The best horror movies on Amazon Prime

In many respects, The Alchemist Cookbook is a horror film, following the example of so many low-budget backwoods creepfests about ghouls and demons lurking among cracking branches and crinkly dead leaves. (Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead is the obvious reference.) As Sean, Gimme The Loot’s Ty Hickson gives what is very nearly a solo performance, ranting, guzzling soda, wolfing down Doritos, listening to The Smoking Popes and a warbly recording of “Jingle Bells,” sacrificing an unfriendly possum to evil forces. Like the protagonist of Buzzard, Sean is identified with George Miller’s Mad Max; he wears a stiff metal brace over his left leg, à la The Road Warrior. He is director Joel Potrykus’ poignant version of the loner in the wasteland, calling on unseen forces to get back at a world that is also unseen. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Shot on a budget of just $60,000 (coincidentally the same cost as its most obvious influence, The Blair Witch Project), Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made presents itself as a long-lost 1970s arthouse horror flick about two siblings digging a hole to hell. But screenwriter David Amito, who co-directed with Michael Laicini, also augments this supposedly recovered cult curiosity with bookending narration and a “legal notice” that recount the numerous suspicious deaths and injuries they claim have befallen anyone who’s watched the entire film. Antrum also overlays its footage with various spooky occult symbols and audio distortions, which—as the aforementioned narration informs us—may or may not be the work of whoever also happened to splice in quick glimpses of a gruesome snuff film. Keeping up so far? [Andrew Paul]

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The affable anti-hero of the clever horror comedy Behind The Mask seems like a fun guy to grab a beer with, if not for his unfortunate aspiration to become a legendary mass murderer. To him, being a cinema-style serial killer is like being an Olympian, with a grueling training regimen that pays off in an adrenaline-pumping burst of glory. Like a heist movie, Mask spends much of its running time diligently laying the groundwork for the climactic crime, but there’s nothing arbitrary about the smart, funny, light-footed way the filmmakers handle the buildup. Here, getting there is much more than half the fun. [Nathan Rabin]

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An uncompromisingly dark, expertly directed and acted film, Bringing Out The Dead relies less on the forward momentum of its story than its overall tone, an alternate version of New York as hell (or maybe purgatory) from the team behind Taxi Driver. The fact that it deals with a far less sociopathic variety of fragile psyches, and fails to build up to a similarly extreme climax, may make its impact less immediate. But it also makes its story more universal. Nicolas Cage stars as a New York City medic on the verge of burning out, a condition that’s compounded after he saves the life of former junkie Patricia Arquette’s father after not arriving soon enough to ensure that he won’t spend the rest of his life in a coma. Over the course of three nights, Cage is accompanied by three decidedly different fellow medics (John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore). Caught between life and death, Cage has no choice but to work, contemplate whether he’s doing the right thing, and wonder how much more he can take. [Keith Phipps]

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Where Scream put a postmodern twist on slasher films, The Cabin In The Woods takes on the whole genre and twists even harder. Director Drew Goddard, screenwriter of Cloverfield and a veteran of Lost and Alias, co-wrote the film’s script with Joss Whedon, who worked with him on Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel. The script brings to the fore Whedon’s love of subverting clichés while embracing them and teasing out their deeper meaning. [Keith Phipps]

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Early in Ciaran Foy’s thriller Citadel, a therapist tells the intensely agoraphobic Aneurin Barnard that if he carries himself like a victim, he’s more likely to be targeted by criminals. But it’s hard for Barnard to behave any differently. Almost a year ago, he helplessly watched through an elevator window while his pregnant wife was attacked and rendered comatose by hooded thugs; now, Barnard has a newborn baby to look after, in an impoverished neighborhood where there have been multiple kidnappings. He has every reason to be petrified. Citadel starts off in the tradition of such all-alone-and-paranoid suspense classics as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, where every creaking floorboard and shifting reflection touches off a mild panic in the protagonist. Foy plays up the fear by finding the creep-out potential in every square foot of Barnard’s residence. His front door has frosted glass—the better to see amorphous figures lurking on the stoop—and a latch that won’t hold. The power in his neighborhood is faulty, and flickers out at inconvenient times. Meanwhile, his child cries constantly, especially when Barnard’s trying to hide from the murderous gangs that he knows are after him. Finally, Barnard decides to take the offensive, and Citadel becomes less quietly unnerving and more overtly horrific. [Noel Murray]

