion, or a desperate cry for attention from a disturbed child. Or call it what the movie very explicitly calls it: The Devil. With this installment, the Conjuring movies may have overtaken The Exorcist as the most Christian of horror franchises, taking place in a universe where the Catholic Church is the spiritual S.H.I.E.L.D. and demon hunters Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) its holy roller super-agents. [Katie Rife]
Let’s make something clear up front: Creep 2 is not a scary movie. Despite a plot that concerns a serial killer and the unsuspecting woman who answers his Craigslist ad and drives to his remote home in the woods, there is nothing about the film that would inspire much in the way of goosebumps. (A few small jump scares are played more for laughs than shrieks of fright.) Whereas the first Creep wrung tension from the familiar tricks of the found-footage style, the new one assumes the viewer already knows the situation with its homicidal subject, and doesn’t really try to generate chills from it. Instead, it’s a serial-killer midlife crisis: Within the first five minutes, Mark Duplass’ character has already desultorily cut someone’s throat, sat morosely as the blood congealed, and said, with heavy existential ennui straight to the camera he snuck into the house, “What’s happening to me?” A slasher sequel this is not. But for fans of the original who don’t mind the loss of scares, Creep 2 improves on the first film in nearly every way, from tone to dialogue to plot. Aesthetically, the two films are more or less identical, as director Patrick Brice maintains a straightforward functional approach to the material. As in the first, the protagonist is a filmmaker, or at least a wannabe filmmaker, thereby narratively justifying a steadier and more professional level of camerawork. This series isn’t all that pretty to look at, but as far as found-footage cinematography goes, it sits firmly in the upper tier. [Alex McLevy]
Billed as a haunted-house horror movie, it’s actually a violent R-rated romance geared toward the sensibilities of “14-year-old bookish girls,” as director Guillermo Del Toro described it in a recent preview screening. As in Del Toro’s chilling The Devil’s Backbone,the apparitions represent the sins of the past, writ here on a familial instead of a national scale. As such, they’re more tragic than terrifying, which, on the one hand, perfectly fits the swooning Gothic atmosphere. On the other, this means the scariest scenes of the movie appear early on, with diminishing thrills after that. [Katie Rife]
Coming off of the positive critical buzz surrounding 2016’s Hushand Ouija: Origin Of Evil, [director Mike] Flanagan decided to re-team with Hush producer Netflix for a film adaptation of Gerald’s Game. It’s not an easy sell: Not only is King’s book structured in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to adapt—much of it takes place inside the mind of the main character, Jessie (Carla Gugino), as she lies handcuffed to a bed, alone and unable to escape, after her husband dies mid-kinky sex—but it deals with some very challenging themes of sexual abuse and the silencing of women. Thankfully, Flanagan’s film is up to the challenge, thanks in large part to Gugino and her compelling performance, which deftly expresses emotions from panic to grief to despair to rage, sometimes all at once. [Katie Rife]
Most horror is grounded in something real. In His House, the feature debut of writer-director Remi Weekes, it’s the terror of war-weary Sudan and the tired, huddled masses fleeing a brutal life that nonetheless shaped who they’ve become. Bol (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) travel by land and sea, eventually sailing under the cloak of night to seek asylum on the shores of the U.K. Their arrival is bittersweet, to say the least: An accident claims their daughter along the way, and they’re briefly interred at a cold, uncaring detention center, before being granted filthy housing in a nondescript English town. What follows is a potent, heart-wrenching spin on the classic haunted house story, buoyed by two stellar lead performances. [Anya Stanley]
Though this tense home-invasion thriller involving sensory impairment went straight to Netflix, Mike Flanagan’s ruthlessly efficient Hush would play like gangbusters on the big screen. At just 81 minutes, the film wastes little time setting up its cat-and-mouse game, which pits a deaf novelist (Kate Siegel) against the psychopath stalking the perimeter of her secluded country home. The heroine’s impairment ratchets up the threat level (how can she fend off what she can’t hear?), and Hush toys with genre convention by unmasking the killer fairly quickly. Mostly, though, this is just an effectively straightforward exercise in suspense, one that further positions Flanagan—who also made the well-received Ouija prequel—as a filmmaker with a strong grasp on horror’s fundamentals. [A.A. Dowd]
Photo: I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House
I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House
