The 30 Best Horror Movies on Hulu Ranked (March 2025)

In terms of comparing the major streaming services, it’s easy to think of Hulu as “the TV-focused one,” but that’s not entirely fair—the service also has a healthy number of movies at any given time, although its overall library is nowhere near the size of Netflix’s or (especially) Amazon Prime’s. Still, horror geeks who happen to have a Hulu subscription actually have access to a surprisingly large library of quality films.

Kudos to Hulu for eventually creating a horror-specific subcategory instead of “horror and suspense” jumbled together into one category that somehow contained the likes of both The Babadook and Snowden. Now at least everything you see when you visit the “horror” tab makes sense being there.

In 2025, the Hulu library seems to have been recently been purged of some films, which has reduced the overall size of the library. Particularly in terms of indie horror, though, Hulu has made its mark as one of the better streaming services.

You may also want to consult the following horror-centric lists:

The 100 best horror films of all time.
The 100 best vampire movies of all time.
The 50 best zombie movies of all time.
The 50 best movies about serial killers.
The 50 best slasher movies of all time
The 50 best ghost movies of all time.
The best horror movies streaming on Netflix.
The best horror movies streaming on Amazon Prime.
The best horror movies streaming on Shudder.

So without any further ado, here are the 30 best horror movies streaming on Hulu:

1. Alien

Year: 1979
Director: Ridley Scott
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt
Rating: R

Conduits, canals and cloaca—Ridley Scott’s ode to claustrophobia leaves little room to breathe, cramming its blue collar archetypes through spaces much too small to sustain any sort of sanity, and much too unforgiving to survive. That Alien can also make Space—capital “S”—in its vastness feel as suffocating as a coffin is a testament to Scott’s control as a director (arguably absent from much of his work to follow, including his insistence on ballooning the mythos of this first near-perfect film), as well as to the purity of horror as a cinematic genre. Alien, after all, is tension as narrative, violation as a matter of fact: When the crew of the mining spaceship Nostromo is prematurely awakened from cryogenic sleep to attend to a distress call from a seemingly lifeless planetoid, there is no doubt the small cadre of working class grunts and their posh Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) will discover nothing but mounting, otherworldly doom. Things obviously, iconically, go wrong from there, and as the crew understands both what they’ve brought onto their ship and what their fellow crew members are made of—in one case, literally—a hero emerges from the catastrophe: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the Platonic ideal of the Final Girl who must battle a viscous, phallic grotesque (care of the master of the phallically grotesque, H.R. Giger) and a fellow crew member who’s basically a walking vessel for an upsetting amount of seminal fluid. As Ripley crawls through the ship’s steel organs, between dreams—the film begins with the crew wakening, and ends with a return to sleep—Alien evolves into a psychosexual nightmare, an indictment of the inherently masculine act of colonization and a symbolic treatise on the trauma of assault. In Space, no one can hear you scream—because no one is listening. —Dom Sinacola

2. When Evil Lurks
Year: 2023
Director: Demián Rugna
Stars: Ezequiel Rodriguez, Demian Salomon, Luis Ziembrowski, Silvia Sabater, Marcelo Michinaux
Rating: NR

Director Demián Rugna’s debut horror feature Terrified has slowly but surely captured the attention of horror geeks around the world, but 2023’s When Evil Lurks is likely to complete his ascent to a star in the genre, even if he hasn’t yet produced an English-language feature. This is one of the most disturbingly creative and fraught possession horror films to arrive in decades, dropping the viewer absolutely cold into a setting where god is dead and evil is seemingly running roughshod over the Earth.

It’s deeply disconcerting to watch a horror film centered around demonic possession where the act of possession isn’t decried by the characters as some foolish impossibility, but is instead a well-understood facet of daily existence in this world. The arrival of a “rotten one” in a community is like the outbreak of an exotic and extremely deadly disease, requiring the presence of a specifically trained “cleaner” to dispose of the gestating demon in a way that doesn’t result in the entire area quickly becoming infected with evil. What happens when regular people have to deal with that kind of horror themselves? We quickly come to realize that there are a plethora of “rules” to surviving these encounters, but Rugna doesn’t handhold the audience and inform us of what they all are–every interaction instead becomes a paranoid question of wondering if the characters have become possessed, or vulnerable to attack. Never are we certain of what is true, and what is folklore. Pair this uncertainty with unflinching savagery and brutality, and you have one of the most gut-wrenching horror films to make its way to a small number of U.S. theaters in recent memory. —Jim Vorel

3. Aliens

Year: 1986
Director: James Cameron
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Michael Biehn
Rating: R

James Cameron colonizes ideas: Every beautiful, breathtaking spectacle he assembles works as a pointillist representation of the genres he inhabits—sci-fi, horror, adventure, thriller—its many wonderful pieces and details of worldbuilding swarming, combining to grow exponentially, to inevitably overshadow the lack at its heart, the doubt that maybe all of this great movie-making is hiding a dearth of substance at the core of the stories Cameron tells. An early example of this pilgrim’s privilege is Cameron’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s horror masterpiece, in which Cameron mostly jettisons Scott’s figurative (and uncomfortably intimate) interrogation of masculine violence to transmute that urge into the bureaucracy that only served as a shadow of authoritarianism in the first film. Cameron blows out Scott’s world, but also neuters it, never quite connecting the lines from the aggression of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation to the maleness of the military industrial complex, but never condoning that maleness, or that complex, either. Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) story about what happened on the Nostromo in the first film is doubted because she’s a woman, sure, but mostly because the story spells disaster for the corporation’s nefarious plans. Private Vasquez’s (Jennette Goldstein) place in the Colonial Marine unit sent to LV-426 to investigate the wiping out of a human colony is taunted, but never outright doubted, her strength compared to her peers pretty obvious from the start. Instead, in transforming Ripley into a full-on action hero/mother figure—whose final boss battle involves protecting her ersatz daughter from the horror of another mother figure—Cameron isn’t messing with themes of violation or the role of women in an economic hierarchy, he’s placing women by default at the forefront of mankind’s future war. It’s magnificent blockbuster filmmaking, and one of the first films to redefine what a franchise can be within the confines of a new director’s voice and vision.—Dom Sinacola

