The 21 best horror movies on Amazon Prime Video for a solid scare

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Released eight years after the first Cloverfield movie hit theaters, 10 Cloverfield Lane takes a more psychological — and minimalist — approach to the sci-fi horror franchise. Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) awakens after a car accident to find herself injured and chained to a wall inside a bunker. Her captor (or savior, depending on who you ask), Howard (John Goodman), explains that Earth has been attacked, the outside world is poisonous and uninhabitable, and the only way to survive is to remain in the bunker with him and his fellow doomsday roomie, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) for the next few years.

Slowly, Michelle begins to adapt to life underground — until she discovers clues that suggest that Howard may not have been honest with her about the world’s circumstances. The second of three films in the franchise — with The Cloverfield Paradox following in 2018 — 10 Cloverfield Lane is only tangentially related to its predecessor, but the film’s lean cast and terse plot make it an entertaining addition to the series. —Ilana Gordon

Where to watch 10 Cloverfield Lane: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: B

Director: Dan Trachtenberg 

Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr., Bradley Cooper 

47 Meters Down (2017)

When two sisters (played by Mandy Moore and Claire Holt of Pretty Little Liars) decide to vacation in Mexico to decompress from a recent break up, they don’t expect to spend their time battling great white sharks and the depths of the ocean. But such is the plot of 47 Meters Down, a women versus nature horror drama with teeth to spare. Moore and Holt carry the majority of the film on their wetsuited shoulders as they writhe in a shark cage at the bottom of the ocean, always aware of the Chekhovian device that is their quickly depleting supply of oxygen.

47 Meters Down doesn’t present as a typical thriller; there are no (human) villains, no supernatural elements or vengeful spirits. The film stays in its “nature is terrifying enough” lane, ultimately producing, as one EW critic writes, “a lean and mean (and mostly un-gory) shark thriller clocking in at an efficient and slightly threadbare 89 minutes.” —I.G.

Where to watch 47 Meters Down: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Johannes Roberts

Cast: Mandy Moore, Claire Holt 

American Psycho (2000)

Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 best-seller looks unrecognizable in Mary Harron’s cinematic adaptation of the controversial novel. Starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a yuppie investment banker whose only real passions are consumerism, dining out, and committing murder, this black comedy and horror fusion satirizes the mass-consumption and performative lifestyle that was a hallmark of the 1980s culture and economy.

Luckily for viewers, the film version of American Psycho presents the best aspects of the novel without luxuriating in book Bateman’s fevered misogyny. EW’s critic writes that the film is elevated by Bale’s interpretation, noting, “He keeps Patrick lurching blindly toward humanity, until we see a self being born in a man who, paradoxically, was too selfish to have one.” —I.G.

Where to watch American Psycho: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Mary Harron

Cast: Christian Bale, Justin Theroux, Josh Lucas, Bill Sage, Chloë Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon, Samantha Mathis, Matt Ross, Jared Leto, Willem Dafoe

Black Box (2020)

The mind is a terrible thing to waste, and in the horror sci-fi film Black Box, mind games run rampant. Nolan Wright is a single father suffering from amnesia after surviving a car crash that killed his wife. Struggling to remember how to perform basic tasks both at work and in his personal life, Nolan reaches out to a neurologist who deems him a perfect candidate for her experimental black box treatment.

Repeated journeys into his mind force Nolan to battle the monsters in his memories, but the deeper he delves, the more he suspects that his past is not what it seems. A Blumhouse Television production full of twists, turns, and traumas that push Nolan to horrifying realizations, Black Box questions how much control we have over our minds, and the lengths to which people will go to keep their loved ones alive. —I.G.

Where to watch Black Box: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr.

Cast: Mamoudou Athie, Phylicia Rashad, Amanda Christine, Tosin Morohunfola, Charmaine Bingwa

Black Christmas (1974)

This slasher classic still holds up as one of the most chilling horror films of all time. A group of sorority sisters’ good tidings of comfort and joy are interrupted by repeated profane phone calls, leading to one of them being murdered in the attic. This kicks off a horrifying series of events as they try in vain to get the police to determine the source of the call while they are picked off one by one. There have been two attempts at remaking Black Christmas in the 21st century, but neither has approached the level of paranoia and dread of the ’70s original. —Kevin Jacobsen

Where to watch Black Christmas: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Bob Clark

Cast: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon

Carnival of Souls (1962)

After an accident pushes their car off the road, Mary (Candace Hilligoss) awakens on the banks of a river in Kansas with no memory of how she got there or of what happened to her friends. Puzzled and shaken, Mary proceeds with her plans to move to Salt Lake City, where she’s been hired as the new organist at a local church. But no matter where Mary goes, mysterious events, creepy people (including one played by the film’s director, Herk Harvey), and sinister spirits seem to follow. And none of the oddities that pepper the movie’s 78-minute runtime will prepare you for the twist at the end. 

