13 Halloween Movies on Netflix That Are Spooky as Hell

Sometimes a studio delay works out great for the producers, and you could say that happened with this horror film, which wasn’t loved by critics but still became a box office success due in no small part to the fact that it stars Jennifer Lawrence, who was on the cusp of stardom in 2010 when it was filmed, but had fully burst out with The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook by the time it came out two years later.

The film is a textbook horror plot: Lawrence plays a girl who learns of a family that was gruesomely murdered on the street her family has just moved onto. When she befriends the sole survivor of the massacre, the family’s son, she learns that everything might not be as it seems.

Watch The House At The End of the Street on Netflix

There’s a grand tradition in scary movies of upping the sense of dread by pretending to be true: so-called “found footage” films like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity tell their story as though it were actually happening. That’s the case with this 2014 screamer, a faux-documentary set in the historic catacombs below the city of Paris.

With shades of National Treasure or The Da Vinci Code to boot, the story follows a young archaeologist obsessed with finding the mythical Philosopher’s Stone, a journey that leads her deeper and deeper into horror as she descends far below the city streets.

Watch As Above So Below on Netflix

A perfect marriage of actor, director and source material, Sleepy Hollow takes an American literary classic and updates it for the big screen. Longtime collaborators Johnny Depp and Tim Burton teamed up to adapt Washington Irving’s classic 1820 Halloween tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, with Depp playing Ichabod Crane, a constable sent to examine a series of unsolved murders purported to be the work of a mysterious headless horseman.

Both Depp and Burton can verge on camp, but they’re both at the height of their powers in this film, which was a critical and commercial success, blending Burton’s stunning visuals with Depp’s method-to-a-fault acting to make a modern classic.

Watch Sleepy Hollow on Netflix

Now, if you really want to talk classics, let’s talk The Addams Family. It’s hard to convey what a big deal this movie was when it came out—a big-screen adaptation of the 1960s television comedy about a family of supernaturally spooky characters. The casting is pitch-perfect, with each actor seemingly born to play their role, from Raul Julia’s Gomez to Anjelica Huston’s Morticia to Christina Ricci’s Wednesday to Christopher Lloyd’s Uncle Fester. It’s hard to imagine the roles having ever been filled by anyone else.

They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky, they’re altogether ooky—there, good luck getting that out of your head the rest of the month.

Watch The Addams Family on Netflix

Guillermo del Toro has covered a ton of ground in his career as a filmmaker, from Oscar winners like The Shape of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth to big-budget Hollywood romps like Blade II, Hellboy and Pacific Rim. Here, he adapts a 1973 made-for-TV movie with an absolutely classic horror plot: a family moves into an old house in New England and scary things start happening. (Fun fact: all of New England is haunted. All of it.)

Katie Holmes stars in this movie as a woman who gradually realizes she’s made a horrifying mistake, something she was likely quite well-equipped to do after her marriage to Tom Cruise.

Watch Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark on Netflix

There are plenty of classic elements in Halloween movies: spooky ghosts, haunted mansions, terrifying crypts, and so on, and we’ve covered most of them already. You know what other classic element we’re missing, though? Horny teenagers! This 2017 film hits that note perfectly, with Judah Lewis starring as Cole, a teenager enamored with his hot babysitter Bee (Samara Weaving). While spying on her one night, he realizes that she’s part of a demonic, murderous cult, and suddenly finds himself in grave danger.

It’s not the most original film, but it plays its campy role perfectly, and makes for a fun romp from start to finish.

Watch The Babysitter on Netflix

When you watch an Eli Roth film, you have to accept that you’re not in it for the subtlety, you’re in it for the gore. This film—a remake of Roth’s own earlier film of the same name—has blood and guts to spare (and plenty of smut, too.) Five friends rent a cabin in the woods for a getaway, but soon they’re confronted by scary strangers and a terrifying virus, proving that even socially-distant activities aren’t without risk. The movie was critically panned, but again—if you know what you’re looking for, Roth will give you exactly that.

