Updated October 1, 2026. This is iHorror’s running list of the best horror movies on Netflix in the U.S., and it gets a fresh pass every month. Titles that left the service come off, new arrivals get slotted in where they belong, and the write-ups get sharpened when a film earns a second look. (For everything else arriving over the month, see our Netflix October 2026 horror lineup.)
The picks are ours, not the algorithm’s. Every film in The Essentials and Deeper Cuts was checked against current U.S. availability data in the last week of September 2026 and against Netflix’s own list of October departures, and the October arrivals below carry the dates Netflix has scheduled for them. We weigh a film by how well it works, not by how loud its marketing was, which is why a small 2016 ghost story set in Tehran shares a section with a Guillermo del Toro production.
New this month: the first three Psycho films, all starring Anthony Perkins, Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead and a Mike Flanagan double of Hush and Ouija: Origin of Evil land October 1, The Boogeyman follows October 5, and Oculus, which arrived September 24, has earned its spot.
What’s New This Month
- Psycho (1960), Psycho II (1983) and Psycho III (1986) arrive October 1. Hitchcock’s original plus the next two sequels is the headline addition of the month.
- Also October 1: Evil Dead (2013), The Sixth Sense (1999), Hush (2016), Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) along with the original Ouija (2014), Crimson Peak (2015) and The Strangers (2008), plus Split (2016), Dracula (1992), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Red Dragon (2002), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Friday the 13th (2009), Happy Death Day 2U (2019) and Lake Placid (1999).
- The Boogeyman (2023) arrives October 5, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) October 6 and Cocaine Bear (2023) October 14.
- Oculus (2013) landed September 24 and now sits in Deeper Cuts.
- On the series side, Josh Hartnett’s Below premieres October 8, the second season of the animated Haunted Hotel arrives October 9, and the Korean horror series Dead-End Job, moved off October 9, now premieres October 30.
- Gone as of October 1: The Witch (2015) and Krampus (2015). Leaving later this month: Scream (2022) on October 8, Deadstream (2022) and Prevenge (2016) on October 9, and A Quiet Place Part II (2021) on October 11. None of them were on this list, but if they’re in your queue, move them up.
New on Netflix This Month
Psycho (1960)
Netflix is carrying the first three Psycho films this month, all starring Anthony Perkins, and they play best as a set. Start with Hitchcock’s original, obviously: it kills off its apparent lead nearly halfway through, hands the story to the nicest young man in California, and dares you to keep rooting for him. The shower scene gets the credit, but the parlor conversation between Norman and Marion, all stuffed birds and small talk, is where the film gets under your skin. Then keep going. Psycho II (1983) is far better than a sequel made 23 years later has any right to be, and Psycho III (1986), which Perkins directed himself, is a strange, sad and sometimes very funny follow-up. Arrives October 1.
Evil Dead (2013)
Fede Álvarez’s remake skipped the winking. Mia (Jane Levy) goes to the family cabin to kick heroin cold turkey, her friends read everything that follows as withdrawal, and by the time anyone takes the book in the cellar seriously it’s far too late. Álvarez leaned on practical effects, and the box cutter, the nail gun and the finale in a downpour of blood still make people look away. It holds up better than its reputation among Raimi loyalists, and with Evil Dead Burn reaching HBO Max on October 2, it’s the right warm-up. Our Evil Dead bible covers the whole timeline, and here’s where the Burn reviews landed. Arrives October 1.
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Everyone knows the twist, and it doesn’t matter. The reason to go back to M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough is Haley Joel Osment’s Cole whispering to Bruce Willis like a kid confessing to something, and Toni Collette in the car near the end, which may be the best single scene of acting in a mainstream ghost movie. Shyamalan shoots Philadelphia in cold, waiting-room tones and lets the dead announce themselves with a drop in temperature rather than a sting on the soundtrack. Six Oscar nominations for a horror film in 1999 was a real statement. Arrives October 1.
Hush (2016)
Mike Flanagan wrote this one with Kate Siegel, who plays Maddie, a deaf novelist living alone in the woods, and the masked man at her glass door (John Gallagher Jr.) works out early that she can’t hear him. The film’s smartest decision is never making her helpless. Flanagan builds the whole night out of sight lines, windows and what Maddie can figure out before he does, and at well under an hour and a half there’s no slack anywhere. It was a Netflix exclusive in 2016 before it drifted off the service, and it’s good to have it back. Arrives October 1.
Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
The first Ouija is a board game commercial with jump scares. Mike Flanagan’s prequel is a period ghost story about a widow (Elizabeth Reaser) running a fake séance business out of her 1967 Los Angeles house until her youngest daughter (Lulu Wilson) starts channeling something real. Flanagan dresses it up like a film from that year, down to the vintage studio logo and the cue marks in the corner of the frame, and Wilson’s calm little speech about what it feels like to be strangled is the scene everybody remembers. You don’t need the first film. It made our list of sequels better than the original for good reason. Arrives October 1.
Crimson Peak (2015)
Guillermo del Toro insisted at release that this was a gothic romance with ghosts in it rather than a horror film, and he was right, which is exactly why it belongs in your October. Mia Wasikowska’s Edith marries Tom Hiddleston’s charming, broke baronet and moves into Allerdale Hall, a collapsing mansion sitting on red clay that seeps up through the floorboards and stains the snow. Jessica Chastain, as his sister Lucille, gives one of the wildest performances of her career. The ghosts are gorgeous. The living are the problem. Arrives October 1.
The Strangers (2008)
Bryan Bertino’s debut is a couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) in a remote family house after a proposal gone wrong, and three masked people who want in. That’s all of it, and it’s enough. What makes it last is how little the intruders explain themselves: the line everyone quotes, “Because you were home,” is the film’s entire philosophy. It’s cruel and quiet, and the skipping record still ruins people. Arrives October 1.
The Boogeyman (2023)
Rob Savage’s Stephen King adaptation is a lights-off movie in the most literal sense: the thing that follows a grieving family home lives in the dark, so every scene turns into a negotiation with a light switch. Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair play the sisters and Chris Messina their therapist father, and Savage, who made Host, knows how to get a scare out of an empty doorway. It’s more effective than it is deep, but it is very effective, and it was made for Hulu before test screenings pushed it into theaters. Read our review and our conversation with Savage. Arrives October 5.
The Essentials
28 Years Later (2025)
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland went back to the Rage Virus nearly three decades on, and the result is stranger and sadder than a legacy sequel has any business being. Young Spike (Alfie Williams) leaves his island community with his father to find out how badly Britain has changed, and the answer involves infected that have evolved, survivors who have devolved, and Ralph Fiennes as a doctor building a monument out of skulls. Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson co-star. Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson is the best thing in the film. We tracked it from the first trailer and that spoken-word poem everyone asked about.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
You don’t have to wait to keep going. Nia DaCosta’s follow-up picks up Spike’s story and pushes the world somewhere considerably weirder, with Jack O’Connell’s Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal running a cult that plays like a bad joke until it very much isn’t, while Dr. Kelson’s relationship with the infected takes a turn nobody predicted. Fiennes, O’Connell, Williams, Erin Kellyman and Chi Lewis-Parry star. It’s a different film from the first, looser and more grotesque, and it works best watched the same weekend. We covered its home release back in April.
Frankenstein (2025)
Guillermo del Toro finally got his monster, and it’s the film he’s been describing in interviews for twenty years. Oscar Isaac plays Victor as a brilliant man who cannot stop performing his own genius, and Jacob Elordi’s Creature is the most sympathetic version of the character since Karloff. Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz round it out. It’s long, it’s gorgeous, and it takes Shelley’s novel seriously as a story about a father who fails a child. Our review called it merciless in the best way.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper’s original is on Netflix again, and if you’ve only seen the remakes you owe yourself the real thing. It’s shorter than you remember, hotter than any film has a right to feel, and far less gory than its reputation. What it has instead is that dinner scene, a sound design built out of squeals and generator hum, and a final shot of Leatherface swinging the saw at sunrise that still hasn’t been topped. Our Late to the Party column covers what it’s like to meet it fresh.
Alien (1979)
Ridley Scott’s haunted-house-in-space has Aliens streaming right beside it, so the two best films in the franchise are a double feature again. Alien is the one to start with: a truckers-in-space crew, a company that regards them as expendable, and a creature designed to make you uncomfortable on a level you can’t quite name. Nearly fifty years on, the chestburster still lands. For the rest of the timeline, our watch-order guide has it.
The Black Phone (2021)
Scott Derrickson puts 13-year-old Finney (Mason Thames) in a soundproofed basement with a disconnected phone on the wall and Ethan Hawke’s Grabber upstairs. The phone rings anyway. The dead boys on the line each know one thing that might help, and the film’s cleverest move is treating their advice as a relay race rather than a rescue. Hawke behind that mask is genuinely frightening because he keeps changing the rules. We called it an instant classic out of Fantastic Fest and haven’t walked that back.
Gerald’s Game (2017)
Mike Flanagan took a Stephen King novel everyone called unfilmable, a woman handcuffed to a bed in an empty lake house, and made his best film. Carla Gugino carries it nearly alone, arguing with hallucinated versions of her dead husband and herself while a stray dog and a figure in the corner wait for her to weaken. The degloving scene is the one people warn each other about, and they’re right to. But the reason it holds up is the last act, where Flanagan does the thing he always does and turns the horror into a reckoning. His Carrie series arrives on Prime Video October 7.
