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The Best Horror Movies on Hulu Right Now

We’re spotlighting our favorite movies currently streaming on Hulu.

Blade II
Photo: 20th Century Fox

Ever since audiences ran screaming from the premiere of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1895 short black-and-white silent documentary 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. Horror films remain perennially popular, despite periodic (and always exaggerated) rumors of their demise, even in the face of steadily declining ticket sales and desperately shifting models of distribution.

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. And some of our favorites are currently streaming on Hulu. Budd Wilkins

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Agnes

Agnes (2021)

The setup of writer-director Mickey Reece’s Agnes sounds like the typical starting point for a gauntlet of spiritual horror. At the start of the film, the eponymous nun (Hayley McFarland) is seen having a profane and apparently telekinetic outburst over dinner with her fellow sisters, after which two priests are dispatched to perform an exorcism on her. Midway through, though, the film abandons its exorcism conceit and switches to another nun’s perspective some time after she leaves the convent. Throughout this extensive stretch of the film, Reece’s script homes in on Mary’s (Molly Quinn) search for something new to be devoted to and live by, which she finds briefly in the company of a stand-up comedian (Sean Gunn) who was once a lover and teacher to Agnes. As such, Agnes files religion alongside other power structures that can provide comfort and stability but also create space for abuse of the power dynamic. The film is neither an explicit condemnation or celebration of earnest belief, but rather a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel. Steven Scaife


Alien

Alien (1979)

A film whose shadow looms darkly over subsequent decades of horror and sci-fi, Ridley Scott’s Alien is a master class in the evocation of escalating dread. Made forever distinctive by H.R. Giger’s visual rendering of psychosexual horror and biomechanical hellscapes, not to mention the unusual foregrounding of working-class and female characters, Alien is still—at its core—a prototypical haunted-house picture. It just happens to be one of the most artful, flawlessly executed examples of that type, the rationed-out shocks underscored by groundbreaking creature effects, jarring sound design, and the talents of a magnificent ensemble. It’s the stuff of primordial nightmare, mapping the infinite reaches of human anxiety—about everything from sexuality to technology—into two agonizing hours. Abhimanyu Das

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The Beta Test

The Beta Test (2021)

Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe’s The Beta Test is a livewire thriller-slash-parable, dashed with audacious elements of farce, about how a man rechannels his longings. It’s also one that’s governed by a knowing complicity with a devil. It’s easy to feel virtuous when decrying the crimes perpetuated by Harvey Weinstein, but what of the casual ways we manipulate and exploit one another daily? The film’s lynchpin is a series of scenes between Jordan (Cummings) and Jaclyn (Jaquelin Doke), a young assistant whom Jordan utilizes as a punching bag, a foil for his roiling frustrations. The film doesn’t play these moments for easy pathos, instead homing in on how each character is conditioning themselves, and one another, to play preordained roles. It’s as if Jordan is trying to teach himself how to behave as Scott Rudin, while Jaclyn is learning the rules of the survivor who flourishes (we feel her yearning for power as viscerally as his). The filmmakers understand that Jordan is a tormented schmuck who, with the right luck, could be allowed to turn into the monster of his dreams. Chuck Bowen



Black Death

Black Death (2010)

Grim aesthetics and an even grimmer worldview define Black Death, in which ardent piousness and defiant paganism both prove paths toward violence, hypocrisy, and hell. Christopher Smith’s 14th-century period piece exudes an oppressive sense of physical, spiritual, and atmospheric weight, with grimy doom hanging in the air like the fog enshrouding its dense forests. His story concerns a gang of thugs, torturers, and killers led by Ulric (Sean Bean), a devout soldier commissioned by the church to visit the lone, remote town in the land not afflicted by a fatal pestilence, where it’s suspected a necromancer is raising the dead. Dario Poloni’s austere script charts the crew’s journey into a misty netherworld where the viciousness of man seems constantly matched by divine cruelty, even as the role of God’s hand—in the pestilence, and in the personal affairs of individuals—remains throughout tantalizingly oblique. Nick Schager

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Blade II

Blade II (2002)

With Blade II, horror maestro Guillermo del Toro morphed a vampire hunter into the king of all insects. Even when del Toro is under studio control, there’s no suppressing his spiritual, entomological freaky-deakyness. The director has become a tortured lover of myths. He’s the fallen Catholic easily enamored by the stained-glass worldview of fairy-tale empires at the brink of destruction. In Blade II, signature del Toro obsessions are on fierce display: a monarch’s fear of aging, his incessant desire to suspend time, and his messianic opponent’s own conflicted sense of past and future. In the film, del Toro places less emphasis on the decadence of the vampire lifestyle than he does on the societal effects of its widening plague. Luke Goss’s Nomak asks in one scene: “Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?” What first seems like a cut-and-dry moral dilemma becomes an awesome, cautionary tale against cultural homogenization. Ed Gonzalez