4. Prey

Year: 2022
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Starring: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp, Michelle Thrush, Julian Black Antelope
Rating: R

Filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator prequel Prey succeeds by daring to embrace what prior sequels did not: Simplicity. The basics of Predator cinema boil down to skull trophies and rival combat, but most of all, the thrill of an uninterrupted hunt. With brutal ease, writer Patrick Aison translates Predator codes to hunter-gatherer dichotomies in Native American cultures. There’s nothing scarier than the laws of natural hierarchies on display in their most elemental forms, and that’s what Prey recognizes with menacing regard. Trachtenberg understands what Predator fans crave, and executes without mercy. Set in the Northern Great Plains of 1719, Prey pits a Predator challenging any species’ alphas—wolves, bears, people—against a Comanche tribe. Taabe (Dakota Beavers) leads other boys on hunts while his sister Naru (Amber Midthunder) practices her deadliest skills in secrecy. She’s dismissed by most for her gender, but not by Taabe. Naru’s chance to defeat a lion (thanks to Taabe) and earn her warrior’s rite of passage fails when a Predator’s alien technology distracts from afar—which no one believes. Only Naru can protect her family and tribespeople from the unknown Yautja threat since no one will listen, which will be the warrior-wannabe’s ultimate test. Prey is inarguably the best Predator since the original. The film gets so much right, paying homage to John McTiernan’s 1987 masterwork—through cigars and direct quotes that it’ll have fans hooting—and adding Indigenous representation with real cultural strength. Trachtenberg and Aison keep things simple, and that’s the special sauce. The performances are tough-as-nails, action sequences absurdly gory and intensity streamlined like a high velocity arrow. By going back to beginnings, Prey sheds pounds of franchise dead weight for a leaner, meaner Predator prequel with all the spine-tearing, one-liner-spouting gladiatorial conquest that fans desire—computer-generated or not. —Matt Donato

5. The Empty Man

Year: 2020
Director: David Prior
Stars: James Badge Dale, Owen Teague, Stephen Root, Marin Ireland
Rating: R

From the start, everything about The Empty Man is misleading. Its title sounds like the absolutely terrible Bloody Mary-esque The Bye Bye Man or the botched adaptation of Slender Man, where spooky too-long shadow dudes creep up on some doltish teens. Those bad high school urban legend films (that this trailer is cut oh-so-specifically to evoke) don’t usually stray from the 90-minute mark. Even Candyman, maybe the best and most ambitious example of this type of film, is barely 100 minutes. The Empty Man’s 137-minute runtime clearly has more to do than kill off a couple of kids for failing to be superstitious enough. Rather than falling into that traditional type of stock schlock, The Empty Man follows a troubled ex-cop investigating the root causes of an incident that could’ve been the entire plot of one of those movies. “We knew we weren’t making that movie and nobody wanted to make that movie,” writer/director/editor David Prior told Thrillist. “But it turns out, the people who inherited the movie wanted that kind of movie.” It makes sense that the ever-expanding, ever-spiraling photos-and-folders paranoid conspiracy of The Empty Man can feel a bit like getting sucked into the kind of heady, hyper-specific hell that festers in the underbellies of Zodiac, Se7en or Mindhunter. That ‘70s thriller structure, dedicated to the paper trail, merges in The Empty Man with a downright otherworldly horror (used here in the literal sense, as opposed to terror) aesthetic that’s sheer scope makes a mockery of the movie’s shoe-leather detective work. But even The Empty Man’s start is a delightful little horror film all its own, a mythological amuse-bouche set on snowy Bhutan peaks where set design and some solidly naturalistic acting sell the scares. Great! Solid. Sold. And then the movie keeps going, as if to literally push past your expectations. Its narrative evolves into something increasingly strange and engaging. It’s like A Cure for Wellness, another cult favorite, in its dedication to piling on an investigator’s hallucinogenic obsession and repulsion as he finds himself suddenly so deep that climbing back out—or, perhaps, out for the first time—proves impossible. Prior’s grasp of tone and savvy subversion of different modern monster tropes, alongside a staggering and committed James Badge Dale performance, position the film as one that understands and appreciates studio horror movies, but has much bigger things on its mind. In short, it rules.—Jacob Oller

6. Barbarian

Year: 2022
Director: Zach Cregger
Stars: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long
Rating: R

