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What Should You Watch First?
There’s a pretty good mix here.
If you’re looking for something big and brutal, start with 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple. For supernatural horror, The Black Phone, His House, Host, and Verónica are easy recommendations.
Want something uncomfortable? Go with Creep or Green Room.
And if you just want to have some fun killing zombies for a couple of hours, Zombieland still does the job.
All 18 films are currently listed as streaming on Netflix in the U.S. as of August 2026. As always with streaming services, availability can change.
1. 28 Years Later (2025)
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland returned to the infected world they created with 28 Days Later, this time jumping nearly three decades into the future.
The film follows young Spike, who lives with his parents in an isolated community that has managed to survive while the Rage Virus continues to devastate Britain. When he ventures beyond the relative safety of the island, he discovers just how much the infected, and the survivors, have changed.
Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, Alfie Williams, and Jack O’Connell star.
2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
You don’t have to wait to continue Spike’s story.
Directed by Nia DaCosta, The Bone Temple expands the increasingly strange world of 28 Years Later. Spike encounters a group led by the terrifying Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, while Dr. Kelson’s relationship with the infected takes an unexpected turn.
Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, and Chi Lewis-Parry star.
3. The Black Phone (2021)
Before Black Phone 2, there was the Grabber.
Scott Derrickson’s supernatural horror hit stars Mason Thames as Finney, a 13-year-old boy abducted and imprisoned in a basement by a masked killer played by Ethan Hawke.
His only apparent lifeline is a disconnected black telephone hanging on the wall. Then it starts ringing.
The voices on the other end belong to the Grabber’s previous victims, and they may know how Finney can escape.
4. Creep (2014)
Sometimes all you need to make a great horror movie is a camera, two actors, and one deeply unsettling man.
Patrick Brice plays Aaron, a videographer who answers an online advertisement from Josef, played by Mark Duplass. Josef claims he’s dying and wants Aaron to film a video diary for his unborn child.
It sounds innocent enough.
It isn’t.
At just over 75 minutes, Creep is a quick, bizarre and increasingly uncomfortable descent into found-footage madness.
5. El Conde (2023)
What if Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet didn’t die, but instead spent centuries secretly living as a vampire?
That’s the premise behind Pablo Larraín’s visually striking black-and-white horror satire El Conde.
Dark, strange and deeply political, this isn’t your traditional vampire movie. It’s an arthouse horror film that literally transforms one of history’s monsters into a bloodsucker.
6. Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021)
Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy kicked off with a bloody love letter to ’90s slashers.
A group of teenagers in Shadyside find themselves targeted by seemingly unstoppable killers connected to a centuries-old curse haunting their town.
Based on R.L. Stine’s books, 1994 mixes Scream-style slasher energy with supernatural horror while setting up a mystery that continues through Fear Street Part Two: 1978 and Fear Street Part Three: 1666.
If you haven’t watched the trilogy yet, this is where to start.
7. Frankenstein (2025)
Guillermo del Toro finally got his monster.
Oscar Isaac stars as Victor Frankenstein, with Jacob Elordi portraying the Creature in del Toro’s lavish adaptation of Mary Shelley’s legendary novel.
Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz round out the cast.
It’s gothic, tragic and visually unmistakably del Toro, approaching Frankenstein’s monster as something far more complicated than the creature audiences have seen lumbering across movie screens for generations.
8. Gerald’s Game (2017)
Long before The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan tackled one of Stephen King’s seemingly unfilmable novels.
Carla Gugino stars as Jessie, whose attempt to spice up her marriage goes catastrophically wrong when her husband suddenly dies while she is handcuffed to a bed in an isolated house.
Unable to escape and with no one coming to help, Jessie begins confronting memories and hallucinations while desperately trying to survive.
And yes, there’s a particular scene involving a hand that longtime horror fans still haven’t forgotten.
9. Green Room (2015)
Few movies make being trapped in a room feel this dangerous.
A struggling punk band witnesses something they weren’t supposed to see after performing at a remote neo-Nazi club. Suddenly, the band members find themselves barricaded backstage while the people outside decide how to eliminate the witnesses.
Anton Yelchin leads the cast alongside Imogen Poots and a terrifyingly restrained Patrick Stewart.
Green Room isn’t supernatural. It doesn’t need to be.
10. His House (2020)
One of Netflix’s strongest original horror movies is also one of its most emotionally devastating.
A refugee couple escapes war-torn South Sudan and attempts to begin a new life in England. They’re assigned a home, but something inside the house doesn’t appear interested in letting them forget the past.
His House uses supernatural horror to explore grief, displacement, trauma and guilt while still delivering some genuinely frightening moments.
11. Host (2020)
The pandemic produced a lot of Zoom calls.
Thankfully, very few involved demons.
Rob Savage’s Host follows a group of friends conducting an online séance during lockdown. What begins as something to break up the monotony quickly becomes terrifying when they realize they may have invited something into their homes.
Running under an hour, Host wastes almost no time.
Turn the lights off and watch this one on a laptop for the full effect.
12. Influencer (2022)
Social media horror has become its own little subgenre, and Influencer is one of the better examples.
The film follows Madison, a social media influencer traveling alone in Thailand who meets a mysterious woman named CW.
What begins as an unexpected friendship takes a much darker turn.
Rather than relying entirely on supernatural scares, Influencer builds its horror around identity, isolation and just how easily someone’s carefully constructed online existence can be stolen.
13. Nope (2022)
Jordan Peele looked toward the sky for his third horror film.
Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood, who operate their family’s struggling Hollywood horse ranch. When something strange begins appearing above their property, they decide capturing proof of it could change their lives.
What they discover is much stranger than a traditional flying saucer.
Part creature feature, part science-fiction spectacle and part commentary on our obsession with turning everything into entertainment, Nope gets even better on repeat viewings.
14. A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
The Abbott family’s nightmare continues.
Following the events of A Quiet Place, Evelyn and her children are forced to leave their home and discover that the creatures hunting humanity aren’t necessarily the only threat waiting outside.
Emily Blunt returns alongside Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe, with Cillian Murphy joining the franchise as Emmett.
John Krasinski once again directs.
15. Under the Shadow (2016)
Set in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, Under the Shadow combines supernatural horror with the very real terror of living in a city under attack.
A mother and daughter remain inside their apartment as missiles fall around them, but another threat may have entered their home.
The result is a slow-burning supernatural story where it’s increasingly difficult to determine which danger is worse.
16. Verónica (2017)
Spanish supernatural horror Verónica follows a teenage girl who attempts to contact the dead using a Ouija board during a solar eclipse.
You can probably guess that things don’t go according to plan.
After the séance, Verónica begins experiencing increasingly disturbing supernatural events while trying to protect her younger siblings.
Director Paco Plaza, one of the filmmakers behind [REC], knows exactly how to build dread.
17. Your Monster (2024)
Horror, romance and comedy aren’t always the easiest genres to combine, but Your Monster embraces all three.
Melissa Barrera stars as Laura, an actress dealing with a cancer diagnosis and painful breakup who discovers a monster living in her childhood home.
Instead of immediately trying to kill each other, Laura and the creature begin developing an unusual relationship.
Think Beauty and the Beast by way of a dark romantic comedy with considerably more rage.
18. Zombieland (2009)
We’ll finish with something a little lighter.
Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin star as four survivors attempting to navigate a zombie-infested America.
The movie’s combination of gore, comedy and surprisingly likable characters turned Zombieland into a modern zombie favorite.
It also features one of the greatest celebrity cameos in horror-comedy history.
If you’ve somehow avoided Zombieland for the last 17 years, now’s your chance.
