Why not freak your nut out with one of these scary movies? Updated for October 2022
There’s a universal thrill in being scared – especially when there’s no actual danger involved. And what better way to indulge your taste for the pants-fillingly frightening than to dim the lights, curl up on the couch and cue up a horror movie?
Thankfully, the days of having to venture out to the video shop or cross your fingers that something suitable is on are over: there’s a horrifying wealth of scary movies available at your fingertips on streaming services.
Here, you’ll find the Stuff team’s pick of Amazon Prime Video’s horror movie selection, plus a few films even non-Prime subscribers can view on Amazon’s ad-supported Freevee channel. There’s sure to be something in here that’ll put the willies up you.
You can sign up here for a free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime Video: so, go on: fill your boots on scary flicks.
In his infinite wisdom, Stephen King identified the very high creepiness potential of clowns, choosing to propagate this concept via his classic novel It – here adapted for the screen for a second time by Andy Muschietti in a movie which comes off like a cross between The Goonies and Halloween.
Packed with Kingian tropes (childhood trauma, small town America, loss of innocence, friendship, horrifying ancient evil) and a loving homage to the 1980s, It is a fine piece of crowd-pleasing supernatural horror in which seven misfit schoolkids are stalked by an entity that takes the form of their worst fears – and yes, in some cases that’s a clown. While it doesn’t attempt to redefine the genre, it works within horror’s confines to produce a film that’s as stuffed with heart and soul as it is with scares.
Watch It on Prime Video
A group of aspiring moviemakers descend upon a Texas farmstead to make an adult film, only to encounter something else that goes bump in the night. Bursting with retro charm, Ti West’s movie wears its influences proudly – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre being perhaps the most obvious – but also succeeds in forging its own identity, being as much a treatise on fame, sexuality and aging as it is a gory, suspenseful stalk-and-slash flick. Mia Goth, playing two key roles, is fantastic.
Watch X on Prime Video
It might not have been the original “found footage” horror movie – but The Blair Witch Project was the first to break into the mainstream. Despite being made on a shoestring budget, it raked in truckloads of cash thanks to a marketing campaign that hinted at the footage being real – that the movie was cobbled together from tapes discovered after a trio of college film students disappeared in the Maryland woods.
It’s not real, of course, but the shaky, low-grade camcorder footage, unknown cast and their mounting sense of panic as they sense they may not be alone all serve to create an authentic feel that cinemagoers hadn’t experienced in years. In the time since its release we’ve been deluged with similar films (some of which you’ll find elsewhere in this very list), but this remains one of the creepiest and best-executed examples.
Watch The Blair Witch Project on Freevee
The movie that kicked off the late 90s Japanese horror craze, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is wonderfully atmospheric – a masterpiece when it comes to gradually building up tension and releasing it to maximum effect.
The story? Well, there’s an urban myth about a weird videotape doing the rounds. Pop the tape in your VCR and watch and you’ll receive a creepy phone call shortly thereafter, with a scratchy voice uttering the words, “seven days.” Then you’ll be dead within the week, your corpse horrifically contorted – as if you bore witness to something truly terrifying in your final moments. With a group of teenagers reportedly falling victim to the curse, a curious and sceptical journalist decides to uncover the truth, only to discover that some stories are better left untold.
An early Tim Burton movie, Beetlejuice stars Michael Keaton as the eponymous ghoul: a devious and mischievous spirit summoned by a recently deceased couple to rid their home of its objectionable new (living) inhabitants. He’s hired to perform a kind of reverse-exorcism, in other words, and it’s the perfect setup for Burton’s brand of visually striking, effects-driven black comedy. Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis also star in this surreal and fantastical 1980s classic.
Watch Beetlejuice on Prime Video
Later remade in the US as Quarantine, this low budget, lo-fi Spanish movie offers a slightly new spin on the well-worn found footage horror yarn: it’s presented in real-time. A TV news crew, documenting the night shift of a crew of Barcelona firefighters, finds themselves trapped in an apartment building amidst some kind of unspecified emergency. While the subject matter doesn’t tread new ground, the real-time approach brings the viewer right into the action: you’re experiencing the terror right along with the actors. It’s good, simple and strong stuff that rarely gives you a chance to relax, and the climactic scene is terrifically tense.
Great horror films for kids do exist; The Witches is all the proof you need. Based on Roald Dahl’s beloved book, Nicolas Roeg’s tale of wickedness hidden in plain sight hits the perfect level of scariness for an eight- or nine-year old, and it’s so well made that their parents won’t mind watching along too.
