Netflix 13 Best Halloween Movies For 2025

The heretofore unknown Pierce Brothers unwittingly produced an unusual bit of trivia back in 2020 when their indie horror movie The Wretched, where a teenage boy attempts to repel a witchy neighbor, managed the unusual feat of topping COVID-summer box office six weeks in a row. How did that happen, when most theaters would remain closed at least until fall (and in some cases until 2021)? Drive-ins, of course! The Wretched was one of a few brand-new original movies that hit drive-in screens that summer, alongside a bunch of rereleases and some wide-release holdovers from earlier in the year. Despite this unexpected success, it was still something of a niche item, never playing more than 100 screens (though it was also available on VOD, naturally). It’s not as artsy as some of its contemporaries, but that lends the movie an appealing throwback quality: It really is a pretty solid spooky story, accessible and well-told.

RATED: TV-MA

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Technically, this horror comedy takes place over a different holiday entirely: Juneteenth, which also served as the original title, meant to riff on holiday-inspired horror monikers like Halloween or Christmas Evil. It’s also more comedy than horror, but it’s the rare hybrid of the two that’s truly, consistently funny, rather than trafficking in cheesy splatter gags. A group of friends arrive at a cabin over Juneteenth weekend and are menaced by a board game quizzing them on their levels of blackness – with deadly consequences! The ensemble cast, including Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, X Mayo, and Dewayne Perkis, is enormously funny and appealing, and unlike a generation’s worth of Get Out knockoffs, the jokes here are sharply clever.

RATED: R

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Tim Burton’s return to the world of his 1988 classic could have been a dispiriting cash-in. Instead, it seems to have put him back in touch with the hands-on, practical-effects playfulness of his earlier films. The sequel story for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which features the “bio-exorcist” (Michael Keaton) returning alongside Jenna Ortega as the daughter of Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), is frequently slapdash and overbusy – but what it’s overbusy with is such a variety of spookhouse sights, sounds, and visual-gag ideas that it becomes difficult to resist.

RATED: PG-13

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Parker Finn burst onto the horror scene by taking a familiar image – the creepy rictus grin of the demonically possessed – and building a whole creepy mythology around a tough-to-beat curse that should appeal to fans of The Ring. Smile goes even grimmer as exposure to a demon-assisted suicide curses that witness to be vexed by hallucinations that torture them until they eventually submit. Fun! Definitely one for the doomier fan, Smile is one of the more unsettling mainstream horror movies in recent memory, bearing the influences of some gnarlier indie fare alongside several established classics.

RATED: R

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Writer-director Remi Weekes made an auspicious debut, somewhat lost between its 2020 Sundance premiere, a Netflix acquisition, and COVID-era chaos, with this Britain-set story of a couple seeking asylum from South Sudan, assigned to live in a house that may be haunted by a mysterious presence. Weekes avoids the trappings of tedious metaphorror by rooting his characters in actual real-world racism and strife, creating a potent mix of social realism and otherworldly creep-outs.

RATED: TV-14

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Josh Ruben, who directed the surprisingly great adaptation of video game Werewolves Within, teams with screenwriter Christopher Landon, who made the Happy Death Day movies, for a slasher-driven rom-com, an all-star team-up for two horror filmmakers who care about character, emotional stakes, and, in Ruben’s case, clever staging, more than empty shocks or jump scares. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding are both charming as hell playing two strangers on a non-date forced to spend the evening together eluding a masked killer, while ’00s genre staples Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster get to do some more deadpan work as the cops investigating the case.

RATED: R

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Cam (2018)

Gigging as a camgirl starts to resemble peering into a haunted hall of mirrors in this small-scale, character-driven, and intensely effective thriller starring Madeline Brewer as an online sex worker who encounters a bizarre digital doppelganger. It’s the kind of premise that Brian De Palma might have gloried in, had his glory days coincided with the rise of streaming. Director Daniel Goldhaber takes it in a more quietly unnerving direction, blurring the lines between reality, digitally created fantasy, and nightmares.