His House (2020)
Still the strongest original horror film Netflix has produced. A couple who fled South Sudan are assigned a rotting council house in England and told not to leave it. Something in the walls knows what they did to get there. The scares are built out of the house itself, faces pressing through the plaster, a hallway that opens onto the sea, and the film never lets the metaphor smother the horror. The two lead performances are extraordinary. It’s frightening first and devastating second, and it manages both without cheating on either.
The Ritual (2017)
Four English men walk a hiking trail in northern Sweden to honor a dead friend. One is injured, so they cut through the woods. That’s the whole plot and it’s enough. David Bruckner directs the first half as a story about four middle-aged men who don’t much like each other anymore, which is why the second half works: grief and resentment are already loose in the group before anything starts hunting them. The creature is the reason people keep recommending this. It’s withheld for a very long time, it’s one of the best monster designs of the last decade, and it isn’t a variation on anything you’ve seen.
Apostle (2018)
Gareth Evans made The Raid, then made a folk horror film about a cult on a Welsh island, and almost nobody watched it. Dan Stevens plays a broken former missionary who infiltrates a religious commune in 1905 to ransom back his kidnapped sister, and what he finds isn’t the swindle he expected. Michael Sheen plays the prophet as a man telling the truth in the worst possible way. Evans brings action-filmmaking instincts to a genre that usually moves slowly, and the last forty minutes are as brutal as anything on the service. If you liked The Wicker Man but wanted it to stop being polite, this is the film.
Nope (2022)
Jordan Peele’s third film is the one that gets better every time. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer are the Haywood siblings, horse wranglers on a failing Hollywood ranch who decide to film the thing in the sky above them. What’s up there is not a saucer, and the film’s midpoint reveal of what it actually is remains a jolt. The sitcom-chimp flashback is the scariest thing Peele has shot. It’s a creature feature about spectacle that is also a spectacle, and it earns the contradiction. We once chased the real footage that may have inspired it.
Smile 2 (2024)
Parker Finn took the curse from the first film and handed it to a pop star mid-comeback tour, and the result is bigger, meaner and better than it had any right to be. Naomi Scott’s singer is on stage, on camera and on painkillers, which means the smiling thing has an audience for every one of her breakdowns. Finn stages the set pieces like musical numbers, and the film understands that fame is already a kind of possession. It outperformed Terrifier 3 at the box office for a reason.
Green Room (2015)
A broke punk band plays a backwoods neo-Nazi club, sees something they shouldn’t have, and barricades themselves in the green room while the men outside decide how to remove the witnesses. Jeremy Saulnier shoots it with a sick, practical clarity: every injury is specific, every plan is bad, and Patrick Stewart runs the whole operation with the calm of a man ordering lunch. Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots hold the center. There’s nothing supernatural in it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s the film to put on when a friend says horror doesn’t scare them anymore.
Ready or Not (2019)
A bride spends her wedding night being hunted through a mansion by in-laws who believe a board-game pact with the devil requires it. Samara Weaving in a ripped wedding dress with a shotgun became an instant genre image, and the film around her is fast, funny and properly bloody. It’s built on a simple rule the best horror comedies follow: real stakes, real gore, and the joke arriving one beat after the scare, never instead of it. If you want the follow-up, we reviewed the Here I Come Blu-ray.
Creep (2014)
A camera, two actors, one deeply wrong man. Patrick Brice plays a videographer who answers an online ad from Josef (Mark Duplass), who says he’s dying and wants a video diary for his unborn child. Josef also owns a wolf mask named Peachfuzz. At just over 75 minutes, Creep is the rare found-footage film that understands the format is about intimacy, not shaky cams, and Duplass’ performance keeps flipping between pitiable and predatory until you stop being able to tell which is the act. The franchise is still going: The Creep Tapes season three is here.
Incantation (2022)
The highest-grossing horror film in Taiwan’s history opens by asking you to chant along and memorize a symbol, and then spends the rest of its running time making you regret it. Kevin Ko’s found-footage story follows Li Ronan, a mother who broke a religious taboo six years ago and is now trying to keep whatever followed away from her daughter. The participation gimmick sounds cheap. It works because the film commits to it through the final frame, and the chant itself became a news story when viewers insisted it had cursed them. Our review was surprised by how bloody it gets.
