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 Halloween, here are 15 of the best goosebumps and chills-inducing Halloween movies on Netflix.
Updated in November 2021: Each month, Netflix makes huge changes and deletes several films from its library, replacing the movies with new options. This means some of our picks leave, with other great films arrive to take their place.
It Follows (2014)
It Follows is a 2014 horror-thriller about a supernatural entity that stalks teens after sexual encounters.
The movie takes the old horror trope of teens dying after having sex and made the actual act of sex as the trigger device for this entity, which begins following the kids until it finally either kills them or they pass it on by having sex with someone else.
The movie was a success, making $23 million with just a budget of $1.3 million. It also has a fantastic 96% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
Monster House (2006)
Monster House is a great Halloween movie for the kids, although it is also pretty scary at times.
Released in 2006, the movie is a motion-capture movie (similar to the Christmas movie The Polar Express) but is a little more smooth concerning the animation.
The movie features three children who believe the house across the street is haunted, and they are right, as it eats balls, bikes, and people who wander onto its lawn.
The movie picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.
Crimson Peak (2015)
Guillermo del Toro returned to gothic horror in 2015 for the movie Crimson Peak.
The cast was top-notch, with aspiring author Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) moving to England with her new husband (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister (Jessica Chastain).
However, when the three move into the large creepy dilapidated mansion, Edith begins to see mysterious ghosts in the house and she begins to descend into madness as everything falls apart around her.
The Ritual (2018)
Released on Netflix in 2018, The Ritual was a film that took a familiar horror movie trope — a group of friends head out into the woods — and turned it into a terrifying horror film.
The movie starts with five friends planning a trip that never happened. When one of them dies, the other four head out together to finally fulfill the plans in honor of their friend.
However, things go wrong when they fall asleep in a cabin, and when they wake up, they realize they are lost, and a monster might be in the woods, tracking them.
The Conjuring (2013)
The Conjuring hit Netflix in February 2021. The movie is based on paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, a real-life couple who investigated several cases throughout the years.
In the movie, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson played the Warren’s as the couple goes to a small farmhouse to investigate a possession.
They realize there are problems there, but the Catholic Church won’t authorize an exorcism unless they can prove it.
The movie had a sequel, also hitting Netflix in February 2021, and spin-off movies as well.
The Strangers Prey at Night (2018)
In 2008. The Strangers was a surprising addition to the home invasion movie, one of the best of its subgenre. It took 10 years, but a sequel came.
Unlike the original, which was a tense home invasion horror movie, the sequel, Prey at Night, was more stylized and went for the more retro look.
What resulted was an entertaining horror movie, another surprise entry for the franchise.
The three masked strangers are back and killing once again. While seen as a critical disappointment, horror movie critics delivered almost universal praise.
Hush (2016)
The man who scared everyone on Netflix with his series The Haunting of Hill House also has some great horror movies on the streaming service as well.
His best might be Hush, a scary movie perfect for Halloween with an interesting premise.
A deaf woman lives alone in a secluded home in the woods. After a visiting friend leaves, a stranger kills the friend and then goes to kill the woman in the house.
However, when he learns she is deaf and has no idea he is in her house, he decides to torment her with a game of cat and mouse. The best part is that when she figures out he is there, the tables turn.
ParaNorman (2012)
For kids looking for a great Halloween movie this year, look no further than ParaNorman.
From Laika, the company that also brought the world the movie Coraline, ParaNorman is about a young boy named Norman who can see and speak to the dead.
People think Norman is a freak, but when his supernatural talents allow him to realize that danger is coming to his town, he and his oddball friends are the only ones who can save the day.
However, when the humans in the town turn out to be more dangerous than the undead, things take a frightening turn.
Vampires vs. The Bronx (2020)
There is a new movie on Netflix just in time for Halloween called Vampires vs. The Bronx.
The movie has vampires moving into the Bronx, where they start to buy up local businesses and then killing the business owners. The plan is to take over the entire community for themselves, a form, of gentrification.
When some kids in the Bronx realize what is going on, they set out to stop them while leads to the kids teaming up against the vampires to save their community.
This one isn’t for little kids, but for anyone who has older kids, this is a Halloween movie on Netflix for the family.
Veronica (2017)
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.
1922 (2017)
1922 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.
Eli (2019)
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 (2019)
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.
Sinister (2012)
Blumhouse has become the go-to when it comes to lower-budget horror movies that make a monster box office take.
In 2012, the company created Sinister, which stars Ethan Hawke as a true-crime writer who moves his family into a house that saw its previous tenants killed.
As he starts to explore the house, he realizes that there are evil spirits in the house that might have led to the previous murders and be putting his family in danger.
The movie picked up a sequel three years later.
The Perfection (2019)
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 hallucinations, 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 at the hands of her mentors at the music school.