18 Best Horror Movies on Netflix Right Now (September 2024)

What are the best horror movies on Netflix right now?

Pearl (2022) is one of the best horror prequels ever, and it’s now streaming on Netflix.

Table of Contents

Netflix streams over 3,000 movies at any given moment. The movies change daily. So keeping track of all the best horror and scary movies on Netflix in 2024 can be a chore. This list though is designed to help you quickly find all the best horror movies on Netflix. It’s updated constantly to ensure every movie is actually still on Netflix. If you’re looking for a good scary movie on Netflix, this is the best place to start.

Best Horror Movies on Netflix — September 2024

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Godzilla Minus One (2023)
Godzilla Minus One was released by surprise on Netflix on June 1, 2024.

Godzilla Minus One is one of the best movies of 2023, and it is easily in the top-level of best Godzilla movies in the franchise. Set at and after the end of World War II, Godzilla Minus One follows a kamikaze pilot who deals with survivor’s guilt and the ramifications of his actions during the war. In the ensuing years, Godzilla arrives and wreaks havoc on Japan, forcing the pilot and other citizens still recovering from the war to band together in a fight for their collective survival.

Thanksgiving (2023)

The killer from Thanksgiving (2023) wearing a John Carver mask.
Thanksgiving was one of the more well-received slasher movies of 2023.

In 2007, Eli Roth created a fake trailer for a ridiculous (and fictional) slasher movie titled Thanksgiving. Sixteen years later, a full-length version of Thanksgiving was released. The movie plays out like a somewhat modern remake of whatever the movie represented by the 2007 fake trailer would have been like. Meaning, while the trailer looked gory, mean, and ridiculous, but Thanksgiving (2023) is moderately gory, fun, and campy.

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

The Pope's Exorcist (2023)
Russell Crowe is the best reason to watch The Pope’s Exorcist.

Russell Crowe stars in The Pope’s Exorcist as Father Gabriele Amorth, a real-life priest who claimed to have performed over 60,000 exorcisms. In this fictional story, Father Amorth, who is framed as a kind of rebel-priest, tries to help a boy who is demonically possessed. The overall movie is a very by-the-numbers possession film, but the campy nature of how it’s presented (without actually being a comedy) is what makes The Pope’s Exorcist so good.

The Conference (2023)

The Conference (2023)
A team-building getaway turns into a slaughter in this Swedish slasher comedy.

The Conference is a great slasher movie with good kills and just the right amount of comedy. In many ways it feels like a standard slasher in which a bunch of people in an isolated location are picked off one by one by a masked killer, and it executes the formula very well. The movie also takes a few interesting turns towards the end which helps make it feel unique.

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (2023)

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is based on a manga which also serves as inspiration for an anime series of the same name.

Akira Tendo is overworked and underappreciated in a career that turned out to be nothing like he expected. But when a zombie apocalypse breaks out in Japan, Akira is finally free to live his life the way he wants. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is an entertaining zombie comedy that isn’t afraid to get extremely goofy with its premise.

Pearl (2022)

Pearl (2022)
Even though it’s the second movie released in Ti West’s X trilogy, Pearl can be watched as a standalone movie.

Pearl explores the background of its title character, Pearl, during a pivotal point in her life. Set in 1918 at the same Texas farm seen in X (which is set in 1979), Pearl is a young woman with darkness and longing inside her. Her mother has certain traditional expectations of her, but Pearl wants to be a star. She wants to be seen and loved. She believes she’s found a way to make her dream come true, and whenever her own expectations are dashed, she has a very violent way of dealing with her feelings.

Re/Member (2022)

Re/Member (2022)
Re/Member is based on the web novel (and later manga series) Karada Sagashi (translation: Body Search) first published beginning in 2011.

Re/Member is a time loop movie that unfolds like a survival game mixed with Japanese supernatural horror. It is about a group of high-school students who are tasked with participating in a morbid scavenger hunt. At night, they must search their school to find the body parts of a murdered girl so they can piece the girl back together. They are stalked through the building by the “red person” who kills them in horrible ways, but when they die they wake up at home and are forced to relive the same day over and over until they complete the “body search.” Re/Member is a bit cheesy in a Japanese-teen-horror kind of way, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Incantation (2022)

Incantation (2022)
Incantation became Taiwan’s second highest grossing domestic horror film of all time.

Incantation is a found-footage movie about a mother who is cursed after taking part in the desecration of a religious ritual while she was pregnant. Six years later, the mother is plagued by supernatural events that threaten her daughter’s safety. The movie has been touted as one of the most terrifying movies to come out of Taiwan, and it is at least partially inspired by true events. It may also be the scariest movie currently streaming on Netflix.

Fear Street (2021)

Fear Street (2021).
The Fear Street trilogy was released on three consecutive Fridays in July of 2021.

