The best horror movies to stream on Hulu

12 Hour Shift is not political, unless you want to count its grisly, madcap plot about a crew of night nurses and the organ-trafficking scam they’ve been running out of the back of an Arkansas hospital as a commentary on the American healthcare system. Mostly, it’s an ensemble comedy as black as a longtime smoker’s lungs, full of the kind of working-class gallows humor that gets you through a long night on your feet. 12 Hour Shift is Brea Grant’s second feature outing as a writer-director, but she’s best known as an actor. And that shows here: Although it boasts a large cast that includes David Arquette and wrestler Mick Foley, 12 Hour Shift hinges on the performance of ’s Angela Bettis as Mandy, the opioid-addicted nurse at the center of her small town’s black-market organ trade. The material is edgy and at times outrageously gory and chaotic, but Bettis gives Mandy an exhausted, fed-up quality that keeps the movie on track, even (or maybe especially) when she’s pissed off about having to do everything herself. []  

is a terrifying, brilliant film. From the cast to the design to the score, everything works and, perhaps more important, works well together. There’s no bullshit exposition, no needless narration, no obligatory love interest. Alien starts, keeps you uneasy, then ends. From the first second, Alien establishes space as an unfriendly, perilous expanse of nothingness—as the film’s famous poster decreed, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” One of my favorite parts of the film is the opening credits: It’s a simple panning shot of an unnamed planet from outer space, but the oppressive silence just fills everything with dread. Dialogue doesn’t begin for six long minutes, and there’s no score—just strange sounds that grow more pronounced as time passes. Alien’s sterling legacy ratchets up the potential anticlimax factor: It’s generally regarded as one of the scariest films ever made, and it inspired countless copycats (which I probably haven’t seen), and maybe even changed Hollywood’s paradigm when it came to strong leading ladies in action movies. It’s kind of a big deal—and, as such, a perfect candidate for a big letdown. I wasn’t disappointed. []

Just as the story bridges disparate worlds, so does Agnes move Reece from DIY filmmaking into a better-funded indie world. No compromises have been made along the way, however. The direction is just as eccentric—during a weighty dialogue scene, the camera’s eye wanders towards taxidermy on the wall, like a bored kid listening to an adult conversation—and the script still adheres to Reece’s self-described style of “people talking in rooms.” (There are just more rooms now.) The dialogue is surreal, the details bizarre, the performances an odd mix of mannered and naturalistic, and the storytelling radical enough to alienate a sizable chunk of the audience. As with all of Reece’s work, you’re either on this movie’s wavelength or you’re not. But once you catch the Mickey Reece wave, everything else seems uninspired by comparison. []

A subtle (until it defiantly isn’t) British mood piece, Censor makes horror films, and the emotions they evoke, feel dangerous again—maybe as dangerous as they felt during that era of moral panic. The film, directed and co-written by Prano Bailey-Bond, is set in 1985, at the height of the video nasty hysteria. It follows Enid Baines (Naimh Algar), one of the most motivated and meticulous censors at the BBFC. Enid has a visceral antagonism towards splatter that’s linked to a childhood tragedy the film thankfully discloses up front. The mysterious loss of her sister has left her sensitive to the why of the content she snips and bans, and every step she takes through life winds the spring tighter. Algar, best known perhaps for her regular role on , is staggeringly good here, whether wielding a notepad or an axe. She has the best horror movie hair since Greta Gerwig in : disciplined, but with meticulous unruly strands that imply repression and a shift in power dynamics. []

Director David Bruckner’s is not at all the same as Clive Barker’s 1987 original. That might seem obvious, but it’s important to note—if for no other reason than to help set expectations. Bruckner and his screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski don’t seem altogether interested in the kind of psychosexual introspection that drove Barker’s film (or the novella it was based upon), instead leveraging the franchise’s iconography as a canvas for a different sort of psychological exploration.As decades of rights-preserving sequels can attest, that choice is nothing new for the Hellraiser franchise, but fans of Barker’s queer proclivities may be disappointed that this 2022 version marks another propagation rather than a return to its roots. That said, Bruckner, Collins, and Piotrowski plant their vision in fields that are no less rich, terrifying, or gorily violent than the hellbound story that started it all…. [] 

Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a Western revenge yarn of such heightened cruelty and suffering that it basically demands to be read as allegory. Westerns, as a rule, are violent, and that perhaps goes double for the Aussie ones, which tend to be more pitiless than their American cousins, stripping the genre of its romance and derring-do. Even by those standards, The Nightingale is tough to take. Set in the Oz of 1825, it confronts audiences with the full horror of colonialism, including enough scenes of sexual assault to warrant the trigger warning offered up before several screenings of the film. But while what we see and can never unsee over the course of a grueling two-plus hours is certainly extreme, it’s not gratuitous. That’s partially because Kent, who made the spectacular spookfest , isn’t some B-movie shockmeister, rubbing our noses in ugliness for the sake of it. She’s pulled back the veil of awful history to find a cracked reflection of the modern world—and a corresponding, hard-won beauty in solidarity among survivors. []

In keeping with the MTV vibe, the protagonists are now closer in age to horror movies’ core demographic of gullible, undiscriminating teenagers. Liev Schreiber fills in for wooden old Gregory Peck in the role of an accomplished ambassador who unwittingly turns his home into a way-station for Satan’s minions when he and wife Julia Stiles adopt Beelzebub’s adorable son and a not-so-huggable hellhound. Mia Farrow lends a smiling malevolence to her role as Satan’s nanny of choice, in a deft bit of stunt casting that pays off. Who better to look after Satan’s pride and joy than the waif who once gave birth to a devil-baby of her own? []

