Editorials
The 20 Best Horror Movies on Netflix Right Now!
Movies are added and removed from Netflix every week. With so many options, it can be stressful to try to pick just one to watch. What if it sucks, you know? I took the liberty of combing through the many horror films currently on Netflix and selected 20 of the best ones for you to watch (if you haven’t already watched them, that is). You’re welcome.
The Classics
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Anyone who has ever taken a film class has undoubtedly already seen Robert Wiene’s German Expressionist silent film, but now that it’s available on Netflix so a re-watch is in order! The film tells the story of a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) who runs around Holstenwall committing murders at the behest of a hypnotist (Werner Krauss). Running at a brief 71 minutes, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is mandatory viewing for any horror fan.
The Exorcist
William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel is one of the best films ever made, horror or otherwise. The winner of two Academy Awards (and nominated for eight more), The Exorcist is the rare horror film to earn widespread acclaim from audiences and critics alike. It is also one of the scariest films ever made.
Hellraiser
The film that introduced the world to Pinhead and his fellow cenobites still shocks to this day (though I’m partial to Hellbound: Hellraiser II). Clive Barker’s tale of a puzzle box that will grant its solver unlimited pleasure (or pain) is a classic for a reason. Jesus wept.
90s Horror
Cape Fear
Robert De Niro stars in this intense thriller as a rapist who is released from prison only to go after the defense attorney (Nick Nolte) he deems responsible for putting him there. While not a horror movie per se, it features enough horrifying elements to merit a spot on this list (just try not to get the chills during De Niro’s flirtatious scene with a teenage Juliette Lewis (the actress was 21 at the time of filming, but her character is definitely a teenager).
Event Horizon
Some people love it, some people hate it. Either way, you’ve got to give Paul W.S. Anderson’s space nightmare some credit for its truly haunting imagery. The special effects don’t really hold up after all these years (all of the CGI anti-gravity effects look cartoonish by today’s standards), but Event Horizon is a pretty freaky mind-fuck of a film.
From Dusk Till Dawn
El Rey’s television adaptation may be all the rage now, but you just can’t beat the original. Robert Rodriguez’s crime-vampire flick is a hoot and a half. Starring a George Clooney (just one year before Batman and Robin happened to him), From Dusk Till Dawn follows two robber brothers (Clooney and Quentin Tarantino) as they kidnap a family and seek refuge across the Mexican border in a bar (aptly named the Titty Twister) that just so happens to be run by vampires. It’s even more fun than it sounds.
Slasher Sequels
Curse of Chucky
After the stinker that was Seed of Chucky, who ever thought we would get an above-average sixth installment of the Child’s Play franchise. Curse of Chucky returns the series to its horror roots and while it’s not without its flaws, it is a serious improvement over its predecessor. The only issue with watching this one on Netflix is that you lose the fantastic post-credits stinger, so make sure you don’t deprive yourself of that luxury if you watch it.
Scream 2
Scream 2 is a near-perfect slasher and a perfect sequel. End of story.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Wes Craven was on fire in the 90s. New Nightmare is essentially his meta precursor to Scream, and it mostly works. In the film, the Freddy Krueger entity has escaped into the real world after the Nightmare on Elm Street films stopped getting made and started attacking the actors and crew that have worked on the film, with his prime target being actress Heather Langenkamp (Nancy from NOES 1 and 3). While the film could use a few more kills, it’s still whip-smart. It was just released a few years too early.
Foreign Horror
The Host
While we all wait patiently for a sequel (seriously, does anyone know what happened to that thing?), check out Bong Joon-ho’s original 2006 masterpiece The Host. This is how you do a creature feature. The simplistic story follows the Park family as they go on the hunt for the youngest daughter in the family that has just been taken hostage by a creature that suddenly jumped out of the Han River. The Host is more than your average creature feature, as it focuses more on the close bond forged by the Park family (as opposed to the creature’s antics) as they try to rescue one of their own.
Battle Royale
The Hunger What? Kinji Fukasaku’s adaptation of Koushun Takami’s novel of the same name is the original child vs. child story, and boy is it tough to watch. In the near future, the Battle Royale Act was enacted when 800,000 students walked out of school. As part of the act, one class is selected to participate in a death match where only one student will be left standing. It’s a brutal, harrowing film and one of the best films to come out of the 2000s.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Otherwise known as “The first Iranian vampire-western,” Ana Lily Amirpour’s visually striking film (shot entirely in black and white) is also one of the most feminist horror movies to come out in quite some time. The plot is relatively simple, but it also a very sweet story of the love between a lonely vampire and a human misfit.
Modern Classics
The Babadook
The Babadook gets a lot of hate from mainstream moviegoers, and I can understand why. It’s mostly due to the obnoxious child, but I’ve come around on the film since being so hard on it a couple of years ago. It is a rather scary allegory for grief and learning to let go. The creature design on the titular boogeyman is fantastic (even if he’s barely on screen). If you found yourself not liking this one, give it another watch with your expectations in check. You may find yourself having a new appreciation for it.
Housebound
One of the funniest films of 2014 came to us courtesy of New Zealand. When Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly) is placed under house arrest at her parents’ home, she begins to suspect that the house is haunted. What follows is scares and laughs galore with a few twists thrown in for good measure (one of which was stolen by this year’s The Boy). If you want something to watch with friends, Housebound should be your top choice.
The Den
One of the few movies to truly unsettle me this decade has been Zachary Donohue’s The Den. The majority of the film is told from the viewpoint of webcams, but unlike other films with technology gimmicks, The Den actually creates a believable (and totally creepy) situation. Running at a brief 81 minutes, The Den flies by and will have you thinking twice about signing in to Skype or Chat Roulette.
New(ish) Releases
We Are Still Here
While it may be a bit too slowly paced for some, We Are Still Here is a moody and atmospheric horror film that focuses on a quartet of adult characters for a change. Set in 1979, the film follows a couple grieving the recent death of their son who move to a new home in New England, only to come under attack from some crispy spirits.
Hush
While not popular with quite a few readers here at Bloody Disgusting, Hush is nonetheless a tense and exciting experience (my review). The latest film from Oculus director Mike Flanagan (at least until Before I Wake finally gets released in September) is a fun little potboiler of a film that sees a deaf-mute woman get stalked around her house by a psychotic killer. It doesn’t really reinvent the wheel, but it spins that wheel remarkably well.
Starry Eyes
If you saw The Neon Demon and walked out underwhelmed, give Starry Eyes a watch. The Kickstarted film chronicles Sarah’s (Alex Essoe, a revelation) journey to becoming a famous actress. Though a slow burn, Starry Eyes has plenty of cringeworthy body horror elements that will be sure to have you squirming in your seat.
Let Us Prey
This British-Irish horror film was a huge surprise for me last year. The film tells the tale of a mysterious stranger named Six (Liam Cunningham, aka Davos Seaworth from Game of Thrones) who is arrested and put in a prison cell, only to cause the criminals and police officers inside to come to terms with their sins. The ultimate reveal of Six’s true identity may be a bit predictable, but the road there is a gory blast.
They Look Like People
The feature film directorial debut of Perry Blackshear is less an outright horror film and more an intense look into mental illness. Running at a brief 80 minutes, the film stars MacLeod Andrews as a man who believes that the world is being taken over by evil creatures. You will have to watch the film to find out whether or not he is correct, but suffice it to say that the film leads to an appropriately disturbing conclusion.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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