The best horror movies on Netflix UK right now

In this epic-length Korean chiller, director Na Hong-jin braids together just about every horror trope that exists: evil spirits! Mystery viruses! Demonic possession! Zombies! And yet, the result is truly unlike anything in the genre. A plot synopsis – a small-town cop scrambles to save his daughter from a strange illness – hardly does it justice. Don’t be deterred by the two and a half hour runtime, either: you won’t be bored for a second.

The horror renaissance was already underway when Jordan Peele dropped his debut feature, but he gave the genre something it hadn’t seen in a while: a mainstream thriller that had packed theatres screaming, hooting and hollering, not from cheap jump scares but out of genuine shock and surprise. More than that, Get Out is the kind of vicious satire movies in general have long missed, lifting the cellar door on American neoliberalism and shining a light down into the Sunken Place below.

Haunted house tales usually take place in the ‘burbs, the sticks or ancient European castles. By setting his in a dilapidated British housing project, first-timer Remi Weekes delivers a potent allegory for the horrors of the refugee experience. A pair of asylum-seekers from war-ravaged Sudan settle into a run-down tenement outside London, where they face racism, bureaucracy and something possibly even more sinister.  

A key film in the new wave of smash-hit mainstream horror (see also Sinister, The Conjuring), Insidious is the one with the creepy kid, the astral plane and the demon hiding behind the Big Red Door. Watch it alone, and completely scare your own pants off.

It takes some gall to remake one of the most cultishly beloved horror movies of all time, but this reboot succeeds largely by knowing what it can’t do. Without Bruce Campbell’s singular leading-man charisma, director Fede Alvarez couldn’t hope to achieve the original’s mix of sick horror and absurd humour. Instead, Alvarez focuses exclusively on the sick horror, amping up the blood-and-guts to levels Sam Raimi’s 1981 budget would never allow. In terms of sheer terror, it might even outdo the original – quite a feat.

Struggling to cope with the death of her mother, teenage Mia (Sophie Wilde) begins to self-medicate – by allowing herself to become briefly possessed by various spirits. Hey, all the cool kids are doing it. Aussie YouTuber twins Danny and Michael Phillipou made a big splash with their debut film, which remixes several horror tropes into something fresh, thrilling and deeply scary.   

Iran’s answer to The Babadook, this chilling, provocative horror film brings the terrors of war home – quite literally. A Tehran woman and her daughter find themselves trapped inside with something malevolent during the height of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. As the missiles rain down, it’s hard to know if it’s more dangerous to be inside or out. It’s directed by Iranian-born, British-based writer-director Babak Anvari, who has a canny knack both for social commentary (Iran’s repressive, sexist regime is a second villain here) and scaring you shitless. 

John Carpenter didn’t invent the slasher genre, but he did give it a face. Before, most cinematic serial killers were just… some guy. With Michael Myers, the director gave audiences a figure to visualise in their nightmares: a nigh-unstoppable murder machine with NBA height, dark coveralls and a party-store Captain Kirk mask. The original Halloween is still the model of efficient monster-making – proof that all you need is a kitchen knife and flapping linens to create a boogeyman that’ll haunt generations.

A man-eating shark stalks the waters of a New England beach town on its biggest tourist weekend of the year. C’mon, it’s friggin’ Jaws, dude. Do we really need to write an essay here?

In a rare example of Hollywood sci-fi-horror thoughtfulness, Annihilation has grand concepts in mind, ideas about self-destruction and rebirth. The film follows cellular biologist Lena (Portman) as she ventures to The Shimmer, an anomalous electromagnetic field, to discover the truth about what happened to her husband Kane (Isaac), who visited The Shimmer and returned in poor health and his memory missing. Spooky stuff. 