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How does one classify a film as brilliantly deranged as Climax, Gaspar Noé’s all-out assault on the senses? It’s a profanely funny hangout movie that morphs, with scary speed, into a claustrophobic freak-out, a better Suspiria than the Suspiria remake. It’s an unholy club-banger musical, like a Step Up sequel set in the deepest circles of hell. And in its microcosmic vision of society in collapse, it might be the closest that Noé, French arthouse cinema’s “edgy” showboat extraordinaire, has ever come to actually saying something, to finding method in madness. [A.A. Dowd]

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The minimalist sci-fi mindbender Coherence boasts a scenario as tried and true as the walking dead: Bickering individuals hole up in a house during a crisis, discovering that the threat looming beyond their walls may pale in comparison to the conflict happening within them. There’s a wrinkle in the design this time, however, and it’s that the characters are their own worst enemies not just in a figurative sense, but in a literal one, too. Confused? Writer-director James Ward Byrkit has the answers, and he’s not stingy about providing them. What separates his film from other exercises in Twilight Zone trickery is its refusal to play coy with a high concept. Unlike, say, the feature-length rug-pull The Signal, Coherence doesn’t get off on withholding. It would rather milk its premise for all it’s worth than stockpile secrets. The result is an uncommonly clever genre movie, reliant not on special effects—of which there are basically none—but on heavy doses of paranoia. [A.A. Dowd]

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The rare Stephen King adaptation to capture the author’s signature sense of inexplicable, internal/external terror, The Dead Zone stands as one of David Cronenberg’s most straightforward and eerily effective early works. Trimming King’s source material down to its lean essence—and benefiting from the lack of his imaginative monsters, which never properly translate to the screen—the film concerns Maine schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), who turns down an offer to stay the night with his girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Adams), subsequently gets into a traffic accident, and awakens from a coma five years later with the gift of second sight. Far from a blessing, however, the power proves to be a damnable curse, turning Johnny into a freak show whose time and attention is coveted by many, but only for their own selfish ends. As the man’s vision expands, his life shrinks down to nothing—an isolated existence which Cronenberg depicts through direction that routinely lingers on the empty silences between words and the distant whooshing of wintry New England wind. Cronenberg’s icy directorial detachment lends The Dead Zone a haunting creepiness, greatly amplified by Walken, whose halting verbal rhythms and glassy stare imbue Johnny with an alienated (if not outright alien) quality. [Nick Schager]

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It’s hard to discuss what’s so amazing about Richard Bates Jr.’s offbeat teen horror picture Excision without talking about what happens at the end, which is predictable, but in the best way. The last five minutes or so of Excision is the gory, appalling, Vault Of Horror eight-pager that the entire film has been building to, and pays off all the weirdly beautiful gore effects that Bates has previously strewn throughout the film’s stylish dream sequences. Yet what makes Excision such an original is what precedes that payoff. AnnaLynne McCord (in a gutsy performance, at once monstrous and sympathetic) plays a pimply, gawky high-school senior who has sexy fantasies about mutilation and spends her spare time researching ways she can help her sister Ariel Winter, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. The whole movie is as body-conscious as its heroine, watching with real fascination as McCord pierces her own ears, sniffs her used tampons, and imagines herself crawling across naked men and women so that she can submerge herself in a gore-filled bathtub. Long before Excision turns into the story of an adolescent mad scientist and her sick scalpel skills, it’s already been a celebration of viscera. [Noel Murray]

