The best horror movies to stream on Hulu
Seeking thrills and chills this Halloween? Hellraiser, Alien, Titane, and other one-word titled horror hits await on Hulu
Film Features Hulu
Thrills and chills await movie buffs on Hulu, the streaming service that’s making its case to be synonymous with the horror genre. That’s especially this Huluween month, which has brought sadomasochists everywhere with Hellraiser 2022, David Bruckner’s reimagining of Clive Barker’s twisted horror classic. The platform is a reliable resource for viewers seeking pulse-pounding, thought-provoking horror, whether it’s mainstream fare like Alien or indie gems like Possessor. There’s a particular focus on non-English-language horror classics; recent French hit Titane is available, as are several titles from Korean master Bong Joon-ho (ever heard of an Oscar best picture winner called Parasite?). The A.V. Club is here to point you in the right direction, to minimize the time spent meandering through listings, and get you straight to the edge of your seat with Hulu’s best and most horrific offerings.
This list was most recently updated on January 31, 2024.
66 Comments
The version of Inside on Hulu is not the New French Extremity classic. It’s actually the 2018 American remake. 🙁
Inside is one of the pinnacles of the French New Wave. If you’re familiar with other films in that category you know what you’re in for.
Unfortunately, they confused the original Inside with the American remake which is what is actually streaming on Hulu right now.
Let the Right One In was very well done, the kind of movie that afterward you aren’t even sure what you should be most disturbed by about it
For me, the bullies. They could help what being what they are.
Dahmer’s an interesting piece of shit. There’s aspects of his life that he absolutely deserves sympathy over, especially because he did show signs that he wanted to stop, but he continued regardless, so fuck him. What’s most interesting is looking through how he was enabled by society- like Konerak Sinthasomphone, a 14-year-old victim that escaped & was RETURNED TO DAHMER BY THE POLICE, in a “I won’t question this because I’m a bigot” kind of way.
Major spoilers for The Lodge, which is pretty decent and went right under the radar with the pandemic. It has one of the most obvious twists of any film I’ve ever seen, but there’s about 5 minutes where they make you think that the obvious twist was a misdirection and that the film was actually going to go in a much more insane direction. It’s almost worth watching just to think about how much better that twist would have been. *Extra spoiler-y spoilers*I mean, it was obvious that the kids were just fucking with her and it was obvious that that was going to push her over the edge. But, man, right up until the son pulled himself off of that fake noose, I thought the movie was really going to have had them all end up in purgatory after dying, and it would have been so much better if it actually went that way. There are endless shitty possession films, but they inadvertently found an entirely new direction for religious horror, then fucked it up by substituting an ingeniously bleak ending for an obvious and boring one.
I would have much preferred the purgatory direction being the actual story. I can suspend a lot of disbelief for horror, but that film asking me to buy that two children meticulously planned and executed every single phenomenon throughout the entire movie is one of the dumbest twists I’ve ever seen. There are so many logic holes and problems with that twist, the only abiding impression the film left me with is that it assumed it’s audience was stupid as hell.
Being able to drag her out of the house and hundreds of yards into the center of a frozen lake without her waking up is, uh, not believable.
Yeah by the end I was like, yep she’s justified. Those little sociopaths need to go.
Some of it really prompts disbelief. How did they drag her out of her house and several miles deep onto the frozen lake?
The Lodge is one of the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen, and I like my movies bleak. You walk out of that movie looking for a hug. Stuck with me though. Definitely worth the watch.
shhhh write this ending into your own project.
Can someone just give me the list I’m not fucking around with a slideshow in 2020.
Resize your browser window and you can scroll through all of them.
Just look in the Hulu horror section, the 2020 way…LOL!
The Alchemist’s CookbookBladeBlade IIBody At Brighton RockThe Cabin In The WoodsThe Clovehitch KillerCoherenceHellraiserHigh-RiseThe HostHostel: Part IIInsideLet The Right One InThe LodgeLords Of ChaosMotherMy Friend DahmerThe NightingaleParanormal Activity 3ParasiteA Quiet PlaceShirleySouthboundThe Standoff At Sparrow CreekThe Tall ManTragedy Girls
If you go to “Start Slideshow” there’s a button to view the list. I strongly encourage everyone to click that button so whoever watches the metrics on these things sees everyone just clicking the list button and skipping everything else!
