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What To Watch
The 20 Scariest Things to Watch Right Now
Weak stomachs need not apply.
By Tudum Staff
Oct. 8, 2026
The 20 Scariest Horror Movies and TV Shows to Watch on Netflix - Netflix Tudum
There’s never a bad time of year to enjoy a few bumps in the night. In fact, true horror film and television aficionados crave the thrill of a good scare all year long. From gore fests and haunting encounters to existential horrors, there's no shortage of hair-raising content.
But horror is a spectrum, and when one wants truly goosebump-inducing, hold-your-breath, nightmare fuel, it can be hard to know what shows and movies will deliver. So, to make things a little easier (read: scarier), here are some of the scariest things you can stream now. You might want to grab a friend … and keep the lights on.
If you want to watch a scary movie …
Apostle
When Thomas Richardson arrives on a remote island off the coast of Wales in an attempt to rescue his kidnapped sister, he discovers something far more sinister is afoot. If you loved the cult shenanigans of movies like Midsommar and The Wicker Man, Gareth Evans’ Apostle should be next on your watch list. Starring Dan Stevens (Beauty and the Beast) and Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody), Apostle includes some of the most unnerving violence — and an assortment of just downright bad vibes — presented in a beautiful yet chaotic manner.
The Black Phone
It’s 1978, and a lurking kidnapper stalks the children of a Denver suburb. He’s called “The Grabber,” and Finney Blake (Mason Thames) and his younger sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), are both upset when a kid they know, Bruce, goes missing. Then Finney’s best friend is grabbed, Gwen starts having psychic dreams about the missing boys, and the worst happens: Finney is also abducted. Trapped in the basement of the Grabber (Ethan Hawke), Finney is desperate — until a broken phone in his cell starts ringing, and the voices of the Grabber’s past victims are supernaturally on the line to help Finney survive.
Brick
After experiencing the loss of a pregnancy, Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer) and Olivia (Ruby O. Fee) have been navigating a difficult time in their relationship. Olivia, feeling alone, decides it’s time to move on with her life and tells Tim she is leaving him. But when she opens the door to leave, the couple finds that their unit has been blocked off by a mysterious brick wall. And it’s not just Tim and Olivia who are trapped — their neighbors are also locked inside their own apartments. Now working together to find a way out, the building’s residents learn that there may not be an easy exit.
Don't Move
A grief-stricken woman heads into an isolated forest looking for a moment of peace when she unknowingly crosses paths with a serial killer. The man seems friendly enough when he first strikes up a conversation with Iris (Kelsey Asbille). But when the two prepare to leave the forest and go their separate ways, he injects her with a paralytic agent that gradually takes over her entire body. Now Iris has 20 minutes to run and find somewhere to hide before her entire nervous system shuts down. And if that’s not enough to hook you, Don’t Move was produced by legendary director Sam Raimi (Evil Dead).
Fear Street Part 1: 1994
Got a thing for slasher movies? Does the image of a scary knife-wielding maniac sound like it would add some excitement to your Friday night? Then the Fear Street trilogy is for you. With three stories set in different time periods (1994, 1978, and 1666), the series follows in the tradition of horror staples like Scream, Friday the 13th, and The Witch. All three Fear Street films are available to stream, so no need to wait years for sequels. One more note for the horror nerds out there: This trilogy is inspired by the famous eponymous series of novels by R.L. Stine (creator of Goosebumps), so you can revel in that knowledge while you watch.
Gerald's Game
Just one year before his work on The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan did what many believed to be impossible: He adapted Stephen King’s novel Gerald’s Game for the big screen. Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood play Jessie and Gerald, a couple who heads to their remote lake house for what’s supposed to be a romantic getaway. The simple vacation turns into a complete nightmare for Jessie when Gerald handcuffs his wife to the bed and attempts to enact a sexual assault fantasy. But Gerald has a heart attack and dies on top of her. Jessie becomes consumed by repressed memories and vivid hallucinations — and considers making a truly gruesome escape attempt.
The Ritual
Consider adding a dash of Norse mythology to your spooky film fest. This movie follows a group of reunited college friends on a trip into a Swedish forest, but what they don’t know is that insanity and horror await. From director David Bruckner (The Night House) and based on Adam Nevill’s novel, creature feature The Ritual is a first-class lesson on why you should probably go to a campsite instead of wandering into the darkest, spookiest part of the woods (just saying).
Run Rabbit Run
If you’ve missed seeing Sarah Snook (Succession) on your screen, you’re in luck. There’s plenty of drama to be had in this chilling psychological horror. Snook stars as Sarah, a fertility doctor who is forced to confront her past when her 7-year-old daughter starts behaving strangely and claims to be the sister that Sarah lost when she was young. As Sarah questions what’s happening to her daughter and why, her world begins to unravel, and the mystery threatens to destroy her family.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Leatherface returns in the sequel to the classic 1974 slasher film — and this time, he’s taking down urbanization one gentrifier at a time. When a group of young social media influencers and foodies travels to a Texas ghost town, they arrive bright-eyed and ready to capture content. Looking to transform the lone town into a social media paradise, the group’s plans are disrupted when Leatherface emerges. He immediately falls back into his bloody past as he hunts the young crowd disrupting his hiding spot. We hope they snapped all their selfies first.
