13 best horror movies on Netflix to watch right now

[Ghostface voice] You like horror moviesWhich? [Slightly less Ghostface voice] Like 203,000,000 other humans on Earth, do you have a Netflix Account? Then, logically, you’ve probably found yourself scrolling around, looking to find the best horror movies on the service. Unlike Jamie Kennedy in The ScreamWe have the answers.

But rather than wade through that ever-shifting glut of films pouring in and out of the service every month trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve got you covered with a list of our own written and curated by Polygon’s own resident horror aficionados.

We’ve slashed our way through the horror offerings on Netflix to find you a heap of movies worth an evening … alone … with the lights off … and surely … no one watching you … through the window … right now …

Apostle

Netflix Photo

Horror fans will love the 1973 classic. The Wicker ManWarning! Raid director Gareth Evans’ 2018 movie Apostle Intentionally, it starts at the exact same spot and ends in a different place. The film opens in 1905 and features Thomas the addicted (Legion The GuestDan Stevens, star) receiving a note stating his sister’s imprisonment by an unknown cult. The man pretends to be in a small, religious community. But, he is really there because people leave bloody bowls outside their doors, and there’s something under the floors. It was tense and gory in parts, but it is almost absurdly outrageous. Apostle has a lot to say about the nature of religious fanaticism, both for the obedient flocks doing whatever their leader says God wants, and for the manipulators that weaponize whoever they can find who’s willing to be led. But this isn’t just Wicker Man redux — it’s a creative, relentless spin on the same idea, leading to its own unique horrors. —Tasha Robinson

Blood Red Sky

Netflix Photo

Peri Baumeister’s Blood Red SkyPeri Baumeister stars as Nadja. She is a mother with a severe illness and travelling on an overnight flight between Germany and the United States. A group of terrorists with high-level organization take over the plane in order to kidnap the passengers. As Nadja becomes more desperate for blood and hungry, the situation escalates. She attacks her captors to free her son and all aboard. While the social commentary at the heart of the movie’s premise feels anemic, the action and gore in Blood Red Sky is thrilling enough to make the concept of “Vampires fighting on a plane” an entertaining watch. —TE

Cam

Image: Divide/Conquer/Netflix

Madeline Brewer stars in Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam as Alice, an ambitious camgirl trying desperately to reach the coveted number one spot of the site she streams for. Alice wakes up to discover that her account was taken over by an unknown doppelganger. He will go to great lengths to help Alice achieve the goal she set. As Alice fights to regain control of her show and expose the identity of her impersonator, she’ll have to deal with the consequences of her offline and online identities blurring into one. CamIt is chillingly psychological horror with a spooky ending that has the audience asking how the heroine will survive and overcome all the dangers in her life. —TE

The Conjuring 2

Warner Bros.

James Wan’s follow-up to 2013’s The Conjuring takes place six years after the original, following paranormal investigators Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) travel to London to aid Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor), a mother of four children who believes that she and her family are being haunted by preternatural forces that take hold of their home. The Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullian wrote in his 2016 review, “[The Conjuring 2] manifests a canny understanding of what modern audiences expect from a ghost story, delivering slowly mounting dread, punctuated by alternating bursts of terror and laughter.” —Toussaint Egan

Creep & Creep 2

The Orchard

Mark Duplass (indie darling) and Patrick Brice (regular collaborator) should take care of it.The Overnight) to keep the found-footage horror movie kickin’ 15 years after Blair Witch Project In CreepJosef (Duplass), who is a videographer on Craigslist, hires Aaron (Brice), with the intention to film a letter of goodbye to his unborn child. Josef is dying … at least, that’s how he convinces his new buddy Aaron to spend the night in the woods drinking whiskey with him. These batshit revelations should not be said. Creep 2The story is continued by For GirlsDesiree Akhavan, actress and hopeful YouTube star is front and centre. It’s even more fun. Creep We deserve the internet-friendly, deranged horror movie franchise. —MP

His House

Photo by Aidan Monaghan/Netflix

His House The trials of immigration are transformed into an eerie ghost story. London’s Gangs’s Sope Dirisu and Lovecraft Country’s Wunmi Mosaku play a Sudanese couple seeking asylum in Britain, where they encounter supportive but not exactly friendly social workers (including former Doctor Who star Matt Smith) who can’t accept that the home they’ve been given is haunted. Couple are trapped between haunted homes and inflexible systems that can send them back into war-torn nations. —TR

