Do you want to watch something scary? Well, you horror stan, Hulu is a great place to start looking.
Right now, the streaming service has a solid lineup of new and old frights, ranging from recent Hulu originals like False Positive, starring Ilana Glazer, to cross-genre international hits like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Of course, not all horror experiences freak us out in the same way — or to the same degree — so you’ll want to know what you’re getting yourself into before pressing play.
To help you out, we’ve combed through Hulu’s catalog and selected the 10 all-around best horror movies available (in no particular order).
Good luck out there, and remember: Never go alone!
1. False Positive
Credit: Hulu
From Mother! to Rosemary’s Baby, reproduction has been explored by enough horror titles to qualify pregnancy-terror as its own subgenre. In director John Lee’s False Positive, co-written with star Ilana Glazer, the gross-out body stuff you’ve seen done countless times gets fresh framing with a snappy script that addresses modern mothering imperfectly but thoughtfully. Plus, Pierce Brosnan plays a campy, creepy OB-GYN villain you’ve just gotta see.
Where to watch: False Positive is streaming on Hulu.
2. Villains
Credit: Hulu
Venerable horror icons Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe lead Villains, a Bonnie and Clyde-meets-Don’t Breathe mashup with a sprinkling of ’50s style you’ll love. When criminal lovebirds Jules and Mickey decide to rob a house, they encounter a mystery within and must contend with the home’s residents, played by Kyra Sedgwick and Jeffrey Donovan, to solve it.
Where to watch: Villains is streaming on Hulu.
3. Prey
Credit: Photo By David Bukach © 2022 20th Century Studios
The widely successful prequel to the Predator franchise, Prey is set in 1719 and follows Naru (Amber Midthunder) as she tries to protect her community from our favorite clicking, creepy alien nightmare. Hulu also has the entire Predator franchise available for streaming if you’re up for a marathon. — Yasmeen Hamadeh, Entertainment Intern
Where to watch: Prey is streaming on Hulu.
4. Infinity Pool
Credit: NEON
Like The White Lotus on meth, director Brandon Cronenberg’s nightmarish Infinity Pool sends a pair of married well-to-do beauties named James (Alexander Skarsgard) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) to an exclusive tropical resort to see what chaos they can wrangle up, all in the name of avoiding their marital problems. And does it ever wrangle up, first in the form of another pair of married well-to-do beauties – Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert). The foursome flirt over dinner, as beautiful rich people do, and the next day they find themselves breaking the resort’s rules to head off into the countryside to taste a little local color.
Unfortunately, the local color they find is all red – blood, gore, and some unknown science-fiction goo that traps them in a sticky tangle of consciousness cloning that’ll have them wishing all the locals had wanted was their kidneys. Like all of Cronenberg Jr.’s movies to date, Infinity Pool proves itself to be a surreal puzzle that spirals outward into endless complexity, dissolving not just the walls of the body but those of the mind too. The barriers between our flesh and our fantasies turn to liquid in his hands – we’re mostly water after all, and Infinity Pool means to drown us in its deep end. — Jason Adams
How to watch: Infinity Pool is now streaming on Hulu.
5. Sea Fever
If you’re a fan of the ever-reliable subgenre of aquatic horror (think Leviathan or The Deep) and you’ve never seen Neasa Hardiman’s 2019 Sea Fever, then are you ever in for a treat. Starring the capable twosome of Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott as a fishing boat captain and her husband who trawl the waters off of Ireland, the search for one big haul takes them and their crew into uncharted waters where, you guessed it, something sinister lurks below the surface. Meaning the surface of the water and then, unnervingly, beneath the surface of their skin. Convincingly marrying science with its horror a la Barry Levinson’s equally underrated The Bay, Sea Fever manages to drag all manner of slippery grossness up; it becomes terrifying because the movie makes it seem terrifyingly plausible. — J.A.
How to watch: Sea Fever is now streaming on Hulu.
6. Come True
If you’ve ever experienced sleep paralysis, where your consciousness floats to the surface just enough to convince you that you’re paralyzed in your bed, then you know what a terrifying experience it can be. Uncannier still is how a lot of people have shared similar hallucinations of shadowy figures with glowing eyes while in that state; it’s one of those creepy real-life examples of a collective unconscious, or at least that our brains are wired similarly enough to have us fearing the same things. And where there’s a collective fear to be exploited, horror films will find a way. Anthony Scott Burns’ Come True taps into this shared trauma, bringing these waking nightmares to fearsome life.
Starring Julia Sarah Stone as Sarah, a young woman in need of cash who agrees to participate in a mysterious sleep study, Come True takes its time soaking us in its strange environs. Lots of long corridors and parking lots – I believe the popular internet terminology is “liminal spaces.” And the movie becomes all the creepier for its methodical, trance-like plotting, aided along by its killer synth score from Electric Youth. Getting trapped inside somebody else’s dream hasn’t been so terrifying since the heyday of Freddy Krueger. — J.A.
How to watch: Come True is now streaming on Hulu.
