The best horror movies on Paramount Plus right now
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(Clockwise from top left:) Smile (Paramount), Scream (Paramount), The Blair Witch Project (screenshot), A Quiet Place (Paramount), The Ring (screenshot), 10 Cloverfield Lane (Michele K. Short )
October means Halloween and Halloween means horror films. All the streamers are currently doubling down on diabolically evil content but Paramount+, always home to a bevy of horror offerings, has plenty of films to satisfy movie buffs and thrill-seeking couch potatoes alike. As a studio, Paramount has historically produced some of cinema’s most enduringly scary classics, from Scream to A Quiet Place. And as a streamer, it’s only looking more and more promising, considering it’s home to more recent well-received hits like last year’s Orphan: First Kill and Smile. Read on for The A.V. Club’s top horror film recommendations, and get ready to turn off the lights, and log onto Paramount+—if you dare.
This list was updated on October 27, 2023.
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The P.T. Barnum of blockbuster salesmanship, J.J. Abrams makes good movies and better ad campaigns; he doles out pre-release information in tantalizing droplets, getting moviegoers hooked on the mystery he cultivates. But does this strategy always benefit the films themselves? Conceived and shot in near-total secrecy, like a surprise album dropped with little advance notice, 10 Cloverfield Lane follows in the clawed footprints of another project produced but not directed by Abrams: the 2008 mock-doc monster movie Cloverfield. And yet those primed to watch more camera-toting hipsters run for their lives across Manhattan, a skyscraper-sized lizard in hot pursuit, should know that a title is close to all that the new film shares with the old one. On top of that, this “spiritual sequel” seems almost perversely at odds with the expectations it inflates: What comes packaged as a major motion-picture event quickly reveals itself to be something more modest—a pressurized chamber thriller, not an early prelude to the clang-and-bang summer season. [A.A. Dowd]
The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project
What’s scarier, a wolf in the house or a wolf at the door? Is it more frightening to be eaten by a monster or to live in fear of such a fate? Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick’s debut film The Blair Witch Project leaves its horror to the audience’s imagination, and in doing so creates a truly scary horror film, something akin to a lost art these days. An opening screen announces that the movie consists of footage recovered from three lost student filmmakers who disappeared in the Maryland woods while searching for the legendary Blair Witch, and never allows anything to shatter that illusion. Shot with handheld cameras, Blair Witch has the look of a student film and its accompanying outtakes, but more importantly, it feels real. [Keith Phipps]
Crawl
Produced by Evil Dead honcho Sam Raimi, Crawl is dumb genre fun, but it’s not too dumb. The gators, convincingly summoned from the digital gene pool, are perhaps cunning even by the standards of this sneak-attack species—they know just when to hold their hisses and growls for a well-timed jump scare. But they’re not too big or too unstoppable or too intelligent; you wouldn’t confuse them for escapees from the Deep Blue Sea laboratory. The humans, meanwhile, don’t make blatantly stupid decisions just to move the plot along or thrust themselves into further danger. They do walk off an awful lot of serious injury, even managing to hold up their respective ends of conversations while holding their gaping wounds/stumps. If any one thing holds back this modest, skillfully made potboiler from true B-movie glory, it’s the human drama. The script, by brothers Michael and Shawn Rasumssen (The Ward), presents Haley and Dave’s battle against the elements as a therapeutic ordeal, endured in the symbolically subterranean space of the old family house. Will the two escape not just the hungry gators but also the resentment that’s forced a wedge between them over the years? Will dad’s tough-love encouragement, doled out in flashbacks to the days when he was still Haley’s swimming coach, come in handy during the experience? It’s pure formulaic pap, but then, so were the emotional motivations of The Shallows and The Meg. Shark or gator, no leviathan can compete with the deadliness of a tortured family backstory. [A.A. Dowd]
Orphan: First Kill
In director William Brent Bell’s Orphan: First Kill, our favorite pint-sized, parent-less antagonist with a killer sensibility and the instinctual skill to slay all day is back and better than ever. While its title is a bit of a misnomer considering where this journey begins, it’s the rare prequel that surpasses the original. And similar to others in its genre, like Ouija: Origin Of Evil and Annabelle: Creation, it cleverly re-engineers those foundational building blocks to ingeniously complement its predecessor. [Courtney Howard]
A Quiet Place
In the ingenious suspense contraption A Quiet Place, Earth has been overrun by blind beasties from above: a species of fast, spindly, vaguely reptilian monsters who can’t see their prey but can sure as hell hear it, pouncing with scary velocity at any sound louder than a handclap. That’s a drag for humanity, chatterboxes that we are. It’s also a great hook for a creature feature, and John Krasinski, star and director at the helm, milks it for all it’s worth. Horror movies often play with the contrast between deathly silence and deafening cacophony, one puncturing the other to shred nerves and send asses out of seats. A Quiet Place takes that strategy to a new extreme, engulfing characters and viewers alike in an eerie sustained hush, and then generating anxiety about how and when it will suddenly be shattered. It turns sound itself, cinema’s first invader, into a threat. [A.A. Dowd]
A Quiet Place Part II
A Quiet Place Part II follows the standard sequel protocol of upping the ante, with more characters, more locations, and more scuttling predators putting their powerful lugholes to the proverbial ground in search of noisy prey… The film does recall, in at least one respect, the most revered Part II in cinema, going full Godfather saga with an opening passage set before the events of the last movie. Krasinski, returning to direct, rewinds to the start of the invasion, which allows him to briefly reprise his starring role as Lee Abbott, husband and father of a family about to be thrust into a new nightmare normal. This “day one” sequence is spectacular: As a peewee ballgame is interrupted by something streaking through the sky overhead, an idyllic stretch of American everytown erupts into panic and death, which the former sitcom star stages through a series of extended shots, including one that surveys the mayhem from a moving vehicle, Children Of Men-style… [A.A. Dowd]
