The 25 Scariest Movies on Netflix: ‘Pearl,’ ‘The Conjuring,’ ‘Fear Street,’ and More

‘Jaws’ (1975)

‘Jaws’ is a lot of things: The progenitor of the Summer blockbuster, an action film, a thriller, a smear campaign against the great white shark that has had severe ecological effects for decades. But what it starts out as, at the very least, is a peerless horror film. The menacing score from John Williams soundtracks the film’s iconic opening scene, where a young woman is attacked and pulled by an unseen force. Decades of cultural osmosis (and also the film’s title) make what’s lurking underneath the waters of Amity Island obvious to any viewer, but that doesn’t change the tension and terror director Steven Spielberg mines out of keeping the creature of the deep out of sight. As the film progresses to showing the great white it loses a bit of its fear factor, but the opening inspired decades of oceanic phobias for a reason. —WC

‘As Above, So Below’ (2014)

A ridiculous and often corny found footage film made during the format’s early 2010s heyday, ‘As Above, So Below’ nonetheless has enough juice in its tank to provoke some frights. John Erick Dowdle’s film stars Perdita Weeks as an archaeologist searching for the Philosopher’s Stone, who gathers a crew to raid the catacombs of Paris. Things take a turn for the worse when they get trapped miles underground, and spirits and horrors begin to reveal themselves. The film gets a bit silly, but moves at a brisk pace from one setpiece to the next to keep the viewers on their toes. And, if you have any claustrophobia whatsoever, the movie’s dusty caverns will haunt your nightmares. —WC

‘The Birds’ (1963)

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s last great classics, ‘The Birds’ is terrifying precisely because it’s so withholding. A slow burn, the main horror of the premise — birds turning on and attacking the populace of a small island town — isn’t the scariest on paper. What makes it great is how much Hitchcock withholds, refusing to offer a pat explanation for why the forces of nature have come for this community. It makes every scene in the film, including the iconic schoolhouse swarm sequence, much scarier, the product of a danger both natural and inexplicable. —WC

‘Psycho’ (1960)

The shower scene of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ is so firmly embedded in our cinematic language that it’s hard to remember how terrifying it was when it first shocked audiences in 1960. Even still, the prototypical slasher film still terrifies thanks to Anthony Perkins’ disarming portrayal of the disturbed Norman Bates. At first a pleasant momma’s boy that Janet Leigh encounters in a roadside motel, Perkins makes it clear from the first second he’s on screen that there’s more troubling Bates than meets the eye, and digging into what really haunts this man proves the film’s core. Hitchcock is on his a-game in ‘Psycho,’ turning in a masterpiece of suspense that never slacks for a second, but it’s Perkins’ all-time great genre performance that elevates ‘Psycho’ into a truly terrifying experience. 

‘Pearl’ (2022)

Ti West’s ambitious, decade-hopping ‘X’ trilogy has its highs and lows, but its middle-portion ‘Pearl’ is almost universally seen as the high-point for a reason. A prequel to the original ’70s porno slasher ‘X,’ ‘Pearl’ casts a terrific Mia Goth as the young farmhand of the title in a 1930s melodrama turned psychological thriller, exploring how she goes from a wide-eyed aspiring starlet to a cold-blooded killer. It’s a story more poignant than scary, but Goth’s unnerving performance as a woman that’s always had a little darkness within her — and a memorably messed up one-shot monologue — gives the cost-of-fame parable plenty of blood-curdling power of its own. —WC

‘Annabelle’ (2014)

Chucky is one of the most beloved slasher villains of all time, but past his ‘Child’s Play’ debut, Don Mancini’s murderous dolly has rarely actually been scary. ‘Annabelle,’ the first spinoff in Atomic Monster’s sturdy ‘Conjuring’ franchise, plays a bit like a gender-reversed Chucky, and handily out-terrors its obvious inspiration. The prequel follows Mia (the aptly named Annabelle Wallis), a pregnant wife who receives a beautiful porcelain doll from her husband. But when devil worshippers attack their home the doll becomes the conduit of an evil spirit. ‘Annabelle’ isn’t a perfect horror film, with a very formulaic screenplay and sometimes cheap production value, but it succeeds at building a tense, gothic atmosphere, and its scares are among the best of the ‘Conjuring’-verse. —WC 

‘The Babadook’ (2013)