When a young boy and his grandmother visit the seaside for a holiday, he uncovers evidence that the annual meeting of the RSPCC, apparently taking place in their grand hotel, is actually a cover for something far, far more sinister.
Watch The Witches on Prime Video
Ringu director Hideo Nakata returns with another chilling, slow-burning J-Horror – this time about single mother Yoshimi who, along with her young daughter Ikuko, moves into an aging, unloved apartment building following a divorce. The pair’s attempts to settle into their new life are hampered by water leaking into their flat – at first a drop here and there, then a trickle, then a torrent. With the landlord and caretaker mystified by the problem and uninterested in investigating it further, Yoshimi begins to suspect the cause may not be related to leaky pipes but rather to the creepy little girl she catches glimpses of in the building’s corridors.
Watch Dark Water on Freevee
A clever modern horror film that plays with the genre’s tropes and viewers’ expectations, I See You is one of those under-the-radar, straight-to-streaming movies that may never get the attention it deserves. We can’t say too much without risk of ruining the fun, but it involves creepy, unexplained goings-on around Helen Hunt’s house while she struggles to keep her family together and local children are going missing in strange circumstances. If it sounds like a lot to follow, rest assured everything comes together satisfyingly in the end.
Watch I See You on Prime Video
Written and directed by Crispian Mills, perhaps better known as the former frontman of mid-90s Britpop also-rans Kula Shaker, this breezy horror-comedy is set in a posh but dysfunctional boarding school. Despite featuring a number of familiar faces (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Michael Sheen and Margot Robbie), the film actually centres on a gaggle of pupils who find themselves in a battle for their lives after a sinkhole begins spewing hellish monsters into the school grounds. It’s not particularly smart and not especially scary, but if you want a horror film that lays on the laughs you could do a lot worse.
Watch Slaughterhouse Rulez on Prime Video
Horror doesn’t have to be played dead (no pun intended) straight to work, as evidenced by the silly, camp and somewhat tongue-in-cheek Jeepers Creepers – a film that’s not short or gore or scares but steadfastly refuses to take itself too seriously. A brother and sister, driving home from college, endure a threatening encounter with an old truck – and later witness its driver dumping what seems to be a dead body into a sewer pipe. Choosing to investigate rather than immediately calling the police is their first mistake, but thankfully for us the decision sparks off a life-and-death chase with the apparent killer.
Watch Jeepers Creepers on Amazon Prime Video
Originally made for the BBC and written by Neil Cross (best known as the creator of Luther) this creepy TV movie comes in at under an hour, making it an ideal ghost story for the nights when you don’t have lots of time to spare.
A modernised (and loose) adaptation of the classic M.R. James short story, it stars the late John Hurt as a retired academic who, after placing his dementia-stricken wife in a residential care home, takes a solo walking trip to a quiet English coastal town – a place the couple frequented in their younger days. In the midst of loneliness, guilt and regret, the staunch rationalist starts to see and hear things he can’t comfortably explain, but who or what is it that’s haunting him – and why?
Watch Whistle and I’ll Come to You on Amazon Prime Video
The second in George Romero’s series of zombie classics, this is one of the most iconic and influential horror movies of all time, despite its low budget. When an epidemic of undead starts to unravel society from within, four survivors decamp to a giant abandoned shopping mall in a bid for safety – only to discover that the shambling hordes also find themselves drawn to this palace of consumerism.
You’d have to be braindead to miss Romero’s satire (no pun intended) but there’s so much else going on here that it hardly matters. Zack Snyder’s 21st-century reimagining isn’t a patch on this for atmosphere, and the practical effects and synth score give it an eerie atmosphere you just don’t get with modern horror flicks.
Watch Dawn of the Dead on Prime Video
Writer-director Rose Glass’s startling debut film wears the clothes of a horror movie but might instead be viewed as an exploration of loneliness and its dangers. Born-again Christian Maud is a private nurse, assigned to a cancer-stricken former dancer after leaving her previous job under a cloud. As she gets to know her new charge, she is informed that her purpose is not only to ease her pain, but save her immortal soul – but is it really God talking to her, or something else?
Watch Saint Maud on Amazon Prime Video
Genres get sliced and diced as much as the unfortunate characters in S. Craig Zahler’s brutal debut, which starts out like a Western but gradually unfolds into a nightmarish horror flick – albeit one with some great comedic dialogue and character moments.
