The 20 Best Horror Movies of the 2010s and Where You Can Stream Them

Director: Wes Craven
Starring: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, Hayden Panettiere, Marley Shelton, Nico Tortorella
Best Place to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

It didn’t exactly re-ignite the Scream franchise for a new generation (instead of a Scream 5, we got an MTV television series, which I suppose was fine), though at least part of the reason for that should be chalked up to the 2015 death of Wes Craven. But credit must be paid to Scream 4 for threading the needle perfectly between revisiting the Screams of old and re-booting the series with younger characters. And after the creative slump that was Scream 3, Scream 4 delivered with a particularly bloody and creative finale.

Where to stream Scream 4

Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam
Best Place to Watch: HBO Go

If the bleeding clay walls of Crimson Peak don’t get you, the ghostly apparitions and twisted familial bonds will. At times, Guillermo del Toro’s epic work of gothic horror feels like a big excuse for a lot of intricate and creative art direction. If that’s the case, though, it’s hard to complain too loudly when what’s onscreen looks as singular and deliciously sinister as it does here.

Where to stream Crimson Peak

Director: James Wan
Starring: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey, Lin Shaye
Best Place to Watch: HBO Go

For a film that inspired three sequels (well, a sequel and two prequels, one of which doesn’t come out until next year), there isn’t a ton to say about the actual plot or storylines of Insidious. It’s … ghosts. Your standard Poltergeist descendant. Insidious stuck with the horror-loving public not for its story but for its imagery and execution. Simply put, that red-faced demon scared the crap out of us.

Where to stream Insidious

Director: James Wan
Starring: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Lili Taylor, Ron Livingston
Best Place to Watch: HBO Go

Married paranormal investigators go to investigate the strange goings on at a creaky Rhode Island home, and all manner of creepy things are encountered. That this story was supposedly based on real-life demonologists gives the whole thing an Amityville Horror-esque appeal, but it’s also just simply one of the best-acted horror films of the decade, with Wilson, Farmiga, and Taylor all working at the top of their game.

Where to stream The Conjuring

Director: Steven Quale
Starring: Nicholas D’Agosto, Miles Fisher, Emma Bell, Tony Todd
Best Place to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

The only film from the Final Destination franchise to be eligible for this list, it’s not the best of the franchise, but it featured some of the series’ more memorable sequences, including a gymnastics routine that is a master class in playing with the audience’s paranoia. By this point, the FD formula was fully known, and the films’ audiences were having fun with their own expectations. One of the most purely crowd-pleasing horror films on the list.

Where to stream Final Destination 5

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Starring: Blake Lively
Best Place to Watch: Prime Video (Starz subscription)

Ever since Jaws, sharks have held an elevated position in the pantheon on horror movie villains. It’s not easy to do anything new or interesting with horror sharks (Deep Blue Sea made them smart; Open Water made them real), but in The Shallows, the defining characteristic of the beast that is terrorizing Blake Lively on a secluded beach in Mexico is that he’s a huge asshole. He doesn’t need to eat Lively for food. He’s got plenty of food. He just wants to kill her. And she’s gotta stop him. Collet-Serra (whose Orphan would’ve made this list if it were made a year later) knows how to do single-minded horror, and he delivers here.

Where to stream The Shallows

Director: Jee-woon Kim
Starring: Byung-hun Lee, Min-sik Choi
Best Place to Watch: Shudder, Prime Video

This Korean release tells a familiar tale of a federal agent whose wife was brutally murdered by a serial killer, so he goes out on a quest for revenge. But this killer he seeks is way more than he bargained for, and their cat-and-mouse game gets bloody and terrifying. This film has one of the most sudden and brutal murder scenes I’ve ever seen in a film, one that haunts and terrifies to this day.

Where to stream I Saw the Devil

Director: Ben Wheatley
Starring: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Michael Smiley
Best Place to Watch: Sundance Now, Shudder, Prime Video

Wheatley’s hyper-stylized films often threaten to drown in their own excess. What makes Kill List such an effective entry on this list is that it keeps that stylization under wraps until the audience is least expecting it. Evoking horror films of the ’70s, Kill List starts as one thing (hitmen pulling off one last dangerous job) and ends up as quite another. The film that Kill List turns into is such a hard left turn into horror that it knocks you off balance, which is when it really gets to you.

Where to stream Kill List

Director: Adam Wingard
Starring: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe
Best Place to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

Whether The Guest is strictly a horror movie or not is a bit up to interpretation. But the tension at play when the handsome drifter played by Dan Stevens wanders into the life of a discontented family plays out along the same rules as horror movies. Don’t be fooled by Stevens’ wildly sexy appearance. This one devolves into a horror climax as surely as any other film on this list.

Where to stream The Guest

Director: Breck Eisner
Starring: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson
Best Place to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

A remake of the 1973 George Romero film about a town that is infected by a biological toxin in its water supply, turning the residents one by one into insane homicidal maniacs. The government paranoia at play in the post-Watergate ’70s had far from dissipated for the post-Bush, post-financial crisis 2010s, so the idea of a government bio-weapon getting set loose in the States is an idea with some legs; a movie like The Crazies is going to work in any era. Featuring an aces lead turn by Timothy Olyphant and a story that never lets the audience forget that these are friends and neighbors fighting each other off make for a surprisingly excellent film.

