Perhaps you’ve noticed that Halloween season has begun to creep in. Perhaps this has inspired your sudden urge consume the spookiest media possible. Grab a bag of fun-sized candy bars, with or without razor blade, and start the plunge early with these 10 scary Netflix picks.
Horror’s had enough exorcism tales to last decades—especially with a new Exorcist movie coming next month—but The Pope’s Exorcist, released earlier this year, has found new life on Netflix for a reason. The story is predictable, but Russell Crowe’s character, who’s based on a real-life exorcist who worked directly for the Vatican, is surprisingly delightful, cracking jokes, tooling around on a Vespa, and calling out the Catholic Church for its flaws while still maintaining faith strong enough to battle demons.
A few months after debuting at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, this Australian chiller starring Succession’s Sarah Snook made its way to Netflix to unsettle the streaming masses. Snook plays a doctor whose dark past comes back to haunt her, maybe literally, when her young daughter starts acting like she knows way more about her mother’s troubled childhood than she should.
Florence Pugh gets to dig into that good ol’ horror trope, playing a fake medium who pretends she’s able to speak to the dead. Her tidy scam turns itself inside out when she realizes her latest gig has landed her in a place (a creepy orphanage with a sinister history, no less) that’s actually haunted.
Is Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak the most gorgeous haunted-house movie ever made? While the movie, which stars Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, and Mia Wasikowska, divided audiences when it was released in 2015 (clearly, he won everyone back with 2017's Oscar-winning The Shape of Water)—no matter what you think of the story, it’s still horror eye candy of the highest order.
As long as Babak Anvari’s genuinely frightening tale of a mother and her young daughter struggling to survive in war-torn 1980s Tehran—with the added peril of an apparent supernatural evil haunting their apartment—remains among Netflix’s international horror selection, we’ll keep insisting you watch it. You’re welcome!
“Based on a true story” is a tried-and-true horror hook, and pairing that with a found-footage format just increases the potency of this tale, which became a huge hit in its native Taiwan after its 2022 release. Tsai Hsuan-yen stars as a mother who believes she’s accidentally cursed her daughter after filming a sacred ritual, and proves willing to do anything (don’t read any spoilers!) to reverse it.
A 2019 Fantastic Fest selection, Vivarium incorporates sci-fi elements into its tale of home-buying horrors, with Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots starring as a couple who stumble into dystopian real-estate horrors galore. Read io9's review here.
We’ll finish this slideshow with a trio of Stephen King adaptations, including this 2017 adaptation of King’s novella about a farmer (Thomas Jane) who does a Very Bad Thing and swiftly comes to regret it. It may be a King tale, but its suspenseful narrative and the main character’s mental-anguish deterioration spiral also owe a debt to Edgar Allan Poe.
King and his son Joe Hill co-authored the novella that In the Tall Grass is adapted from; with a cast that includes Patrick Wilson and Laysla De Oliveira (star of another of Netflix’s Hill adaptations, Locke & Key), it takes a seemingly innocuous setting—a grassy field—and incorporates time-loops and madness and monsters.
While horror fans eagerly await Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher series, hitting Netflix next month, there’s plenty of time to watch this 2017 King adaptation, which manages to be visually dynamic despite taking place from the point of view of a woman (Carla Gugino, who’s fantastic) who happens to be handcuffed to a bed nearly the entire time.