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Proof that America doesn’t have a monopoly on pre-fab suburban hellpits, thedarkly funny Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps takes place in a town called Bailey Downs, which looks like a new development that just kept on developing. In this squeaky-clean environment, the Fitzgerald sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), are like a two-person trenchcoat mafia, given to wearing layers of dowdy clothes and isolating themselves in glowering secrecy. If they look to other kids like they’re always sharing some nasty, private joke, that’s because they usually are. Their biggest passion is for suicide fantasies. For a class project, they arrange a slideshow of gruesome tableaux—impalings by pitchfork and picket fence, a bathtub drowning, a classic hanging with an eerily stenciled note around the neck. They love to kick around moony scenarios about the awesomeness of their own deaths, and they even have a suicide pact (“Out on the scene and dead by 16, but together forever”), but it’s one thing to toe the line, and another to cross it. [Scott Tobias]

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Execution is everything in a found-footage horror movie, and execution is what makes Grave Encounters a worthy addition to the subgenre. The concept—a documentary crew enters an abandoned mental hospital in hopes of filming paranormal activity, only to get way more than they expected—goes beyond typical into the realm of cliché. The film opens with the same shots of the crew joking around and testing out their equipment you see in all found-footage horror movies, and the institution itself is so outrageously, exaggeratedly creepy—we’re talking bloody bathtubs and walls covered in the apocalyptic scrawlings of mental patients—that it’s hard not to chuckle. But the movie wants us to chuckle. Grave Encounters revolves around a very 2011 bit of meta-humor by making this particular documentary crew work for one of those cheesy pseudo-scientific cable reality shows, like Ghost Hunters or Ghost Adventures or Paranormal State or Psychic Kids: Children Of The Paranormal. [Katie Rife]

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Working with a modest budget, director Clive Barker created a bloody fairy tale complete with a wicked, if not quite evil, stepmother in the form of theater actress Clare Higgins. Playing the wife of ineffectual husband Andrew Robinson (Dirty Harry), Higgins barely hides her contempt as the two move into a family house once inhabited by Robinson’s hard-living, now-missing brother, with whom Higgins once had an affair. Thanks to supernatural forces, Robinson’s brother returns, sort of, as a skinless pile of organs that entreats Higgins to kill for him in an effort to flesh out his half-formed body. Meanwhile, Robinson’s scream-prone daughter (Ashley Laurence) begins to suspect that matters might be amiss, a suspicion confirmed by the arrival of four pale demons fitted out in bondage gear. One of these, a bald demon with nails pounded into his skull, has become the most enduring image of Hellraiser and its sequels, and rightly so. A deeply unsettling, S&M-inspired creature whose blurring of the division between pleasure and pain extends to a blurring of the division between good and evil, it neatly and instantly sums up some of Barker’s themes. Pinhead barely appears in Hellraiser, a film that, with its intense and uncomfortable family drama, might have even worked without him. With him, however, it becomes one of the most innovative and memorable horror films of the ‘80s, a middle ground between mainstream fare and the work of David Cronenberg, in its most powerful moments conjuring up the latter’s ability to make viewers feel uncomfortable in their own bodies. [Keith Phipps]

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As Denis shoots it, High Life is more prison drama than fantastic voyage. Rare are the cutaways to the glorious celestial canvas. Instead, claustrophobia is emphasized, underscoring the irony of being cooped up while the whole universe expands boundlessly around you. Motivationally, the most interesting of these travelers is the mad scientist figure, Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche, who starred in Denis’ last movie, the uncharacteristically gabby Let The Sunshine In). Convicted for murdering her own children, this “sperm shaman” takes to conducting fertility experiments on her fellow inmates, trading drugs for precious fluid—an arrangement that the celibate Monte resists. Does her obsession with creation, caught somewhere between carnal desire and a warped form of atonement, mark her as an avatar for the filmmaker? High Life, perhaps even more so than her disturbing vampire riff Trouble Every Day, pushes Denis’ fascination with flesh into dark places, into the body-horror sphere. [A.A. Dowd]