Slideshow format is fine for me. What exactly is the big deal? Is it an issue for phone viewing?
Why is this a slideshow? Please stop doing this. I would have read this article otherwise.
At least it’s not a video. They’ve generally stopped pulling that bullshit. (Though, to be fair, I read this on a laptop. It’d be infuriating on a phone).
My Friend Dahmer is a pretty interesting study on the coming of age of someone who grows to be inexplicably evil. You almost feel for him up to a point; however, the obsession with autopsing dead animals is a bit of a turning point. The best descriptor I can leave about this movie is how depressing it will make you feel. The longer it drags on, the more it makes you realize how much of a drag it is. The story is interesting and the feeling your left with, is also equally as interesting.
What if this seemingly upstanding, conservative Christian community leader is actually a dangerous criminal? omg can u imagine what that would be like???And what is it about who he is and where he lives that might let him get away with something truly heinous?The first question answers the second, here.
The Host is not a horror movie and I will die on this hill.
They’ve got Parasite on there now, which is more of a heist than a horror film.
Yeah, that one makes little sense. They’re both brilliant films, in the case of Parasite even magnificent, but they’re not horror films.
This is not the first time I’ve seen Parasite listed as a horror film and while I loved it I cannot imagine categorizing it as such with a serious face. Yet here we are.
I feel like Parasite got promoted as a horror when it originally came out and I never really understood the reasoning.
The list is just titled scary, right? I felt my butthole pucker more during the scene where they’re under the table than any horror movie I’ve ever seen.
Parasite has one of my favorite jump scares of all time, but yeah, it’s not a horror movie
I forgot Parasite existed… There was like a month or two when you couldn’t stop hearing about it. Way too much hype for that thing. Dude’s movies are okay at best.
It’s a monster movie, which I would say is in-theme enough for spooky season. (Like Prey is similarly more action-scifi but it does have a cool monster in it so, hey, why not.)EDIT: Oh wait I’m responding to comments from last year, because they just repost these with some changes. This site sucks.
The Vigil.Sea Fever.I Saw The Devil.Run.The Wretched.Amulet.Sputnik.The Other Lamb.Ghost Stories.Spontaneous.
The Nightingale is a fantastic film, but dear God is it hard to watch.
12 Hour Shift is not a horror film.
You have an argument to back that up or just horror fan gatekeeping?
Let The Right One In works on two levels (well, some could argue four) – it’s a clever little horror film, definitely – but it also plays on in the “Scandi-Noir” trope/genre. It’s one of those films that you knew, you just knew that some dumbass American studio executive sat back in his chair, belched and said “fuck that, we need a film audiences don’t have to worry about reading” (even though it was pretty well-received by non-Swedish audiences worldwide) and lo, we were “blessed” by the mediocre American remake. Fans of that always go on about the swimming pool scene, yeah, well, the Swedish original is oddly more terrifying in how clinical everything appears. It’s a remarkably beautiful-looking film. And creepy, creepy, creepy as fuck.
I’m perfectly okay with subtitles and think it’s a shame that *some* Americans resist “foreign” films. But can we not do the stupid Ugly American assumption about subtitles? A LOT of people dislike them for perfectly legitimate reasons having nothing to do with ignorance. Difficulty with eyesight. Bad subbing (white text on white screens, for example). Text moving too fast off screen. Etc. As I moved from my 30s into my 40s I noticed an increasing difficulty with subtitles.
Body At Brighton Rock is decent and worth checking out.For those that like horror anthologies, Southbound is a hidden gem. Love it.Shadow in the Cloud started off promising, but quickly got disappointing. Lots of annoying missteps in the execution.The Vigil has some genuinely spooky moments. High recommend.
Southbound made it into our standard rotation, some really neat design/FX (the floating specters are so well done), unifying concepts across the individual stories and the main arc are nicely done, pretty solid acting, like most anthologies some stories are better than others, but overall it’s a great movie.The Vigil is really spooky, it’s quiet, low key, very atmospheric, I really like movies that have a strong cultural infusion, gives it a lot of character. Really strong performances too.
Thank you for the list. For you old-timers/people tired of having to sign up for yet another streaming service, all of the ones that I looked up were available from Netflix/DVD.
All good movies, but Hulu is never gonna be the premier streaming site for horror. That’s Shudder.
TIL Blade is ‘scary’.