The deceptively simple premise of Barbarian, the horror debut from writer/director Zach Cregger, is enough to induce genuine goosebumps. However, Cregger takes a creepy idea and concocts a breakneck tale of unyielding terror, giving audiences whiplash with each unpredictable revelation. When Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at her Detroit Airbnb on a forcefully stormy night, she finds that there’s no key in the encrypted lockbox to let herself in. After calling the host proves fruitless, she suddenly sees a light turn on through a front window. Tess frantically rings the doorbell, and the recently roused Keith (Bill Skarsgård) awkwardly answers the door. Realizing they accidentally double-booked the same rental for the next few days, Keith immediately insists that Tess get out of the rain and take the bedroom for the night (of course, he’s totally content with taking the couch). Surprisingly, she agrees. Though few viewers would likely make the same decision as the film’s protagonist, Barbarian wastes no time creating a thick sense of dread that clings until the credits roll. To divulge any further details of the film’s plot would thwart the winding, increasingly shocking narrative crafted by Cregger. With each terrifying reveal feeling fresher and freakier than the last, it’s encouraged to go into Barbarian with as little background and context as possible. Even citing Cregger’s horror references would serve to unnecessarily hint at jarring shifts in the film’s story, though comparisons to the work of fellow horror filmmakers James Wan, Tobe Hooper and George Romero are particularly apt. Barbarian offers up plenty of food for thought in its rancid banquet from hell. It’s got a biting socially-conscious undercurrent that addresses the bleak reality of existing as a woman in the U.S.—both past and present, whether residing in manicured suburbs or “shady” inner-city neighborhoods—even successfully weaving in a #MeToo subplot that doesn’t feel one-note or cursory. Even more impressive, Cregger incorporates this throughline with a heavy dose of humor, no doubt aided by his tenure as a member of IFC sketch comedy show The Whitest Kids U’ Know. Barbarian offers a fascinating take on the oft-unspoken claim men have long believed they have over women’s bodies. It does an excellent job at juxtaposing banal excuses for gendered violence with ghoulish, heinous ploys to strip women of their bodily autonomy (and their very humanity), exposing the malevolent nature of this deeply ingrained cultural misogyny. With the wounds still raw from the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade, Barbarian’s fixation on the omnipresent threat of rape in our society hits as hard as it (hopefully) ever could. Never relishing in the very brutality that it denounces, the film has its heart in the right place. It refuses to depict sexual violation on screen, cleverly illustrating the pervasiveness of this miserable reality without exploiting it for shallow shock value. Yet, even with the best of intentions, Barbarian will mercilessly run you through the wringer, letting these fucked-up facets of America absolutely ravage the screen—and your sanity—for 102 remarkably tense minutes.—Natalia Keogan

7. Longlegs

Year: 2024
Director: Oz Perkins
Stars: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood, Kiernan Shipka
Rating: R

The first thing I wanted to do after seeing Longlegs is take a shower. Some horror movies have you looking over your shoulder on the way out of the theater, jumping at shadows in the parking lot. These are the horror movies that follow you. Longlegs doesn’t follow you. You’re drenched in Longlegs. It’s all over you—in your hair, on your clothes—by the time the credits roll. Its fear is less tangible than a slasher or a monster, even less than a demon. It’s just something in the air, in the back of your mind, like the buzz of a fluorescent lamp. Oz Perkins’ Satanic serial killer hunt is his most accessible movie yet, putting the filmmaker’s lingering, atmospheric power towards a logline The Silence of the Lambs made conventional. Precisely crafted and just odd enough to disarm you, allowing its evil to fully seep in, Longlegs is a riveting tale of influence and immersion. After FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) successfully, and mysteriously, locates a killer on little more than a hunch, her charming boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), assigns the quiet savant to a long-dormant investigation into a suspect known only by how he signs the coded letters found at the crime scenes: Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). Only, the mystery to be solved isn’t Clue. You’re not filling in weapon, location, suspect. The question crawling under Longlegs’ skin is how grounded this case actually is, whether it’s a truly by-the-book procedural or whether that book is bound in skin and filled with spells. Lee is tight-lipped and uneasy in her own skin, a child’s soft voice wrapped in a blue FBI windbreaker. But she doesn’t balk at corpses, or head for the hills once she realizes she’s on Longlegs’ radar. Longlegs could also feel like familiar territory for Cage, at first glance. And that’s all we get at first, glances. Like any good monster movie, we’re denied a close look at Longlegs for a decent chunk of the movie’s three segments, but once we see him, that’s all you can think about. You see how a demonic seed has been planted and left to its own devices, down in some forgotten cellar, festering in the dark. As Perkins’ story progresses, you wonder where else those seeds have spread. It’s rotten Americana, every god-fearing Bible-thumper’s fears proven right. Longlegs contains a handful of impressively controlled performances, a dilapidated aesthetic rich with negative space, a queasy score, a methodical but always gripping pace, and one of the most original and upsetting horror villains in a long while. Perkins’ haunted vision is so convincing, you also might feel like scrubbing it off of you after you’ve hustled back to the safety of your home.–Jacob Oller

8. Hatching

Year: 2022
Director: Hanna Bergholm
Stars: Siiri Solalinna, Sophia Heikkila, Jani Volanen, Reino Nordin, Saija Lentonen
Rating: NR

Pubescent pressures are compounded by the presence of a horrifying mutant doppelganger in Hatching, Finnish director Hanna Bergholm’s debut feature. Written by Ilja Rautsi, the film is a domestic drama at its core, detailing the toxicity inherent to a controlling mother-daughter dynamic. However, what elevates Hatching to the upper echelons of the familial horror-drama is its inspired use of practical effects and puppeteering, resulting in a genuinely unsettling movie monster that appears all the more uncanny in its originality. While the finer plot details might not feel as fresh as its central doppelganger entity, Hatching hits the right emotional cues nonetheless—instilling its fair share of thrilling scares while stirring adolescent pathos. — Natalia Keogan

9. The First Omen

Year: 2024
Director: Arkasha Stevenson
Stars: Nell Tiger Free, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Ralph Ineson, Bill Nighy
Rating: R