The horror renaissance continued unabated in 2016, as films like The Witch, The Invitation, The Eyes Of My Mother, Under The Shadow, Don’t Breathe, brought increased respectability to this frequently disrespected genre. But one of the year’s most singular horror movies, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, still slipped through the cracks. Maybe it was the unwieldy title. Maybe it was the fact that the movie, an immersive sensory experience, went straight to Netflix. I’d wager the real reason Oz Perkins’ one-of-a-kind ghost story was slept on or even disliked (average grade from the A.V. Club comment community: C+) is that it’s entirely out of step with contemporary horror conventions and trends. It’s an exercise in pure unsettling atmosphere—one so off-kilter that it seems downright haunted itself. A small cult following, as opposed to widespread popularity, is probably apropos for something this rewardingly unusual. [A.A. Dowd]
Watching the big-screen version of It only emphasizes how strange Stephen King’s novel really is. Adapting a more than 1,000 page book into a feature film—or half of it, as director Andrés Muschietti has done here—is a daunting task in and of itself, let alone a novel that features a cosmic turtle and an immortal shape-shifting clown who feeds off of the fear of children. In adapting It for the screen, writers Chase Palmer, Gary Dauberman, and Cary Fukunaga (the latter of whom was also attached to direct at one point) have made some significant changes from King’s book. Some are for the better and some are for the worse, but they’re all in the service of conventional three-act storytelling… [Katie Rife]
It sounds like the stuff of slumber parties, a cautionary tale to be whispered by flashlight or embellished over a flickering flame: Sleep with the wrong person, as the teenage heroine of It Follows does, and the nameless thing will come for you. On the outskirts of Detroit, Jay (Maika Monroe) finds herself the target of this relentless, shape-shifting entity—a curse passed on through sex with Hugh (Jake Weary), her handsome but mysterious new squeeze. As he explains, only the afflicted can see the specter, which will sometimes take the form of someone she knows. It will follow her, persistently but always at a walk, until she either falls into its clutches or passes the burden to a new sexual partner. “Never go anywhere with only one exit,” Hugh warns. There’s a primal, ingenious simplicity to that setup, one that writer-director David Robert Mitchell mines for one enormous scare after another. [A.A. Dowd]
Writer-director Frank Darabont often seems like Stephen King’s biggest fan; of all the filmmakers who’ve tackled King’s work, he’s put the most faith in the source material, for better (by sticking with The Shawshank Redemption’s low-key authenticity) and worse (by dutifully echoing the overblown, corny weaknesses of The Green Mile). So it’s no great surprise that he operates by the book for much of the King adaptation The Mist. What is surprising is how he rebounds from his weak, awkwardly compressed opening to produce one of the scariest King films since Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. [Tasha Robinson]
“An animal that’s tasted human flesh isn’t safe.” This line of dialogue, spoken halfway through the film by a father who has yet to discover the dark secret that’s upended both his daughters’ lives, could also serve as the thesis statement for French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s Raw. The film gained an unfortunate reputation as a gross-out cannibal shocker on the festival circuit, and while that categorization is not entirely, technically incorrect—this is a piece of body horror, and an intensely visceral one—it detracts from the striking imagery and layered symbolism of Ducournau’s uncommonly assured debut feature. [Katie Rife]
There’s a moment in Under The Shadow where the heroine does something that people in haunted-house movies almost never do: She grabs her child and bolts straight out the front door. Recent additions to the genre have devised some clever justifications for keeping the characters planted, ranging from financial incentive to house arrest to the explanation that the haunters will simply follow the haunted to their new digs. But Under The Shadow cuts through all that noise, allowing its scared-witless protagonist to make a sensible break for it. Trouble is, this young mother lives in Tehran circa 1988, and in her instinctive dash for safety, she fails to cover her head with a hijab. Forget abandoning the haunted house. How many horror movies feature someone fleeing the unholy terror in their home, only to be arrested for not wearing proper attire in public? [A.A. Dowd]
Unfriended, a fiendishly clever fright flick, may be the most ingenious addition to the “horror movies that present themselves as raw documentary footage” genre since the original Paranormal Activity. The film unfolds entirely within the frame lines of a teenage girl’s laptop screen, its characters squeezed into the tiny boxes of a group video chat, its protagonist toggling frantically between various browsers as her evening web time becomes an online nightmare. There’s some precedent for this premise—last year’s Open Windows attempted something similar, as did the Joe Swanberg short in V/H/S—but the filmmakers here completely commit to their gimmick, turning its limitations into benefits and exploiting the chosen technology for maximum effect. In the process, they hit the refresh button on the entire found-footage format. [A.A. Dowd]