The last time Bong Joon Ho made a parable of class warfare, he set it aboard one hell of a moving metaphor: a train looping endlessly around a frozen Earth, its passengers divided into cars based on wealth and status, upward mobility achieved only through lateral revolution. Parasite, the South Korean director’s demented and ingenious new movie, doesn’t boast quite as sensational a setting; it takes place mostly within a chicly modern suburban home, all high ceilings, stainless steel countertops, and windows instead of walls, advertising the elegant interior decoration within. But there’s a clear class hierarchy at play here, too; it runs top to bottom instead of front to back, vertically instead of horizontally. And though we’re watching a kind of warped upstairs-downstairs story, not a dystopian arcade brawler, Parasite races forward with the same locomotive speed as , with plenty of its own twists and turns waiting behind each new door. [] 

Possessor is a mindfuck without a safe word: a slick, nasty bit of science-fiction pulp that’s as interested in shredding nerves as buzzing the brain they’re attached to. The premise, a nightmare vision of bodies snatched and unwillfully weaponized, could have been extracted straight from the racing noggin of Philip K. Dick. But that author’s dystopian premonitions are just one aspect of its genre alchemy, a stylish mash-up of , , , and Olivier Assayas’ corporate-espionage thriller . And as it’s both written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of Canadian horror maestro David, it should probably come as no great shock that Possessor includes some truly gnarly mutilation of the flesh alongside the mental variety. [A.A. Dowd]

There’s a fallacy in thinking each subsequent entry of a franchise needs to go bigger. What worked well for Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, simply isn’t applicable to every ‘80s-born sci-fi/action franchise that Hollywood repeatedly attempts to reinvigorate. With Dan Trachtenberg’s , the long-running Predator franchise finally has an entry that can stand as an equal to the original film, precisely because it narrows its focus on the story elements that matter dramatically, instead of unnecessarily expanding the franchise’s mythology. Prey is the shot in the arm that the franchise needed—a confident addition to its timeline, populated with moments that will leave long-time fans grinning and will encourage newcomers to explore the rest of the franchise. Additionally a win for genre film representation, Prey knows exactly what it wants to be, expanding the Predator mythos by creating traditions among the human characters that are as meaningful, or more, than their alien foes. More franchise filmmaking should be like this. []

In Run, helicopter parenting reaches a whole new level of unhinged. Likely taking cues from the real-life Munchausen-by-proxy case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, writer-director Aneesh Chaganty’s second feature makes mommy dearest a formidable foe against teenage dreams of independence. Contrary to what it looks like, single mother Diane Sherman (Sarah Paulson) has no intention of letting her chronically ill 17-year-old daughter, Chloe (newcomer Kiera Allen), fly the coop once college acceptance letters come around. This realization strikes early on, unfurling a series of increasingly berserk revelations about Chloe’s origins and upbringing. A psychological thriller with frustratingly little to say about the trenches of the human mind, Run nevertheless satisfies as a taut and titillating get-out movie that lands somewhere between HBO’s  and ? []

Suffering has long been characterized as a woman’s lot, canonized in the form of Catholic saints and celebrated in literature and art. (Pablo Picasso merely made it explicit when , “Women are suffering machines.”) To defy this edict will bring further misfortune, leaving only two choices: either smile and let your soul die piece by indignant piece, or embrace the darkness and learn to enjoy it. Josephine Decker’s Shirley is about a woman who opted for the latter: Shirley Jackson (played here by Elisabeth Moss), author of high-school staple “The Lottery” and the oft-adapted The Haunting Of Hill House.  Mocked by her peers, mistreated by her husband, and burdened by mental illness, Jackson lived with the psychic evils that lurk in her writing. But for Decker, what’s important about Shirley’s misery is how she used it to fuel her work. [] 

Shadow In The Cloud is pure popcorn entertainment, superimposing the dynamic synths and narrative efficiency of a John Carpenter movie onto the burnished metal and green fatigues of a World War II adventure. This one stars Chloë Grace Moretz as Maude Garrett, a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer who’s been charged with protecting a highly classified piece of cargo aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress military plane departing from New Zealand. Maude is nobody’s fool—steadfast, driven, and tough as she needs to be to get by as a female soldier in the 1940s. But the male crew of the plane sees her as nothing more than a liability and a sex object, laughing at her attempts to establish authority and menacing her with sexual threats even before they force her into a ball turret dangling on the underside of the plane. From within these claustrophobic confines, director Roseanne Liang throws threat after threat at Maude and the crew, from Japanese fighter planes to one of the of gremlins—here, a CGI bat/monkey/rat hybrid. A preposterous development midway through the film threatens to derail both the plot and the rah-rah female empowerment message. But if you can save the questions for after the movie’s over and concentrate on the pulpy derring-do, it doesn’t ruin the fun. []  

Let’s just say that the surprise winner of [2021’s] Palme d’Or, a.k.a. the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is about bodies. Young bodies with skin pulled tight over rock-hard muscles, and aging bodies desperate to recapture the suppleness of youth. Traumatized bodies, uncontrollable bodies, bodies in the midst of transformation. There are a lot of wild twists and turns in this movie, but underneath there’s a constant: the agony of being trapped inside of a human body, and the itchy, restless desire to transcend it. [Julia] Ducournau’s work is sometimes compared to that of David Cronenberg, and that rings true in the sense that both are obsessed with the erotics of disgust and the possibilities of a “new flesh.” Yet the similarities between Titane and Cronenberg’s have been overstated. After all, a sexual predilection for cars is only one aspect of our heroine, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), and her fucked-up psyche… []