7. The Descent
A year after Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) loses her husband and daughter in a car accident, her besties Juno (Natalie Mendoza) and Beth (Alex Reid) make a plan for her to have some fun and step out from under the profound weight of her grief by taking her on a caving adventure in North Carolina. Tagging along are sisters Sam (MyAnna Buring) and Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), plus the brash Holly (Nora-Jane Noone) – just six gals out for some good, old-fashioned, spelunking fun! What could possibly go wrong? Oh, wait, there are sightless bloodthirsty mole-men, you say? They should really include them in the brochure.
Buried deep inside the aughts era of bro horror, Neil Marshall’s The Descent felt revolutionary in its moment just for giving us a cast of nothing but tough, capable, kick-ass women. And Marshall’s movie does so much more than that. Even before any mole-people show up, he’s already mined a world of claustrophobia from the setting itself; you’re almost relieved when the monsters pop up, so you can focus on something else for a second and stop having a panic attack about the walls falling in on you. The Descent remains an absolute and total banger 20 years on. — J.A.
How to watch: The Descent is now streaming on Hulu.
8. Cobweb
Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate.
Vibing on similar themes as The Babadook and Coraline, director Samuel Bodin’s debut feature stars C’mon C’mon‘s Woody Norman as a bullied eight-year-old named Peter whose overprotective parents Carol (Lizzy Caplan) and Mark (Antony Starr) don’t much help matters. Refusing to let him partake in normal childhood activities like trick-or-treating, they keep him cooped up in the house most of the time, constantly warning him about a young girl who went missing in their neighborhood some years before.
And then one night as Peter tries to sleep, a tap-tap-tapping on the inside of his bedroom wall begins, followed soon thereafter by a little girl’s voice. And this little girl has nothing nice to say about Peter’s parents. Slowly, Peter starts sensing his parents’ strange behavior might be covering up a horrible secret, and before you can say “yellow wallpaper,” the boy’s suspicions begin unraveling his entire home life around him. Like a Grimm fairy tale sprung to life, this fabulous bedtime story features ace performances from all three of its leads (especially Caplan, who’s clearly having a blast) and more goth atmosphere than you can shake a pumpkin full of bones at. An unduly overlooked gem! — J.A.
How to watch: Cobweb is now streaming on Hulu.
9. Skinamarink
Based on anecdotal data, Skinamarink works on about one out of every ten people who watch it. Those who do click with it may be few and far between, but this ultra low-budget indie leaves them shuddering in terror, unable to shake off its sense of absolute wrongness for days after. So lucky, we few! I do indeed count myself among those who found Kyle Edward Ball’s experimental 2022 flick unnerving as hell. It got to me and then some.
The story, as much as there is one, involves two little kids named Kevin and Kaylee who seem to have been left home alone one night, as long as you don’t count the sinister presence stalking the hallways, whispering to them from the darkness, and making the doors and windows of their home disappear. Time seems to stretch out infinitely, which can feel either entertainingly terrifying or like 100 minutes of staring at walls with the occasional glimpse of a haunted toy. If you are one of those able to vibe on Skinamarink‘s wavelength, then watch out. Those walls will stare right back. — J.A.
How to watch: Skinamarink is now streaming on Hulu.
10. 28 Weeks Later
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 2007 sequel to Danny Boyle’s revolutionary zombie movie 28 Days Later has never gotten the proper appreciation it deserves. Yes, tonally, it’s a different beast, but I’ve always dug its concept of society crumbling all because of one man’s simpering cowardice. Doesn’t it just feel that way sometimes?
Starring Trainspotting‘s Robert Carlyle as a man guilt-stricken over having run from a horde of infected and having left his wife to die, the film admittedly has a bit of a Jaws IV thing going on where the plague (slash shark) seems to have it out for one particular family, thereby straining all logic. But logic be damned, this one feels more like poetry, like a fairy tale turned to terrible life. — J.A.
How to watch: 28 Weeks Later is now streaming on Hulu.
11. Alien
Witness the birth of three, yes three, horror icons! Ridley Scott’s 1979 haunted-house-in-space masterpiece Alien gives us first the Xenomorph, the murderous outer space creature with acid for blood and a mean streak a million light-years long. And it gives us Ellen Ripley, the ultimate Final Girl brought to life by actress Sigourney Weaver, in what would be the first of four on-screen appearances by this character. Finally (and most importantly) it gives us Jonesy the cat, who’s had enough of this shit for nine lifetimes.
Still the best movie Scott’s ever made, this horror classic about a group of space truckers who encounter one hell of a stowaway has lost none of its terrifying power in the four and a half decades since its making. Awash in killer character actors doing their thing (Yaphet Kotto! Veronica Cartwright! Ian Holm!) before getting torn to shreds one by one, every sequence of this movie, from chest-burster to Mother’s countdown, deserves to be in the Horror Movie Hall of Fame. Just as long as they stay out of Jonesy’s way. — J.A.
How to watch: Alien is now streaming on Hulu.
