Halloween is a time of the year filled with lots of fun activities, such as eating candy, carving pumpkins, making spooky costumes and decor, and sharing ghoulish stories.
Halloween is also a time to grab some popcorn and settle down to binge on the scariest movies you can find.
Netflix has a huge library of movies spanning the entire Horror genre, and we are here to help you sort through them to find the best fit for a creepy Halloween season.
This list includes a selection of supernatural, psychological, post-apocalyptic, dark fantasy, slasher/serial killer, and comedy horror movies, all filled with ghosts, monsters, demons, and psychos of all sorts.
We also include some nail-bitingly suspenseful thrillers all in the macabre spirit of the Halloween season.
Ahead of the Halloween, here are 15 of the best goosebumps and chills-inducing Halloween movies on Netflix.
The Open House
The Open House is a terrifying 2018 horror film that follows Naomi, a mother who moves with her son Logan to her sister’s secluded mountain vacation home after her husband died in an accident.
The house is up for sale, and Naomi’s sister lets her and Logan stay in the beautiful chalet until it sells.
There they meet Martha, an elderly neighbor who behaves strangely.
Strange things soon start to happen: things go missing, the phone rings mysteriously, and the utilities get shut off repeatedly.
They eventually have a deadly encounter with a sinister entity lurking in the house.
The movie is written and directed by Matt Angel, who played Morgan in The Funhouse Massacre, and Suzanne Coote.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) is an unsettling psychological horror movie directed and written by Osgood Perkins (Gretel and Hansel, The Twilight Zone).
It follows two girls, Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), who are left alone during winter break at their Catholic boarding school, Bramford Academy, in upstate New York after their parents fail to pick them up.
While alone with the nuns, the girls begin to experience spooky events involving an evil force.
Kat is in contact with the evil horned entity that directs her to murder Rose and the nuns.
In another timeline, a young woman named Joan (Emma Roberts) escapes from a mental institution. A man and his wife offer her a ride in their car to Bramford.
The story builds up to a terrifyingly deadly climax as the two timelines intersect.
Veronica
Veronica, a 2017 Spanish horror film directed by Paco Plaza, with a screenplay by Fernando Navarro, follows a 15-year-old girl who lives with her family in Vallecas, Madrid.
Her mother has to work long hours to support the family after their father died, leaving Veronica in charge of her three younger siblings.
The story takes a scary turn when a solar eclipse occurs. Veronica learns from her teacher about ancient traditions in which people offered human sacrifices during eclipses to summon evil spirits.
The plot of Veronicas was inspired by real-life events that occurred in Vallecas, Spain, in 1991. The incident involved a girl named Estefanía Gutiérrez Lázaro who died in mysterious circumstances after performing a séance using an ouija board.
You need nerves of steel to watch Veronica as it is one of the scariest moves on Netflix.
The Invitation
The Invitation is a tension-soaked psychological thriller. Will (Logan Marshall-Green) is invited by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) to a dinner party she hosts with her husband David (Michiel Huisman) at their Hollywood Hills home.
Will attends the party with his girlfriend, Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi).
Will realizes too late that Eden has sinister motives for inviting him. The two divorced after their son died in a tragic accident some years before.
Along with other mysterious guests, Will is forced to relive the trauma of their son’s death, and Eden’s sinister motives emerge in a plot that blurs the boundary between reality and paranoia.
The invitation is directed by Karyn Kusama (The Man in the High Castle) and co-written by Phil Hay (Clash of the Titans) and Matt Manfredi (Destroyer, Ride Along 2).
Session 9
Session 9 (2001), a chilling psychological horror movie co-written and directed by Brad Anderson (Fractured, The Sinner), follows a group of workers who go to an abandoned mental asylum to remove asbestos from the building.
While they work in the building they encounter a mysterious presence.
One of the workers find audiotapes recordings of therapy sessions with Marry Hobbes, a former inmate at the hospital who suffered from dissociative identity disorder
But there is more to her illness than her therapists understood and before long one of the workers comes under the power of an evil presence and wreaks havoc armed with a lobotomy pick.
Prepare to be utterly creeped out by this horror flick filmed at the Danvers State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts,
1922
1992 is a Stephen King adaptation directed by Zak Hilditch (Rattlesnake).
It follows a Nebraska farmer, Wilfred James (Thomas Jane), who pens a confession in which he admits that he murdered his wife Arlette with the help of their teenage son Henry.
Will murders Arlette after they disagree over the sale of their farm. He dumps her body inside a well and convinces the sheriff that his wife ran away.
But the story takes a disturbingly macabre turn when the co-conspirators begin to be plagued by their sense of guilt and the ghost of the murdered returns with hordes of rats.
Candyman
Candyman (1992) is a supernatural horror film about a graduate student, Helen Lyle, who is working on a thesis on Chicago urban legends.
Lyle’s research leads her to the legend of the Candyman, the ghost of an artist and prosperous son of a slave from the late 1800s who was lynched by a white mob after fathering a child with a white woman.
Mayhem follows after Lyle accidentally summons the hook-handed ghoul who then goes on a gratuitous killing spree.
Candyman, written and directed by Bernard Rose, is based Clive Barker’s short story, The Forbidden.
The movie stars Virginia Madsen (Witches of East End, Designated Survivor, Swamp Thing) as Helen Lyle and Tony Todd (Scream: The TV series) as Daniel Robitaille, aka Candyman.