RATED: TV-MA

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Here’s one for your baby goth. Netflix beloved animator Henry Selick (the actual director of The Nightmare Before Christmas as well as Coraline) money to produce another ghoulishly adorable stop-motion extravaganza, this one with the help of Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael-Key, who play mischievous demon siblings who trick troubled young Kat (Lyric Ross) into summoning them back to the land of the living. Some of the supernatural plotting is convoluted, but the atmospheric and witty animation more than makes up for it.

RATED: PG-13

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20 years after The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola adapted a rather better-regarded popular novel, kicking off a mini-boom of grown-up monster movies in the process. None of the subsequent films did it like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though, a florid and visually sumptuous fever dream of a vampire movie, featuring Gary Oldman as both a ghastly blade-licking old-man count and a dreamy (OK, he looks like a Vegas magician) younger version obsessed with Winona Ryder (who wasn’t, back in 1992?). It’s a hell of a sight to behold, for good (the production design, costumes, and vintage visual effects are stunning) and ill (it also features one of the few genuinely bad Keanu Reeves performances).

RATED: R

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SEE ALSO: One of Netflix’s few pre-1990 offerings at the moment is the 1979 remake of Dracula, starring Frank Langella as the count. It’s not as opulent, gothic, or just plane nuts as Coppola’s vision, but part of the fun of monster movies is sampling different iterations from different time periods, so don’t sleep on the too-rare opportunity to watch an older horror movie on the world’s most ubiquitous streaming channel.

RATED: R

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Not to be confused with Netflix series The Watcher, this slow-burn stalker horror features scream queen Maika Monroe as a young woman who moves to Bucharest with her husband for his job, eventually convinced that she’s being watched and possibly stalked by a neighbor. Writer-director Chole Okuno wrings a lot of suspense from open shades, a trip to the supermarket, and the pervasive unease of making your way through an familiar environment; there are quiet moments that produce bigger and more visceral shivers than any number of flashier horror shows.

RATED: R

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At a low career ebb following A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach, Danny Boyle came roaring back with the digital-video experimentation of 28 Days Later, a zombie movie that essentially reintroduced the public to this particular horror subgenre and re-established Boyle as one of the most exciting and eclectic filmmakers of his generation. A young Cillian Murphy plays a bike messenger who wakes up from a coma to find London ravaged by a super-communicable “rage virus” that turns victims into raving, bloodthirsty zombies, captured with early-DV immediacy by Boyle’s roaming cameras.

RATED: R

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And once you’ve watched the best 21st century zombie movie, why not roll right into this year’s legacy sequel, which happens to compete for that very same title? Easily one of the best horror movies of 2025, 28 Years Later doesn’t pick up with any of the characters from the 2003 movie (or the 2007 sequel). It’s more creative and spiritual sequel than direct continuation, reuniting director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland for a coming-of-age story following a young lad who’s grown up in post-apocalyptic England, living in a small island community isolated from the rage virus and its zombiefied victims. Of course, the movie ventures off-island – but how, when, and why all manage to maintain a sense of genuine surprise, as do the performances from Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, and Jodie Comer. It all adds up to one of the most eclectic and emotionally affecting horror movies in years – before a bonkers ending leaves off wondering what the hell could be in store for the next sequel, arriving in January.

RATED: R

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You may have noticed most of these selections are from the 2020s. That’s natural, given Netflix’s recency bias and the sheer number of good-to-great horror movies that have come out this decade so far. But luckily, the original Texas Chain Saw, which celebrated its half-century anniversary last year, remains on the service, too, so horror fans new and old can still check out one of the all-time greats, a proto-slasher movie that’s so much stranger and more discomfiting than that description implies. Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece stands with Psycho and Halloween as particularly formative to modern ideas of horror, and of those three, it’s the one that feels most genuinely unsettling and unlike any other scary movie. The sun-baked wilds of Texas become somehow autumn-appropriate as a group of young people stumbles across a particularly twisted family. It’s somehow both less bloody and more disturbing than you might assume.

RATED: R

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SEE ALSO: Netflix also got the actual rights to make a new Texas Chainsaw movie, and they did it in 2022 with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a critically drubbed and not particularly fan-beloved installment. But you know what? In the admittedly low-competition field of non-Hooper Texas Chainsaw installments, this is one of the better ones, not to mention possibly the only one to feature an on-screen chainsaw massacre.

RATED: R

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