Unless it’s something like the Evil Dead franchise, I generally don’t give horror sequels or prequels a passing thought other than “obvious insta-garbage.” How wrong I was about The First Omen, the feature debut of writer/director Arkasha Stevenson. Her film immediately struck me not as a franchise cash-in, but as the work of someone who deeply understands what makes good horror tick and who made this installment almost completely their own. The small handful of Marvel-esque Easter eggs are entirely negligible for how well the film succeeds at being an affecting and stomach-churning work of modern horror. The First Omen kicks off with a queasy conversation between two English priests, Father Harris (Charles Dance) and Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), over the conception of an unknown cursed child, a girl (Damien is a boy, yes—but I’ll keep this review spoiler-free) whose birth will bring forth an all-powerful evil. Kept elusive and told via a collage of disturbing yet striking images, we leave this scene and cut to the arrival of a young American nun-to-be named Margaret (Nell Tiger Free). She befriends her new roommate, the free-spirited Luz (Maria Caballero), who is determined to use her remaining days of secular freedom spent as the hedonistic young woman she still is. One night, Luz gets a reluctant Margaret all gussied up and drags her to a disco, where Margaret meets a nice Italian boy with whom she shares an intimate moment. The next day, she wakes up in a puddle of her own sweat, the memory of the previous night already erased; Luz assures her that she got Margaret home safely. A grave encounter with Father Brennan portends impending doom, and Margaret begins to see and experience strange, diabolical things. Stevenson, aided by co-writers Tim Smith and Keith Thomas, makes The First Omen remarkably fresh while utilizing old tricks. Pans and zooms give the filmmaking a throwback feel (cinematography credited to Aaron Morton), jump scares function as earned accoutrement for a well-crafted atmosphere instead of supplanting actual horror filmmaking, and there are images that are genuinely difficult to look at—not just because they make the audience look at something particularly visceral, but because of the way the shot is blocked, the way the lighting is lit, the way a body is not quite as it should be. Not overtly gory but just off, which is often far more skin-crawling than blood and guts ever are. The First Omen is an exceedingly successful first feature, and an invigorating film within a genre’s increasingly limp mainstream.–Brianna Zigler

10. Castle Rock

Year: 2018
Director: Various
Stars: Andre Holland, Melanie Lynskey, Bill Skarsgård, Sissy Spacek, Lizzy Caplan, Tim Robbins
Rating: NR

Castle Rock is easy to love if you’ve already given yourself up to Stephen King’s brand of campfire story, with all the hokey chuckles and midnight palm-sweating that comes with it. I know I have—I just finished enjoying King’s latest, The Outsider—which makes me a prime target (though, I suspect, not the only target) for Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason’s Hulu original series, based on King’s mythos. Michael Uppendahl directs the solid pilot, which pushes artistry and literary fidelity into its compellingly sketched mystery, and the hooks only sink in deeper over the rest of season one. The plot and environment (because one is inevitably entangled with the other) use the stories of Stephen King as their knitting fiber, intertwining both meta- and textual characters and themes into the afflicted town of Castle Rock (home of Cujo and The Dead Zone). Along with It’s Derry and the oft-abbreviated Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock makes up the Bermuda triangle of fictitious Maine haunts that King keeps coming back to. King’s work loves a polluted system, and towns work just as well as prisons or hotels. The atmosphere works because the series’ thematic and artistic construction do each other plenty of favors. For example, the show treats religion and the supernatural as forces that aren’t necessarily on equal footing, but are certainly enabling each other, like a father pushing his child higher and higher on the swing set. Which is which never stays the same. There’s misguided righteousness, dangerous excitement, and legitimate goodness caught up in the battle for Castle Rock’s soul, which is an exciting spin on the conventional Exorcist-like binary questioning of faith. —Jacob Oller

11. Cobweb

Year: 2023
Director: Samuel Bodin
Stars: Lizzy Caplan, Antony Starr, Cleopatra Coleman, Woody Norman
Rating: R

Samuel Bodin’s upstart Cobweb arrived seemingly out of nowhere in the summer of 2023, and was sadly given very shoddy marketing that doomed it to a quick and uneventful theatrical release before it settled into the morass of VOD availability. That’s a shame, as Cobweb is a very skillfully directed horror yarn from the young filmmaker, unraveling a tangle of familiar tropes in a manner that is able to refresh almost all of them. The film has been expertly framed as a perspective we are seeing entirely from child height, featuring a grimy layer of nightmare unreality through which young Peter (Woody Norman) begins experiencing nightly disturbances from within the walls of his bedroom. It all has the feeling of dark fantasy or fairytale rather than the cold light of our own reality, helped along by scenery-chewing sinister performances from Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr as Peter’s not-at-all-suspicious parents. There are moments here still helplessly bound by cliche like a fly caught in a spider’s web, but Cobweb’s genuinely unnerving visuals, oppressive atmosphere, Halloween-rich setting and gonzo third act lift it above so many other superficially similar stories. —Jim Vorel

12. After Midnight

Year: 2019
Director: Jeremy Gardner, Christian Stella
Stars: Jeremy Gardner, Bea Grant, Henry Zebrowski
Rating: NR

