The 11 Best Horror Movies on Netflix

There's a lot to enjoy here, especially if you're into classic gothic horror The Innocents, which The Others' poster knowingly winks at. Nicole Kidman is Grace Stewart, a mother of two on Jersey just after the Channel Island was liberated from Nazi occupation whose spooky house starts trying to boot her out.

Once in a while, a horror film breaks out of the genre pool and becomes a proper cultural phenomenon.

Ari Aster's Midsommar, about a grieving young woman in a failing relationship (an absolutely incredible Florence Pugh) who tries to distract herself from both miseries by following her shithead boyfriend and his mates to a Swedish midsummer festival.

While John Carpenter's opus wasn't the first slasher flick, it was the one which took the terror of a faceless killer out of the city and had it stalk the suburbs of middle America and drew first blood in the Golden Age of slashers.

Anya Taylor-Joy is Thomasin, a young woman whose family is drummed out of their tight-knit, hardscrabble community of super-duper-Christian early European settlers in America.

They reckon she's a witch, and is causing all manner of mayhem. Slowly, her family start to suspect her too. The truth? All we'll say is, never trust black goats.

About a grieving lawyer Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe) schlepps out to the Essex bogs to sort out some paperwork in a creepy old haunted house and gets chased around by a ghoul, was a West End sensation before it got a Hammer Horror-influenced cinematic release, and it's got a pleasingly gothic, foggy feel to it.

Isa Mazzei's work as a camgirl informed this tightly plotted, fresh-feeling story, and having toyed with putting together a documentary she realised that the experiences of having her content pirated and uploaded, and of being dismissed by police, could only be told through a horror.

The story follows a family who experience a paranormal phenomenon after moving into a farmhouse in Rhode Island: their clocks all stop at the same time as the family dog is found dead in the garden. The story is made more sinister still by the fact it was inspired by a real-life couple, a pair of paranormal investigators and authors whose reporting inspired The Amityville Horror film.

This Netflix adaptation of Steven King's 1992 novel Gerald's Game is a psychological thriller which sees a good-natured sex game go very badly wrong.While there are no actual monsters in here, it's still a terrifying scenario – one pushed to extremes with acclaimed horror director Mike Flanagan at the helm.

It stars Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne as a couple whose son inexplicably enters a coma after discovering something in their family attic, which is never a good sign when you're spending time in somewhere this spooky.

Upon awakening, they naturally discover he is possessed with a dark spirit. Cue carnage.

Based on the first of The Southern Reach Trilogy by author Jeff VanderMeer, Alex Garland's follow up to Ex Machina is a sci-fi horror in which biologist and ex-soldier Lena sets out to explore Area X – the sinister space expanding across the American coastline where her husband went missing.

A dive into the mind of a psychopath with jet-black humour carried perfectly by Bale's maniacal grin, American Psycho is a classic which pointed to the vanity of serial killers in a way that still feels beyond its time.