Hush

Blumhouse Productions Photo

A new twist is added to the home invasion film Haunting of Bly ManorCreator and Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan in Hush, a lean, mean feature that centers on a deaf-mute woman’s fight against a would-be killer. Maddie (Kate Siegel, who also co-wrote the film) lives on her own in the woods, and becomes the focus of a man (John Gallagher Jr.) after he chases and kills one of her friends, discovering through Maddie’s failure to notice that she cannot hear anything. It’s a terrific modern slasher, and even got the seal of approval from Stephen King. —MP

The Platform

Netflix Photo

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s debut film is an eye-popping wonder, a memorable and horrible metaphor for wealth inequality that also works as a pure science-fiction dystopian yarn. A good-natured scholarly type (Ivan Massagué) wakes up in a concrete cell with a sneering old crank (Zorion Eguileor), but there are no bars or doors holding them in — there’s just an endless stack of cells atop each other, with a yawning rectangular void connecting them all. Once a day, a floating platform holding a sumptuous feast descends through all the levels of the prison — but people in the cells below are doomed to eat whatever the people on the levels above them reject. Every month everyone is gassed, and then moved to another level. From grim and hilarious humor to shocking violence, Gaztelu Urrutia creates plenty of terror from this simple arrangement. —TR

Ritual

Vlad Cioplea/Netflix

Even post-Cabin in the Woods world, there are still opportunities for clever filmmakers to spook us with creepy-shack-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-why-the-hell-would-you-go-in-there-what-was-that-in-the-shadows-no-no-no-no-no stories. Ritual follows four friends who trek along northern Sweden’s Kungsleden trail as a tribute to a fifth friend, who was recently murdered in a convenience store. Luke feels especially heavy after the loss.Prometheus’ Rafe Spall), whose drunken belligerence put his buddy in harm’s way in the first place. Luke discovers, along with the rest of the group that they are being haunted more than their memories when they find a deer altar in an old house. This is a mix of Euro horror and European terror. Hills Have Eyes Ritual To keep it fresh, the author twists an already familiar story with animal-feature instincts. —MP

Strangers

Photo: Rogue Pictures

Byran Bertino’s 2008 film StrangersIt is a powerful and affecting horror movie. This film strips home invasion down to the essentials to highlight the primal terror that it entails. Scott Speedman stars as Scott Tyler, a husband and wife who are terrorized after arriving at a remote holiday home by a trio of serial killers. It begs the obvious question: What is it? You can’t imagine the answer, but it is clear and terrifying. —TE

The Shadow

Vertical Entertainment

The Iranian government bans Shideh, a political activist and medical student from Iran (Narges Rashidi), from continuing her education after a series of airstrikes targeting Tehran in the late 1980s. She retreats to her family’s apartment, and despite her husband’s wishes, remains with her young daughter in the war-torn capital — this is her home, and she’s not leaving. When a missile strikes her apartment, Shideh’s normal life and that of her child are disrupted by an unseen, evil presence. It could be a djinn. Similar to in BabadookBabak Anvari is the director for the first time. He allows questions about the supernatural to guide the action. The Shadow as he captures the erosion of his plain, main set, and Shideh’s very existence. —MP

Unfriended

Universal Pictures

Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended pulls the audiences through the screen — almost literally. Viewed entirely from the perspective of a computer desktop, 2014 supernatural horror film centers around a Skype call between a group of high school students who are joined by an unknown presence known only as “billie227.” What at first appears to be a prank swiftly morphs into something much more horrific, as the mysterious stranger begins to reveal terrifying secrets about each of the friends before killing them off one by one. UnfriendedThis is a gripping extrapolation on our ever-online world. A world in which vengeful doxxing and vengeful pollergeists co-exist side-by-side, and where no crime or secret goes unpunished. —TE

Find out What’s Really Going On Below

Vertical Entertainment

Braden R. Duemmler’s Find out What’s Really Going On Below stars Ema Horvath as Libby, a 16 year old girl who returns home to her mother’s lake house after summer camp to discover that she’s taken on a new boyfriend, John (Trey Tucker). While initially excepting of her mom’s new beau, Libby gradually begins to suspect that something is … off about John that he’s trying to conceal. With no-one but her friend Marley (Haskiri Velasquez) to turn to for help, Libby must expose the truth of John’s sinister nature before it’s too late to save her mother … and herself. The story is filled with tension and creepy, ethereal images, as well as a bizarre, mind-boggling ending. Find out What’s Really Going On BelowIt has more to offer than it might appear at first glance. —TE