Dan Stevens in Netflix’s Apostle. Photo: Warren Orchard/Netflix
As we quickly approach Halloween proper, movie fans are turning to streaming services for scares more than ever. It helps that Netflix maintains a steady output of original movies for the season, adding to its already impressive collection of horror films.
We watched as many of the horror offerings under the Netflix Original banner as possible and ranked the best ones. Two notes on qualifications. First, it has to have the already-iconic Netflix boom-boom title card, so stuff that they picked up but don’t consider a “Netflix property” for whatever reason (like the great Under the Shadow) doesn’t qualify. Second, it has to be a horror movie. There are some thrillers (like Hold the Dark and Rebirth) and sci-fi action movies (like Spectral) that we’re leaving off. With that said, here are Netflix’s best 15 original horror flicks.
Sure, it’s not exactly a horror movie, but this surprisingly fun Adam Sandler original could set the right tone for your holiday movie marathon. The comedy superstar pulls another goofy voice out of his closet to play Hubie Dubois, an awkward guy who just happens to live in Salem, Massachusetts. A target of mockery for the entire town, he becomes its only salvation when supernatural events start to occur. While most of the Sandler Netflix movies are pretty horrible, this one is actually kinda sweet and funny. Of course, it includes a lot of the Sandler comedy troupe, including Kevin James, Steve Buscemi, and even a reunion with Happy Gilmore co-star Julie Bowen.
McG’s 2017 horror comedy has developed something of a cult following in the years since it dropped on Netflix, to the degree that it actually got a sequel. It helps that Samara Weaving has become a bigger star behind hit films like Ready or Not. She’s also the best thing here, playing Bee, a sweet babysitter who looks like she may be the first crush for the kid she watches, a 12-year-old named Cole. One night, Cole gets up to see what Bee does after he goes to bed — only to discover that the object of his preteen affection is actually the leader of a demonic cult. This is a deeply stupid movie, but in the kind of way you sometimes want around Halloween: a comedy-horror hybrid with a game performance from future star Weaving. (Note: The inferior sequel is also on Netflix.)
Netflix dropped a new genre movie every week in October 2019, and most of them fell pretty flat — but this flick from writer-director Vincenzo Natali was the best of the bunch. The Cube director adapts a short story by Stephen King and his son, Joe Hill, about a pair of siblings (Laysla De Oliveira and Avery Whitted) who hear a boy crying out for help in a field of tall grass by the side of a relatively deserted road. They head into the weeds to try and save the boy, only to quickly learn the error of their ways. It’s a great concept that’s, admittedly, a bit overwritten by Natali, but it contains a fun performance from Patrick Wilson, as well as some visual strength that the filmmaker likely brought with him from his excellent work on Hannibal.
Still in the “Yeah, it’s okay” section of the list is this offering, a ghost story that takes a hard turn into something closer to torture porn in the final act. There’s some really effective filmmaking before then, largely due to the grounded, in-the-moment performance from Florence Pugh, caught here just before she became a household name in films like Little Women and Don’t Worry Darling. Here, she plays a faux ghostbuster, conning people out of their money with her brother, who finds out that some ghosts are real. The end of this movie is a mess, but Pugh does enough good work in the first hour to justify a look.
It wouldn’t be a list of horror movies without a Stephen King adaptation or two, and this Zak Hilditch period piece is based on one of the master’s novellas from the 2010 anthology, Full Dark, No Stars. Thomas Jane is excellent as Wilfred James, a Nebraska farmer with a very unhappy wife, played by Molly Parker. When it become clear that Wilf’s wife is insistent on moving back to the city, the farmer decides she has to go, even convincing his son to help him. It’s essentially one of King’s riffs on murderous guilt à la The Tell-Tale Heart, with a seemingly good man going from one awful deed to flat-out insanity. It can’t quite hold for its running time (as often happens with short stories turned into long films), but there’s some unforgettable imagery here.
This is the only film on this list that one could argue isn’t really a horror film, but the final act gets so Wicker Man weird that we’ve decided it qualifies. It starts as a pretty terrifying thriller, the inciting incident being a hunting accident in which one of the protagonists accidentally shoots a child. It gets worse from there. When they decide to try to hide their crimes, things go downhill fast. Here’s the moral message: When one of your mates says “no harm done” after the murders of two people, you know you’re in trouble.