Hank (Jeremy Gardner) has a problem: Abby (Brea Grant), his longtime girlfriend and the weathervane of his existence, has up and left with only a vague note to explain her sudden disappearance. All Hank has to hang onto now is his family’s old home, which he and Abby had made their home together, plus a bottomless case of peanut wine. Oh, also, there’s that damn monster that batters Hank every night after the clock strikes 12. That’s a problem, too. After Midnight could be read as anything other than a horror film, but if there’s a worse horror to live with than the horror of knowing your short-term future is going to be defined by monster attacks, well, Gardner doesn’t care. Following his usual tack, he wrote this movie, co-directed this movie and put himself in front of the cameras while they rolled: There’s more budget to speak of than his other work (like The Battery), considering the involvement of effects studio MastersFX (see: Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight), but most of the money goes toward…well, wait for the final 10 or so minutes to find out. Everything that’s left over goes toward creating a sadsack world for Hank to live in and pity himself in, his stunted emotional growth being the bugbear holding him back from going anywhere with his life and with Abby. “Manchildren but make it scary” sounds like a terrible elevator pitch, but Gardner’s been making low-budget, high-tension, higher-atmosphere movies in his sleep for his whole career, and After Midnight is the most refined example of his vision yet. —Andy Crump

13. Infinity Pool

Year: 2023
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Stars: Mia Goth, Alexander Skarsgard, Cleopatra Coleman
Rating: R

Getting too deeply into what exactly happens in Infinity Pool is like outlining the recirculating edge of its title’s horizon-flouting construction. It won’t take away from its pleasures, but you can’t really understand until you’re in it. Until Cronenberg drives you down an unlit backroad, long enough that you start wondering if you’re dreaming or awake. But what’s clearest in this gallows comedy is that its characters exist. The people who think they’ve solved reality, the conceited class with the luxury of being horny for death, because death has never been real to them. Infinity Pool’s inspired critique of this crowd is fierce and funny, its hallucinations nimble and sticky, and its encompassing nightmare one you’ll remember without needing to break out the vacation slideshow. —Jacob Oller

14. Cuckoo

Year: 2024
Director: Tilman Singer
Stars: Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Marton Csokas, Jan Bluthardt
Rating: R

Cuckoo is a twisty, giallo-inspired, semi-body horror mystery that double acts as an impressive lead showcase proving that Schafer is more than just an “it girl.” Gretchen, a moody American teen grieving the recent loss of her mother, is forced to move in with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), his much younger English wife Beth (Jessica Henwick), and their mute daughter Alma (Mila Lieu). Luis and Beth have relocated from the States to the Alps, where they had once honeymooned at a lavish resort and subsequently conceived Alma. Both architects, the couple has been solicited by the resort’s owner, the overly pleasant Herr König (Dan Stevens) to build him a new resort. Thus, their project leaves them, and now Gretchen, with an indefinite stay in Germany. This is much to Gretchen’s chagrin, to put it lightly. She resents her stepmother and half-sister in what is customary for this archetypal character dynamic: a new mother has laid eggs in Gretchen’s nest, stealing resources. So, too is Gretchen’s relationship with her father strained. She had previously been under her mother’s welcomed custody, but in the wake of her untimely passing, Gretchen is now required to encroach upon her father’s new, younger family whom he had willingly abandoned her for.

One could argue that Cuckoo’s chief failing is that it doesn’t allow its tone to lean into the pure, visceral absurdity of its narrative. But I’d argue back that the seriousness adds to a certain charm, in a way where it’s clear that Singer isn’t trying to be overly self-serious; certainly, Argento characters are still taking the graveness of their stakes to heart. That König is so dead-set in his absurd goals is delightful, because there’s still a little twinkle in his eye, and Cuckoo manages to imbue this vibe with an earnest terror that makes for an exceedingly entertaining horror film. —Brianna Zigler

15. Crimes of the Future

Year: 2022
Director: David Cronenberg
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar, Scott Speedman
Rating: R

Sharing a title with Cronenberg’s second film, the latest from the body horror auteur is a return to (de)form after two decades of more dialed-back drama. Digging into the art world’s juicy guts and suturing it up as a compelling, ambitious sci-fi noir, Crimes of the Future thrills, even if it leaves a few stray narrative implements sewn into its scarred cavities. The dreamy and experimental Crimes of the Future (1970) sees creative cancers develop in a womanless world ravaged by viruses. New organs are created (and sometimes worshiped) in a broken society now run by fetishists and hurtling towards a dire, damnable biological response. While Cronenberg’s 2022 do-over on the subject of organic novelty in a collapsing society isn’t a remake by any stretch of the new flesh, it addresses the same pet interests that’ve filled his films since the beginning. Thankfully, it does so with new subtextual success and a far more straightforward and accessible text (despite the full-frontal nudity and graphic autopsies). Unlike Cronenberg’s early work, this movie has color, diegetic sound and movie stars. It embraces traditional dramatic pacing and supplements its perversion with cutting-edge effects. And at least now the characters speak to each other—in that detached, psychology-textbook-meets-FM-2030-essay style—while the camera dives deep into the guts that fascinate us. Specifically, the guts of Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen). He and Caprice (Lea Seydoux) are performance artists whose medium is the generation and removal of neo-organs. Saul builds them up, Caprice slices them out. Our destruction of the world, filling its oceans with plastic and its air with pollution, allowed this to happen. Humanity is now literally numb. People slice each other with knives at clubs, or in the street. Recreational surgery is commonplace. Many can only feel real pain while asleep. This unconscious suffering is just one of many sharpened sides of Crimes’ metaphor. Art is evolving to meet this nerve-deadened world on its terms. Humans are too, literally. That’s why Saul’s able to squeeze out nasty new lumps of viscera and why National Organ Registry investigators Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), as well as radical transhumanist Lang (Scott Speedman), find him fascinating. The trio help narratively blend the dystopian bureaucracy and thriving, subversive multimedia generated by Cronenberg’s nihilistic predictions. When we eventually ruin things, there will just as surely be new cogs in old machines as there will be new rebels in old resistances. Erudite and exploitative, gory yet gentle, Crimes of the Future shows the new kids on the chopping block that an old master can still dissect with the best. But Crimes of the Future’s more meaningful impact is in its representation of a trailblazer finally seeing the horizon. Cronenberg’s view of the future understands that the true death of an artist and the death of society at large result from the same tragic failure to evolve—even if that innovation is simply renovation.—Jacob Oller