In the last 20 years, no director has come to her first feature so fully formed as both a storyteller and a master of cinema as actress-turned-writer/director Jennifer Kent. Kent’s tale of a widowed mother (Essie Davis) battling her son’s fear of a storybook character come to life is hide-under-your-seat terrifying, but instead of relying on lazy scare tricks that have come to define the genre in recent years, Kent uses carefully crafted compositions and clockwork-like precision to build tension and draw viewers into a scene. Kent is not simply a master technician, but one who uses the horror genre to tackle a subject (the burden of motherhood) that doesn’t get discussed in polite company and creates something that is far more hard-hitting than any “important” piece of Oscar bait. —CO
 

‘The Perfection’ (2019)

After getting famous for playing Type A perfectionist Marnie in ‘Girls,’ Allison Williams started bringing that same tense, controlling energy to the horror genre, in breakout hits like ‘Get Out’ and ‘M3gan.’ In between the two films that earned her an unexpected scream queen reputation, she starred in ‘The Perfection,’ one of the weirdest horror movies Netflix has ever released. Richard Shepard’s 2018 film follows Williams’ Charlotte, a talented former cellist who reconnects with her mentor Anton (Steven Weber) and romances his new student Lizzie (Logan Browning). It quickly becomes obvious that Charlotte is hiding secrets, but the film cleverly uses Williams’ reputation from past roles as a front to hide much darker twists from plain view. To say more would spoil, but the film goes to truly gruesome and unpredictable places. —WC

‘The Perfection’ Is a Gayer, Gorier, Goofier ‘TÁR’ — and Fringe Netflix at Its Finest

‘The Platform’ (2019)

‘Cube’ meets ‘The Menu’ in this chilling contained horror movie about inmates fighting over gourmet food in a massive vertical prison. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s twisted allegory for the dangers of human greed and individualism boasts one of the most unique horror concepts we’ve seen in years, and finds a way to make its dystopian morality play believable with stunning production design. Come for the creepy premise, stay for some of the most unique sets you’ll find on Netflix. —CZ

‘Apostle’ (2018)

Gareth Evans proved he can direct action as well as just about anyone with ‘The Raid: Redemption,’ but with ‘Apostle,’ he showed audiences that horror is firmly within his wheelhouse as well. This stellar folk horror effort tells the story of a man (Dan Stevens), who infiltrates a religious cult on a remote island in an attempt to extract his sister from it, but what he finds is more horrifying than anything he could possibly imagine. —CZ

‘Blood Red Sky’ (2021)

One of the more fun Netflix original horror movies in recent memory, Peter Thorwarth’s ‘Blood Red Sky’ gets more mileage out of its ‘vampires on a plane’ story than it had any right to. While the German hijacking thriller may never get as gory as its wild logline suggests, it makes up for it in enough psychological drama to make for a highly entertaining viewing. While the idea sounds like pure camp, it takes itself more seriously than one might think and delivers some real scares in the process. —CZ

‘Veronica’ (2017)

‘[REC]’ filmmaker Paco Plaza caused a stir in 2017 when his horror movie ‘Veronica’ became a viral sensation on Netflix. The film is a fictional account of an alleged true story which occured in Madrid in 1991, where a young woman died suddenly a few months after using her Ouija board. In Plaza’s film, a teenage girl tries to make contact with her dead dad using a Ouija board during a solar eclipse. The girl’s friends join her, but soon all three realize that their plan to reach the dead has had horrific consequences. Social media erupted in 2017 when the film hit streaming, with many subcribers saying they had to turn off the movie midway through its runtime because it was just too terrifying. —ZS

‘Cargo’ (2019)

Martin Freeman must protect his daughter from a zombie outbreak in ‘Cargo,’ a Netflix horror offering that also tackles environmentalism and colonialism. Taking a page from ‘A Quiet Place,’ which also explored parenting under unique apocalyptic circumstances, ‘Cargo’ stands out from the pack by asking viewers to imagine what they might do if they knew their life was doomed but they could still offer their child hope. As the world continues to become a dark and unrecognizable place, that seed of hope just might be the key to overcoming insurmountable odds, whether it’s a zombie infestation or the chance to right the wrongs of the past in the hopes of a better future. —ZS

‘1922’ (2017)

Thomas Jane gives his best performance in ages in this poetic take on the Stephen King novella of the same name. In ‘1922,’ a guy kills his wife and feels guilty about it. That’s the gist of its premise, and while nothing groundbreaking, the story mines a degree of profundity out of the traditional supernatural thriller tropes at its core. As directed by Zak Hilditch (whose 2013 debut ‘These Final Hours’ was an expressionistic apocalyptic tale), ‘1922’ has the merits of a solid ‘Tales From the Crypt’ or ‘Masters of Horror’ episode, with a straightforward story that folds the delicate visual language of a rural Terrence Malick drama into the mold of existential horror. The result suggests what might happen if Malick took at stab at ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ with a mentally disturbed male protagonist straight out of King’s ‘The Shining.’ So while not the most original or surprising King story, it hits a lot of the right notes. —ZS