Fear Street is a trilogy of horror films that combine to tell one large story. The first movie is set in 1994 and feels like a teen slasher reminiscent of Scream (1996). The second film is largely told in flashbacks to 1978 and is made as an homage to campground slasher movies like Friday the 13th (1980). And finally, the final part of the trilogy flashes back to 1666 to tell a story of a witch hunt with a strong resemblance to The Crucible (1996).

47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)
47 Meters Down: Uncaged is a standalone sequel to 47 Meters Down (2017).

47 Meters Down: Uncaged is a survival horror movie about a group of young women who become trapped in the submerged ruins of a Mayan city with ferocious sharks. The setting is interesting, the action is good, and for a shark-attack movie it has enough of a gimmicky twist to help it stand out from the rest.

Cam (2018)

Cam (2018).
Cam was written by Isa Mazzei and is partially inspired by her own experiences as a camgirl.

Cam is a psychological thriller about a camgirl, Alice (Madeline Brewer), whose identity is stolen by a woman who looks and acts exactly like her. Is this an extremely convincing case of identity theft, or is there something else going on? Cam is tense and creepy, and it is a great first feature from director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei.

Verónica (2017)

Veronica (2017)
Verónica is inspired by the real-life case of Estefanía Gutiérrez Lázaro who died in 1991 under mysterious circumstances.

Verónica is a Spanish film about a teenage girl who becomes possessed after using a Ouija board with two of her classmates. In the days after trying to contact her deceased father, Verónica (Sandra Escacena) is seemingly the focal point of an increasing amount of supernatural activity. Part haunted house movie and part demonic possession story, Verónica feels familiar in many ways, but it is still a highly effective horror movie. Verónica is so effective and scary that some people reported that they couldn’t even finish it.

Life (2017)

Life (2017)
Jake Gyllenhaal (pictured) stars in life along with Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, and Olga Dihovichnaya.

If you enjoy outer space/isolation horror like Alien (1979) and Sunshine (2007), then you’ll probably enjoy Life. The story is about an alien organism that gets loose aboard a space station and causes havoc. It’s not as terrifying as Alien, but it is well-acted and tense throughout.

The Babysitter (2017)

The Babysitter (2017)
The Babysitter was directed by McG (Terminator Salvation, Charlie’s Angels) and written by Brian Duffield (Love and Monsters, Underwater). (pictured: Bella Thorne, Robbie Amell, Samara Weaving, Hana Mae Lee, and Andrew Bachelor)

Cole, a shy 12-year-old boy who lacks self-confidence, has the best babysitter, Bee. Cole decides to see what Bee does whenever she’s babysitting him and he’s supposed to be asleep, but what he finds puts Cole in serious danger: Bee and her friends are part of a secret satanic cult. The Babysitter is a blast of a horror comedy that plays out like a cat-and-mouse chase as Cole tries to escape Bee and her friends, and people keep winding up dead.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
André Øvredal, the director of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, also directed Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023).

Smart and insidious, The Autopsy of Jane Doe gets under your skin. The body of an unidentified woman found at the scene of a crime is taken to a small-town coroner for an urgent autopsy. So, late at night, the coroner and his son perform an autopsy to try to find the woman’s cause of death, but they end up uncovering a dark, occult mystery hidden within the woman’s body.

Under the Shadow (2016)

Under the Shadow (2016)
Under the Shadow is set in Tehran, Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s during a time when Iraq performed “strategic bombing” on various Iranian cities. (pictured: Narges Rashidi)

With her husband away during the Iran-Iraq War, Shideh (Narges Rahidi) and her young daughter are left behind in their apartment under the constant threat of attack. Shideh is determined to not let outside forces, both war and her country’s restrictive laws, keep her from living her life as she chooses. However, a dark presence inside her home threatens to break down what remains of Shideh’s will.

It Follows (2014)

It Follows (2014)
A sequel titled They Follow was announced in late 2023, though news on the production has been slow since then.

It Follows stands out as one of the best and most important horror movies of the 2010s. It’s about a young woman, Jay (Maika Monroe) who is followed by a relentless entity that only she can see. The entity slowly walks towards her, never stopping. The only way she can avoid certain, eventual death is by passing the curse to someone else the same way it was passed to her: through sex.

Creep (2014)

Mark Duplass in Creep (2014).
Creep was partially inspired by weird experiences the director/co-writer/costar Patrick Brice had using Craigslist.

Creep (2014) is a strange and darkly humorous found-footage movie about a man, Aaron (Patrick Brice), who answers an ad offering $1000 for a day of “filming services.” The ad was put out by Josef (Mark Duplass), a man who requests that Aaron spend the day recording him as a video diary for his unborn child. Josef claims he has a brain tumor that will kill him soon, but his strange and erratic behavior makes Aaron believe there is something else going on. Creep is a quirky horror film perfect for when you’re in the mood for something very, very different.

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Meet The Author

Chris has a degree in film studies at Temple University’s campus in Tokyo, Japan. He is a renowned expert on horror cinema.