Verónica (2017)
Paco Plaza, one half of the [REC] team, made a Ouija film that got branded the scariest movie on Netflix by people who’d clearly never seen one. It isn’t that. It’s something better: a patient, sad story about a teenage girl looking after her younger siblings who tries to contact the dead during a solar eclipse and brings back the wrong thing. Plaza knows exactly how to build dread, and he builds it out of household routine rather than jump scares. The ending is a gut punch because it was always going there.
Under the Shadow (2016)
Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, missiles falling on the city, and a mother and daughter alone in an apartment as the neighbors leave one by one. The film lets the war do half the work, then introduces something that arrives on the wind and wants the child. It’s a slow burn where it gets harder and harder to say which danger is worse, the one outside or the one in the ceiling, and the film’s best trick is making a piece of fabric the scariest thing on the service. Precise, patient, and it never wastes a shot.
Deeper Cuts Worth Your Night
1922 (2017)
Zak Hilditch adapted the Stephen King novella about a Nebraska farmer who murders his wife and drops her down a well, and Thomas Jane disappeared into it. Jane sets his jaw so hard the voice barely gets out, which plays as an affectation for five minutes and then simply becomes the man. What follows is less a ghost story than a slow accounting: the rats arrive, the son is ruined, the land turns. It’s the bleakest King adaptation Netflix has made, and it got buried because Gerald’s Game came out the same year and took all the oxygen.
It’s What’s Inside (2024)
Netflix paid seventeen million dollars for Greg Jardin’s debut at Sundance and then released it with the marketing budget of a weather report. College friends reunite the night before a wedding. One of them brings a suitcase containing a machine that swaps bodies. They play a game with it. It’s a thriller for most of its running time, but the last act turns genuinely nasty, and the premise is handled with real rigor: every actor plays several people and the film never loses track of who’s inside whom. The best argument that Netflix’s problem isn’t what it buys.
Don’t Move (2024)
A grieving woman at a remote overlook meets a stranger who seems kind. He injects her with a paralytic. She has about twenty minutes before her body stops working, and the film is her trying to escape while progressively losing the ability to move, speak and keep her eyes open. Adam Schindler and Brian Netto direct it as a pure mechanical thriller, Sam Raimi produced, and Kelsey Asbille does most of her acting with a face that’s shutting down. Ninety minutes, one idea, used properly. We flagged it when Netflix picked it up.
Sister Death (2023)
Paco Plaza’s prequel to Verónica, and arguably the better film. In post-Civil War Spain, a novice arrives at a convent school where she was once venerated as a child who saw a miracle. The building has a history involving the war, and the nuns would rather not discuss it. Plaza shoots the place in washed-out grays and builds the film almost entirely out of sound, footsteps in corridors, a chair dragging upstairs, a rope. It’s restrained for ninety percent of its running time and then extremely not. Watch it after Verónica and the last scene lands twice as hard.
Outside (2024)
A Filipino family flees a zombie outbreak to the father’s abandoned childhood farm. They’re safe there. The infected can’t reach them. The film is about what the father does with that safety. Carlo Ledesma directs a slow, ugly domestic horror story in which the apocalypse is mostly set dressing for a man with an inherited temper who finally has nobody around to stop him. Sid Lucero plays him, and he’s terrifying without ever raising the film’s volume. The zombies are the least frightening thing in it, and that is entirely the point.
Before I Wake (2016)
Before Hill House, before Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan made a small film about a foster child whose dreams appear in the room while he sleeps. When Cody dreams of butterflies, Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane wake to butterflies. When he has a nightmare, the nightmare is also there. It sat on a shelf for two years while its distributor went bankrupt, which is most of why nobody saw it. Every Flanagan signature is already present: grief as the real monster, a creature built around something sad, an ending that chooses mercy. He’s still working that vein.
Oculus (2013)
Before Netflix turned Mike Flanagan into a brand, he made this. Kaylie (Karen Gillan) has spent ten years planning to prove that an antique mirror killed her parents, and her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites), just released from psychiatric care, has spent the same ten years being told it was all in his head. Flanagan cuts between their adult experiment and the childhood night itself until the two timelines start sharing the same rooms, and by the end you can’t trust anything either of them sees. The lightbulb scene is still one of his nastiest tricks. Added September 24.
How We Keep This List Current
This page is refreshed every month against Netflix’s own listings, its monthly departures page and current U.S. availability trackers, and our weekly new horror streaming this weekend posts feed it as titles arrive and leave. Streaming rights move without warning, so if you find a film here that’s gone, or one we’re missing, tell us through the Contact page and we’ll fix it on the next pass.
More Horror Streaming Guides
- The Best Horror Movies on Shudder
- The Best Horror Movies on Hulu
- The Best Horror Movies on HBO Max
- The Best Horror Movies on Prime Video
- Upcoming Horror Movies: The Complete Release Calendar
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