Where to stream The Crazies

Director: Adam Wingard
Starring: Sharni Vinson, Joe Swanberg, Amy Siemetz, AJ Bowen, Ti West
Best Place to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

Wingard’s second film on the list, You’re Next is top-notch home-invasion horror mixed with an undercurrent of dark familial humor that doesn’t quite leaven the proceedings but rather brings out the characters so you have a sense of who they are before they’re taken out in brutal fashion. Also kudos to the film for coming so strong with a Final Girl as capable and excellent as Sharni Vinson.

Where to stream You're Next

Director: Julia Ducournau
Starring: Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Nait Oufella
Best Place to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

We just recently raved about Raw‘s ability to tell a young girl’s coming-of-age story through the lens of an unsettling and increasingly horrifying cannibalism tale. Featuring some great performances and a veterinary-school setting that feels unbearably cold and isolating, Raw is some of the most unsettling horror being made today.

Where to stream Raw

Director: Rodney Ascher
Best Places to Watch: Netflix, Prime Video

This documentary about sleep paralysis is hands-down one of the scariest things you’ll ever see. Comprised of a series of first-person accounts of people who suffer from the disorder, you get story after story of people who wake up but can neither move nor speak. And if that isn’t terrifying enough, wait til they get to the part about the red-eyed demons who sit on their chest. Nice try ever sleeping again!

Where to stream The Nightmare

Director: Robert Eggers
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Katie Dickey, Ralph Ineson
Best Place to Watch: Prime Video

Old-timey religious Puritanism is always going to lead to bad things, but what makes The Witch so audacious is that it follows that old Puritan paranoia to its obvious conclusion. Think there are godless demons out there in the forest? There are. Think beautiful, uninhibited women are here to corrupt and ruin your children? They are. Think your coming-of-age daughter isn’t to be trusted and is possibly a witch? …Well, she’s not. Yet.

Where to stream The Witch

Director: Karyn Kusama
Starring: Logan Marshall-Green, Tammy Blanchard, Emayatzy Corinealdi, Michiel Huisman, John Carroll Lynch
Best Place to Watch: Netflix

An unbearably tense portrait of a group of friends and estranged lovers who reconvene after time apart only to realize that some of them have changed for the worse. Paranoid cult thrillers have become popular lately (The Sacrament is but one example), but setting The Invitation at a Hollywood Hills dinner party, where any number of social anxieties are given a dark, sinister shading is a masterstroke. Kusama pulls the wires tight until they snap, and she leaves us with one of the most unsettling endings ever.

Where to stream The Invitation

Director: Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz
Starring: Lukas Schwarz, Elias Schwarz, Susanne Wuest
Best Places to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

Creepy Austrian children! Scary bandaged woman who might be their mother or might be an insane woman they’ve never met before who’s only pretending to be their mother. You won’t learn the truth until the very end, and by the time you do, it will be way too late.

Where to stream Goodnight Mommy

Director: Jennifer Kent
Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman
Best Places to Watch: Netflix, Hulu

Manifestation of post-partum anxiety and a mother’s strange ambivalent feelings towards her son? Or secret gay icon? YOU DECIDE. …It’s the former, come on. But the fact that The Babadook is a cinematic monster who’s been able to cross over into ludicrous pop-culture memes is only a testament to how bold Jennifer Kent’s vision really was. This is a monster who’s going to be lurking in our pop-cultural basements for a long time.

Where to stream The Babadook

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassel
Best Places to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

High-class, high-production-value horror? Sure. But if there’s been a better example or paranoid body horror this decade, I’ve yet to see it. Natalie Portman plays the single-minded obsession of a ballet dancer with expert-level (and Oscar-winning) mania, taking the audience down a terrifying path. That Aronofsky has the balls to pull off a final 20 minutes as crazed and reality-bending as he does only proves once again that he’s one of our best and most audacious filmmakers.

Where to stream Black Swan

Director: Jordan Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener
Best Places to Watch: Amazon Video, iTunes

We live in horrifying times, and Jordan Peele knows that. He’s smart enough to know that his audience knows that too. Among its many virtues, Get Out has a perfect grasp on how much it needs to guide its audience’s hand and when it can just trust them to connect the dots. It’s a film that knows you know why Allison Williams’s parents are so unsettling, even before the covers are pulled back and you see what’s been going on beneath the surface this whole time.

Where to stream Get Out

Director: David Robert Mitchell
Starring: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist
Best Places to Watch: Netflix, Showtime

It Follows is a movie that will scare you with the most simple of ideas: there is something coming to kill you, and it will never stop. You may not see it now, but it is on its way. The conceit is that the only way to get this monster off your case is to have sex with somebody else, and the moral and interpersonal implications of this serve for much well-drawn tension among the characters. But the reason why It Follows tops this list is because it taps into what’s elemental about horror. Look far enough towards the horizon and you’ll see it. It’s walking right towards you. It wants to harm you. What are you going to do?

Where to stream It Follows