16. Handling the Undead

Year: 2024
Director: Thea Hvistendahl
Stars: Renate Reinsve, Bjørn Sundquist, Bente Børsum, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bahar Pars, Inesa Dauksta
Rating: R

A zombie tragedy of false hope and brutal realizations, Handling the Undead adapts John Ajvide Lindqvist’s follow-up book to Let the Right One In with contemplative quiet. Director and co-writer Thea Hvistendahl positions three families afflicted by the sudden resurrection of a newly dead loved one as isolated units, staring in disbelief at the thing we’ve been trained since birth to avoid. A grandfather and mother care for a boy whose distended belly and unseeing eyes are like punishments inflicted upon them. An elderly woman jabbers away about her garden with the wife that walked back from her funeral. A comedian and his children ride an emotional roller coaster after his wife doesn’t stay dead after a car accident. Each is shot in strict compositions defined by straight lines, distancing angles and obscured frames. Hvistendahl’s lovely yet unnerving aesthetic is as cold and tangible as its corpses, paced with plenty of time for us to think. In this telling, the realities of death don’t go away with the unreality of revitalization, and the cannibalistic motivations that drive similar genre stories to crisis are avoided in favor of a creeping, omnipresent desperation. Where Let the Right One In‘s austere and icy vampire tale played more to our sympathies for its characters, Handling the Undead allows us to project our own fears and sadnesses onto its unaware zombies—just like those still living in its world. –Jacob Oller

17. Flux Gourmet

Year: 2022
Director: Peter Strickland
Stars: Asa Butterfield, Gwendoline Christie, Ariane Labed, Fatma Mohamed, Makis Papadimitriou, Richard Bremmer, Leo Bill
Rating: NR

In Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet, there are whole ecosystems of sound: Noises warble and moan and serrate, each one with its own finicky, unpleasant rhythms, until they cohere into something bigger. In Strickland’s world, this is “sonic catering,” an immersive form of performance art which relishes in the peals and clunks of kitchen appliances and foodstuffs. The saucepans and blenders are mic’d; steam is plucked at like a zither; a performer will sometimes writhe on the ground naked and bloodied in an effort to assume the likeness of a dying pig. Sound is reinventing itself constantly and Strickland is determined to materialize its every flavor. —Saffron Maeve

18. Bad Hair

Year: 2020
Director: Justin Simien
Stars: Elle Lorraine, Jar Pharoah, Lena Waithe, Kelly Rowland, Laverne Cox
Rating: NR

The truest statement anyone can make about Justin Simien’s horror-comedy Bad Hair is that it’s very much a Justin Simien movie. Like his breakout feature debut, Dear White People, and the Netflix TV series he wound up spinning the film into, Bad Hair unpacks Black American identities through social and cultural lenses, mixing straight-faced character studies with sharp banter and humor. Unlike Dear White People, Bad Hair has issues balancing the two in tandem with the horror side of the scales, and often finds itself thrown out of equilibrium in the final measurement. Simien’s work is funny, and spooky, but never both together. Comedy and horror historically go together well. Genre film, particularly the grotesque, straddles a fine line, and the grotesque has a way of tipping easily into comedy. In Bad Hair the two share a split-custody agreement: They visit the viewer only in every other scene. —Andy Crump

19. Insidious

Year: 2010
Director: James Wan
Stars: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey, Lin Shaye
Rating: PG-13

A couple years before he essentially perfected the modern, big-budget haunted house movie via The Conjuring, Insidious was the film where James Wan proved once and for all that his genre success in the original Saw was no fluke. It’s a film that benefits from an audience’s low expectations for its complexity–the viewer goes in assuming that they’re seeing the same basic haunting/possession/poltergeist-type story they’ve seen before, and Wan then dazzles them with a mythos that is considerably more detailed (and batshit) than what they expected to receive. So too does the film benefit from a few key performances, whether that’s Patrick Wilson as the anxious father (and secret font of psychic energy) searching for his son, or the utterly essential Lin Shaye as the knowledgeable demonologist who is the family’s only hope. The near-starring role of Shaye really is something worth acknowledging, as the presence of older women as stars/protagonists in the horror genre is close to nonexistent–the Insidious series managed the odd task of taking a character who was in the supporting role of Zelda Rubinstein in Poltergeist and somehow turning her into the legitimate hero of the franchise. Today, the film still holds up well enough, undone a bit by its sequels’ insistence on constant canonical retconning, but featuring jump scares (especially that red-faced demon) that are as effective as anything in their era. —Jim Vorel

20. Run

Year: 2020
Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Stars: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen
Rating: NR

Under 90 minutes and without an ounce of fat, Run buzzes with anxiety even in the quietest scenes where technically all’s well but nothing’s right: Repeated sequences, like a daughter’s ritualized mealtimes, grow increasingly uneasy as her questions about her mother and the truth slowly evolve into suspicions and then, at last, fully blossom into horrified disbelief. What would you do if you found out the person you call “mom” may not actually be your mom at all? Earlier in 2020, The Craft: Legacy clumsily posed and answered the same question, but Chaganty and his Searching co-writer Sev Ohanian map Run around that fearful betrayal and give real thought to its consequences—and Chloe’s response. —Andy Crump

21. Late Night with the Devil

Year: 2024
Director: Colin Cairnes, Cameron Cairnes
Stars: David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi
Rating: R

