The best horror movies on Netflix right now

Say what you will about the bombastic rock-video opuses of Zack Snyder, but the man does know how to open a picture, doesn’t he? The director of some of the   of has, if nothing else, mastered the lost art of the opening credits sequence—a talent he flexes once more at the onset of his palate-cleansing new film, the action-horror hybrid Army Of The Dead. Through his signature style of near-tableau, Snyder depicts the fall of a Las Vegas overrun with ghouls. A Liberace impersonator is devoured by his dancers. A parachuting soldier floats helplessly into a horde, his billowing chute becoming a canvas painted bright red. Dropped bombs engulf the strip in gorgeous plumes of blue and orange. All this carnage is, naturally, set to the ironic tune of an Elvis cover and stamped with hot-pink text, creating a pageant of doomsday excess, a Sin City literally consumed by sinful appetite. It may be the best introductory montage to a Zack Snyder movie since, well, the Johnny Cash end-of-the-world blur that kicked off the filmmaker’s first feature and last visit to the zombie apocalypse, his . []

A horror fantasy about the worst fears of parents and children, Before I Wake imagines a married couple, Jessie (Kate Bosworth) and Mark (Thomas Jane), trying to move on after their son’s death by taking in an 8-year-old orphan who’s gone from foster home to foster home under mysterious circumstances. Waiting for the new arrival, Mark screws grab bars to the tub wall (their boy drowned in the bath, which is basically every first-time parent’s nightmare) while Jessie takes down the family photos from the living room, enacting an unwittingly creepy ritual of preparation; skewed in a horror movie’s exposition, the things adults think will make kids safe seem conspiratorial and sick. But slyly, the film keeps turning viewer sympathies about who might be the bigger threat to whom. As the new foster parents soon discover, the kid, Cody (’s Jacob Tremblay), possesses a dangerous supernatural power, and when he falls asleep, his dreams haunt the house—projections of a small child’s manias (butterflies are Cody’s favorite subject) and uneasy thoughts about grown-ups and themselves. Often, Cody dreams of the dead son, Sean (Antonio Romero), the little boy’s face unnervingly frozen in the rictus of the only photo of him he’s seen. []

For years now, I’ve found it strange that there were only two or three good movies about the internet, the most important thing in the world. My wish for a film truthfully capturing all the connection, gratification, desperation, and despair of living online came true with this sophisticated thriller, in which a cam girl (Madeline Brewer, making a convincing argument for herself as a bona fide star) discovers that an automated doppelgänger has taken over her channel. There’s a lot to love here, from the low-key sex-positivity to the cringe comedy to the delectable supporting turn from Samantha Robinson. But I like Cam best as our most ruthlessly honest film about the nightmares of full-time freelancing. []

Let’s make something clear up front: Creep 2 is not a scary movie. Despite a plot that concerns a serial killer and the unsuspecting woman who answers his Craigslist ad and drives to his remote home in the woods, there is nothing about the film that would inspire much in the way of goosebumps. (A few small jump scares are played more for laughs than shrieks of fright.) Whereas the first wrung tension from the familiar tricks of the found-footage style, the new one assumes the viewer already knows the situation with its homicidal subject, and doesn’t really try to generate chills from it. Instead, it’s a serial-killer midlife crisis: Within the first five minutes, Mark Duplass’ character has already desultorily cut someone’s throat, sat morosely as the blood congealed, and said, with heavy existential ennui straight to the camera he snuck into the house, “What’s happening to me?” A slasher sequel this is not. But for fans of the original who don’t mind the loss of scares, Creep 2 improves on the first film in nearly every way, from tone to dialogue to plot. Aesthetically, the two films are more or less identical, as director Patrick Brice maintains a straightforward functional approach to the material. As in the first, the protagonist is a filmmaker, or at least a wannabe filmmaker, thereby narratively justifying a steadier and more professional level of camerawork. This series isn’t all that pretty to look at, but as far as found-footage cinematography goes, it sits firmly in the upper tier. []

Billed as a haunted-house horror movie, it’s actually a violent R-rated romance geared toward the sensibilities of “14-year-old bookish girls,” as director Guillermo Del Toro . As in Del Toro’s chilling , the apparitions represent the sins of the past, writ here on a familial instead of a national scale. As such, they’re more tragic than terrifying, which, on the one hand, perfectly fits the swooning Gothic atmosphere. On the other, this means the scariest scenes of the movie appear early on, with diminishing thrills after that. []

Somewhere along the line, . But the original myth places its emphasis far more on the blood than the sucking. In early European folklore, vampires were bloated and decidedly gross. By the turn of the 20th century, starting in earnest with Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, they were being talked about in a political context as blood-sucking creatures moving from host to host, killing in order to maintain their own tenuous grasp on life. This is the kind of vampire that Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled Chile for 17 years, is—at least in Pablo Larraín’s new satire  (in English, The Count). []