Come True

Come True (2021)

In contrast to Kon Satoshi’s Paprika, which revels in the anarchic freedom of lucid dreaming, writer-director Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True specializes in the sense of powerlessness that makes nightmares so terrifying, stressing the horror side of horror sci-fi. Burns trades jump scares for slow POV tracking shots, their inexorable drifting movement plunging us into shadows where Jungian archetypes hang upside down and the silhouette awaits with glowing eyes. This device reproduces the feebleness experienced by the film’s angst-ridden protagonist, Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), during sleep paralysis, that state in which dreamers are, say, confronted by an incubus, and attempt to scream or jerk awake but find their muscles unresponsive. Rather than subjecting dreams to the logic of narrative cinema, which would neutralize their potential to both fascinate and terrorize, Burns allows his subject matter to suggest all manner of formal deviations from genre expectations. William Repass

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Depraved

Depraved (2019)

What does a Frankenstein figure look like today? According to Larry Fessenden’s Depraved, he’s a once-noble guy set adrift by male ego and shady benefactors. The film paints multiple psychological portraits that are sad, angry, and strangely beautiful. It shows us the mind of not just PTSD-afflicted field surgeon Henry (David Call), but also that of his sewn-together “monster,” Adam (Alex Breaux), and his assistant and Big Pharma bankroller (Joshua Leonard). Throughout, the film remains firmly focused on its thesis of Frankenstein as a lens for examining modern society. Fessenden diagnoses the rot of our era through these solipsistic men that pour their prejudices and their insecurities into Adam, an open book eventually read back to its authors with a violence they cultivated themselves. Scaife



Drag Me to Hell

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Many horror films from the 2000s are so eager to splatter and slice their way into our hearts that they end up covering their canvases in bloody clichés. Not so with Sam Raimi’s masterfully paced throwback, which is smart enough to withhold its more disturbing visceral elements until the very last moment. This directorial restraint allows the perfectly calibrated sound design and dread-inducing mise-en-scène to drive the viewer mad with anticipation. Anchored by Allison Lohman’s brilliant performance as a loan officer fated for Hades’s gallows, Drag Me to Hell is as much about greed as it is culpability, or more specifically our arrogant attempts to cover up sin even when the devil herself is staring us down. Glenn Heath Jr.

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Alone

Hunter Hunter (2020)

Across Hunter Hunter, writer-director Shawn Linden links us empathetically to every member of a family living off the grid, rather than merely favoring Mersault (Devon Sawa) and his determination to remain in the wild. His wife, Anne (Camille Sullivan), isn’t written as a one-note nag of a wife, but as a poignant fount of common sense, and his 13-year-old daughter, Renee (Summer H. Howell), is shown to be torn between being a hunter and a normal little girl. Linden skillfully draws us into this narrative, emphasizing the nuts and bolts of hunting and the terrifying anonymousness of the drab and shadowy woods, before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety. In the end, the wolf that torments them throughout the film is revealed to be the lesser of two evils, and it’s here that Hunter Hunter deviates from traditional survivalist tropes, drifting into the realm of neurotic and nihilistic horror. Bowen



In the Earth

In the Earth (2021)

Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth feels like a palate cleanser for the English filmmaker, a return to his gnarly, DIY roots after his unimaginative adaptation of Rebecca. Like the films on which Wheatley built his reputation, namely Kill List and Sightseers, In the Earth is a collision of genres: a darkly comic story of English manners, a cabin-in-the-woods thriller, pagan horror, and environmental parable. This film is also, like Doug Liman’s recent Locked Down, a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, though Wheatley has seized on an element of pandemic life that other filmmakers have yet to acknowledge: the escalating fetishizing of the remote country in the wake of a sickness that’s confined people indoors. Wheatley perversely, cheekily follows characters who flee into the woods implicitly on the run from a virus only to find that nature has more than one way of exacting its wrath. Bowen

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Let Me In

Let Me In (2010)

Matt Reeves’s amplification of Let the Right One In’s study of human loneliness and the prickly crawlspace between adolescence and adulthood isn’t even the filmmaker’s greatest coup; it’s Let Me In’s rooting of its story in March 1983, in a bleak region of New Mexico where no one moves to, only runs away from. Reeves, who wasn’t too much older than Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in that year, prominently foregrounds a televised speech that Ronald Reagan gave around that time (his budgetary-obsessed Star Wars one, no doubt), so that Let Me In becomes impossible to read just as story of a boy who feels awfully lonely. By setting the story in this time of brutal economic discontent, of rampant divorce among baby boomers, Reeves gives his story great gravitas, conflating the political with human feeling so that Owen’s struggle becomes that of an entire nation of suffering, desperate, naïve people looking for a savior. Gonzalez