Time Cut
The time-travel genre gets a chilling twist in this film about a young woman who goes back in time to try to save her sister from a grisly fate. When Lucy (Outer Banks’ Madison Bailey) discovers a time machine, she decides to go back to 2003 to stop a masked killer from murdering her older sister, Summer (Ginny & Georgia’s Antonia Gentry). Directed by Hannah Macpherson (T@gged) and written by Macpherson and Michael Kennedy (Freaky), Time Cut is sure to get your heart racing — while also channeling all that early millennium nostalgia.
Until Dawn
Loosely based on the 2015 PlayStation video game of the same name, Until Dawn is a survival horror that is sure to keep you up all night. In this case, that’s not such a bad thing. The film follows a group of friends who head to a remote valley in search of a family member who went missing there one year earlier. Upon their arrival, they are each picked off one at a time by a masked killer. But there’s a catch — when they mysteriously wake up at the start of the same night, the group soon realizes that they are fated to relive the horrors on a loop unless they can stay alive until dawn.
If you want to watch some horror TV shows …
All of Us Are Dead
In this Korean series, classrooms become battlegrounds as high school students are forced to fight for their lives after a sudden zombie virus spreads rapidly among their classmates. Over its 12-episode first season, the students form a disparate group, working together and fending for themselves after most of the adults all but abandon them. All of Us Are Dead is a bloody thriller that turns its central location into a terrifying prison for its heroes, all while using the zombie genre to examine topics of corruption, wealth inequality, and the myriad ways in which the older generation has failed young people.
Archive 81
In 1994, filmmaker Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi) began her PhD dissertation: a documentary about an apartment complex, the Visser, at the center of a suspected demonic cult. More than two decades later, a conservator, Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie), is tasked with traveling to a remote facility and reviving Melody’s tapes, which were damaged in a fire. That same blaze also killed many of the building’s residents — while Melody seemingly disappeared. As Dan watches the footage and unravels the mystery, he experiences horrific visions. Are they all in his head, or is there a larger, life-threatening conspiracy afoot?
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Do you remember Archie comics? The ones that serve as the foundation for the phenomenal Riverdale? Well, in 2018, Sabrina the teenage witch — one of the original Archie members — received her own modern update. It could’ve gone in many directions, but what we got in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a horrific, satanic retelling of the teenage witch’s exploits — filled to the brim with gore, teen drama, and more than enough pentagrams and goats. So make the room dark, light some candles, and get the séance going.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Flanagan’s limited series follows twin siblings Roderick (played by Bruce Greenwood in the present day and Zach Gilford in flashbacks) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell and Willa Fitzgerald, respectively), who have spent their lives building their pharmaceutical empire into an unprecedented success. So when Roderick’s disparate children — the company’s heirs — begin to die one by one in increasingly fantastic ways at the hands of a mysterious woman (Carla Gugino) from their youth, the siblings are forced to look back at the path that led them to their horrifying present.
The Haunting of Hill House
Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s seminal 1959 novel, this series follows the turbulent history of the Crain family after its first encounter with the titular haunted house. Over 20 years later, the five adult Crain siblings –– all clearly traumatized by their time at Hill House –– reunite with their estranged father (Timothy Hutton) after a second tragedy. It’s full of ghosts, jump scares, and extremely complicated sibling dynamics. Written by Flanagan (there’s that name again!) and featuring a number of standout performances, The Haunting of Hill House provides a terrifying and emotional update on a horror classic for the modern era. Just make sure you keep those tissues close.
Marianne
This French horror series was universally lauded by critics when it came out in 2019. The story follows horror author Emma Larsimon (Victoire Du Bois), who found fame through her book series about a witch named Marianne. Ready to move beyond the character who gave her her start and write other books, she ends the series. But Marianne has become so much more than a character in a book, and when Emma is called back to her coastal hometown, she discovers the witch is possessing people close to her, determined to stay “alive” through Emma’s writing.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
If you like your scares to be dread-inducing, working their way up to a shocking end, this show is for you. Created and showrun by Haley Z. Boston, and produced by the Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things), the eight-episode series follows Rachel (Camila Morrone), who is meeting her fiancé Nicky’s (Adam DiMarco) family for the first time, a few days before their small wedding ceremony. Rachel’s unease over the big day grows as Nicky’s family commandeers the planning, and strange things keep happening. When she discovers astonishing information about her own family, Rachel is forced to seriously consider the potential consequences of marrying the wrong person.
Stranger Things
Hawkins, Indiana, isn’t like other small towns. Set in the 1980s, the Duffer brothers’ series follows a group of young friends who encounter supernatural forces that turn their rural town upside down. Since its premiere in 2016, Stranger Things has seen the characters battle bone-chilling monsters like the Demogorgon, the Mind Flayer, and Vecna, and save their friends from near-death experiences. Now that this epic sci-fi series has wrapped up with its fifth and final season, fans can see the full extent of this twisted universe with its many horrors laid bare.
Wednesday
In Wednesday, the Addams Family is as creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky as ever. The series tells the story of the eccentric family through the eyes of the morbid yet witty Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega). After she’s sent away to boarding school at Nevermore Academy, where her parents first met, Wednesday investigates a string of mysterious murders while also working to master her psychic abilities. Now with two seasons streaming, the series features plenty of familiar faces, including the passionate Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones), strange Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen), and a helping hand in Thing (Victor Dorobantu), as well as new friends, like Wednesday’s werewolf BFF, Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers).
Number of recommendations may vary by region.
By Erin Corbett, Reyna Cervantes, Ananda Dillon, Phillipe Thao, and Caitlin Busch
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