The best horror movies to watch on Prime Video

Shot on a budget of just $60,000 (coincidentally the same cost as its most obvious influence, The Blair Witch Project), Made presents itself as a long-lost 1970s arthouse horror flick about two siblings digging a hole to hell. But screenwriter David Amito, who co-directed with Michael Laicini, also augments this supposedly recovered cult curiosity with bookending narration and a “legal notice” that recount the numerous suspicious deaths and injuries they claim have befallen anyone who’s watched the entire film. Antrum also overlays its footage with various spooky occult symbols and audio distortions, which—as the aforementioned narration informs us—may or may not be the work of whoever also happened to splice in quick glimpses of a gruesome snuff film. Keeping up so far? []

When the scares of this slasher variation do arrive, Candyman can be quite effective. [Director Nia] DaCosta instinctively keeps both audience and legend at arm’s length, occluding kills by focal length and abstracting them into slivers of light under a door or a red-splattered movement across a window you have to squint to catch. The reflective mood flip-flops with requisite carnage, and while the true nature of Candyman has changed, horror fans who come for blood will get it by the bucket. The jokes are applied with intent and purpose; the funniest smash-cut gag of 2021 comes after a Black character asks who would be foolish enough to do the Candyman prompt for fun, just before a white girl traipses down a hallway to her doom. It’s a throwaway goof until DaCosta sees the concept through to interesting places in the film’s final act… []

 is a movie that was already a certain kind of hit before it even came out thanks to its idiotic premise and outrageously blunt name. The film does not stick too closely to the facts, trying instead to invent a -esque carnival of dumbass criminals, cops, and civilians all tangling with a ferocious bear whacked out on coke. There are some aspects that really work. One thing to admire throughout is how the picture leans into the scuzz. Right from the beginning there are little kids (Brooklyn Prince, from , and the extremely amusing Christian Convery) with potty mouths who intentionally and happily swallow some of the cocaine. In a world where comedy is so bland and safe, it’s good and right to be reminded that some movies—especially movies called Cocaine Bear—don’t really care if they offend. The kills—and there are many—are gross and hilarious. There is one stretch that involves a flubbed escape that gets surprisingly brutal, but it’s still darkly funny when a growling black bear with white powder all over his snout leaps in slow motion as Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” plays on the soundtrack. []

The minimalist sci-fi mindbender boasts a scenario as tried and true as the walking dead: Bickering individuals hole up in a house during a crisis, discovering that the threat looming beyond their walls may pale in comparison to the conflict happening within them. There’s a wrinkle in the design this time, however, and it’s that the characters are their own worst enemies not just in a figurative sense, but in a literal one, too. Confused? Writer-director James Ward Byrkit has the answers, and he’s not stingy about providing them. What separates his film from other exercises in Twilight Zone trickery is its refusal to play coy with a high concept. Unlike, say, the feature-length rug-pull , Coherence doesn’t get off on withholding. It would rather milk its premise for all it’s worth than stockpile secrets. The result is an uncommonly clever genre movie, reliant not on special effects—of which there are basically none—but on heavy doses of paranoia. []

It’s hard to discuss what’s so amazing about Richard Bates Jr.’s offbeat teen horror picture Excision without talking about what happens at the end, which is predictable, but in the best way. The last five minutes or so of is the gory, appalling, Vault Of Horror eight-pager that the entire film has been building to, and pays off all the weirdly beautiful gore effects that Bates has previously strewn throughout the film’s stylish dream sequences. Yet what makes Excision such an original is what precedes that payoff. AnnaLynne McCord (in a gutsy performance, at once monstrous and sympathetic) plays a pimply, gawky high-school senior who has sexy fantasies about mutilation and spends her spare time researching ways she can help her sister Ariel Winter, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. The whole movie is as body-conscious as its heroine, watching with real fascination as McCord pierces her own ears, sniffs her used tampons, and imagines herself crawling across naked men and women so that she can submerge herself in a gore-filled bathtub. Long before Excision turns into the story of an adolescent mad scientist and her sick scalpel skills, it’s already been a celebration of viscera. []

Proof that America doesn’t have a monopoly on pre-fab suburban hellpits, thedarkly funny Canadian horror film takes place in a town called Bailey Downs, which looks like a new development that just kept on developing. In this squeaky-clean environment, the Fitzgerald sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), are like a two-person trenchcoat mafia, given to wearing layers of dowdy clothes and isolating themselves in glowering secrecy. If they look to other kids like they’re always sharing some nasty, private joke, that’s because they usually are. Their biggest passion is for suicide fantasies. For a class project, they arrange a slideshow of gruesome tableaux—impalings by pitchfork and picket fence, a bathtub drowning, a classic hanging with an eerily stenciled note around the neck. They love to kick around moony scenarios about the awesomeness of their own deaths, and they even have a suicide pact (“Out on the scene and dead by 16, but together forever”), but it’s one thing to toe the line, and another to cross it. []

