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The Best Horror Movies on Netflix Right Now

These are our favorite horror films currently streaming on Netflix.

Box Office Rap: Crimson Peak and Two Brands of Horror Nostalgia
Photo: Universal Pictures

Ever since audiences ran screaming from the premiere of the Lumière brothers’ 1895 short Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, the histories of filmgoing and horror have been inextricably intertwined. Through the decades—and subsequent crazes for color and sound, stereoscopy and anamorphosis—since that train threatened to barrel into the front row, there’s never been a time when audiences didn’t clamor for the palpating fingers of fear.

Into the new millennium, horror films have retained their power to shock and outrage by continuing to plumb our deepest primordial terrors and incarnate our sickest, most socially unpalatable fantasies. They are, in what amounts to a particularly delicious irony, a “safe space” in which we can explore these otherwise unfathomable facets of our true selves, while yet consoling ourselves with the knowledge that “it’s only a movie.”

At the same time, the genre manages to find fresh and powerful metaphors for where we’re at as a society and how we endure fractious, fearful times. For every eviscerated remake or toothless throwback, there’s a startlingly fresh take on the genre’s most time-honored tropes; for every milquetoast PG-13 compromise, there’s a ferocious take-no-prisoners attempt to push the envelope on what we can honestly say about ourselves. Budd Wilkins

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Annihilation

Annihilation (2018)

Alex Garland doesn’t so much adapt Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 bestseller Annihilation for the screen so much as he riffs on the novel’s trippy happenings, creating something almost entirely his own. Garland has the genre bona fides, and the writer of Sunshine and writer-director of Ex-Machina handles Annihilation’s hallucinatory setting with an appropriate and compelling sense of shifting unreality. The characters who enter the alien-terraforming Shimmer in the film are all people who’ve lost the will to live, yet their survival instincts compel them to self-defense against the horrors thrown at them by the film’s creepy elements. The Shimmer responds in kind, folding the terrors of characters about to meet their deaths into the flora and fauna that form out of corpses and sport gnarled looks of frozen anguish. Henry Stewart and Jake Cole


1922

1922 (2017)

Wilfred James (Thomas Jane) initially scans as a broadly brutish characterization given by an actor looking to disrupt his handsomely aloof image. But Jane’s dramatization of rage is haunting and shrewdly comical in its overt and ultimately moving über-manliness. The casual violence of Wilfred’s physicality is subtly calibrated, particularly the tension in his muscled back as he drinks lemonade after a hard day of murder. Complementing Jane’s portrait of coiled wrath, Molly Parker physicalizes the fear that informs every minute wrinkle of Arlette’s relationship with her husband, which the character attempts to paper over with bravado, inadvertently sealing her doom. Arlette is one of countless women who’re damned if they do and if they don’t, yet somehow the men are able to rationalize themselves as the victims. 1922 informs Stephen King’s pulp feminism with a primordial force. Chuck Bowen

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Before I Wake

Before I Wake (2016)

Before I Wake hints at a remarkably cruel psychodrama, physicalizing one of the worst and most common fears that orphans share: that they’re awful and unlovable, and therefore undeserving of parents. This fear is similar to the terror that parents have of inadvertently destroying or disappointing their children, and Mike Flanagan unites these anxieties with a ghoulishly inventive plot turn that he doesn’t fully explore. Flanagan is deeply invested in Cody’s (Jacob Tremblay) welfare, to the point of rigidly signifying the various manifestations of the boy’s nightmares, pigeonholing irrationality into a rational framework so as to justify a moving yet literal-minded finale. Chaos could’ve opened Before I Wake up, allowing it to breathe, though Flanagan’s beautiful and empathetic film cannot be taken for granted. Bowen


Cam

Cam (2018)

Compulsion is but one of an array of ideas informing Daniel Goldhaber’s lithely satirical take on the present state of online sex work. Based on screenwriter Isa Mazzei’s own experiences as a cam model, the film is neither plainly sex positive nor outright cautionary in its depiction of an up-and-coming streamer, Alice (Madeline Brewer), whose account is hacked and stolen by someone appearing to be her doppelgänger. Even as Cam gives new meaning to “ghosting” when Alice watches “herself” online, the film’s strengths come from an intimate familiarity with the anxieties of trying to thrive in a gig economy. Cam is also one of the first American films to grapple with the realities of being doxed to family and friends, further demonstrating its acumen as a check on the social pulse of a particular strain of U.S. conservatism that continues to obsess over and patrol sex work and those who participate in it. Clayton Dillard

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Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak (2015)