‘His House’ (2020)

This tender but terrifying Netflix movie tells the story of two Sudanese asylum-seekers who arrive in Britain with their demons in tow. One of the best debut films of 2020, Remi Weekes’ shrewd, tender, and often terrifying ‘His House’ begins with a clever premise — the immigrant experience as a horror movie — and expands on that idea in knowing and unexpected ways. Whereas a lesser film might have condescended to these characters and mined easy scares from the indignities of the assimilation process, Weekes’ dingy chiller implicitly recognizes that life would be difficult for a grieving Black couple who show up in England with nothing but each other and a few trinkets to their names, and it never stops using its genre as a torch to illuminate the specific forms those shadowed difficulties might take. —ZS

‘The Ritual’ (2018)

Horror favorites like Guillermo del Toro and Mike Flanagan took to social media in 2018 to champion David Bruckner’s lost-in-the-woods chiller ‘The Ritual.’ The film stars Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, and Sam Troughton as four friends who get together to honor the memory of one of their late pals by setting out on a hiking trip through Sarek National Park in northern Sweden. The forest, however, is hiding some dark secrets, and it doesn’t take long for the group to be put in jeopardy after they discovery something terrifying is lurking about. Del Toro ‘highly recommended’ the movie to his followers and called it ‘amazing and scary.’ Flanagan, meanwhile, said the film was ‘seriously great’ and ‘dripping with tension.’ —ZS

‘Creep’ (2014)

Just when you thought the found footage horror genre had hit its limit, Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass dropped ‘Creep’ to get fans excited about the subgenre all over again. Brice plays a down-on-his-luck filmmaker who answers an online ad to film the eccentric Josef (Duplass) for an entire day. Filming around Josef’s family cabin in Northern California, the director soon realizes that not everything is as it seems. The first part of ‘Creep’ has an oddly hypnotic quality, with Duplass starring in what feels like a performance art piece. As the day goes on, the dynamic between the two characters gradually mutates and becomes more imbalanced until Josef makes a startling revelation late at night and things become unrelentingly creepy. The revelation forces the director to flee the cabin, and that’s when ‘Creep’ goes from hypnotic chiller to scary good horror movie. —ZS

‘Under the Shadow’ (2016)

Jump scares and a frantic parent shielding her child from ominous supernatural forces: These tropes are hardly new to the horror genre, but they receive a fresh spin in ‘Under the Shadow,’ the feature-length debut of Iranian director Babak Anvari. The Tehran-set story takes place in 1988, as Iraqi bombs rain down at the height of the two countries’ war, an enticing historical backdrop for things that go bump in the night. On the face of it, the setting of ‘Under the Shadow’ may call to mind 2014’s black-and-white Iranian vampire tale ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,’ but the similarities stop with the nationality and demonic presence. Instead, ‘Under the Shadow’ bears a closer similarity to ‘The Babadook,’ which also focused on a mother protecting her kid from an an eerie, largely unseen figure who may or may not be a metaphor for psychological duress. —ZS

‘Cam’ (2018)

‘Handmaid’s Tale’ star Madeline Brewer and ‘The Love Witch’ breakout Samantha Robinson lead this eerie mind-fuck about our online personas. Brewer plays Alice, an ambitious camgirl who wakes up one day to discover she’s been replaced on her show with an exact replica of herself. This early twist sends the movie even deeper into Lynchian territory, but ‘Cam’ would have been plenty effective without it. Director Daniel Goldhaber, resisting the urge to confine the entire film to a computer screen (à la ‘Unfriended’) creates a thoroughly credible live-stream community. Lola’s web chamber is slathered in a neon pink light that turns everything it touches into the stuff of pure creepiness. ‘Cam’ is able to reflect the strange house of mirrors that we’re all lost in whenever we log on, and it’s able to viscerally convey the panic of trying to find a way out. The ultimate solution that Alice devises is too simple to be dramatically satisfying, but it’s believable enough to scare you off social media… if only for a couple of minutes. —ZS

‘Gerald’s Game’ (2017)