Watching Carnival of Souls today feels like witnessing a slew of Easter eggs before they’ve even happened, as many a genre filmmaker has been inspired by the haunting imagery, gothic music, and ending that continues to baffle even decades later. An EW critic writes, “More than just scary, it’s arrestingly odd, with a bats-in-the-belfry 3-a.m. loneliness that you plug into like a private dream.” —I.G.

Where to watch Carnival of Souls: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: A–

Director: Herk Harvey

Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Sidney Berger

The Deep House (2021)

Set in France, The Deep House follows two American YouTubers (James Jagger and Camille Rowe) as they travel the country, searching for haunted houses. But after discovering a mansion submerged in a lake, the couple finds themselves launched into the deep end of some nasty supernatural business.

Haters of deep water, satanic imagery, and sustained suspense need not apply: The Deep House runneth over with all three. But lovers of slow-moving, found footage films with unique settings (a significant portion of the action takes place underwater) will find much to love about this ambitious horror movie. —I.G.

Where to watch The Deep House: Amazon Prime Video

Directors: Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury

Cast: James Jagger, Camille Rowe

The Descent (2005)

Subtlety is all good and fine, but sometimes we want a scary movie whose thrills are delightfully down to earth. Such is the case in The Descent, a film that literalizes the trope of characters descending into danger, seeing our adventurous protagonists (a group of women on a girls’ trip) encounter creepy critters deep underground.

EW’s critic writes, „Made with a connoisseur’s love of muck, blood, inky darkness, and equal parts elegance and ewwww, The Descent raises the level of the post–Blair Witch, post–Open Water horror game.” Ultimately, this movie is a triumph for trading the claustrophobic terrors of a cabin in the woods film for the even more constrained carnage of a cave. —Chris Snellgrove

Where to watch The Descent: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: A–

Director: Neil Marshall

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, Nora-Jane Noone, MyAnna Buring

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)

YouTubers will do a lot of questionable things for views, but in Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, one channel’s livestream ends with more of its participants dead than alive. A South Korean found footage horror film set in the Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, the movie follows a web series creator and the six people he recruits to explore the abandoned building. Drawn to room 402, the former intensive care unit, the group encounters supernatural entities they can’t explain and danger they can’t escape.

Based on the real-life Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital — a South Korean asylum that was considered one of the country’s most haunted buildings before it was demolished in 2018 — the film starts off slow, but will have you lunging for the lights by the time the ending arrives. —I.G.

Where to watch Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Jung Bum-shik

Cast: Wi Ha-joon, Park Ji-hyun, Oh Ah-yeon, Moon Ye-won, Park Sung-hoon, Yoo Je-yoon, Lee Seung-wook, Park Ji-a

Goodnight Mommy (2014)

There is no shortage of creepy twins in horror (“Come play with us, Danny!”), and the most terrifying example from recent memory is in Austria’s Goodnight Mommy, which premiered in 2014 at the Venice International Film Festival and was released theatrically a year later. A psychological horror story, Goodnight Mommy follows twin 9-year-old boys who begin to question their mother’s identity after she returns from intensive cosmetic surgery as a seemingly different person than the parent they once knew. The boys commit to ousting the imposter and finding the location of their real mother, but their investigation leads to truths too horrifying to process.

In 2015, EW predicted an “inevitable remake,” and in 2022, the film gods provided. Feel free to watch both versions, but definitely start with the original. —I.G.

Where to watch Goodnight Mommy: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: A

Directors: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala

Cast: Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz

Hell House LLC (2015)

The subpar sequels have somewhat sullied the reputation of Stephen Cognetti’s Hell House LLC, a low-budget mockumentary about a haunted house attraction where tragedy strikes. That’s too bad. Hell House LLC is supremely creepy, centering on a group of friends who scoop up an old, abandoned hotel in the hopes of remaking it into a profitable haunt only to find out that something evil lurks in the basement.

