It’s a problem most horror fanatics are familiar with: You boot up a streaming service, scroll through their spooky section and realize that you can’t find anything really scary that’s worth watching. I love horror comedies and shlocky sequels as much as the next guy, but sometimes (especially during Halloween season), you want to find something that really, truly puts fear in your bones. Those movies aren’t always easy to find.
But we’re here to help. Here are 13 of the scariest movies that are streaming right now.
“Audition”
When you’re a big horror fan, sometimes you have to turn to some hardcore s–t to get scared. If the slashers and the hauntings aren’t cutting it for you anymore, try checking out Takashi Miike’s delightfully depraved “Audition.” The Japanese horror flick follows Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower who enters a relationship with a young woman, Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), after posing as a casting director for a series of fake auditions to find his perfect girl. I’d hate to spoil any more of what happens in this truly disturbing film, but rest assured: Shigeharu gets his punishment. (Kanopy) — Casey Loving
“Don’t Look Now”
The fact that, with a few clicks of your remote (or mouse), you can watch Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece “Don’t Look Now,” is truly miraculous. For years, the movie, which early print campaigns described as a “psychic thriller,” was difficult to get ahold of. It was released the same year as “The Exorcist” but didn’t have the same cultural purchase. It would routinely show up on the lists of the scariest movies ever made but remained elusive. Now, thanks to digital outlets and an induction into the Criterion Collection, “Don’t Look Now” is easier to see than ever and as it should be. It’s incredible. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a young married couple who have just lost their daughter in a terrible accident (the accident serves as the film’s haunting prologue). They then travel to Venice, where he is working on a project restoring a cathedral, as they attempt to piece their life together. But she’s consumed with guilt and begins consulting with a pair of psychic sisters, while a string of strange murders grips the village in fear. Based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, who inspired the Alfred Hitchcock classics “The Birds” and “Rebecca,” “Don’t Look Now” is an unforgettable film, full of emotion and terror. (Good luck shaking off the final shock.) Almost as famous as any of its scares was the film’s chronologically jumbled sex scene, which was so vivid that people assumed that it was, er, unsimulated. Jumping from the couple getting ready to go out to deep passion, it also served as the inspiration for Steven Soderbergh’s similarly memorable love scene from “Out of Sight.” Hey, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. (Kanopy) — Drew Taylor
“The Exorcist”
Long considered (and rightfully so) the scariest movie ever made, William Friedkin’s blockbuster adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling 1971 novel is just as shocking as it was 53 years ago. Ellen Burstyn plays an actress working on a movie just outside of Washington, D.C. Her daughter Regan (Linda Blair), after communing with something (Ouija boards will do that to you), appears to suffer from a medical issue. An underrated aspect of “The Exorcist” is the intensity of the procedures and tests that Regan goes through as her mother searches frantically for an answer; it might not be as creepy as the actual demonic stuff but it will make your skin crawl just the same. Of course, it’s eventually discovered that Regan is possessed by an ageless force and an exorcism is required to cleanse her soul.
Friedkin’s plainspoken direction, coupled with escalating tension, is key to the movie’s elemental power. There’s a reason filmmakers are still chasing the high of the original “Exorcist” (a new movie, authored by “Carrie” showrunner Mike Flanagan, debuts next year). Often imitated, never duplicated, “The Exorcist” remains a true wonder of modern horror. (HBO Max) — DT
“Hereditary”
Is “Hereditary” the best modern horror movie? The questions were asked right after Ari Aster’s film landed in 2018 and, by now, most are in agreement that yeah it probably is. The film just weighs on you from the moment it starts until its brutal end. There are few true jump scares in “Hereditary” – instead it goes for a suffocating bleakness – but when it decides to turn up the volume on those scares it’s extremely effective and unsettling. And Toni Collette? She should have been showered in far more awards and praise than she got for her role in the film. (Hulu, Prime Video, HBO Max) — Jacob Bryant
“Jacob’s Ladder”
If you’ve never seen “Jacob’s Ladder,” time to buckle up. Tim Robbins plays a man who returns from the Vietnam War… different. He starts having horrific hallucinations and interactions as he stumbles around early-1970s New York City. Was something done to him during the war? Is he having a complete mental breakdown? Or are the demons he is carrying with him more literal than psychological? It leads to one of the biggest twists in cinema history – and one that doesn’t feel tacked on or corny or unearned. Instead, it’s the perfect, melancholic button on a movie that has more layers, symbols and meaning than it appears at first glance. (Multiple viewings helps unlock some of its mysteries.)