Isn’t it amazing that there are any new stories to tell in the zombie subgenre? Just when you think they’ve run out of ideas, along comes an effectively human story such as this piece, starring the always excellent Martin Freeman of Sherlock and The Hobbit fame. He stars as Andy, a man deep in the Australian outback, where things go very undead. The clever twist here is that the bitten don’t turn instantly — they have 48 hours to come to terms with their impending appetite for brains. It makes for a melancholy take on the genre we haven’t really seen before, other than in the other Netflix zombie flick with a twist …
Just as Cargo has a somber tone, this French-Canadian zombie flick captures the depressive state that would fall over the world if most of its residents became hungry for flesh. What works so well about director Robin Aubert’s Ravenous is the world creation he offers us via the brief glimpses of a few surviving characters. The film jumps around a rural landscape, finding a few random survivors just waiting for their next horrifying encounter. Fans of a certain AMC series, take note: Ravenous has echoes of The Walking Dead in the way it captures how the survivors may actually be worse off than those who died.
Based on the books of the same name by R.L. Stine, Fear Street is actually a trilogy of films on Netflix, all worth a look for horror fans. Directed by Leigh Janiak, the movies are subtitled with the year in which they take place: 1994, 1978, and 1666. The films tell the story of a group of teens living in a cursed community called Shadyside, a town that hasn’t reconciled with an ancient evil that awakens again in the first film’s riff on Scream-esque slasher thrillers from the ’90s. The second film has the energy of ’70s/’80s horror like Friday the 13th, while the final film digs back into the history of the town. Starring a couple of Stranger Things icons, Maya Hawke and Sadie Sink, these movies are fun and clever.
Unless it’s been spoiled for you, it’s impossible to know exactly where Richard Shepard’s cuckoo bananas movie is headed. At first, it feels like an intense relationship drama not unlike Black Swan but then it takes a sharp turn into something more akin to the body horror pioneered by David Cronenberg. And then it takes another turn into something even darker and stranger. Allison Williams and Logan Browning take us through this twisted journey of violin prodigies who, well, you just need to see it for yourself. Don’t let anyone else spoil it for you.
Probably the most divisive film on this list is writer-director Osgood Perkins’s (son of Psycho star Anthony) moody ghost story, a film way more interested in getting under your skin than making you jump. The Affair star Ruth Wilson stars as a live-in nurse at what could be a haunted house. With long takes and creepy sound design, Perkins’s film is a challenging one, but it’s a movie that does that one important thing that all the best ghost stories do: coming back to you in the middle of the night like a cinematic haunting.
Arguably more of a thriller than a horror film, Mike Flanagan’s second film on this list qualifies in the same way that The Strangers or even Scream qualifies — it’s one of the few “slasher pics” from the last few years that actually works. The reason it does is because it’s one of the few to have an original idea. (Well, at least as original as 1967’s Wait Until Dark, which probably inspired it.) If you’ve watched The Haunting of Hill House and wondered where you recognized Kate Siegel’s Theo from, it’s from here: She co-wrote and starred as Maddie, a deaf writer terrorized in the middle of the night. It’s effective, hair-raising filmmaking, with a great turn from Siegel.
Every horror section needs a batshit-crazy entry, the kind of gorefest you put on in the middle-of-the-night portion of your movie marathon just to keep everyone awake. The first hour of this slow burn from The Raid director Gareth Evans may be a tough haul if you start this at 3 a.m., but the second hour will wake everyone up. What first appears to be a gritty riff on The Wicker Man becomes an insane, gory riff on, well, The Wicker Man. Starring Dan Stevens (with a key supporting performance Michael Sheen), The Apostle follows a man invading a cult to find his kidnapped sister, and the closing scenes are as loony as anything you could watch on Netflix — or anywhere else really. Some love it, some hate it, but no one will forget it.
Is it possible for a later work to make a previous one better? When we see a filmmaker exploring similar themes in a recent work, it often highlights how he did so in earlier films. Such is the case with Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game, which was a good movie but feels even better in light of Hill House, and not only because both feature great performances by Carla Gugino and Henry Thomas. Flanagan expertly pulls out the human themes of Stephen King’s story of a woman trapped in a waking nightmare and how the trauma of her past influences her survival chances, and Gugino gives the best performance on this list — fearless and unforgettable.
What if it’s not places that are haunted but people? The best horror film with the Netflix Original banner is this Remi Weekes–directed gem that premiered at Sundance back in January 2020, just before the world fell apart; consequently, it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. It’s a masterfully told story of two Sudanese refugees, played by Sope Dirisu of Gangs of London and Wunmi Mosaku of Loki, who end up in a small town in Britain, where they’re told that they’re not allowed to leave their government-assigned home or risk deportation. And then scary things start to happen. Blending a story of immigration with a culturally resonant character study, this is one of the best films on Netflix, regardless of genre.
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October 13, 2022 at 03:00AM
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The 15 Best Netflix Original Horror Movies - Vulture
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