The Ring (2002)
The Ring (2002)
In spite of the technological twists, The Ring is at heart a classic ghost story, and it knows it. It allows the horror to unfold out of a campfire-ready opening scene, as two teenage girls exchange the story of the videotape while left alone in a seemingly peaceful house. The evening doesn’t go well, which prompts single mom and Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Naomi Watts to investigate. Her efforts lead her to a remote cabin and, inevitably, an unmarked videotape whose spooky contents could pass for unused dailies from Mulholland Dr. “Very film school,” says unimpressed former flame Martin Henderson. While he’s not far off the mark, the images have an unsettling quality that portends the troubles to come. Expanding on the strong visual sense evinced in the otherwise mediocre The Mexican, director Gore Verbinski creates an air of dread that begins with the first scene and never lets up, subtly incorporating elements from the current wave of Japanese horror films along the way. He succeeds mostly through sleight of hand. When the shocks come, they interrupt long stretches in which the camera lingers meaningfully as characters accumulate details that confirm what they already know: What they’ve seen will kill them, and soon. [Keith Phipps]
Scream (2022)
Cell phones were supposed to kill off the slasher picture. For a genre built on isolation, miscommunication, and unheard cries for help, surely the ability to contact anyone, anywhere with the push of a button would be (pardon the pun) a death blow? And it might have been, if those masked killers—and the people who bring them to life—weren’t so darn resilient. Scream, the fifth film in the postmodern slasher series that confusingly shares a title with the first, engages with this conundrum throughout. In the 2022 Scream, smart home devices, location tracking apps, and phone cloning software are all tools in the Ghostface Killer’s murder kit… [Katie Rife]
Scream VI
Up until the killer’s reveal in its third act, Scream VI is one of the franchise’s best sequels and the series’ most inventive and character-driven entry. The Scream movies, like the Fast And The Furious films, have mostly gotten better (or, at least, more entertaining) with each installment. This follow-up is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who were behind 2022’s creatively and financially successful Scream. Their latest is another timely and clever exploration of slasher movie tropes—which the witty and violent script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick deconstructs like layers of a meta Russian nesting doll. Fueled by a seemingly endless appreciation for how enjoyable it can be to subvert horror conventions and audience expectations, Scream VI is one of the most fun (and funniest) modern horror experiences one can have at a movie theater or at home. It would seem that another sequel is all but guaranteed, and deservedly so, especially with Scream VI having something no other movie in the series has had: Melissa Barrera front and center. Somewhat underused in 2022’s Scream, here she reconciles her character’s familial ties to one of the first Scream’s killers, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), and then uses that “killer instinct” to the Core Four’s advantage. This is the first time a Scream film has featured someone as dangerous as a Ghostface on the side of good—or, at least, good-adjacent. How our heroes could wield this compelling and complex addition to their arsenal in future sequels holds significant potential, as Scream VI ends in the way all good horror movies should: With fans dying for more. [Phil Pirello]
Smile
Make sure the liquor cabinet at home is well stocked, because you might just want a stiff drink after seeing Smile. The feature debut of writer-director Parker Finn, expanded from his SXSW award-nominated short Laura Hasn’t Slept, is designed to work your last nerves … in a good way, if such a thing is possible. It may take time and repeated viewings to be sure just how good or bad Smile is as a movie, but as a scare delivery device, it is damned effective. (Trigger warning: anyone who cannot bear seeing harm done to pets should probably avoid it.) Smile is unable to resist the temptation of a potential sequel, but Finn delivers an effective resolution nonetheless. Tying the evil force to lingering trauma—and having to smile through the worst of it—is the movie’s most potent weapon, and what ultimately differentiates it from predecessors like Final Destination or Oculus. It’s obvious that Finn draws heavily from his own favorites, but Smile suggests that their skill and effectiveness have successfully been passed along to him. [Luke Y. Thompson]
World War Z
In terms of pure scope, there’s never been a zombie movie like this one. Made for close to $200 million, the film spans several continents, flooding the streets of major cities with hundreds, maybe even thousands of extras, and giving audiences a taste of the mass chaos and hysteria movies like this normally skip past. The wow factor arrives early, with a Philadelphia traffic jam that escalates into a full-blown mob scene. As retired UN operative Brad Pitt attempts to navigate his family out of the outbreak zone, the camera pulls back and up, and the panoramic view—of bodies in fevered motion, of the dead in hot pursuit of the living—is pretty stunning... [A.A. Dowd]
X
X is the story of a group of filmmakers who encounter more than they bargain for during an adult film shoot, director Ty West’s latest exploits two familiar scenarios simultaneously while offering a rejoinder to the moralistic gender and sexual stereotypes that defined older horror scenarios. Shellacked in blue eye shadow, feathered hair, and a gallon of lip gloss, Mia Goth commands the superstar adulation that her character craves, while a supporting cast including Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow, Scott Mescudi, Jenna Ortega, and Owen Campbell navigate both low-budget pornography and backwoods terror. X is like a turducken of overplayed storytelling tropes—in the porn movie, the traveling salesman who encounters a farmer’s buxom daughters after his car breaks down, and in the actual movie, a group of oversexed young people who venture out to a remote location and start poking around where they shouldn’t. But West possesses a unique ability to utilize the rhythms of a familiar narrative or stylistic blueprint and contemporize them so that they don’t feel like a retread of the films that came before. Here he exploits the audience’s knowledge of sex travelogues and hillbilly horror to first make them laugh and then undermine their expectations. X is bloody, ballsy fun. [Todd Gilchrist]
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