10 Recent Horror Movies You Can Stream Free and Ad-Free on Kanopy
There are a lot of free streaming services these days—but precious few are ad-free. All hail Kanopy, which you can access with a public library card through participating institutions, and which boats an excitingly vast array of movies and TV shows, including tons of recent horror releases.
Sign-up is a breeze; within two minutes, I had 12 “tickets” from my local library in my account. Kanopy doesn’t offer unlimited bingeing—most movies require two tickets and have a 72-hour viewing window (most TV series are five tickets per season, and you get 14-21 days to watch). But your ticket supply resets each month, and again: you’re spending zero dollars and sitting through zero ads.
Here are 10 recent horror movies you can find on Kanopy—and this is barely scratching the surface.
The Innocents (2021)
Spooky-kid movies don’t get more unsettling than this pitch-black tale set against the backdrop of a bright Norwegian summer, following a group of youngsters amusing themselves in their isolated apartment complex. As they realize there are superpower-like abilities emerging among them, mischief escalates to malevolence. Watch on Kanopy.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)
Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun made one of the most buzzed-about genre films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (I Saw the TV Glow, which was picked up by A24), but they also caused a stir at the fest with 2021's We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. It’s about a lonely young woman who decides to participate in an online role-playing “challenge,” embarking on a journey that shifts her reality and leads us to question our own perceptions. Watch on Kanopy.
Mother! (2017)
Not long after wrapping The Hunger Games series, and as her time in the X-Men was winding down, Jennifer Lawrence starred in this verrrry out-there fantasy drama from writer-director Darren Aronofsky. In 2017, io9's review called it “grueling and gruesome ... a deliberately pretentious art-house movie, cast with some of the biggest stars on the planet. It’s horrifying on many levels—and yet there’s something deeply admirable about it. Whatever the opposite of “crowd-pleaser” is, this movie is it.” Watch on Kanopy.
Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Speaking of divisive movies, one of 2023's most polarizing movies came from a pair of critical darlings: director and writer Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) and star Joaquin Phoenix. Audiences didn’t know what to make of this tale of a man on a very surreal journey—it was a box-office flop—but no less an authority on boundary-pushing than John Waters named it his top movie of the year. Watch on Kanopy.
Pearl (2022)
She’s a star! Plunge into Mia Goth and Ti West’s colorfully bizarre world of glamour, gators, and gore before the third film in the trilogy, MaXXXine, arrives. Watch on Kanopy.
Titane (2021)
Writer-director Julia Ducournau (Raw) won the top prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival for this audacious, edgy, truly unique body-horror story about a woman who has, uh, a lusty passion for motor vehicles. Watch on Kanopy.
Hatching (2022)
Finnish director Hanna Bergholm made her feature debut with this domestic drama that morphs into a creature feature when the tween daughter of a perfectionist mommy blogger finds an egg that grows to alarming proportions before... well, see title. Grisly chaos ensues. Watch on Kanopy.
In Fabric (2018)
Horror movies like to infuse curses into lots of things, including fashion items—so why not a spectacular scarlet dress? Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio) directs Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Gwendoline Christie in this comedy-infused giallo homage.Watch on Kanopy.
Lamb (2021)
Noomi Rapace plays María, an Icelandic farmer whose maternal instincts go into overdrive when she happens upon a very peculiar sheep-human hybrid. Things get weirder when the infant’s birth mother (an ewe) starts hanging around, demanding the return of her baby, and María’s pest of a brother-in-law starts asking too many questions. Watch on Kanopy.
Relic (2020)
In this Australian import from director and co-writer Natalie Erika James, three generations of women (Bella Heathcote, Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin) face a murky, moldy evil lurking in the family home—while also working through unresolved feelings between them, including the guilt the adult daughter feels about her elderly mother’s care. Watch on Kanopy.
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