With a dynamite supporting cast including Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello, Jason Alexander, Eriq La Salle, Ving Rhames and Pruitt Taylor Vince, along with a brief appearance by Macaulay Culkin, “Jacob’s Ladder” is an all-time, nerve-shredding classic. And the movie seems even bolder when you consider this was director Adrian Lyne’s follow-up to his blockbuster erotic thriller “Fatal Attraction,” and that it was released the same year as screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin’s far cuddlier “Ghost.” But hey, sometimes you need to get freaky. (Paramount+) — DT
“Obsession”
It might be the most recent film on the list but the scares in “Obsession” speak for themselves. The runaway hit of 2026, Curry Barker’s “careful what you wish for” story of a man who wants more than anything for a friend to have feelings for him that quickly goes south when she becomes – you guessed it – obsessed with him entirely. Much of the scares in the film are thanks to Inde Navarrette’s breakout performance as Nikki. There’s a physicality to the way she moves, screams and even just goes still and stares that is bone-chilling from the jump. Beyond just that, she infuses a sadness to the character, who is forced to feel this way against her will, which might be more unsettling than when she’s at her most manic and obsessed. (Peacock) — JB
“Perfect Blue”
In one of the more charming bits of promo for “The Social Reckoning” involved Aaron Sorkin, Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White putzing around a French video store. Madison clutched “Perfect Blue,” Satoshi Kon’s masterpiece of psychological horror, and attempted to explain it to Sorkin, who she said had never seen a Japanese animated movie before. (“There are freshmen at NYU who are better cinephiles than me,” snarked Sorkin.) “It’s very frightening,” said Madison. What we’re getting at here is that you should listen to Mikey Madison (obviously). It follows a former pop star who begins a second career as an actress but is stalked by an obsessive fan, who might also be responsible for a series of horrifying murders. This, of course, sends our dear Mima Kirigoe down a psychological rabbit hole. Can she even hold it together enough to get out of this thing alive?
Slyly satiric, with barbs at consumer culture and the parasocial relationship fans form with their idols, and indebted to Alfred Hitchcock films, “Perfect Blue” made a stamp all its own. (Perhaps most famously it has gotten a second wind when people started realizing how much Darren Aronofsky “borrowed” from the movie for “Requiem for a Dream” and “Black Swan.”) In the last few years, it has rightfully been singled out as one of the greatest, most disturbing animated films of all time. Kon only made a handful of films before he died, tragically, of pancreatic cancer at 46 (Aronofsky wrote a eulogy to him that was published in Japan). Each one of his films is a precious jewel. But “Perfect Blue,” his first as a director, might be the most special of them all. (HBO Max) — DT
“Prince of Darkness”
One of John Carpenter’s best and most underappreciated movies, “Prince of Darkness” follows a group of graduate students who are conducting an experiment underneath a seemingly ancient church. What they find could have implications for the entire human race. Eventually, the students and scientists uncover a glowing green canister that they believe could hold Satan. Like actual Satan. Liberally mixing philosophy with scientific mumbo jumbo (lots of talk of antimatter and parallel dimensions), it’s equal parts hangout movie and horror show. (You can imagine Richard Linklater getting a real kick out of it.)
“Prince of Darkness” has a lurching, woozy mood all its own, along with a creeping sense of dread that Carpenter’s best work always maintained so well. Featuring a great group of character actors (including Carpenter regulars Donald Pleasence, Victor Wong and Peter Jason, along with Alice Cooper as a possessed street person) and one of Carpenter’s best scores (composed with Alan Howarth), it’s often seen as a minor Carpenter work, but it shouldn’t be. This was released in the director’s unstoppable creative heyday, and feels uniquely ahead-of-its-time, particularly with its found footage elements of a pirate transmission from the distant future, that remains some of the creepiest stuff in Carpenter’s filmography and arrived more than a decade before “The Blair Witch Project.” If for some reason you have skipped “Prince of Darkness” after all these years, time to correct the mistake. Before it’s too late. (Prime Video) — DT
“Pulse”
In Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterful, underrated 2001 horror effort “Pulse,” ghosts use the internet to invade the world of the living, infecting humanity with their sorrow. The most “Don’t go in there!” film you may ever see, “Pulse” follows its characters as they encounter rooms marked with red tape, warnings of the ghosts that lurk inside and watch helplessly as the world around them slowly starts to disintegrate and fall apart.
