Building Your Epic Halloween Watch List? Here Are the Scariest Movies on Netflix
So, you wanna know what goes bump in the night, do ya?
Well, besides your mom and dad about nine months before you were born (YA BURNED), there are plenty of other creatures of the night doing equally unspeakable things around this time of year. And many of them (possibly including your parents) have been captured on video (I can’t HELP myself!). Why, even the Spirit Halloween store is jumping on the scary movie train, and possibly, many of its employees are jumping into your parents’ bed with them (WHAT. I don’t know what they’re into in the privacy of your childhood home!).
But in case you’d like to wash the horrifying images of your own conception out of your brain, I’ve compiled a list of other horrifying things that you can watch on Netflix from the comfort of home.
The Babysitter
The Babysitter is a really good example of a reverse slasher film. One of the only few I know! So this middle school kid, Cole (who is kinda too old to have a babysitter), has to spend the night with his babysitter because his parents are leaving town (thank God, right?) As an added bonus, he has a huge crush on his babysitter, so he loves to spend alone time with her. The problem is, she’s a Satanic killer.
So, she has her friends come over and play spin the bottle, and the bottle lands on a shy and sweet guy named Samuel. But instead of kissing Samuel, she stabs him in the head with two daggers while her friends collect his blood in preparation to for a demonic ritual. The worst part? Cole sees it happen. So the teens decide that Cole has to die in order for their secret to be safe. So kind-hearted Cole has to figure out how to defeat (usually through lethal means) each one of the killer teenagers in order to survive the night. See what I mean about a reverse slasher? It’s a fun, campy romp with a nice high body count.
Gerald’s Game
Okay, this movie is fucked up, mostly because your parents might have actually done something like this in order to bring you into the world. Just kidding (I’m not actually kidding.)!
This film is about a couple who are trying to save their crumbling marriage with a little vacation time in a house in the middle of nowhere. The husband, Gerald, wants to spice things up with his wife, Jessie, by incorporating a little bondage in the bedroom. So he has the bright idea to bring real handcuffs and cuff her to the bed. He then begins acting out a rape fantasy in order to scratch the itch of a kink that she didn’t even know he had. She ends up throwing him off of her and kicking him in the chest, and he has a heart attack and dies on the floor while she is still handcuffed. Isolated from the outside world and strapped to the bed, she begins to have terrifying hallucinations.
The movie is a brilliant bit of psychological horror, a battle between fear and self-preservation that are personified by her husband and her own self. And she’s gonna need to be careful who she listens to, because there might be someone else in the house. That person could be another illusion, but they could also be real. Be sure to take a second and be glad that this kind of thing never happened to your parents while you’re watching, or else you wouldn’t be watching the movie in the first place.
It Follows
Another spooky sex movie! I’m sensing a theme here. Be glad that the monster in this movie isn’t real, or your parents may not have lived long enough to raise you. So the story is about a high school girl named Jay who makes the “bad in the context of a horror movie” decision to have sex with her boyfriend, Hugh, in his car. After they have sex, Hugh chloroforms her, ties her to a chair, and takes her to an abandoned building. He explains to her that by having sex with her he passed “it” onto her. What is “it”? “It” is a shape-shifting entity that can only be seen by Jay, and it will pursue Jay for the rest of her life and try to kill her. The only way for Jay to escape this fate is if she passes “it” along to someone else through sex. However, if “it” ends up killing the person Jay passed it to, it will come back down the line to Jay and try to kill her again. Fucking. Yikes. So Jay and her friends spend the entire movie trying to outwit the sadistic monster to varying degrees of success. I won’t spoil anything, but this movie is scary as shit, and has perhaps one of the best concepts for a horror movie monster ever. And who knows, maybe your dad passed it to your mom and she passed it to the milkman. He probably passed it on to someone else immediately after, because we all know that milkmen are super slutty.
The Conjuring
This movie is about your mom and dad if they never decided to have you, but rather, went into the business of exorcising ghosts. Which was definitely a close second for them. It concerns a couple who get a call from a family, who made the horror movie rookie mistake of buying a spooky old house in the country. Why is it a mistake? Because there’s a spooooky ghost in there. This movie is really good if you’re in the mood for horror but don’t have the stomach for all the gore and death that usually comes with it. Because you know what, sometimes I’m in that mood. Sometimes I want to get my blood racing a little bit but don’t wanna have to watch people getting eviscerated to do it. This movie is a fun one and seriously delivers on scares (while pulling some of those darker and more fucked up horror movie punches). To be honest, I think some of the most sublimely scary movie moments are actually where nothing physically happens to a character, but they see something so horrifying that they are left mentally traumatized. There are plenty of freak-out moments like that in this film. It’s basically like what would happen if you walked in on your mom and dad those fateful “however many years old you are plus” 9 months ago. You wouldn’t be physically injured, but you’d be mentally scarred for the rest of your life. And isn’t that what Halloween is all about?
(Featured image credit: Northern Lights Films)
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