Let the Right One In

Let the Right One In (2008)

Not unlike Matt Reeves’s remake, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is, in its color scheme and emotional tenor, almost unbearably blue. When Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a 12-year-old who’s perpetually bullied at school, meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), the mysterious new girl at his apartment complex, one child’s painful coming of age is conflated with another’s insatiable bloodlust. The film treats adolescence, even a vampire’s arrested own, as a prolonged horror—life’s most vicious, unforgiving set piece. This study of human loneliness and the prickly crawlspace between adolescence and adulthood is also an unexpectedly poignant queering of the horror genre. Don’t avert your eyes from Alfredson’s gorgeously, meaningfully aestheticized vision, though you may want to cover your neck. Gonzalez

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Little Joe

Little Joe (2019)

With Little Joe, Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence, as the film sometimes suggests less a drama than a persuasively argued thesis. As in Amour Fou, the filmmaker is concerned with how society governs people with mores that are communicated so early and consistently in their lives as to seem subliminal. In contemporary society, we’re conditioned to accept a ritualized alteration of work and home life that can numb us to individual desires or even render them imperceptible. In Little Joe, this numbing process is sped up with a chilling inciting incident: the invention of a flower that’s either a gift or a curse. Bowen



Oculus

Oculus (2013)

Oculus begins in dreams before freely hopscotching between Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim’s (Brenton Thwaites) present-day sleuthing and the horrors that, 11 long years ago, sent her to foster care and him to a mental institution. Through a mini-triumph of montage, what begins as run-of-the-mill backstory vomit is thrillingly repackaged as an almost-Lynchian duet between warring states of consciousness. The story’s antique wall mirror, as it tightens its grip on the brother and sister, forces them to waltz alongside their younger selves during their parents’ (Katee Sackhoff and Rory Cochrane) last days, and subsequently the depth of the siblings’ fraught relationship to their shared past is put into poignant focus. Throughout, Mike Flanagan’s keying of his formalist frights to his characters’ subjectivities makes Oculus both a scarier and wittier haunted-house attraction than James Wan’s The Conjuring. Gonzalez

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Possessor

Possessor (2020)

Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor is obsessed with tensions between mind and body, and old and new technologies. An analog man in a digital world, Cronenberg invests a narrative along the lines of his father David’s eXistenZ and Christopher Nolan’s Inception with psychedelic imagery and jolts of gouging, bone-splitting, unambiguously in-camera body horror that rival anything in modern cinema for tactility and pure outrageousness. In the process, he imbues Possessor with a disturbing irony: The film’s violence serves as a kind of relief for its perpetrators, who’re displaced by technological doodads and come to long for tangibility, corporeal terra firma, no matter how perverse. Bowen



A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place (2018)

A Quiet Place contributes a strikingly original monster to the genre of horror films focused exclusively on surviving an invasive threat. The big bad at the center of John Krasinski’s film is a species of flesh-eating hellion that happens to be blind, and thus its potential prey can successfully evade capture by being silent at all times. When the bonds between the Abbotts are tested by the external threat of the alien invaders, the viscerally physical ways in which they protect each other from harm are powerful, and it becomes clear that these characters have had to learn different and perhaps more subtle methods of communication due to the circumstances in which they’ve found themselves. The pleasure of the film is in Krasinski’s commitment to imagining the resourceful ways in which a family like this might survive in this kind of world, then bearing witness to the filmmaker’s skillfully constructed methods of putting them to the ultimate test, relentlessly breaking down all of the walls the family has erected to keep the monsters out. Richard Scott Larson

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Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

Santa is one bad mamma jamma in Writer-director Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a yuletide fable that’s equal parts sincere, silly, and scary. Helander’s direction is assured in a manner that inspires flattering comparisons: his softly lit scenes of adolescent fear and fantasy, and of father-son estrangement, recall early Spielberg; Pietari’s (Onni Tommila) trinket-adorned room and makeshift alarm clock (involving keys, sweater thread and a basin) resembles Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s whimsies; his compassionate black comedy evokes Joe Dante’s work; and his eerie snowbound setting and premise harkens back to John Carpenter’s The Thing. This last comparison is also apt in terms of aesthetics, as Helander and cinematographer Mika Orasmaa’s widescreen compositions capture a sense of unsettling scale and unseen terror as well as, in domestic sequences, a warmth and intimacy that helps compensate for somewhat sketchy characters. Schager



The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

Super Dark Times (2017)