Mike Flanagan directs this compelling, faithful Netflix treatment of Stephen King’s book and gets help from his committed actors Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood. ‘Gerald’s Game’ centers on a woman chained to a bed after a kinky sex game gone wrong who is forced to wander the dark contours of her own mind. How do you make a movie out of that? Flanagan figured it out. It takes a specific kind of filmmaker to tackle the challenges of a single-set survival movie, whether it’s Danny Boyle in a canyon (‘127 Hours’) or Rodrigo Cortés inside a coffin (‘Buried’), but the closest cinematic comparison to ‘Gerald’s Game’ is James Wan’s ‘Saw,’ which also involves terrified people handcuffed against their will. Here, modern horror maestro Flanagan tackles the tricky proposition with a keen visual sense and plenty of disorienting twists. Just like King’s book, the film adaptation of ‘Gerald’s Game’ is disturbing, grotesque, and absurd. —ZS

‘Fear Street’ (2021)

The kitschy genius of Leigh Janiak’s ‘Fear Street’ trilogy, which the writer-director has adapted for Netflix from R.L. Stine’s young adult horror books of the same name, is that each of its three chapters offers its own full-tilt throwback at the same time as they all bleed together into a wholly modern story. That story — a frothy but fanged tale of cursed outsiders, cyclical violence, power-mad white men, and virtually every other evil that seems top of mind these days — is plenty of the moment in its subject matter, but even more so in its construction. At a time when the border that separates movies and television can seem like a relic from an outdated map, the ‘Fear Street’ trilogy makes those divisions seem more irrelevant than ever. Here we have three feature-length titles, each of which belongs to a different tradition of horror cinema. —ZS

‘I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House’ (2015)

Osgood Perkins broke out with his 2015 directorial debut ‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’ and most recently earned strong reviews with this year’s ‘Gretel and Hansel,’ but wedged in between those efforts is his sturdy Netflix original ‘I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.’ Ruth Wilson gives a commanding performance as a live-in nurse who comes to believe her elderly employer’s house is haunted. Perkins doesn’t waste a second in this 87-minute supernatural chiller that is further proof the writer-director is one of the most overlooked directors in the horror genre. —ZS

‘Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: The Autopsy’ (2022)

‘The Autopsy’ follows a simple-enough premise: A doctor is sent in to figure out what actually killed the victims of mining explosion. Without being bogged down by all the moving pieces of an hourlong plot, this becomes a showcase for the kind of precision you’d expect from a story told through precise incisions. Prior makes the most out of the tiniest details, be it Luke Robert’s menacing smile, the squelching sound of jostling organs, or the foot pedal controlling Dr. Winters’ (F. Murray Abraham) reel-to-reel recorder. And they’re all presented with the matter-of-fact confidence its protagonist has, even when facing his own death. Of all these stories, this is the one that perfectly harnesses that feeling of seeing something just slightly off, like looking into a stranger’s eyes and seeing them glow a little too brightly. It’s an episode built on tiny, controlled movements, setting the stage for a showdown for the fate of humanity that takes place in the cosmic battlefield of the mind. —SG

‘Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Graveyard Rats’ (2022)

Adapted from the 1936 debut work of author Henry Kuttner, the second in the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ follows another man deep in debt. Having already made peace with betraying his grieving clients and stealing from their dead loved ones, an undertaker faces off with a pack of rodents he claims is stealing his stolen treasure straight off the corpses still underground. There’s a straightforward-enough message to Vincenzo Natali’s film and that’s ‘don’t mess with the dead.’ Rather than picking apart the meaning in this perhaps no longer necessary cautionary tale (Are grave robbers working these days? Do people even get buried with jewels anymore?), the fun in this installment can be found by watching the writer-director and star David Hewlett surrender to the sinfully silly pitter-patter of rat-infested terror. From gross-out bouts of body horror (Rat! In! Mouth!) to a staggering underground environment reveal, ‘Graveyard Rats’ takes the simple concept of its title to spooky extremes for an almost faultless one-off scare. —AF

‘Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: The Viewing’ (2022)

Most of ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ is following characters who have fatally bad ideas. One of the reasons that ‘The Viewing’ works so well is that, for a decent chunk of its runtime, the characters invited to a private exhibition at the home of an eccentric gazillionaire believe they’re going to make it out of the experience with a rad story and nothing else to really worry about. Cosmatos and Stewart-Ahn whip up a central group of artists and scientists, gathered to take in a once-in-a-lifetime evening of ultra-rare booze, coke, and other…indulgences. Before things descend into chaos — when a room in a Cosmatos joint gets drenched in blood-red light, it’s only a matter of time — ‘The Viewing’ is extremely careful about where and when to start dialing up the uneasiness. It’s not just the gory consequences or the way Peter Weller delivers the phrase ‘shit your mind’ or what emerges from the Obelisk Room (or the greatest Michael McDonald smash cut in history). As with all great horror story transformations, it’s the sense that the world as it exists in this shiny, alternate version of September 1979 will never, ever be the same. —SG

Read IndieWire’s complete guide to “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.”