Watch Cabin Fever on Netflix

Some of the best horror thrillers can succeed with a minimal cast—one or two characters trapped in peril both physical and psychological. Those films live or die on their performances, and The Monster succeeds wildly because of Zoe Kazan.

Kazan plays a divorced mother whose relationship with her daughter is strained, and that’s the underlying tension before they find themselves marooned at the mercy of a horrifying creature. That creature may be the title character of the film, but it’s not the focus—it’s just the plot device that exposes the drama between mother and daughter. Because, really, the scariest thing isn’t what goes bump in the night—it’s how we react to it.

Watch The Monster on Netflix

You could say to me “four friends take a hiking trip into the Swedish wilderness” and I would say to you “oh that seems like a bad idea” even if I didn’t know we were talking about the premise of a horror movie. I mean, c’mon. Don’t move into an 18th-century mansion in Rhode Island, don’t run over a fisherman on a darkened road, and don’t take a hiking trip into the Swedish wilderness. These rules aren’t hard.

Anyways, this film follows four friends taking the dream trip of a fifth six months after his murder, and you just know that’s not going to go well. Seriously, guys, go to Vegas or something. Golfing. No one ever gets murdered golfing. At least not that I know of.

Watch The Ritual on Netflix

It doesn’t seem right to have a list of Halloween movies without somehow involving Stephen King. The longtime “King of Horror” has penned some of the most iconic scary movies of all time, from Carrie to The Shining to Pet Sematary and more. Here’s one of his works you might not be familiar with though, a Netflix original adapted from a 2010 novella by King.

Set in 1922 (of course), it follows a Nebraska farmer who enlists his son’s help in murdering his wife to avoid her plan to sell their farm. After the murder, they’re both haunted by the consequences of what they’ve done—and that’s not all they’re haunted by.

Watch 1922 on Netflix

Boy, a lot of these horror films kinda sound like bummers, don’t they? If you need a break from the pure gore, why not have a little laugh at the silliness of it all? In the grand tradition of parody movies—many of which star a member of the Wayans family—A Haunted House stars Marlon Wayans in a madcap sendup of horror movies. Not specifically a parody like the Scary Movie franchise, it’s instead a silly plot all its own, a found-footage film with characters behaving in goofier ways than normal horror movies.

Is it timeless entertainment? Not exactly. But it’s silly fun, and that’s what Halloween’s all about.

Watch A Haunted House on Netflix

I’m biased here, but there might not be a more perfect scary movie than Sam Raimi’s 1981 cult classic. It’s got everything you could ask for: a cabin in the woods, an ancient book of the dead, an accidentally-unleashed horde of evil demons, and a square-jawed, scenery-chewing star in Bruce Campbell. Filmed on a shoestring budget by a cast of then-unknowns, the film became a huge critical success and launched a movie franchise—along with the careers of Campbell and Raimi, the latter who would find big-budget success with the Spider-Man franchise.

You could give a massive movie studio hundreds of millions of dollars and their choice of actors and they couldn’t come close to making something as scary as what Raimi and company did for $90,000 in this masterpiece.

Watch The Evil Dead on Netflix

Like the previous entry, some scary movies truly stand the test of time, and there’s hardly any more iconic than this classic, written and produced by master filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Some horror films gain cult appreciation, others commercial success, even a few critical acclaim: Poltergeist did all three, raking in box-office receipts, earning three Academy Award nominations, and consistently being named one of the most beloved horror movies of all time.

A family begins experiencing strange unexplained happenings around their house, starting when their young daughter appears to converse with static on their television. Soon, they realize their house is being intruded upon by poltergeists, opening a portal to another dimension.

Poltergeist is the kind of film you’ve seen even if you haven’t seen it, with a generation of pop-culture references from Family Guy to The Simpsons and many more spawned from its iconic silver-screen moments.

1. A Haunted House
2. Poltergeist
3. Evil Dead

Watch Poltergeist on Netflix