Hell House LLC is indie horror at its best, eliding fireworks and burdensome lore in favor of subtle, peripheral scares that encourage rewatches (or, at the very least, lots of rewinding). Even customary scares, like a mannequin’s head that turns when the camera’s not looking, are rendered fresh in a setting that’s clearly as eerie in real life as it is on film. —Randall Colburn

Where to watch Hell House LLC: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Stephen Cognetti

Cast: Ryan Jennifer Jones, Danny Bellini, Gore Abrams, Jared Hacker, Adam Schneider, Alice Bahlke

The Host (2006)

Bong Joon Ho decided to make a monster movie for his third feature film, and with The Host, he succeeds in crafting a terrifying family drama. The trouble begins when an American scientist instructs his South Korean assistant to dispose of dirty chemicals into the Han River, thus creating a monster. Years later, said monster emerges from the water to terrorize the people of Seoul and kidnap a teenage girl.

The Host follows the members of the girl’s multi-generational family as they hunt the creature down. A monster movie that editorializes on themes like pandemics (at the time: SARS), health care, government bureaucracy, consumerism, and American-Korean relations, EW’s critic suggests that The Host “should become the hip, thinking-person’s monster movie of choice.” —I.G.

Where to watch The Host: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doona, Go Ah-sung

Lake Mungo (2008)

Given that everything natural on the continent is designed to kill you, Australia seems an ideal setting for a scary movie. But in the psychological horror film Lake Mungo — set in Ararat, Australia — the fear isn’t born from external foes, but rather from the terror required to succumb to the depths of human feeling. Lake Mungo begins with the accidental drowning of 16-year-old Alice Palmer. Upon returning home, her brother Matthew believes he sees Alice’s ghost, but further investigation from the Palmer family reveals that Alice was seeing premonitions of her death.

Far from providing closure, the family begins to realize that the more they learn about Alice’s personal life, the less they understand about what happened to her. Shot in mockumentary style and incorporating elements of found footage, Lake Mungo is, at its core, a horror movie about human behavior and navigating grief. —I.G.

Where to watch Lake Mungo: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Joel Anderson 

Cast: Talia Zucker, Rosie Traynor, David Pledger

Let the Right One In (2008)

Vampire movies don’t work without blood, but the Swedish vampire drama Let the Right One In also offers up an equal helping of heart. Set in 1982, pre-teen Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) lives in a suburb of Stockholm and struggles to stand up to the bullies who harass him at school. But when pale and mysterious Eli (Lina Leandersson) moves in next door, Oskar finally has someone to talk to.

Eli and Oskar connect on a level neither has experienced before — but Oskar doesn’t know Eli is a vampire. Offered up by an EW critic as a contender for best vampire movie of 2008, Let the Right One In, the critic writes, “is like a Scandinavian Twilight minus the teen-steam schmaltz, packing in great gooey scares while tracing the friendship between a picked-on 12-year-old boy and a girl who hungers for the red stuff.” —I.G.

Where to watch Let the Right One In: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: A

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Ika Nord, Peter Carlberg 

Master (2022)

Mariama Diallo’s directorial debut hones in on the insidious world of academia, exposing the unsettling paradigm where colleges promote a faux sense of diversity to mask their racist underpinnings. At the elite New England university of Ancaster, longtime faculty member Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) ascends to the position of the campus’ first Black master. In this newfound role, Gale makes it her mission to protect first-year student Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) from anonymous bigoted pranks that seem to emanate from an otherworldly presence.

Though the film is saturated with macabre visuals, the real horror of Master lies within the shameful reality that „things will just continue as before,“ according to EW’s critic — who wrote, „Any tale set at a place like Ancaster, its hateful baubles still gathering dust on shelves, would need to resemble some kind of ghost story.“ —James Mercadante

Where to watch Master: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: A–

Director: Mariama Diallo

Cast: Regina Hall, Zoe Renee, Amber Gray, Ella Hunt, Talia Ryder

Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers finally got to direct the story he’s always wanted to remake with this haunting gothic horror drama. Based on 1922’s Nosferatu, which was itself an unofficial interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Victorian-set film follows a woman named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) who has an abnormal psychic connection with a faraway vampire, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård).