That new Hellraiser sucked. Very dull, full of bad writing, contributed nothing at all to the franchise.
Also the main girl is in fucking brownface
Oh seriously? I was planning to watch this tonight but I don’t want to watch it if it has brownface. I just googled “Hellraiser brownface” and absolutely nothing came up. I haven’t seen the film so please go on. This is the first I’ve heard of this.
She’s a blonde Jewish girl from L.A. and they gave her (ghastly) lip injections, a curly black wig, and a heavy spray tan
And yet her character’s name is Riley McKendry. Yeah, sounds really “brownface” to me. Not sure why a blonde Jewish girl can’t be a brunette. And they “gave her” lip injections? WTF are you even talking about?
Obviously I’m just cynical to the point of insanity. I blame every single thing in the world ever.Plus I probably wouldn’t have noticed any of it if the movie had been good (except for her lips, which look literally painful in the movie)
(looks around at the world)Ehhh… Fair.
I totally agree they seemed desperate to not have her a white character and the upper lip injection was so fresh and swollen it was painful to look at.
like do you mean in the Justin Trudeau sense or is that a comment on Pinhead’s complexion…?
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding. If you’re going to be a faux-outrage moron, at least be outraged about something real.
We kind of liked it, did drag a bit (the runtime just over 2 hours), some of the new concepts were neat, the production design was excellent, new Cenobite designs nicely done (hahaha, spell check correctly corrected Cenobite). I really dug on how hell opened up each time, some were really clever (one towards the end was very cool – avoiding spoilers). We’re in Halloween mode, so we’re doing a lot of horror movies, maybe we’re a little more forgiving :)I see some reviews of it being the best since the original, I’d still put the original 1 and 2 above this, though #2 started getting a little silly/one-liner-y (as was the trend at the time).At one point, one of us said “Riley looks like Eddie Munson …” and at first, it seemed like a passing resemblance, by the end she was Eddie, and I expected her to bust out a guitar and start shredding some Metallica. 😀
I wanted to like this movie and really tried, but yeah, it was seriously boring. The only thing I did like about it were the Cenobites, as I appreciate their designs. The rest? Meh. Not on Hulu, but I also tried X this weekend. It was fucked up in different ways and not boring like Hellraiser, but would not recommend.
Really? Granted, the bar is pretty damn low, but for me it’s a strong contender for second best of the franchise after Hellbound. I guess my favorite aspect of the series is the fairly interesting mythology, and it’s central to Hellraiser 2022 as I was pleased to discover. Of course it’s not really scary, and I suppose it’s moderately disappointing as far as delivering over-the-top gore and mayhem, but it certainly doesn’t look or feel cheap. It could easily have been way worse.
Eh. Wasn’t that much worse than mid-to-late entries in the original series, which had one interesting sequel then started outright sucking as of III.
Compared to the last two Hellraisers it was an absolute masterpiece.
Did the AV Club just forget that Werewolf By Night came out last night? I’ve seen articles posted within the passed two hours but nothing yet. I kinda forgot it was happening it just seems odd that they’d forget about an MCU premiere.
The article is specifically about Hulu.
I’m guessing the poster understands this but is asking a general coverage question.
RHPS sure is scurrrry!!
I know Peacock gets a lot of shit for being an inferior streaming service but they have quite the surplus of classic horror movies on there right now. Just Friday, I sat myself down for a John Carpenter triple feature of The Thing, Prince of Darkness and They Live. (I know They Live isn’t a horror movie but the point still stands.)
I was so disappointed with the so called Hellraiser reboot as it was just more of the same from the last few lame sequels only with better production values but no real thought put into the writing. The original was great because it was disturbing on a number of levels and none of that was on display here. Making Pinhead a woman now does not count as creativity but just another example of women being in charge of casting at Hulu. A lame waste of time.
That’s especially this Huluween month, which has brought sadomasochists everywhere with Hellraiser 2022, David Bruckner’s reimagining of Clive Barker’s twisted horror classic.Did you accidentally omit ‘true’ from “That’s especially this Huluween month”, ‘out’ from “which has brought sadomasochists everywhere”, and parentheses from the year Hellraiser was released?
Bruckner and his screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski don’t seem altogether interested in the kind of psychosexual introspection that drove Barker’s filmSo nothing that made the original interesting? Hard pass.