The brothers behind Aussie cult horror-comedy 100 Bloody Acres, Colin and Cameron Cairnes return to the uneasy balance of genres for Late Night with the Devil — and they throw in a new one for good measure. Not content to simply be charmingly hacky or tightly gruesome, Late Night with the Devil is also a great movie about (and existing within the form of) talk shows. David Dastmalchian was born for the role of an underdog late-night host, occupying the uneasy space between slick smarm, hungry entitlement and genuine empathy. His piercing eyes and faltering smile persist through the patter and the cue cards, so when it’s clear that he’s brought something he could never hope to understand — let alone control — onto his program as a ratings ploy, we’re plummeting on the roller coaster right alongside him. The Cairnes’ dedication to their set and its stagecraft envelops you in the exploitative environment, ready to see a variety show of oddballs trotted out for America’s perverse pleasure. Add in some no-holds-barred gore and a few guests chewing the scenery, and you’ve got yourself a winning midnight staple – no musical guest necessary. Also, c’mon. If you throw in the owl mask from Stage Fright, I’m basically yours to lose.–Jacob Oller

22. No One Will Save You

Year: 2023
Director: Brian Duffield
Stars: Kaitlyn Dever
Rating: PG-13

Kaitlyn Dever heroically carries what’s essentially a one-woman show as townie Brynn Adams, a lonesome soul fighting off bug-eyed gray trespassers. That’s…pretty much it. She’s seen scribbling letters to a presumed deceased Maude Collins before the flying saucers appear, but then sci-fi terror begins and Duffield channels everything from Signs to The McPherson Tape. Brynn dashes around her creaky wooden childhood home, Brynn hides from alien entities, and Brynn flees from an unknown fate should the cosmic outsiders catch her in their spaceship tractor beams. The craftsmanship behind No One Will Save You showcases Duffield’s strengths with restricted resources. Visual effects studio ​​DNEG nails the creation of traditional X-Files-lookalike aliens down to their bulbous craniums and slender-freaky figures, but that’s only one component. Duffield does a splendid job collaborating with cinematographer Aaron Morton to frame his interstellar guests as stalkers, often peering just out of frame before swelling in size and entering with emphasis. No One Will Save You adheres to a golden creature feature rule by showing Brynn’s adversaries early and never shying away from full-screen reveals, which wafts an appropriate air of confidence. As Brynn cowers behind refrigerator doors or turns her hatchback into an impromptu firebomb, the aliens always hold their impressive on-screen presence. —Matt Donato

23. Little Monsters

Year: 2019
Director: Abe Forsythe
Stars: Lupita Nyong’o, Alexander England, Kat Stewart, Diesel La Torraca, Josh Gad
Rating: R

As Lupita Nyong’o was picking up her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2013, one probably wouldn’t have expected that she would be starring in not one but two different critically acclaimed horror films in 2019, but here we are. Most of the horror attention on Nyong’o last year was understandably derived from her scintillating turn in Jordan Peele’s Us, but Little Monsters feels sadly overlooked. This is a frequently uproarious zombie comedy, set in Australia, starring actor Alexander England as a slacker uncle to a precocious young child, and Nyong’o as the kid’s supremely dedicated and charming kindergarten teacher. And wouldn’t you know it—the class field trip to the farm/petting zoo just happens to be interrupted by a massive outbreak of the undead, leaving Nyong’o to shepherd her little flock to safety, all while concealing from them the seriousness of these events. She pulls off a performance that is both touching and generates the occasional belly laugh, while also showing off such a consistent talent for musical performance that you can’t help but wonder if the film was calculated as the launching point for yet another side career. Josh Gad also shows up as a children’s entertainer in a role that takes full advantage of his irritating talents, but the film really belongs to Nyong’o. —Jim Vorel

24. Skinamarink

Year: 2023
Director: Kyle Edward Ball
Stars: Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault, Jaime Hill
Rating: NR

This is a daring, unsettling, inscrutable and at times deeply boring venture into the farthest boundaries of horror esotericism, utterly unlike anything that most viewers will have ever seen before. If someone hosted a filmmaking competition where the stated goal was to engineer a work as divisive as it possibly could be, surely Skinamarink would be a shoo-in to win the grand prize. Created on a budget of $15,000 (Canadian!) as the feature debut of filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball, and dedicated to assistant director Joshua Bookhalter, who passed away during post-production, Skinamarink is an exercise in experimental, sensory-driven horror filmmaking. Now, when one says “sensory-driven” in this context, one might expect that to imply a certain lushness that overwhelms the senses, a la James Cameron’s approach in Avatar: The Way of Water. Skinamarink, however, is more like the opposite—the film’s ultra grainy visual aesthetic and muddy audio (with cleverly hardcoded subtitles) slowly but surely hypnotizes the viewer into a state of heightened suggestibility, until the viewer’s mind begins to provide its own hallucinatory meaning to what it is seeing. Ostensibly, Skinamarink is about a pair of siblings: four-year-old Kevin and six-year-old Kaylee. They live in an unassuming little house with their unseen father, with the status of Mom a veiled mystery that hints at pain and separation. One night, they awake to find that the house seems changed—doors and windows have disappeared, and any parental presence is missing. Objects are strewn around in seeming patterns, while a deep, gargling voice whispers from the darkness. “Oneiric” is the most perfect single word for the experience. Its images are like watching closed circuit security camera footage of someone’s mental projections during a fever dream. Its sounds recall things heard in the dead of the night from a childhood bedroom, and then blissfully forgotten by morning, only to be recalled in a moment of terror decades later. I look forward to watching the wider world discover Skinamarink, feeling for all purposes as if they’ve blundered into a parallel dimension. Like the titular child of The Twilight Zone’s “Little Girl Lost,” they’ll watch as a familiar place becomes a seeming prison, bound by dream logic, boundless and empty. I certainly won’t forget it.—Jim Vorel