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Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe have the kind of faces Norma Desmond waxed nostalgic about in Sunset Boulevard. Like all the stars of the silent era, they don’t need dialogue; a whole movie could be hung on the topography of their features, on what Pattinson does with those haunted eyes he used to fix on Kristen Stewart and how Dafoe uses that toothy goblin grin of his for mirth or menace. The Lighthouse, a monochromatic nightmare from the writer and director of The Witch, supplies both actors with plenty of dialogue—pages upon pages of outrageous sea-shanty vernacular. But it also knows when to let those interesting faces, ornamented with spectacular tufts of hair, do the talking for them. Very early on, the filmmaker, Robert Eggers, arranges them side by side in the frame by way of introduction. Staring right into the lens, they look starved and weary and American, as though they’ve walked straight out of an early, faded photograph. Or maybe we’ve walked into one, snapped on a lonely spike of seaside rock, circa a primeval yesterday of the 1890s. [A.A. Dowd]

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Midsommar, a disturbing, ambitious, and unsettlingly colorful horror movie from the writer-director of Hereditary, unfolds within a remote village in northern Sweden, a land where the sun never completely sets. The place doesn’t look especially threatening, in its bucolic summer-camp splendor, and neither do its residents, a community of calm, welcoming, very… Swedish hippies, decked out in white frocks and garlands, smiles plastered perennially across their faces. Audiences will, of course, know to instinctively distrust them; in a horror movie about a cult, the true believers often come on friendly, the better to lure sacrificial lambs to the slaughter. But in Midsommar, that mask of holistic, New-Age-that’s-really-very-Old-Age congeniality never entirely slips, even when the bloodshed starts. And that’s a big part of the movie’s black magic, its spooky-queasy power: It makes madness look like an extension of the commune’s blissed-out worldview—a benevolent malevolence. [A.A. Dowd]

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My Friend Dahmer, a coming-of-age drama tracing the struggles of an adolescent Jeffrey Dahmer to fit in at his high school, is going to make some viewers uncomfortable. Some may even lash out against the film, deeming it insensitive toward the families of the 17 men and boys Dahmer raped, murdered, and dismembered before he was apprehended in 1991. And the film does make a bold request of its audience: to try to understand, and even sympathize with, a teenage boy who, at times, seems like any other tortured adolescent—until you remember that he went on to murder 17 men and boys. If there wasn’t a Jeffrey at your high school, the movie implies, you may have been the Jeffrey. [Katie Rife]

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Ever heard the one about the girl eaten alive by showbiz? That’s the meat, more fetid than fresh, that Nicolas Winding Refn tears his teeth into with The Neon Demon, which gives a deep-red (and Deep Red) paint job to the most moribund of cautionary tales: the rise and fall of a bright-eyed ingenue. Last time the Danish director shot a movie in Los Angeles, he made dream-pop noir from the minimalist crime sagas of Michael Mann and Walter Hill. Returning to the nocturnal cityscape of Drive, Refn perverts All About Eve into a baroque death reverie—bathing the fashion industry in harsh pools of giallo light, slowing time to a hypnotic crawl, chopping away all but the faintest traces of plot. Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it. [A.A. Dowd]

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George Romero’s landmark zombie thriller Night Of The Living Dead remains bracing, but nothing could compare now to the way the film was received back in 1968, at a time when even the gamiest exploitation movies were fundamentally goofy and harmless. The grainy black-and-white cinematography and the “They’re coming to get you, Barbara” joshing of Night Of The Living Dead’s opening scene led late-’60s audiences to prepare themselves for a cheesy throwback to ’50s drive-in trash, but George Romero quickly ramped up the intensity, then continued to tighten the screws, in a movie packed with surprising twists and vivid characterizations. It wasn’t just the gore that shocked viewers—although the movie’s rotting, flesh-eating ghouls definitely delivered on the zombie premise as well as any film had before—but also the way that Romero’s assured direction pulled people into his story of a freaky apocalypse and its ragtag band of survivors, before Romero turned mere suspense into outright bloody terror. [Noel Murray]