The boys in Kevin Phillips’s Super Dark Times, a coming-of-age story that unexpectedly transforms into a serial-killer thriller, engage in realistic adolescent attitudinizing. In between riding bikes down tree-lined residential streets, they discuss masturbation schedules, mock their male classmates and assess how hot the girls are, even the female teachers, and debate who would be worth having sex with even if you had to do it in front of the whole student body. These all feel like ways that awkward young men would kill time when they don’t yet have access to drugs or booze. The bloodletting bursts into Super Dark Times as shockingly as it would the characters’ lives, like a buck through a classroom window. But the violence also emerges organically from their teenage posturing, making it seem hauntingly plausible, even if you can also spot how it depends on screenwriter contrivance. Three teens help cover up a crime, and the rest of the film deals with the emotional fallout. The characters’ immaturity is exposed and amplified by the circumstances, revealing that, of course, these teens aren’t old enough to remotely deal with this sort of thing. Henry Stewart

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Titane

Titane (2021)

Julia Ducournau’s Titane expands on the filmmaker’s interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration. It also ratchets up Raw’s combination of body-horror explicitness and art-film abstraction, making for a wild ride through a female serial killer’s techno-sexuality that would make J.G. Ballard blush. At question early on in the film is the way bodies become seen as machines, instrumental objects with components and fluids onto which we project our desires. Alexia’s (Agathe Rousselle) role as a dancer who gyrates on top of expensive vehicles makes her into a sexual object for the men who flock to watch her, but for Alexia it’s clearly always been about a fusion with the metal. The pure audiovisual trippiness of Titane’s final two thirds is welcome—in particular an excursus into the bodily dangers of fire zones and an enigmatic, homoerotic sequence featuring Vincent’s firefighters dancing in slow motion to a Future Islands song. And the film’s exploration of corporeal transformations both willed and unwelcome—based in the alchemy of flesh, gender, and the desire for inorganic hardness—makes for some imagery that taps into deep anxieties about the uncanniness of inhabiting the fluid-filled sack that we call a body. Pat Brown



Unsane

Unsane (2018)

In 1959, Georges Franju’s masterpiece Head Against the Wall used a man’s confinement at a sanitarium as an analogy for the listlessness of French youth—a generation old enough to remember the degradations and traumas of World War II but now confronted with the promise of a passive, consumer-driven middle-class existence. Steven Soderbergh’s down and dirty Unsane functions in a similar way, using the experience of institutionalization to probe the mores around mental health in a privatization-mad America. Few if any Hollywood-adjacent filmmakers have put as much brain power into making the digital revolution work for them as Soderbergh has, and even Unsane’s most ridiculous moments coast on the sheer energy of aesthetic gamesmanship. Shooting on an iPhone 7, the filmmaker continues finding economical solutions in a pinch. Soderbergh remains a major artist at the peak of his powers, fascinated by the textures of the contemporary world—the actual one, not the one we usually pay to see at the movies. Even if he’s just flexing a new mode of production, the result is still 98 minutes of shredding, analeptic cinema. Steve Macfarlane

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The Vigil

The Vigil (2019)

Keith Thomas’s The Vigil has a premise so inherently creepy that it’s a wonder that it’s never been used as grist for the horror mill until now. Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis), a recent defector from the Hasidic Jewish community of Brooklyn’s Borough Park, is approached outside of a support group meeting for others like him by his former rabbi (Menashe Lustig), who asks him to serve as a “shomer” for the night. Seemingly taking a cue from André Øvredal’s similarly corpse-centric horror thriller The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Thomas’s confidently constructed debut hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth. In a particularly patient and assured long take, we watch as Yakov sits down at a table, his back to Mr. Litvak, and pops in earbuds to listen to music. Nothing exactly happens in this sequence, but Thomas’s shadowy, lamp-lit composition invites us to survey every single inch of frame—to spot the corpse in motion or, a perhaps, a ghost in the corner of the screen. And as you stare at this scene for what comes to feel like an eternity, you may even start to see things that aren’t really there. Keith Watson



XX

XX (2017)

Women are underrepresented in horror. XX, then, is a humble gesture of correction, offering four shorts and a wraparound segment that are all written and directed by women, following female protagonists as they wrestle with exclusion and implicit social standards that may or may not extend to their male counterparts. XX utilizes the strength of the horror short: its brevity, which allows a filmmaker to point toward a social fissure and leave it hanging without the pressure of padding a running time with over-explanatory gimmickry. With the exception of “Don’t Fall,” these narratives are preoccupied with motherhood, particularly the way that a father can overshadow a mother without even consciously trying to, suggesting that children’s observation of this state of affairs is the first step to inoculating one into patriarchy. Binding these short films together are a series of elegantly chilling stop-motion pieces by Sofia Carrillo, which involve dolls in various poses of death and resurrection. In this context, their blank eyes connote rage against the machine. Bowen

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