A kind of spiritual cousin to Kurosawa’s 1997 masterpiece “Cure,” which also tells a horror story of quietly apocalyptic size, “Pulse” gets under your skin and stays there. Its ghostly encounters range from unsettling to genuinely, uncannily terrifying, with one sequence in particular ranking high among the scariest things ever put to screen this century. “Pulse” is, in other words, the rare contemporary horror film that is as thoughtful as it is legitimately scary. As a movie about the internet becoming a vessel for hopelessness (imagine that!), “Pulse” also has the unfortunate honor of having aged incredibly well over the last 25 years. (Philo, AMC+ and Arrow Video Channel) — Alex Welch
“The Ring”
Like “The Grudge,” “Dark Water” and a number of other films released around the same time as it, 2002’s “The Ring” was a central part of the sudden wave of J-horror remakes that Hollywood produced throughout the early 2000s. A remake of the 1998 Japanese film of the same name, director Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring” follows a journalist (Naomi Watts) who comes into possession of — and begins to investigate — a cursed VHS tape that supposedly causes its viewers to die seven days later.
Featuring one of the most iconic and viscerally terrifying climaxes of any horror film of the last 30 years, “The Ring” is a film which grows its scares from unsettlingly suggestive to outright, invasively assaultive. It is atmospheric, immersive and beautifully paced, a horror movie that forces you to lean in and then — like all great horror films do — punishes you for doing so at the exact moments when you are least expecting. It is the rare horror remake that is just as deserving of your time as its parent film, and yeah, it is really scary. (Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock and Kanopy) — AW
“The Shining”
Stephen King may have no more confounding opinion about his own work than his well-known, infamous distaste for director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of his acclaimed horror novel, “The Shining.” An epic of intimate and yet supernatural, ghostly horror, Kubrick’s film is a masterpiece of nausea-inducing, infectious cabin fever. Anchored by a ferocious, unhinged lead performance by Jack Nicholson, the film follows a husband (Nicholson), wife (Shelley Duvall) and their young son (Danny Lloyd) as they spend a winter taking care of a mountain resort only to find themselves relentlessly terrorized by the hotel’s ghostly inhabitants.
Rich with metaphors about the demonic effects of addiction and the claustrophobia-like impact of domestic violence and abuse, “The Shining” pulls no punches. It uses simple editing tricks to create unforgettable moments of startling horror, which cumulatively leave you on edge and completely in Kubrick’s control. Here is a horror film that well and truly feels like a slow, unstoppable spiral into a kind of insanity that feels both human and otherworldly. (HBO Max) — AW
“Speak No Evil” (2022)
“Speak No Evil” sneaks up on you. At first, the film doesn’t come off as particularly scary, with around the first hour of Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 Danish thriller playing more as a dry comedy about a painfully polite family falling into more and more uncomfortable situations as they stay with a Dutch family they met on vacation. As the depths of their hosts’ depravity comes to light (a reveal spoiled in trailers of “Clayface” filmmaker James Watkins’ remake), the horror of this story starts to come into focus. Then Christian Tafdrup and co-writer Mads Tafdrup pull out all the stops for one of the most haunting, wrenching finales in a horror movie this century. It’s a bleak, disturbing film, one that has more in common with Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” (another great watch for those looking for hardcore horror) than your classic slasher. For my money, it’s the scariest movie of the decade. (AMC+, Hoopla, Shudder) — CL
“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”
This list wouldn’t be complete without at least one classic slasher — and Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is the scariest of them all. This film, featuring the iconic serial killer Leatherface, is a groundbreaking, highly influential entry in the horror subgenre while also managing to be more terrifying than possibly any slasher that followed in its wake. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is haunting in its simplicity, a story about the horror that can befall anyone who happens to stop in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hooper and Kim Henkel’s classic may be more than 50 years old, but I imagine it’s just as terrifying today as it would’ve been in 1974. (Netflix, Prime Video, Peacock, Tubi, Shudder, Pluto TV) — CL