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The first two Paranormal Activity movies referenced the past, when two sisters first encountered a hostile specter as children. Delving into a box full of VHS camcorder tapes, the third revisits that childhood in 1988, when “Toby,” an imaginary friend that isn’t so imaginary, begins tormenting the girls, their mother, and their stepfather in a California home. Paranormal Activity 3 also has one new technical wrinkle, and it’s brilliant: In addition to the cameras in the bedroom, Smith mounts a third to the base of a rotating electric fan, so it pans back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen and back again. Playing with action in and out of frame has been the series’ stock in trade—without an effects budget, the audience’s imagination will have to do—and Joost and Schulman exploit the rotating camera for all it’s worth, picking up disturbances that appear and disappear with each scan. The mythology behind the series feels all the more grafted-on this time around—and it presumably extends all the way back to the Lumière brothers—but the Paranormal Activity movies are built on fundamental horror concepts, and those fundamentals still hold. [Scott Tobias]

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The new converts are usually the most intense. Even those raised in an evangelical environment complete with speaking in tongues and creationist puppet shows (à la the subjects of the infamous Jesus Camp) can’t compete with the flinty fervor of an ex-addict who’s found God. Some even replace old vices with religion, in a kind of one-to-one swap of self-destructive obsession. Such is the case with the title character of writer-director Rose Glass’ first feature. Maud (Morfydd Clark), a home nurse with a troubled past, depends on her regular fix of communion with the divine in order to stay on her newfound righteous path. And when she doesn’t get it? Well, you’ll see. Saint Maud’s combination of talky chamber drama, Paul Schrader-esque character study, and visceral body horror is an ideal fit for A24. In fact, the film contains a scene that’s in direct conversation with an oft-quoted sequence from one of the distributor’s early “elevated” horror triumphs, The Witch. And if there’s no taste of butter for Saint Maud, that’s because her supernatural visitor is the Old Testament type of angel, the kind that inspires both transcendent awe and bone-shaking fear. [Katie Rife]

Available May 13

In a stunning sequence of unadulterated camp, Sharknado proves it knows what it’s doing. A successful B movie not only embraces its more ludicrous tendencies, but finds a new, even campier angle to exploit. It acknowledges that it’s ridiculous even while the characters, facing a shark or a sharktopus or a sharknado, don’t. In the case of Sharknado, it sends Ian Ziering into the belly of a Great White with a chainsaw so he can cut himself out of the Great White with a chainsaw, and then drag the presumed dead Nova out with him since it turns out they both got swallowed whole by the same Great White because sometimes life hands you awesome, and it’s called Sharknado. [Caroline Framke]

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Willis stars as a Philadelphia psychologist who, shortly after receiving an award for his work with children, is confronted in his home by a disturbed former patient (Donnie Wahlberg), who feels Willis failed him. A year later, he encounters a child (Haley Joel Osment) who reminds him of Wahlberg, a boy who eventually reveals he has some traffic with the supernatural. Though not without some genuinely frightening moments, The Sixth Sense is less a horror film than a moody piece of magic realism. Shyamalan’s approach, composed largely of Kubrickian extended takes, has a sense of purpose and an artful construction that respects both its story and its audience, allowing both to take their time sorting things out. It’s a style that also brings out the best in its cast; Willis has rarely been better, and both Olivia Williams (as Willis’ wife) and Toni Collette (as Osment’s overworked, deeply concerned mother) turn in convincing performances. Also great—and had he not been, the film would have been ruined—is Osment, whose unrelenting gravity and ability to convey sadness beyond his years threatens to give a good name to child actors. The Sixth Sense teeters on the brink of New Age ludicrousness, but it never goes over: Like Kieslowski and others, Shyamalan knows that what makes for lousy metaphysics can make for powerful metaphor, and in the end he creates a deeply, surprisingly affecting film out of a little bit of smoke and brimstone. [Keith Phipps]