Execution is everything in a found-footage horror movie, and execution is what makes a worthy addition to the subgenre. The concept—a documentary crew enters an abandoned mental hospital in hopes of filming paranormal activity, only to get way more than they expected—goes beyond typical into the realm of cliché. The film opens with the same shots of the crew joking around and testing out their equipment you see in all found-footage horror movies, and the institution itself is so outrageously, exaggeratedly creepy—we’re talking bloody bathtubs and walls covered in the apocalyptic scrawlings of mental patients—that it’s hard not to chuckle. But the movie wants us to chuckle. Grave Encounters revolves around a very 2011 bit of meta-humor by making this particular documentary crew work for one of those cheesy pseudo-scientific cable reality shows, like or or or . []

Working with a modest budget, director Clive Barker created a bloody fairy tale complete with a wicked, if not quite evil, stepmother in the form of theater actress Clare Higgins. Playing the wife of ineffectual husband Andrew Robinson (Dirty Harry), Higgins barely hides her contempt as the two move into a family house once inhabited by Robinson’s hard-living, now-missing brother, with whom Higgins once had an affair. Thanks to supernatural forces, Robinson’s brother returns, sort of, as a skinless pile of organs that entreats Higgins to kill for him in an effort to flesh out his half-formed body. Meanwhile, Robinson’s scream-prone daughter (Ashley Laurence) begins to suspect that matters might be amiss, a suspicion confirmed by the arrival of four pale demons fitted out in bondage gear. One of these, a bald demon with nails pounded into his skull, has become the most enduring image of and its sequels, and rightly so. A deeply unsettling, S&M-inspired creature whose blurring of the division between pleasure and pain extends to a blurring of the division between good and evil, it neatly and instantly sums up some of Barker’s themes. Pinhead barely appears in Hellraiser, a film that, with its intense and uncomfortable family drama, might have even worked without him. With him, however, it becomes one of the most innovative and memorable horror films of the ‘80s, a middle ground between mainstream fare and the work of David Cronenberg, in its most powerful moments conjuring up the latter’s ability to make viewers feel uncomfortable in their own bodies. [Keith Phipps]

Though the Swedish film concerns a vampire and doesn’t shrink from the traditional mythology (eternal life, blood, neck-biting, resistance to sunlight, etc.) of other vampire tales, it isn’t really a horror film. In fact, its staunch resistance to—if not outright animosity toward—the expected genre thrills makes it difficult for an unabashed horror enthusiast like myself to get behind it completely. It’s an arch, “classy” piece of work, something critics who regularly turn their noses up at the likes of Takashi Miike, Rob Zombie, and Eli Roth can recommend as an antidote. And while there’s plenty of grisly mayhem on display, director Tomas Alfredson isn’t inclined to goose the audience with big shocks or nerve-jangling suspense sequences; he keeps his distance. Let The Right One In works beautifully as a mood piece, with a gorgeous wintry atmosphere that makes you feel the anguish of characters who are literally left in the cold. []

From the moment she was revealed, M3GAN was an instant icon for a horror fandom in love with eerily autonomous dolls. With a face planted firmly in the uncanny valley and dance moves so fluid as to be off-putting, it’s no wonder that the cybernetic horror villain became beloved meme fodder months before her film even came out. So how well does hold up to the hype? Remarkably well. M3GAN is a blast, especially with a crowd that’s game to laugh along with a doll’s ominous stare and her inhumanly humorous attempts to be the perfect best friend. Though the contortionist-level juxtaposition of an American Girl murderbot should probably be more viscerally satisfying, Cooper’s offbeat humor and Johnstone’s ability to build tension with her characters make for a potent combination. M3GAN may have been iconic before we ever heard her utter a word, but seeing her in action cements her as a worthy addition to the movie monster pantheon. Long may her franchise slay. []

, a coming-of-age drama tracing the struggles of an adolescent Jeffrey Dahmer to fit in at his high school, is going to make some viewers uncomfortable. Some may even lash out against the film, deeming it insensitive toward the families of the 17 men and boys Dahmer raped, murdered, and dismembered before he was apprehended in 1991. And the film does make a bold request of its audience: to try to understand, and even sympathize with, a teenage boy who, at times, seems like any other tortured adolescent—until you remember that he went on to murder 17 men and boys. If there wasn’t a Jeffrey at your high school, the movie implies, you may have been the Jeffrey. []

Ever heard the one about the girl eaten alive by showbiz? That’s the meat, more fetid than fresh, that Nicolas Winding Refn tears his teeth into with , which gives a deep-red (and ) paint job to the most moribund of cautionary tales: the rise and fall of a bright-eyed ingenue. Last time the Danish director shot a movie in Los Angeles, he made dream-pop noir from the minimalist crime sagas of Michael Mann and Walter Hill. Returning to the nocturnal cityscape of , Refn perverts into a baroque death reverie—bathing the fashion industry in harsh pools of giallo light, slowing time to a hypnotic crawl, chopping away all but the faintest traces of plot. Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it. []