25. Underwater

Year: 2020
Director: William Eubank
Stars: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie
Rating: PG-13

Underwater turned out to be the most unusual type of Lovecraftian adaptation for the 2020s–a film that didn’t advertise itself as one, and instead left the association as a third act reveal of sorts. And even then, this is one of the odder takes on Lovecraft’s arcana, for the simple fact that we don’t usually see this mythology in the context of what is essentially a big budget action/disaster movie. Lovecraftian stories are most typically marked by their intimate settings and most scope–a family under attack, or an obsessed researcher delving into materials he should know better than to explore. Lovecraftian monsters slither into the frame (or linger outside it) with slowly building suspense–they don’t usually topple underwater research stations in a cacophony of explosions and screeching metal. And yet that’s what we have in Underwater, a genuine Lovecraftian monster/disaster movie. —Jim Vorel

26. Hellraiser

Year: 2022
Director: David Bruckner
Stars: Odessa A’zion, Jamie Clayton, Adam Faison, Drew Starkey, Brandon Flynn
Rating: R

I wanted very much to enjoy Hellraiser 2022. The first movie leaves room for variation, expansion or reinterpretation, and this certainly isn’t a by-the-numbers remake of the old movie’s plot. (There are many Hellraiser sequels, and this appears to be more of a fresh crack at one of those than a full reboot.) Bruckner has a command of oppressive mood, the Cenobite designs are first-rate and some of the movie’s imagery (like an impossible contraption integrated into one poor human’s body in grisly pursuit of new pleasures) will stay with me for a while. The movie itself, however—the actual sum of these sliced and stretched parts—is elusive, and at times inert. As much attention as Riley draws in the movie’s protracted opening, the rest of her cohort feel like warm bodies necessary to show off the requisite gore. —Jesse Hassenger

27. False Positive

Year: 2021
Director: John Lee
Stars: Ilana Glazer, Justin Theroux, Pierce Brosnan, Sophia Bush
Rating: R

Motherhood is a pretty scary thing. Particularly when it comes to the typical nine-month gestation period that produces a newborn child, the horror genre has been a hotbed of filmmakers exploring the visceral terror inherent in the body-altering state of pregnancy and the bloody act of giving birth. Perhaps this is why False Positive feels so fractured within this realm—for all of the diverse and interesting explorations within this subgenre, co-writers Ilana Glazer and John Lee limit their film by exclusively riffing on the notoriously inimitable Rosemary’s Baby. —Natalia Keogan

28. Fresh

Year: 2022
Director: Mimi Cave
Stars: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan
Rating: R

App dating gets its Bumbling psychothriller with Fresh, a movie that Hinges upon its literal and allegorical human meat Grindr. Music video director Mimi Cave adds some glitz to Adam McKay disciple Lauryn Kahn’s script in her feature debut, but the film lacks the necessary bite either in its body horror or humor to truly pull off its cannibalistic commentary. To even get to the fun, Fresh asks a high price: Weathering Noa’s (Daisy Edgar-Jones) played-out dating app horror stories and a psychopathic meet-cute with grocery store creep Steve (Sebastian Stan) that’s clearly leading nowhere good. This goes on for a good half-hour—during which the starry-eyed and bland Noa claims Steve is cute (he is, in a movie star way), funny (he is not, even in a movie star way), and charming (he doesn’t openly neg her)—before we finally get to the title card and the meat (ha!) of the movie. It’s a bold move that would’ve worked wonders if it all didn’t feel a little predictable. —Jacob Oller

29. Pooka!
Year: 2018
Director: Nacho Vigalondo
Stars: Nyasha Hatendi, Dale Dickey, Jon Daly, Latarsha Rose
Rating: NR

Talented Spanish sci-fi/weird fiction director Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal) turned his eye toward the Christmas holiday in this off-kilter entry in Hulu’s Into the Dark horror anthology series, in which a struggling actor is hired to portray the man-in-a-suit version of hot new Christmas doll Pooka, only to find that the big, fuzzy suit may have a mind of its own. Functioning something like a Vigalondo tribute to the claustrophobic, psychological meltdowns of Roman Polanski, especially Repulsion and The Tenant, Pooka! offers up apocalyptic visions, albeit on a shoestring budget. It’s eventually revealed to harbor some of the same mobius strip logic as Vigalondo’s earlier Timecrimes, but mostly gets by on solid performances despite a lack of production value. Zimbabwean-British-American actor Nyasha Hatendi in particular helps carry the film above its “TV movie” trappings. —Jim Vorel

30. The Invitation

Year: 2022
Director: Jessica M. Thompson
Stars: Nathalie Emmanuel, Thomas Doherty, Stephanie Corneliussen, Alana Boden, Hugh Skinner, Sean Pertwee
Rating: PG-13

It’s rough work trying to remix a classic like Bram Stoker’s Dracula when there’s been 125 years of others endlessly giving it a go on paper, stage and screen. As such, when an attempt does hit some fresh angles, it’s to be commended—as is the case with The Invitation. Coming at the mythology with a female lens is director Jessica M. Thompson, writer Blair Butler and actress Nathalie Emmanuel, who execute some unexpected choices that manage to slightly subvert their full goth approach to the material. However, The Invitation takes way too long getting to its most interesting ideas, leaving us with the distinct feeling of “too little, too late.” —Tara Bennett