Available May 1

Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece Suspiria (1977) is beautiful to look at, but calling it an art film is a distinctly revisionist impulse. Although the heightened aesthetics and hysterical melodrama of Italian opera have undoubtedly influenced Argento’s style, he also overlays those high-art impulses onto B-movie genre forms. Shot mostly without sync sound and dubbed for both its Italian and American releases, Suspiria wasn’t intended to be a museum piece. In fact, take away the delirious beauty of the color-coded lighting and surging prog-rock score, and you’ve got a simple slasher movie, a film whose “witches at a ballet school” mythology is a mere delivery device for the real attraction: the violent, symbolic violation of young female bodies. Not so with A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s new remake of Suspiria, a film that replaces Argento’s fixation on sexualized violence with arthouse ostentation. In his version, Guadagnino doubles down on the commitment to aesthetics that has given Argento’s original such staying power, but draws from a wholly new set of influences: Soviet-era Eastern Bloc architecture, folk-art collage, ’70s feminist performance art, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. What was bright and colorful is now drizzly and gray, and what was lurid is now self-consciously weighty. [Katie Rife]

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South Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho found a fresh take on the zombie-breakout flick by narrowing and elongating its shape; he constrains most of the action to a single high-speed rail, challenging a band of human survivors to safely pass from car to car. Yeon clearly establishes the rules governing his flesh-eaters early on and works within them well (one clever set piece involving a climb through the luggage racks will leave one’s nails in shreds), though his humans don’t have that same thought-through quality. (Pregnant woman and dutiful husband? Check. Workaholic dad and precocious young daughter? Check. Tragic teenage lovers? Check.) But a zombie movie content not to aspire to any loftier subtextual readings needs little more than a skilled choreographer of action, and there’s plenty of evidence that this film had one in Yeon. Ooh, do “demons in a submarine” next! [Charles Bramesco]

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A performance like Nicolas Cage’s gonzo turn in the brilliant 1989 black comedy Vampire’s Kiss—and this is true of many Nicolas Cage performances—raises the question of what good acting really means. Cage’s unbridled exuberance is reason enough to cherish Vampire’s Kiss, but Minion’s script gives it purpose. As a study of misogyny, the film taps shrewdly into Peter’s fear of women—of being dominated, as he turns submissive and powerless to love, or of being understood by his therapist (Elizabeth Ashley). Cage is all raging id, aggressive and demonstrative and unrelenting in his stampede through the night, but he’s tortured for it all the same. In writer Joseph Minion’s world, the pursuit of love eats people alive—and if there’s anything left of them, this buzzard of a city will pick it clean. [Scott Tobias]

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Pure evil proves an elusive matter for a provincial policeman to investigate in the Korean film The Wailing, a supernatural thriller that veers between caustic comedy and blood-soaked horror over the course of its operatically intense two and a half hours. It’s anyone’s guess why the film’s otherwise peaceable rural-village setting has lately seen a rash of grisly murders. Yet perhaps the most mysterious thing about The Wailing has to do with the spell it casts rather than with the mechanics of its plot. The Wailing might be a somewhat meandering and nonsensical genre recombination, but that spell never breaks over its lengthy running time. [Benjamin Mercer]

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What Lies Beneath, a supernatural thriller that moves with the precision of a well-oiled infernal machine. Essentially a haunted-house spin on Gaslight, the movie plonks Michelle Pfeiffer in the middle of a creaky Vermont house, where she’s mostly left alone by her scientist husband, Harrison Ford. It’s not long before her mind begins to play tricks on her: The couple next door’s spats, as well as the ecstatic cries of their lovemaking, seem to be coming from a neighboring room; doors unlatch and picture frames shatter unbidden. The way that tension pays off is unfair to divulge—though DreamWorks’ trailers were notoriously free with a critical reveal—but suffice it to say that her unease has its roots in both the otherworldly and the entirely tangible. Director Robert Zemeckis is as shameless as Hitchcock in his deployment of cinematic tricks; the way to love the movie is to give into the sensation of being pleasurably led by the nose. But few have led so expertly and with such terrifying command. It’s scary how good he is at it. [Sam Adams]

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