12. Piggy
Credit: Jorge Fuembuena. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.
Sara (Laura Galán) is an overweight teenager living a deeply unhappy existence in a rural Spanish town; she can’t even go for a swim on the hottest day of the summer without being mercilessly bullied by a gang of mean girls. (The film’s title is their cruel nickname for Sara.) Those mean girls get theirs, though; they’re kidnapped by a mysterious man who leaves behind one witness who could help save them: Sara herself.
And so writer/director Carlota Pereda’s 2022 film, a feature-length reenvisioning of her own short film from a few years earlier, introduces its troubling moral quandary — should Sara show mercy for those who tormented her? Or should she give in to her thirst for revenge and leave them to rot on the vine? Pereda manages to complicate our feelings on the matter with every twist, all while delivering a terrific and tense exercise from the small-town drama surrounding the mystery of the missing girls. Galán gives a wonder of a performance, making Sara difficult to love but tremendously easy to empathize with. — J.A.
How to watch: Piggy is now streaming on Hulu.
13. The Vigil
Credit: Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.
One of the rare horror movies that uses Judaism and/or Jewish its folklore as a linchpin, The Vigil uses the ancient Jewish tradition of sitting with a body before its burial as a setting for terror. Dave Davis plays Yakov Ronen, a former member of an Orthodox community in Brooklyn who’s struggling with an unnamed trauma — and with keeping a job and paying rent.
When Yakov is asked to sit shomer for a recently deceased Holocaust survivor, he takes the job because he needs the money. And that’s when the shadows start moving. Suffused with a proper sense of dread and heart-pounding stretches of silence, writer/director Keith Thomas’ The Vigil revels in showcasing aspects of Jewish mysticism we’ve never seen play out in a horror movie before. It’s out with the dybbuk and in with the demonic mazzik (which translates to “destroyer” in Hebrew), which becomes a stand-in for the ancient scourge of antisemitism itself. — J.A.
How to watch: The Vigil is now streaming on Hulu.
14. The Clovehitch Killer
Inspired by the double life of sadistic serial killer Dennis Rader, who stalked and murdered people in Kansas over the course of two decades, The Clovehitch Killer stars Charlie Plummer as a teenager named Tyler who begins to suspect that his father (Dylan McDermott) might not be the innocent family man he presents himself as. We watch as Tyler begins digging up his father’s secrets — sometimes literally — and we play witness to his slow corruption by proxy.
Twisting your typical coming-of-age movie into something far more disturbing, director Duncan Skiles charts Tyler’s burgeoning adulthood as an extended act of perversion, with the rite of passage into manhood as a dark and dirty spoiling of innocence. And Plummer gives yet another of his wounded, understated performances in a young career already thick with them. — J.A.
How to watch: The Clovehitch Killer is now streaming on Hulu.
14. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
The pressure to continue running the family business is given a whole new spin in director André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe; in it, Brian Cox (pre-Succession success) stars as Tommy, a coroner who works with his son Austin (Emile Hirsch). It’s a weird, isolating life, carving up corpses — one which Austin has watched muck up his parents’ relationship in close detail. And now that he’s got a new girlfriend, Austin is thinking about maybe doing something else with his life besides death.
That’s the emotional playing field laid out when our titular Jane Doe appears. Taking the advice to leave behind a beautiful corpse to its extreme, this dead body that shows up one dark and stormy night is outwardly perfect. Not a sign of trauma in sight. Weird, right? But when Tommy and Austin get out their scalpels and bonesaws and start digging around underneath, well, that’s when the black clouds really roll in. The mystery of the body and its methodical undoing is riveting stuff — if you’ve got the stomach for it, anyway — and Øvredal turns this tight little thriller into a masterclass in subversion. — J.A.
How to watch: The Autopsy of Jane Doe is now streaming on Hulu.
15. Censor
The conservative argument that disturbing content (like horror movies, for instance) will rot a person’s brain and turn them into a psychopath is brought to diabolical life in writer/director Prano Bailey-Bond’s psychedelic 2021 thriller Censor. Set in the mid-’80s, when controversy over “video nasties” has taken England by storm, Censor stars a stellar Niamh Algar (Mary & George) as a prim woman named Enid who works for the British Board of Film Classification. Basically, it’s her job to watch all of the really fucked-up movies and tell the filmmakers what they have to edit out if they want to be certified for public exhibition.
And so day after day Enid sifts through the worst stuff imaginable, going frame by repulsive frame. It doesn’t help that she’s got her own childhood trauma involving a missing sister lurking about, which one film that she watches in particular seems to trigger a few repressed memories of real hard. And before you know it, our precious Enid finds herself falling down the filthy rabbit hole of exploitation cinema, her sanity a mere splatter upon its walls. And thank goodness nobody was around to censor Censor, because this is one fucked-up good time. — J.A.
How to watch: Censor is now streaming on Hulu.
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UPDATE: Apr. 24, 2024, 5:00 a.m. EDT This article has been updated to reflect current streaming options.
