25 of the Best Horror Movies on Netflix Right Now[html]
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For some, spooky season begins sometime in late August, when Home Depot puts out the animatronic skeletons and ghost projectors, and when every vacant retail space is possessed by a Spirit Halloween. For others, it's a no go until after Labor Day. Still other gorehounds believe there's no better time for a heart-rending scares than Valentine's Day.
Whatever timing you prefer, there's a horror flick worth catching on Netflix—or 25 of them.
28 Years Later (2025)
As much as I enjoyed the earlier 28 movies, I didn't expect to care much about a legacy sequel. Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and co. have still got it, though, grounding this visceral, sweaty, post-COVID installment in the story of Alfie Williams' Spike, a young boy coming of age amid the apocalypse alongside a distant dad and a dying mom—and then Ralph Fiennes comes along to steal the movie with his bone temple (not a euphemism).
Deadstream (2022)
There’s life in the found-footage genre yet, as proven by this fun and inventive horror comedy that cleverly calls back to the original Evil Dead with its blend of goofy good humor and wonderfully gross practical effects. Director/star Joseph Winter plays Shawn, a once-popular YouTube personality working on a comeback (one of the movie’s most clever conceits is in tricking you into liking a character who does not deserve your love). Popular for his outrageous stunts, he builds an all-night livestream around locking himself in a purportedly haunted house. You can certainly see where this is going, but Winter and company deftly blend solid scares, technical wizardry, and a few laughs to create a movie that’s loaded with scares and still manages to get in some good digs at our toxic social media landscape.
Heart Eyes (2025)
Director Josh Ruben is on a roll, from clever two-hander Scare Me, to the surprisingly effective video game adaptation Werewolves Within, to Heart Eyes, a clever slasher that’s also a very solid rom-com. Olivia Holt plays Ally, a pitch designer for a jewelry company who doesn’t quite understand why her “doomed couples” commercial is seen as offensive. Love, she’s pretty sure, is dumb, so the Heart Eyes Killer running around murdering lovers doesn’t quite register—she’s not dumb enough for romance. At least until consultant Jay (Scream’s Mason Gooding) shows up, their will-they-won’t-they chemistry putting them firmly in the sights of the killer.
The Blackening (2022)
A horror comedy that serves both genres pretty darn well, Tim Story's modern slasher updates that horror trope wherein the Black character dies first. Here, everyone is Black, so who's the killer going to go for? A group of friends show up at a cabin in the woods to celebrate Juneteenth, only to discover their hosts are nowhere to be found, and that they're being targeted by a masked killer who wants them to play a Scream-esque game of Black culture trivia, with deadly stakes. Satire aside, the threats are intense and the would-be survivors (played by Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, Melvin Gregg, Sinqua Walls, Jay Pharoah, and Yvonne Orji) are better developed (and funnier) than in many a slasher, in tht you might actually care who lives and who dies.
Train to Busan (2016)
Before Parasite, Yeon Sang-ho’s film was, perhaps, the biggest South Korean film to break into the American market, even if some of the subtext gets lost stateside (Busan was a haven for refugees during the Korean War). The 2016 film follows Seok-woo, a workaholic divorced dad who comes to feel that he’s running out of time to be the father he ought to be for his daughter Su-an. He has no idea how right he is. The train trip he plans for them as bonding time becomes something much more desperate when a zombie-infected woman hops aboard just before departure. What follows is one of the best action-horror movies of the past decade, but also a surprisingly moving story about a father and daughter reconnecting at the end of the world, as well as one that doesn't shy away from some pretty pointed critiques of modern capitalism. You can stream Train to Busan here.
Frankenstein (2025)
I think we're supposed to call this a gothic drama—its cast is too A-list, and it's been written and directed by perennial Oscar-fave Guillermo del Toro, so it must be more than mere horror. And yet! This unusually faithful version of Mary Shelley's classic novel finds the humanity in the monster, but there's plenty of existential horror on offer, aplus some of the gnarly, stomach-churningly grisly special effects sequences in recent memory It's up for nine Academy Awards, which doesn't mean that it isn't disturbing.
El Conde (2023)
The spectre of the fascist rule of Augusto Pinochet continues to loom large in Chile, despite his having died a couple of decades ago. This is hardly unusual in the history of dictatorships—there are always those who remember the horrors, and those who made out OK and wonder if things weren't better back in the bad ol' days. This dark comedy/horror from Pablo Larraín (Spencer) turns that psychological omnipresence literal: Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is a 250-year-old vampire who faked his own death, continuing his bloodsucking habits on a less public stage, while a determined nun seeks to exorcise him for good. There are bloody bits, and also some wild, but well-deserved swings at other dictatorial world leaders you might have heard of. With a nod to the original Nosferatu, the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography earned an Academy Award nomination.
Blood Red Sky (2021)
German widow Nadja is taking a flight to New York with her kid, Elias. She seems sick—we and her fellow passengers are meant to think that she has cancer, which makes her an easy mark for the terrorist hijackers who board the plane and shoot her out of pique. Big mistake. The vampires-on-a-plane high concept at work could have been silly, but at no point does the movie forget that we're seated for gory bloodsucking action.
Nightbooks (2021)
So, Nightbooks is technically for kids, and therefore might not provide quite the volume of scares that a grown-up horror audience might be hoping for. That being said: There are some legit frights here, frankly a little beyond what you’d expect from a kids’ movie. It’s the old story of kids kidnapped by a witch (Krysten Ritter), with the added twist that one of the kidnapped, Alex (Winslow Fegley) writes scary stories, and has to tell one each night that he’s trapped in the witch’s apartment in order to stay alive. There’s imagery here to creep out just about anybody.
