If you’re looking for something to match the chilly weather outside and stay in the Halloween spirit, check out the list below for a truly chilling movie experience. 

Hereditary (2018)

Premise: After the loss of her mother, Annie (Tonie Collete) begins to experience strange events that affect her and her whole family and slowly discover a terrifying reality. 

Hereditary is a movie that will for sure keep anyone who watches up at night.  Director Ari Aster truly knows how to scare and disturb an audience. The tension and the slow descent into absolute madness truly makes Hereditary something special and definitely not for the faint of heart. 

Where to watch: Amazon Prime 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) 

Premise: Sally (Marilyn Burns) and her brother take a detour to their families farmhouse while on a trip. During their stay they are attacked by a strange cannibalistic family. The worst of them all, Leatherface, is a man with a chainsaw and a mask made of human skin. 

Texas Chainsaw is a classic horror masterpiece. Even with the low budget, director Tobe Hooper delivers a gruesome and gory story that paved the way for many modern horror films, such as The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House On The Left. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is truly twisted and is sure to make the audience scared of ever taking a detour on a road trip again. 

Where to watch: Hulu 

Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

Premise: Whenever a person dies with deep rage in their soul, a curse begins. Ju-On: The Grudge tells the stories of multiple people living in a house haunted by two terrifying ghosts after a horrible murder occured. 

The Grudge definitely isn’t the scariest on this list but it’s extremely entertaining. Director Takashi Shimizu tells a story with multiple parts that follows a diverse cast of characters. His use of atmosphere and scary sounds make the movie all the more eerie. Ju-On has a very classic Japanese horror trope of vengeful ghosts and gained quick popular in Japan. The film has also been given an American recreation called The Grudge, and has a T.V. show on Netflix called Ju-On: Origins. So there’s actually many things to check out if you enjoy this one!

Where to watch: Amazon Prime 

Train To Busan (2016)

Premise: A zombie virus begins to break out while a man and his daughter are on a train to drop off the daughter at her mother’s house. The pair must fight to survive while the number of infected people in the train continues to rise. 

Train To Busan is a zombie movie masterpiece. Not only are the zombies portrayed as very terrifying – the film has a deep story at its core about a father struggling to have a good relationship with his daughter. The story is very human despite the man-eating zombies and the gore.  It’s definitely one of the greatest zombie apocalypse films to come out in recent years. 

The Shining (1980)

Premise: Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes the job of living and watching over the Overlook hotel during the winter season with his wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lioyd) During their stay at the Overlook, strange things begin to happen and Jack feels his grip on reality start to slip. 

The Shining is another classic horror film that everyone should see. Stanley Kubrick does a fantastic job of making viewers squirm with the intensity of each scene. As the film progresses, the viewer’s ability to differentiate reality from fantasy only gets more complicated. Stephen King actually hated Kubrick’s adaptation of his book, but that didn’t stop it from becoming one of the most infamous horror films to date. Even if the movie is vastly different from the book it’s still a masterpiece when it comes to classic horror. 

Where to watch: HBO Max 

Candyman (1992)

Premise: While doing research on superstitions in the Cabrini-Green housing development in Chicago, graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) learns of the Candyman, a murderous man with a gruesome background who can be summoned by calling his name 5 times in front of a mirror. Helen decides to dig deeper into the Candyman when strange disappearances start to happen and she begins to experience a horrible nightmare.

Candyman is wildly underrated for how scary it is. From the intense scenes of people foolishly summoning Candyman, to the awful amount of bees that show up periodically throughout the film, Candyman is really one of a kind. It’s also a story of revenge and anger with the character Candyman being the ghost of a slave who was brutally murdered by a group of white people. Even if that happened years and years ago Candyman is still out for revenge. This movie will definitely scare the audience away from playing games like Bloody Mary again. 

Where to watch: Hulu 

Sinister (2012)

Premise: A true-crime writer in a slump finds a video tape showing the horribly violent death of an entire family in the attic of his new home. He vows to solve the case and use it as the basis for his new book. Thinking that he’s finally got his big hit, he quickly realizes that living in that house and digging into the mystery will do him and his family more harm than good. 

Sinister is shockingly dark. It definitely has classic horror movie tropes and jumpscares but probably the scariest thing about it is the faux snuff films shown throughout the movie. Most of them will start out looking like a family home video, but you get the sense that something is not right up until the point where it shows the horrible fate these people are met with. Scenes like this mixed with the intensity that the characters face is what’s really chilling about Sinister.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime 

Hush (2016)

Premise: A deaf writer living in the middle of nowhere must fight for her life when a murderous man breaks into her home. All while not being able to hear where he is.

Hush is an extremely intense movie. The fear of someone being in your house without your knowing of it is truly terrifying and Hush brings that fear to a new level. It’s truly scary to watch as the main character goes about her nightly routine while a man is lurking in her home and planning to hurt her. It’s definitely a movie that makes people yell at their screen in frustration even if it changes nothing. 

Where to watch: Netflix 

Us (2019)

Premise: Adelaide Willson (Lupita Nyong’o) returns to the beachfront home where she grew up with her family. Still haunted by a traumatic event that happened to her as a child, Adelaide is hesitant to be back. Her fears only grow when a group of masked people break into her home at night. Once the masks are removed the family realizes that each intruder is an exact doppelganger of themselves. 

Us is Jordan Peele’s second time directing a film and he does not disappoint. He takes the idea of a family vacation gone wrong and adds a very creative twist to it that hasn’t been done before. The idea of being hunted down by someone who looks exactly like you is truly scary to think about. Especially when the last thing you see before death is your own face staring back at you. 

Where to watch: Hulu