5 Scorching Summer Horror Movies You Can Stream for Free During the Heat Wave
“What are all these sharks doing here?”
Most of the world celebrates horror movies primarily in the fall around Halloween. However, in Japan summer is actually considered the season for telling ghost stories as it is the time when the boundary between our world and the world of the dead is most fragile, allowing spirits to cross over. To take your mind off of the impending heat wave and hopefully send a chill down your spine, we’ve collected some sweltering summer horror movies that you can stream for free.
Each horror movie on this list is currently (as of May 2025) streaming on the free service Tubi. You don’t even need to sign up for an account to watch these movies, links are provided below.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Five young people endure the Texas heat for a summer road trip. After a remote gas station says they have no gas to sell, the group explores a nearby farmhouse looking for help (or gas). Unfortunately, the crew meet Leatherface and his deranged family instead.
It was so hot filming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in a non-air-conditioned Texas farmhouse that actor Edwin Neal (who played the hitchhiker) said: “Filming that scene was the worst time of my life . . . and I had been in Vietnam, with people trying to kill me, so I guess that shows how bad it was.”
Children of the Corn (1984)
For everyone from the midwest, summer = corn. In Children of the Corn, the children of Gatlin, Nebraska follow a corn-based religion that requires them to make human sacrifices to their corn god, “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”. A couple on a road trip in the late summer heat encounter this ghost town and are accosted by its religious extremist children.
Wolf Creek (2005)
Temperatures in the Australian Outback often surpass 100°F. Wolf Creek follows a group of three backpackers on a sweltering trip into this desolate area. They have car trouble and are offered help by a stranger. However, they are drugged and wake up to realize the man has sinister intentions.
Wolf Creek 2 and the short-lived Wolf Creek TV series are also streaming on Tubi.
Shark Night (2011)
When it gets hot outside, crowds form at beaches where swimming in the cool water offers a break from the summer heat. Shark attack movies will inject fear into this activity for ocean swimmers, and if you’re in a landlocked part of the country, there’s a horror movie that shows sharks appearing in freshwater lakes too. Shark Night is one of the best modern shark attack movies. It follows a group of friends spending a weekend at a home on a lake where they are inexplicably attacked by sharks. Nowhere is safe!
Revenge (2017)
Revenge is a dark fairytale about a woman who is raped by her boyfriend’s friends at an isolated desert home. After being shoved off a cliff and left for dead, the woman survives and seeks revenge against the men, chasing them through the sweltering desert landscape. If the style of Revenge seems familiar, writer/director Coralie Fargeat also wrote and directed one of 2024’s best horror movies, The Substance.
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