Kurt Russell heads a killer cast as the upstanding sheriff who assembles a small posse to track down tribe of cannibalistic kidnappers. There’s an old-school nastiness about Bone Tomahawk not often seen in modern movies, not to mention a refreshing tendency to take its time, allowing you to get properly acquainted with its characters and its world.
Watch Bone Tomahawk on Amazon Prime Video
Scanners might be best known for that famous shocking scene early on (if you’ve seen it, you’ll know the one), but David Cronenberg’s psychological (and psychic) thriller is a great piece of early 80s cinema, all bad haircuts and doom-laden synths. A shady corporation seeks to turn “scanners” – a growing number of powerful psychics – into living weapons, but somebody appears to be murdering them just as fast as they can be found. When one particularly powerful scanner goes on a killing spree, the corporation sends its latest recruit to hunt him down – but things don’t go to plan.
Watch Scanners on Amazon Prime Video
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” Honestly, this Australian indie flick is going to stick with you for some time. In addition to all the thrills and chills you’d expect from a standard horror movie, The Babadook has something extra hidden in its basement under the stairs: smarts.
Yes, this film will fray your nerves like wool dragged across a barbed wire fence, but it’s also a powerful meditation on loss and trauma. Can single mother Amelia finally lay the repressed memory of her dead husband to rest and save her son Samuel in the process? You’ll simply have to watch this modern classic to find out.
Watch The Babadook on Amazon Prime Video
This 1999 supernatural thriller was overshadowed by the thematically similar The Sixth Sense at the time of its release but 21 years later Stir of Echoes is still a suspenseful and creepy watch – while The Sixth Sense has become “that film with the twist ending everybody knows about”.
Kevin Bacon puts in a great shift in the leading role, a lower-middle class family man feeling disillusioned with his unexceptional life. That all changes when a bit of light-hearted late night hypnosis unlocks something in his mind, opening a channel to an unquiet spirit seemingly tied to his house.
Watch Stir of Echoes on Amazon Freevee
Made on a budget that would barely get you a Ford Focus and running with the ‘found footage’ angle that was already long in the tooth by its release in 2009, Paranormal Activity will nonetheless put the willies up all but the hardiest viewer.
The story centres on a young couple, one of whom claims to have been haunted by some kind of presence since her childhood. A psychic cautions the pair against attempting to communicate with said presence, which turns out to be good advice, given that when they don’t take it the entity goes on to torment everyone throughout the remainder of the film. Cue minor creepy occurrences captured on grainy night vision video, gradually ramping up to the point that you’ll be sleeping with the lights on.
Watch Paranormal Activity on Amazon Prime Video
Hollywood movie remakes are often about as welcome as a set of razor-sharp fangs to the neck, and while we wouldn’t say Let Me In comes close to matching the frost-bitten brilliance of Swedish horror flick Let the Right One In, it’s one of the few remakes that does stand up in its own right.
Kodi Smit-McPhee plays a boy tormented by bullies, who befriends a female vampire in 1980s New Mexico. While it lacks the same level of childlike innocence found in the original, it makes up for it with plenty of tension. If you really can’t handle subtitles (or you’re just a horror completist), Let Me In is well worth sinking your teeth into.
Watch Let Me In on Amazon Prime Video
Luca Guadagnino’s stylish reimagining of the Dario Argento classic is bound to divide audiences. Ponderously paced and tottering under the weight of more themes and ideas than it knows what to do with, this is peak arthouse horror – and some might find the eventual gory payoffs too little reward for the investment.
Others will appreciate the movie’s strong sense of place (late 1970s Berlin, a divided city riven by political turmoil) and the way it builds an atmosphere of oppressive discomfort throughout with its use of sound effects, strange camera angles and Thom Yorke’s krautrock-inspired score. Dakota Johnson stars as an unworldly young dancer joining a prestigious all-female company that just might be a coven of witches, while Tilda Swinton excels in three separate roles.
Watch Suspiria on Amazon Prime
Outstanding horror-comedies are few and far between – for every American Werewolf in London, there are five Scary Movies – but this low-budget Kiwi mockumentary (directed by and starring Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi) about a house of dysfunctional vampires succeeds in hitting the spot.
With plenty of laughs mined from the awkwardness of being a neurotic immortal living in the modern world, it’s certainly leaning more towards the comedy side on the spectrum, but it’s not without genuine moments of creepiness. If you’re a fan of This Is Spinal Tap as well as Salem’s Lot, it’s one to get your teeth into.
Watch What We Do in the Shadows on Amazon Prime
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