Oz Perkins broke through as a director with 2024’s Longlegs, but his mastery of slow-burning dread was evident years earlier in this gothic ghost story. A nurse (Ruth Wilson) is hired to care for a dementia-addled horror author (Paula Prentiss, in her first major role in three decades), and comes to believe her most famous novel may not be a work of fiction. Even if the narrative is a bit lacking, Perkins’ detailed mood-setting will still leave your spine tingling.

In this Stephen King adaptation, a struggling couple look to reignite the flames of their flagging marriage with some kinky sex at an isolated lake house. Then he dies of a sudden heart attack while she’s handcuffed to the bed. It’s an anxiety-inducing scenario, and Carla Gugino’s impressive performance keeps you glued to the screen even as she spends much of the runtime lying on her back.

With his third movie, Jordan Peele steps back from straight horror, into Spielberg-meets-Shyamalan territory, and the result is a sci-fi spectacle that’s still plenty scary. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer are sibling horse trainers who discover something strange hovering in the sky above their ranch in the California desert. It may not be as uniquely freaky as Get Out or Us, but it’s further proof that no filmmaker is making major event pictures quite like Peele right now.

When this Spanish-language horror first landed on Netflix, people took to Twitter to admit that they found it so frightening that they had to turn it off. From director Paco Plaza, who also helmed the equally horrifying [Rec], the story is apparently based on a true story and follows the horrifying events after a group of friends decide to do a ouija board session together. Is it the ‘scariest film ever’, as many have suggested? Maybe so...

In this bizarre blend of psychological thriller and body horror, Allison Williams and Logan Browning play rival concert cellists whose trip to China to visit the music school where they were both trained turns into a twisty, majorly screwed-up descent into hell. It’s something like Cronenberg directing Black Swan, with a twist of Whiplash. 

Unless you’re Demi Moore trying to shtup your murdered husband one last time, communing with dead loved ones is never a wise idea. Another rule of horror? A burlap sack makes every monster more terrifying. Director Alberto Corredor puts both principles to use in his first feature, about a woman (Freya Allen) who inherits a pub with an unevictable tenant lurking in the basement. It’s not wholly original, but it has enough creepy-crawly energy to satisfy most fright fans. 

Patrick Brice directs and stars in this found-footage two-hander about Aaron, a videographer who is hired to record a video diary for the eccentric and supposedly terminally ill Josef. When the pair meet, though, Aaron is distrubed by his subject’s increasingly bizarre behaviour, which in the end could rival Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Unsettling yet oddly humorous, this is one that’ll stay with you after the credits roll. 

And you thought the water quality was the worst thing about swimming in the Seine. Released just prior to the Paris Olympics, director Xavier Gens’ addition to the ‘place where shark shouldn’t be’ canon unleashes a mutated mako into the City of Lights’ main waterway. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s right before a major triathlon the mayor steadfastly refuses to cancel. It’s a silly, fun B-movie whose topicality made it an unexpected hit.

It’s 2023, and Augusto Pinochet is ready to die. ‘Uhh, what?’ you’re probably asking. You see, in this bizarro blend of political satire and horror-comedy from Chilean provocateur Pablo Larrain, the former dictator is a 250-year-old vampire who faked his death in 1990 and retired to a farm, but who can’t quite outrun his past. And that’s not even the weirdest part. It sounds adjacent to historically-informed gimmicks like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but Larrain is an expert button-pusher, and the film was recently awarded Best Screenplay at Venice. Like its immortal old tyrant, it should live on.

In this knotty techno-thriller, an internet cam girl suddenly finds herself competing for views with her own doppelganger. On the surface, it sounds like something from Black Mirror, but the smart script and strong lead performance from Madeline Brewer give it an identity all its own – and in the era of increasingly convincing A.I. deep fakes, its central idea is seeming less metaphorical with each passing year.

This teen-focused horror trilogy is based on Goosebumps scribe RL Stine’s other book series, and plays like a sister series to Stranger Things – one of the films even stars Sadie Sink. Spread across multiple decades (and centuries), the movies follow a group of kids attempting to figure out why their small US town is cursed, and what they can do to bring it to an end.