We all like a good scare every now and then, and Netflix has been more than competent in providing them. Decider has compiled a list of the streaming service’s 25 scariest horror movies and although a cursory glance at the rundown will quickly reveal that it’s not entirely populated by horror films, each entry has something terrifying about it to mark it as worthy of inclusion.
One of the highlights on Decider’s list is, undoubtedly, Pan’s Labyrinth, which many would say is Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece. It follows Ofelia, a young girl living in the early days of Franco’s Spain, who attempts to escape from her misery by exploring the subterranean labyrinth beneath the rural home of her new stepfather, where she encounters a faun who believes her to be the reincarnation of a lost princess and sets her three tasks to prove her identity.
It has all the hallmarks of del Toro’s love of dark fantasy, including a tense sequence where Ofelia must infiltrate the chambers of the Pale Man, a grotesque and child-eating monstrosity with eyeballs in its hands. Despite the unnerving nature of the movie’s fantastical elements, it’s the parts that take place in the ‘real’ world, featuring the actions taken by her sadistic stepfather to battle the Maquis rebels fighting the new regime in the countryside above, that are the most horrifying.
Session 9, meanwhile, is another great title on this list that many in the horror community are rediscovering their forgotten love for. It sees a contractor desperate for employment hired to remove the asbestos from an abandoned psychiatric hospital. Upon beginning the job, however, he and his crew start experiencing echoes of the torment endured when the site was operational.
Although initially seeming like little more than a standard haunted house film, rather than the jump scares that characterize typical ghost stories, the fear comes from the identifiably human suffering revealed as the story progresses, the horror being psychological rather than physical, but infinitely more unsettling.
Those two are just a couple of the highlights, but the rest of them are also quality offerings of varying notoriety worth checking out, and here’s how the list reads in full:
- Zodiac
- Bird Box
- The Devil’s Advocate
- Apostle
- Sinister
- Hush
- Session 9
- Train to Busan
- Pan’s Labyrinth
- The Blackcoat’s Daughter
- Green Room
- Insidious
- Paranormal Activity
- The Invitation
- It Comes at Night
- The Neverending Story
- Child’s Play
- Jurassic Park
- The Evil Dead
- Poltergeist
- Taxi Driver
- Candyman
- The Witch
- The Silence of the Lambs
- The Wicker Man
Tell us, though, what horror movies have you been digging on Netflix lately? As always, sound off down below and let us know.