Things escalate when Ellen’s husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), accepts an opportunity to sell Count Orlok a manor in town, and the parasitic vampire’s arrival spells doom for the townsfolk. Unsettling and graphic with an undeniably dark romantic draw, Nosferatu is one of the most elegantly made horror films in recent years. —K.J.

Where to watch Nosferatu: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Willem Dafoe

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

In the indie horror classic Sleepaway Camp, camp is established in both setting and tone. A film known for its out of left field final plot twist, this low-budget slasher follows an unknown killer as they terrorize the young occupants of a summer camp in upstate New York in the 1970s.

The film was derided by critics upon its release, but in the decades since, Sleepaway Camp has been given its flowers and is recognized as a cult classic. Modern viewers have debated the effectiveness of the movie’s queer themes, but genre enthusiasts agree that the best way to watch Sleepaway Camp is to go into the viewing with limited information. —I.G.

Where to watch Sleepaway Camp: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Robert Hiltzik

Cast: Mike Kellin, Katherine Kamhi, Paul DeAngelo, Jonathan Tiersten, Felissa Rose, Christopher Collet, Karen Fields

Suspiria (2018)

In a creative pivot, director Luca Guadagnino followed up his hit Call Me by Your Name with Suspiria, a period retelling of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic that features the incomparable Tilda Swinton playing three different characters (one of whom is male), Dakota Johnson, and new-era scream queen Mia Goth.

When a sheltered young woman named Susie (Johnson) travels to Germany and joins an exclusive dance company, she encounters a whole different kind of company in the coven of witches who run the place. EW’s critic highlights some of „the incredibly effective sequences in the film, including one showstopper in which Susie auditions for the lead part in a piece while, in a nearby studio, one of her fellow dancers is violently whipped around like a rag doll, her joints contorting like a possessed Swiss Army knife.“ —I.G.

Where to watch Suspiria: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Angela Winkler, Chloë Grace Moretz

The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

Before helming horrors such as Insidious: The Last Key (2018) and Escape Room (2019), Adam Robitel poured his heart into his directorial debut, a film that quietly first dropped on Netflix sans any marketing or hype, yet swiftly attracted a million viewers in its opening weekend. The top half of this found-footage horror forces you to confront your own mortality when meeting Deborah Logan (Jill Larson)  — worn down by Alzheimer’s disease and unable to care for herself  — and her attentive daughter (Anne Ramsey) through the investigative lens of aspiring documentarians.

However, as the film sinks its teeth into the second act, the filmmakers uncover something far more sinister lurking beyond Deborah’s condition. Marked by a heart-rending yet horrifying performance from Larson, The Taking of Deborah Logan crafts a story where characters and their struggles feel achingly real while generating a fraught atmosphere that doesn’t rely on over-the-top special effects or ominous music to scare the living hell out of you. —J.M.

Where to watch The Taking of Deborah Logan: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Adam Robitel 

Cast: Jill Larson, Anne Ramsay, Michelle Ang, Ryan Cutrona

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

One of the forebears of the horror genre, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre built the sadistic road map followed by many modern films — the Saw and Hostel franchises among them. A movie that prompted eight sequels, and inspired 2022’s X, this ‘70s torture film only needs a chainsaw and a face mask sewn from human skin to drive its viewers into spasms of terror.

Following a group of young hippies who visit an old family farmhouse and end up encountering the home’s murderous next-door neighbors, EW calls The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the “template for modern horror.” As EW’s critic writes, “What Chain Saw channeled, far more than any other horror film of its time, was the dementia, the terrifying insanity, of violence. It made you feel like you were really experiencing what it was like to be murdered.” —I.G.

Where to watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Tobe Hooper

Cast: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Parenting is the ultimate horror story, and in the thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin, a writer named Eva (Tilda Swinton) reflects on how raising her psychopathic son Kevin (Ezra Miller) ruined her life. Kevin and Eva’s relationship is fraught from birth, but as Eva struggles to get her husband (John C. Reilly) to recognize their child’s emotional issues, Kevin’s urges become increasingly more violent.

Miller’s performance as the manipulative, destructive Kevin is, as EW’s critic writes, “the best thing in the movie,” and in a conversation with EW, Swinton says the film “has as much to do with the business of bringing up children as Rosemary’s Baby had with the practical business with being pregnant.” —I.G.

Where to watch We Need to Talk About Kevin: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Cast: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller