What To Watch
24 Horror Movies to Watch When You Want a Good Scare
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
By Matthew Jacobs and Erin Corbett
March 4, 2026
24 Best Horror Movies to Watch for a Good Scare - Netflix Tudum
Horror never goes out of style, but the genre has become one of Hollywood’s most reliable moneymakers in recent years, lighting up the box office and giving viewers at home endless options for crowd-pleasing frights. It’s full of rich traditions that can be resurrected, reinvented, or subverted entirely. Some of the best directors working today are horror acolytes who have an uncanny ability to scare the masses.
Whether you want a classic ghost story, a thought-provoking social thriller, or an unbridled adrenaline rush, we’ve got you covered. These films are best watched at night with the lights turned off. Just be careful not to spill your popcorn everywhere when you leap off the couch in terror.
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If you want to watch a classic horror movie …
Jaws
Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic Jaws changed everything, from the director’s career trajectory and the release of summer blockbusters, to the intense fear some people now have of the ocean. The two-note theme that signals the shark’s approach is still one of the scariest — and most iconic — film scores ever written. But what’s most striking about Jaws all these years later is how withholding it is, the result being a suspenseful beachside horror that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The movie is a slow burn that focuses on character building over cheap thrills, and a lot of the film follows three guys swapping stories on a boat, which makes it all the more startling. Like anyone’s worst fears, Jaws’ menace will come when you least expect it and it’s a perfect summertime horror classic that withstands the test of time.
If you want to watch a found footage horror movie …
Creep
Mark Duplass and director Patrick Brice put an invigorating spin on the 2010s’ found footage craze with Creep, a two-hander about a videographer (Duplass) hired to record what he’s told is a diary meant for a dying man’s (Brice) unborn child. At first, the guy seems charming. Then, his eerie eccentricities start to show, and a sense of dread takes over. Maybe he’s not who he says at all. In a taut 77 minutes, Creep becomes an ominous battle of wills between two strangers in a dimly lit house. (Its sequel, starring Desiree Akhavan, is also available on Netflix.)
If you want to watch a funny horror movie …
Day Shift
Jamie Foxx as a pool cleaner whose real calling is hunting vampires? Yes please. J.J. Perry, a mixed martial arts master and longtime stuntman with movie credits that include Mortal Kombat and Iron Man, made his directorial debut with this raucous romp. In order to get out of debt and pay for his daughter’s tuition, Foxx’s hard-up Bud Jablonski must return to his slaying ways. He recruits an old buddy (Snoop Dogg) to help him out, and from there, Bud’s anti-bloodsucking adventures escalate. By the time a vampire (Karla Souza from How to Get Away with Murder, also available on Netflix) captures his family, Bud means business.
Vampires vs. the Bronx
Lorne Michaels produced this acclaimed romp, so you know its comedy plaudits are legitimate. Really, though: Vampires vs. the Bronx is a hilarious and clever standoff between a group of winsome teenagers and the bloodsuckers that have invaded the titular New York City borough where they live. Plenty of horror hits lean on social commentary, but this one tackles gentrification in ways that actually feel novel. It’s also incredibly charismatic, brimming with jokes that keep the messages from feeling too heavy-handed.
We Have a Ghost
Happy Death Day, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, and Freaky established Christopher Landon as one of the best directors of horror comedies working today. His ability to blend teen-friendly screams with sophisticated meta commentary about the genre makes him a perfect fit for We Have a Ghost, which Landon adapted from a short story by Geoff Manaugh. It’s about a family that moves into a home with a (mostly) friendly poltergeist (David Harbour) residing in the attic. Rising star Jahi Di’Allo Winston (Queen & Slim) plays the lead, with Anthony Mackie as his father, Jennifer Coolidge as a big-haired TV medium and Tig Notaro as a horror writer determined to capture the ghost.
Heart Eyes
For some, being single on Valentine’s Day can feel like the worst thing imagineable, but in this genre-bending slasher, you might be better off without a date. The movie follows the masked “Heart Eyes Killer” in a spree that targets unsuspecting couples on the most romantic day of the year. But this time, the killer chose to mess with the wrong couple. When Heart Eyes assumes Ally (Olivia Holt) and her colleague Jay (Mason Gooding) are romantically involved, they become the killer’s next target — and they decide it’s time to put an end to this killer for good. Heart Eyes blends elements of romance, comedy, and classic slasher horror for any movie lover who can’t decide on just one genre.
If you want to watch a supernatural horror movie …
The Deliverance
In Lee Daniels’ The Deliverance, Andra Day plays Ebony Jackson, a struggling single mother who moves her family into a new home looking for a fresh start. But the evil that lives there has other plans. Strange occurrences begin to happen inside the home that raise suspicions for Child Protective Services, which suspects Ebony of child abuse. As Ebony risks losing everything, she soon learns that these occurrences are demonic and seeks help in a spiritual battle to keep her family together. The film, which is inspired by a true story, “is supposed to scare you into believing in a higher power, because it actually happened,” Daniels told Netflix. “It’s a story about demonic possession and the power of faith that’s grounded in reality.”
His House
Another splashy Sundance title with political undercurrents, His House follows a Sudanese family who seek asylum in Britain. The home where they take shelter is a decaying shanty on the outskirts of London, surrounded by racist neighbors and paranormal sights. Wunmi Mosaku received a BAFTA nomination for her performance as a mother striving to preserve her native culture while assimilating within a community that doesn’t want her there. Her character’s fear is palpable, with possible terrors lurking in every corridor. This is a haunted-house movie with grand thematic significance that never skimps on the subgenre’s creeping pleasures.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
Oz Perkins is best known as Dorky David from Legally Blonde, but he’s also a gifted horror director — a fitting career path for the son of Anthony Perkins, aka Norman Bates himself. His second feature, after 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter, follows a live-in nurse (Ruth Wilson) caring for a novelist (Paula Prentiss) who spends her final days in a large, remote house. During her stay, the caretaker discovers ghostly secrets nestled throughout the estate. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, which Perkins wrote while processing his relationship with his own father, is an atmospheric slow burn brimming with gothic tension.
Malevolent
A crew of scam artists who fake supernatural encounters for money become caught up in a deadly trap when a woman hires them for an assignment at her remote estate. Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) and Angela (Florence Pugh), the brother-sister duo at the heart of the operation, use their late mother’s reputation for connecting with the dead as a selling point for Angela’s powers as a medium. But when Mrs. Green (Celia Imrie) hires them to stop the screaming she hears at her estate, the team soon learn they may have bitten off more than they can chew. As it turns out, the hauntings at this estate are very, very real.
Under the Shadow
Under the Shadow debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, after which it became one of the most celebrated horror movies of 2016. It’s a politically conscious supernatural story about a former medical student (Narges Rashidi) in war-torn Iran. When her young daughter (Avin Manshadi) insists that she senses some sort of insidious spirit in their house, things start to go bump in the night. Blending Islamic mythology and real-world terrors, Under the Shadow is guaranteed to induce chills with its nightmarish take on oppression.
Veronica
On the day of the 1991 solar eclipse, 15-year-old Verónica (Sandra Escacena) and her friends Rosa (Ángela Fabián) and Diana (Carla Campra) go into the basement of their Catholic high school to conduct a séance using a Ouija board. When something goes wrong, the girls forget one crucial step as they close their séance: saying goodbye to the spirit. Over the following days, strange occurrences begin at Véronica’s home, where she’s often tasked with babysitting her three younger siblings while their mom works long hours. Now the demonic force won’t let go unless she can find a way to right her earlier mistakes. The 2017 Spanish film is loosely based on the real-life death of an 18-year-old who reportedly experienced hallucinations and seizures after conducting a séance at her school.
If you want to watch a slasher horror movie …
Fear Street: Prom Queen
Sink your teeth into Netflix’s Fear Street series, based on R.L. Stine’s popular books, which unleash paranormal frights upon the fictional town of Shadyside. The latest installment, Fear Street: Prom Queen, travels back to 1988, where the senior It Girls are just dying to be crowned at the big dance. But there can only be one prom queen, and at Shadyside High, losing might not be the worst outcome. From there, you can relive the original trilogy, starting with a trip to 1994 in Fear Street Part 1, then Part 2 winds back to 1978, and Part 3 returns to Puritan times to explore the black magic that was a prelude to Shadyside’s murderous murk.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
This 2022 reboot of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre sees a Leatherface in the influencer age. The film follows sisters Lila (Elsie Fisher) and Melody (Sarah Yarkin) as they return to the rural Texas town of Harlow where Melody hopes to create a social media paradise. Melody’s business partner Dante (Jacob Latimore) is a developer who buys up most of the town to gentrify it, which leads to clashes between the crew and the maintenance person they’ve hired to help. That’s when the bloodbath begins in this modern incarnation of the franchise. But one person in particular makes this film a standout — and that’s Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré), Leatherface’s original lone survivor, who returns to Harlow to finally put an end to his violent spree.
There's Someone Inside Your House
After establishing his horror bona fides with the Creep movies, director Patrick Brice went full-throttle on the slasher genre. The aptly titled There’s Someone Inside Your House, adapted from a 2017 novel of the same name by Stephanie Perkins, follows an exchange student (Sydney Park) who’s still adjusting to life in a new town when her classmates start getting slaughtered left and right. High school, with its pent-up emotions and impressionable teenagers, has always been the perfect backdrop for a serial-killer showdown. These particular murders contain an added bite because the assassin wears masks that resemble the faces of the victims.
Time Cut
Travel back to the 2000s in this time-bending slasher starring Outer Banks’ Madison Bailey and Ginny & Georgia’s Antonia Gentry. Lucy Field (Bailey) discovers a time machine that takes her to 2003 — the year her older sister, Summer (Gentry), was murdered — as she hopes to prevent the crime that’s cast a shadow over her entire life. As is the case with all time-travel, Lucy has to consider how her actions in the 2003 timeline might affect her life in 2024. But dressed in her low-rise jeans, with Hilary Duff playing in her headphones, Lucy’s ready to take on both the challenges of time travel — and the masked killer who changed her family forever.
If you want to watch a psychological horror movie…
Don't Move
Don’t Move takes the idea of being frozen in fear to a chilling new level. Adam Schindler and Brian Netto’s horror thriller follows Iris (Kelsey Asbille), a grieving woman hoping to find solace deep in an isolated forest, where she encounters a stranger who injects her with a paralytic agent. With 20 minutes on the clock until the drug kicks in, Iris must run, hide, and fight for her life before the agent takes over her body and her entire nervous system shuts down. The film, produced by scare master Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead), also stars Finn Wittrock, Moray Treadwell, and Daniel Francis.
Gerald's Game
Like many who have read the Stephen King novel, director Mike Flanagan once called Gerald’s Game “unfilmable.” But he pulled off the impossible, adapting a book that largely takes place inside the protagonist’s head. That would be Jessie Burlingame (The Fall of the House of Usher’s Carla Gugino), handcuffed to a bed in an isolated lake house after her husband (Bruce Greenwood, also in Usher) has a sudden heart attack while attempting to spice up their sex life. Gerald’s Game is a riveting survival movie in which Jessie hallucinates a version of herself who’s capable of escaping her situation. It’s not for the faint of heart.
IT'S WHAT'S INSIDE
IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE is a college reunion gone horribly wrong. Shelby (Brittany O’Grady), her boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini), and their friends Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Reuben (Devon Terrell), Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood), Brooke (Reina Hardesty), and Maya (Nina Bloomgarden) reunite on the eve of Reuben’s wedding to celebrate his big day. But when Forbes (David Thompson) arrives with a mysterious suitcase, everything gets a little out of hand. What’s inside the suitcase, you ask? It’s a body-swapping machine that allows each of the crew to take a walk in one another’s shoes — literally. With a head-spinning series of twists and turns, and untimely deaths, this comedic psychological thriller will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.
In the Tall Grass
Nothing makes sense in the tall grass, and once you enter, you may never find your way back. Another Stephen King adaptation, this one based on a novella by the author and Joe Hill, In the Tall Grass follows siblings Cal (Avery Whitted) and Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) into a field on the side of the road in Kansas after they hear a young boy call out for help. But they have no way of knowing what — or who — they may encounter. Once they enter, they find themselves caught in the trap of a sinister force that lurks within. They soon discover that there may be no way out.
The Perfection
After her mother’s death, Charlotte (Allison Williams) returns to her prestigious New England music school hoping to resume her position as an exceptional cellist, when she learns the school has a new star student. Now, the troubled musician will do anything to keep Lizzie (Logan Browning) off the stage. But nothing in this twisty horror-thriller is quite what it seems — you’ll be on the edge of your seat until the very end trying to figure out who’s really pulling the strings.
Run Rabbit Run
One month after HBO’s Succession came to a buzzy close, Sarah Snook was back with another master-class performance. In Run Rabbit Run, she plays a fertility doctor named Sarah whose 7-year-old daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre), develops supernatural fixations and claims she’s actually the sister Sarah lost as a kid. Set amid a moody stretch of Australia, the movie’s atmosphere grows eerier as Sarah’s emotional state deteriorates. After seeing Snook play a cold-blooded shark on TV for so many years, it’s a wonder to watch her in a role this vulnerable.
If you want to watch a horror movie with monsters…
El Conde
This is a different kind of monster movie. There’s no shark, no aliens, no Godzilla — just Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who indicted, tortured, and executed thousands during his 17-year presidency. Director Pablo Larraín, best known for the unconventional biopics Jackie and Spencer, picks up after those events, during the period when Pinochet lived mostly in seclusion. Larraín presents the former leader (played by an imperious Jaime Vadell) as a 250-year-old vampire who’s finally decided it’s time for him to die. Blending Gothic black-and-white horror with dark comedy, El Conde is a macabre satire that finds Pinochet’s children angling for their inheritance as their father’s corruption is laid bare.
The Ritual
You never know what you’ll find in the woods. The four friends in The Ritual certainly didn’t. After setting out on a Swedish hiking trail, they happen upon cryptic symbols in the trees and a human effigy that can’t bode well for their safety. Indeed, things get worse from there — extremely worse. Based on Adam Nevill’s 2011 novel of the same name, this suspenseful creature feature directed by David Bruckner (The Night House) blends supernatural mythology and plain old vacation terror for a feature-length wilderness freak-out.
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