The 10 highest-rated horror movies on Netflix
With Halloween just over a week away, the spooky season truly is upon us. For those who like to fully embrace all things scary, that usually means that carving pumpkins, dressing up as Jason for parties and eating chocolate eyeballs and jellied spiders simply doesn’t cut it. No – the only way to seriously turn up the fear factor is to immerse ourselves in spine-tingling, bone-chilling, blood-freezingly terrifying movies.
The thing is, a decent horror film isn’t quite as easy to come by as you’d think. Sure, there are thousands of them out there. From delightfully campy old horrors like 1951’s The Thing from Another World to questionable revisionist versions of beloved children’s classics like the recent Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, there is a horror for everybody. And sometimes, an outright cheese-fest can be exactly what you’re looking for. But what if you’re looking for something more? Perhaps something actually good?
Then you’re in luck; Netflix has some of the most acclaimed and highest-rated horror movies to watch right now – and the top ten offers a little something for everyone.
Whether it’s undisputed classics that reshaped the very cinematic landscape as we know it, masterclasses in the notorious jump-scare or more contemporary and cerebral chillers that use the scares as a way to sneakily feed us some sociopolitical context, this diverse and eclectic mix of horrors all have one thing in common: a solid and consistent rating as the finest of the genre.
The 2017 Stephen King adaptation of Gerald’s Game offers something for the more mature audiences: an erotic and suspenseful psychological thriller that takes an abrupt supernatural turn that plays out like 127 Hours with added ghosts.
Meanwhile, in Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy realism opus Pan’s Labyrinth, a young girl in Francoist Spain must navigate a series of increasingly dark and malevolent trials to access a fairytale underworld. It’s widely regarded as one of del Toro’s finest creations and worthy of re-watching at any time fo the year.
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws retains its legendary position, while indie cult-classic Creep returns for a more-than-worthwhile sequel in 2017’s Creep II. And, at the very top, a nightmarish tale about the experience of refugees in small-town Britain from talented debut director Remi Weekes.
The 10 highest-rated horror movies on Netflix:
- His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)
- Creep 2 (Patrick Brice, 2017)
- Under the Shadow (Babak Anvari, 2016)
- Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
- The Old Ways (Christopher Alender, 2021)
- Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
- Sweetheart (JD Dillard, 2019)
- Cam (David Goldhaber, 2018)
- Hush (Mike Flanagan, 2016)
- Gerald’s Game (Mike Flanagan, 2017)