This is a film that sits at the intersection of multiple memory lanes. After all, its official inspiration is a fellow touchstone of the Clinton years: the Fear Street books, aimed at a slightly older readership than the one that gobbled up author R.L. Stine’s other hit YA franchise, Goosebumps. Kevin Williamson, screenwriter of Scream, clearly read his share of teen-courting paperbacks, including the one he adapted into . Stine, likewise, was capitalizing on the success of every wannabe Friday The 13th to hit multiplexes the decade he launched Fear Street. 1994 channels that legacy of give and take, between teen horror of the page and screen, into a polished nostalgia object of secondhand thrills, a throwback to a throwback. []

Coming off of the positive critical buzz surrounding 2016’s  and , [director Mike] Flanagan decided to re-team with Hush producer Netflix for a film adaptation of Gerald’s Game. It’s not an easy sell: Not only is King’s book structured in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to adapt—much of it takes place inside the mind of the main character, Jessie (Carla Gugino), as she lies handcuffed to a bed, alone and unable to escape, after her husband dies mid-kinky sex—but it deals with some very challenging themes of sexual abuse and the silencing of women. Thankfully, Flanagan’s film is up to the challenge, thanks in large part to Gugino and her compelling performance, which deftly expresses emotions from panic to grief to despair to rage, sometimes all at once. []

Most horror is grounded in something real. In His House, the feature debut of writer-director Remi Weekes, it’s the terror of war-weary Sudan and the tired, huddled masses fleeing a brutal life that nonetheless shaped who they’ve become. Bol (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) travel by land and sea, eventually sailing under the cloak of night to seek asylum on the shores of the U.K. Their arrival is bittersweet, to say the least: An accident claims their daughter along the way, and they’re briefly interred at a cold, uncaring detention center, before being granted filthy housing in a nondescript English town. What follows is a potent, heart-wrenching spin on the classic haunted house story, buoyed by two stellar lead performances. []

The horror renaissance continued unabated in 2016, as films like , , , , Don’t Breathe, brought increased respectability to this frequently disrespected genre. But one of the year’s most singular horror movies, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, still slipped through the cracks. Maybe it was the unwieldy title. Maybe it was the fact that the movie, an immersive sensory experience, went straight to Netflix. I’d wager the real reason Oz Perkins’ one-of-a-kind ghost story was slept on or even disliked (average grade from the A.V. Club comment community: C+) is that it’s entirely out of step with contemporary horror conventions and trends. It’s an exercise in pure unsettling atmosphere—one so off-kilter that it seems downright haunted itself. A small cult following, as opposed to widespread popularity, is probably apropos for something this rewardingly unusual. []

It sounds like the stuff of slumber parties, a cautionary tale to be whispered by flashlight or embellished over a flickering flame: Sleep with the wrong person, as the teenage heroine of It Follows does, and the nameless thing will come for you. On the outskirts of Detroit, Jay (Maika Monroe) finds herself the target of this relentless, shape-shifting entity—a curse passed on through sex with Hugh (Jake Weary), her handsome but mysterious new squeeze. As he explains, only the afflicted can see the specter, which will sometimes take the form of someone she knows. It will follow her, persistently but always at a walk, until she either falls into its clutches or passes the burden to a new sexual partner. “Never go anywhere with only one exit,” Hugh warns. There’s a primal, ingenious simplicity to that setup, one that writer-director David Robert Mitchell mines for one enormous scare after another. []

All calculation aside, scary is still scary, and Insidious makes up in old-fashioned tension what it sometimes lacks in originality. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne star as a typical suburban couple, moving into a spacious suburban fixer-upper with their two young sons. There are early signs that the house is haunted—a misplaced book here, a creaky floorboard there—but nothing too serious until their eldest child falls from a ladder in the attic and drops unaccountably into a coma. When the comatose boy returns home, the terror amplifies with each day, getting so bad that Wilson and Byrne resolve to move. Yet the hauntings continue unabated, prompting them to invite an exorcist (Lin Shaye) and her two bungling assistants (Angus Sampson and Whannell) to cast out the demons. []

At its core, this is a movie about sisters, and Basso and Wilson are well cast as such, striking the right mixture of animosity and affection. (The entire cast is quite strong, selling the grief and terror of the story equally.) It’s not, although it may seem like it’s heading that way at times, an explicitly Christian film, a subtle but important difference that sets it apart from James Wan’s retro haunted-house franchise. A long-delayed teen horror film based on a board game isn’t a particularly rich mythology from which to draw, and Origin Of Evil’s story is accordingly thin at times. But, given the circumstances, this is the absolute best-case scenario, and Universal Pictures can thank Mike Flanagan for that. []

A bit like Funny Games without the scolding, the minimalist home-invasion thriller The Strangers doesn’t take many words to describe: isolated vacation home. Masked tormenters. Helpless couple. And yet it’s precisely the film’s spare, disciplined, back-to-basics horror effects that lend it a sustaining chill; if the audience knew any more about who “the strangers” are and why they’ve chosen this house, this couple, and this night to do their worst, then a lot of the tension would dissipate. Making a frighteningly assured debut, writer-director Bryan Bertino understands the fundamentals thoroughly, and he has the patience to hold back and keep the tension hanging where a lesser director might have gone for the cheap shock. Many of the film’s shots and scenes go on several beats longer than expected, just to stoke a near-unbearable feeling of anticipation and dread. As a filmmaker, at least, Bertino seems to have more in common with the perpetrators than the victims. []