’s landmark zombie thriller remains bracing, but nothing could compare now to the way the film was received back in 1968, at a time when even the gamiest exploitation movies were fundamentally goofy and harmless. The grainy black-and-white cinematography and the “They’re coming to get you, Barbara” joshing of Night Of The Living Dead’s opening scene led late-’60s audiences to prepare themselves for a cheesy throwback to ’50s drive-in trash, but George Romero quickly ramped up the intensity, then continued to tighten the screws, in a movie packed with surprising twists and vivid characterizations. It wasn’t just the gore that shocked viewers—although the movie’s rotting, flesh-eating ghouls definitely delivered on the zombie premise as well as any film had before—but also the way that Romero’s assured direction pulled people into his story of a freaky apocalypse and its ragtag band of survivors, before Romero turned mere suspense into outright bloody terror. []

The new converts are usually the most intense. Even those raised in an evangelical environment complete with speaking in tongues and creationist puppet shows (à la the subjects of the infamous ) can’t compete with the flinty fervor of an ex-addict who’s found God. Some even replace old vices with religion, in a kind of one-to-one swap of self-destructive obsession. Such is the case with the title character of writer-director Rose Glass’ first feature. Maud (Morfydd Clark), a home nurse with a troubled past, depends on her regular fix of communion with the divine in order to stay on her newfound righteous path. And when she doesn’t get it? Well, you’ll see. ’s combination of talky chamber drama, Paul Schrader-esque character study, and visceral body horror is an ideal fit for A24. In fact, the film contains a scene that’s in direct conversation with from one of the distributor’s early “elevated” horror triumphs, . And if there’s no taste of butter for Saint Maud, that’s because her supernatural visitor is the Old Testament type of angel, the kind that inspires both transcendent awe and bone-shaking fear. []

Make sure the liquor cabinet at home is well stocked, because you might just want a stiff drink after seeing . The feature debut of writer-director Parker Finn, expanded from his SXSW award-nominated short Laura Hasn’t Slept, is designed to work your last nerves … in a good way, if such a thing is possible. It may take time and repeated viewings to be sure just how good or bad Smile is as a movie, but as a scare delivery device, it is damned effective. (Trigger warning: anyone who cannot bear seeing harm done to pets should probably avoid it.) Though much of the special makeup involves typical blood and guts, along with the kind of minor digital tweaks to victims’ smiles that Soundgarden employed back in the music video for “Black Hole Sun,” the effects team at Amalgamated Dynamics puts together some truly disturbing imagery for the film’s final third. Smile is unable to resist the temptation of a potential sequel, but Finn delivers an effective resolution nonetheless. Tying the evil force to lingering trauma—and having to smile through the worst of it—is the movie’s most potent weapon, and what ultimately differentiates it from predecessors like Final Destination or Oculus. It’s obvious that Finn draws heavily from his own favorites, but Smile suggests that their skill and effectiveness have successfully been passed along to him. []

Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece Suspiria (1977) is beautiful to look at, but calling it an art film is a distinctly revisionist impulse. Although the heightened aesthetics and hysterical melodrama of Italian opera have undoubtedly influenced Argento’s style, he also overlays those high-art impulses onto B-movie genre forms. Shot mostly without sync sound and dubbed for both its Italian and American releases, Suspiria wasn’t intended to be a museum piece. In fact, take away the delirious beauty of the color-coded lighting and surging prog-rock score, and you’ve got a simple slasher movie, a film whose “witches at a ballet school” mythology is a mere delivery device for the real attraction: the violent, symbolic violation of young female bodies. Not so with and director Luca Guadagnino’s new remake of , a film that replaces Argento’s fixation on sexualized violence with arthouse ostentation. In his version, Guadagnino doubles down on the commitment to aesthetics that has given Argento’s original such staying power, but draws from a wholly new set of influences: Soviet-era Eastern Bloc architecture, folk-art collage, ’70s feminist performance art, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. What was bright and colorful is now drizzly and gray, and what was lurid is now self-consciously weighty. [

, the latest horror release from genre power player Blumhouse, sets out with similar ambitions. With a mash-up plot that’s basically Halloween meets Back To The Future, a horror-comedy dynamic that’s not afraid to poke fun at the world of ’80s nostalgia, and a cast eager to dive into genre conventions, it’s the kind of spooky season fun you can get happily absorbed in this Halloween. It’s full of great talent, great moments, and an infectious sense of fun, which means that even when it doesn’t quite work, it’s an entertaining balance of slasher tropes and time travel adventure. It’s not necessarily a new slasher classic, but it is the kind of film horror devotees can happily kick back and enjoy on a cozy Friday night in October, and that’s a particular achievement all its own. [Matthew Jackson]