There have been a number of sequels to Candyman and another is set for release later this year.
Insidious
Insidious, a supernatural horror film released in 2010, is the first installment in a series of movies including Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013), Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015), and Insidious: The Last Key (2018).
Insidious follows a suburban couple, Josh and Renai Lambert, who move into a new home to escape disturbing paranormal activity in their previous home.
But they soon find out that their eldest son Dalton has become a host for a demon from another dimension.
The family seeks the help of Elise Rainier, a psychic and paranormal, and things get really scary after that.
Insidious, directed and written by the Saw franchise pair of James Wan (director) and Leigh Whannell (screenplay), stars Patrick Wilson (Aquaman, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice), Rose Byrne (X-Men: Apocalypse), and Barbara Hershey (The Last Temptation of Christ).
Eli
Eli (2019) follows an 11-year-old boy suffering from a mysterious debilitating illness that causes allergic reactions to the outdoors. His parents, Paul and Rose, take him to Dr. Isabella Horn’s clinic for treatment.
After initially enjoying relief at Horn’s clinic, Eli (Charlie Shotwell) begins to experience paranormal activity in the house. He is convinced that the house is haunted and that some entities are trying to warn him about Dr. Horn.
He befriends a girl named Haley and through her learns some sinister secrets about Horn’s facility.
This is one creepy haunted house movie you likely don’t want to watch alone in the dark.
Eli is directed by Ciarán Foy (The Wildling, Sinister 2) with the screenplay by David Chirchirillo, Ian Goldberg (Fear the Walking Dead, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) and Richard Naing (The Autopsy of Jane Doe).
In The Tall Grass
In The Tall Grass is a 2019 adaptation of a 2012 novella of the same name by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill.
The movie tells the story of siblings Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) and Cal (Avery Whitted) who get ensnared in a disorienting confrontation with an evil force after they go to investigate the cries of a child in a field of tall grass.
This movie is for you if you enjoy Stephen King adaptations, especially It.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe
Small town coroner Tommy Tilden and his son Austin receive the corpse of an unidentified young woman.
While examining the body to determine the cause of death, they encounter strange physical anomalies. The body shows no signs of external trauma, but the bones are shattered, and internal organs damaged.
Although she appeared dead, they determined her brain cells were still active, suggesting she was still alive.
While struggling to make sense of the contradicting physical signs, they experience creepy paranormal activity that leads to a bloody climax.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is one of the creepiest thriller/horror movies you can watch on Netflix.
The 2016 movie was written by Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing, and directed by André Øvredal (Trollhunter).
It stars Emile Hirsch (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) as Austin Tilden and Brian Cox (Good Omens, Succession) as Tommy and Olwen Kelly as the Jane Doe cadaver.
Eerie
Erika, a girl at an exclusive all-girls Catholic school, commits suicide by hanging.
Some of the students at the school report seeing Erika’s ghost, and Pat Consolacion, a clairvoyant guidance counselor at the school investigates.
Thanks to her paranormal powers, Pat uncovers some unnerving secrets about the school’s abusive past.
Eerie is a jump-scare horror movie you don’t want to watch with the lights off.
The Filipino movie stars Bea Alonzo as Pat Consolacion, Charo Santos-Concio as Mother Alice, and Gillian Vicencio as Erika.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
The 2016 movie is a haunted house horror flick that follows Lily, a young nurse who is hired to care for Iris Blum, a former horror novel writer suffering from dementia in her old age.
After multiple strange incidents, Lily begins to suspect that the old lady’s remote home in Braintree, Massachusetts, is haunted by ghosts from its past.
She soon uncovers the house’s horrifying history of murder that one of Blum’s horror novels was based on.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a dark, moody, and somber horror movie that will absolutely creep you out.
It is written and directed by Osgood Perkins and stars Ruth Wilson as Lily, Lucy Boynton as Polly Parsons, and Paula Prentiss as Iris Blum.
The Silence of the Lambs
The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award-winning 1991 psychological thriller/horror, is available for streaming on Netflix
The award-winning movie follows FBI agent Clarice Starling, who is sent to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to interview Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist-turned cannibalistic serial killer.
She hopes to obtain insights from Lector that will help the FBI track down a psychopathic serial killer known as Buffalo Bill.
Although she was sent to interrogate Lecter, Clarice soon finds that she is the one under interrogative scrutiny as Lector digs into her psyche to uncover repressed traumas from her past.
The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme and written and Ted Talley, is based on a 1988 novel of the same name by Thomas Harris.
The movie, starring Jodie Foster (Anna and the King, Elysium) as Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins (Thor: Ragnarok, Westworld) as Lecter, won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay.
The Perfection
The Perfection, directed by Emmy award-winning writer/director Richard Shepard, is an unsettling 2009 psychological horror that follows Charlotte Willmore, a music prodigy who leaves her prestigious music school in Boston to care for her terminally ill mother.
She returns to school after her mother died and finds that she has been replaced by another student Lizzie. She befriends and then drugs Lizzie with medication prescribed for her late mom.
Under the influence of the drug, Lizzie experiences bizarre body hallucination, and Charlotte convinces her to cut off her “bad arm” with a meat cleaver.
What follows is a tortuously bizarre sequence of events with a shocking end. We also learn about Charlotte’s history of grisly and sinister abuse in the hands of her mentors at the music school.