Guillero del Toro’s decision to explicitly underline the weaknesses of his proxy in Crimson Peak belatedly exposes prior stand-ins as equally shortsighted, and in the process he clarifies a thematic through line of his filmography. In retrospect, his fantasies are the opposite of escapes from harsh reality: It’s the real world, with its war and discrimination, that intrudes on the imagination, which can conjure up impressively detailed creatures and settings, but often struggles to map the complexities of emotion and history. Del Toro’s films tend toward the mythological, which is to say they’re timeless, rooted in a deep, era-nonspecific past. When social and historical context finally breach his microcosm, they expose the rifts of immaturity and sadness of a child who knows it’s time to grow up but cannot face adulthood. Cole


His House

His House (2020)

In Remi Weekes’s His House, the unresolved trauma that strips away at an immigrant family’s defenses is horrifyingly manifested when they move into their new home, and struggle to navigate a foreign culture that insists on assimilation. As a desperate-to-fit-in Bol (Sope Dirisu) and his wife, Rial (Wunmi Mosaku), contend with their adversities, their home becomes a dangerous battleground in which they’re forced to wrestle with their inner demons and find ways to adapt without fundamentally changing who they are. This house, with its porous walls and ragged, peeling wallpaper, is eerily symbolic of its new inhabitants’ damaged psyches, their grief and guilt manifesting as ghosts—most chillingly in the form of zombified migrants who died during the perilous crossing to England that opens the film. Derek Smith

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Ouija: Origin of Evil

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

If the prospect of having to adapt a spirit board for the screen is already a grim enterprise, to have to also follow up the unquailed disaster that was Stiles White’s Ouija is certainly a fool’s errand. Except Mike Flanagan, one of the most idiosyncratic horror directors currently working, is no fool. Time and again, he’s proven canny at sneaking an off-kilter and decidedly un-ironic sense of the macabre into big-studio horror productions, which typically depend on snarky humor and ostensibly fashionable scare tactics. At its best, Ouija: Origin of Evil shows up James Wan’s slick but impersonal craftsmanship by complementing goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas. Ed Gonzalez


The Swarm

The Swarm (2021)

In Just Philippot’s The Swarm, Virginie (Suliane Brahim) attempts to save her farm in the south of France from foreclosure by raising locusts, which she markets as farm feed. The insects aren’t proliferating, though, and the local farming community isn’t especially amendable to letting the fortysomething widow into their ranks. Meanwhile, her children wrestle with their own resentments, particularly with being associated with a woman with a strange, unpromising business. Philippot draws these various relationships sharply, establishing a robustly resonant foundation for the narrative’s metaphorical flourish when the locusts develop a taste for blood, growing out of control. Rather than rendering the bugs as flavorless CGI abstractions, Philippot utilizes real insects, filming them with a naturalistic intensity that’s unnerving. Bowen

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Under the Shadow

Under the Shadow (2016)

Writer-director Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow is an emotionally direct and realistic horror story centered around a socially isolated mother and child who are terrorized by eerie supernatural events. Living in Tehran under Ayatollah Khomeini’s reign and during Iran’s long war with Iraq, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) feels the world closing in on her, a suffocation that comes to feel almost tactile through the specificity with which Anvari details her day to day. The paranormal happenings are very likely a combination of the mother’s hallucinations and the child’s way of making sense of the violence the mother perpetrates as her sanity ebbs and flows, but Anvari keeps things creepy in part by leaving open the possibility that there really may be something supernatural gripping his milieu. Elise Nakhnikian


Unfriended

Unfriended (2014)

The computer screen to which we’re exclusively moored throughout Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended belongs to Blaire (Shelly Hennig), a popular high school girl who likes to while away her evenings listening to Spotify while she Skypes with her oft-shirtless boyfriend. One night their video chat is intruded on by several of their classmates—along with a pictureless mystery caller. It soon transpires that the caller in question is Laura Barnes, a former friend of Blaire’s who committed suicide after an embarrassing video went viral, apparently back from the grave to take digital revenge. There’s a ripped-from-the-headlines quality to all of this, but the purpose isn’t merely to sensationalize. Turns out, there are very real, very relevant contemporary anxieties coursing through this story, lending the horror a provocative charge. This is the rare breed of horror film to invent a gimmick and perfect it all at once. Calum Marsh

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Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies (2013)

Zombies make for strange characters in a film about love, or maybe love is just a strange subject for a zombie film. But Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies, based on the 2010 novel by Isaac Marion, marries love and zombies convincingly, if sometimes a bit sentimentally, professing that love cures all ills—and can even bring the dead back to life. This is Romeo and Juliet for a generation weaned on the charms of supernatural bad boys like Edward Cullen and Scott McCall. The ubiquity of Shakespeare’s original template allows Warm Bodies some leeway in terms of believability, where otherwise it sometimes strains against its own logic. But the film’s persistent charm encourages us to look past a few festering surface wounds and see the human heart beating inside, which is really what love is all about. Richard Scott Larson

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