Best Movies On Netflix For A Horror Night

Zach Snyder’s 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a great horror movie that you can stream on Netflix right now. In many ways, this remake is faithful to the original 1978 zombie film, but takes a number of creative liberties to make it a modern classic in its own right. Not only does Snyder’s film have the ever-so terrifying “fast zombies” that we’ve been familiar with in recent decades, but Dawn of the Dead has legs because of an overall update to makeup, special effects, and a more complex storyline.

Dawn of the Dead also gives you the ultimate strategy to survive a zombie attack: find a mall. Think about it, and there’s food, clothes, sporting goods stores, and many other resources at your disposal that are useful to fighting off hordes of zombies if you could only find parking! Considering that most zombies don’t know how to drive, this horror movie is highly entertaining and could serve as an informal survival guide should a zombie apocalypse ever occur in real life.

While we’re on the subject of zombies, we might as well mention World War Z on this Netflix horror movie list. While Dawn of the Dead is limited in its scope in the sense that most of the plot takes place in one singular setting, World War Z travels across the world in a more official capacity. Brat Pitt portrays former United Nations investigator Gerry Lane, who travels the world looking for the source of the zombie outbreak in hopes of finding a cure.

In other words, Dawn of the Dead shows us how citizens handle a zombie outbreak locally, but World War Z has more global implications as the film shows us how world powers use every resource available to restore order across the globe.

We said we’d mention a classic, and it doesn’t get more classic than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Psycho is considered by many to be the ultimate horror movie, and you only have until June 30 to stream it on Netflix. Just like Jaws made us all afraid to go for a swim at the beach, Psycho definitely had a hand in encouraging even the bravest of individuals to have second thoughts about taking a shower when they’re home alone or staying at an unfamiliar hotel while traveling.

Aside from the iconic shower scene that we’re all familiar with by now, Psycho‘s conclusion is still as shocking as it was when it premiered in 1960. Psycho proves that not all horror movies need to have a huge budget or even a ton of special effects to evoke a sense of terror from their audience. Sometimes you need a compelling story full of suspense and a great film score to move things along.

1999 brought us The Blair Witch Project, which was a horror movie that infamously used the “found footage” approach to scare the daylights out of us, changing the genre forever. Unfortunately, The Blair Witch Project isn’t currently streaming on Netflix, but Paranormal Activity is! Using the same found footage approach as The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity brings us to a suburban household suspected of being haunted by demons.

Through a series of time-lapsed video entries, Paranormal Activity reveals to us that something sinister is happening at night in the San Diego home and that the entire family is in danger. What makes this horror movie so jarring is the juxtaposition of perceived reality versus the unexplainable incidents that are transpiring when the video footage is examined.

Ouija is another horror movie that deals with the supernatural and the unknown rather than an antagonist that we can see in the mortal realm. But don’t let the Netflix description fool you; even though this film boasts a PG-13 rating, some of the imagery is truly disturbing. Though many of us have learned bout Ouija boards after being traumatized by The Exorcist, Ouija takes the horrors of the unknown to a whole other level.

This horror movie tells the story of five friends who meet at their deceased friend Debbie’s house and use an Ouija board to try to communicate with her from beyond the grave. They get more than they bargained for when they find out that Debbie played with the board by herself shortly before she became possessed and hung herself. As they investigate what happened to the residents before Debbie’s family moved into the house, they find out that the Ouija board played a role in a missing person’s case from years ago and that finding the missing body may be the key to lifting the curse.

Ouija showed us that messing with a supernatural board game is probably not a great idea, but It Follows is a horror movie that tells a story that’s far more disturbing. They say that when you have unprotected sex, it means that you’ve indirectly also had sex with everybody your partner has had a sexual encounter with. It Follows tells us exactly this story, suggesting that an unknown entity is out to kill whoever is “infected” by the curse, and the only way to escape a gruesome fate is to pass the infection onto somebody else through sexual intercourse.

But if the most recently infected person succumbs to the entity, the previous person to have been infected is the next to die. It Follows is a unique horror movie in the sense that you never know who is going to be the next victim, or who the infection will be passed onto next. If this sounds like a horror movie that you could get behind, we suggest watching it soon, because it will no longer be streaming on Netflix after July 12.