Yahoo Entertainment The best horror movies to watch on Amazon Prime Video
(Clockwise from bottom left:) The Neon Demon (Broad Green Pictures), The Alchemist’s Cookbook (Oscilloscope), Night Of The Living Dead (screenshot), The Wailing (Well GO USA Entertainment), Hellraiser (screenshot), Saint Maud (Courtesy of A24)
’Tis the season for horror, and Amazon Prime Video subscribers have plenty of movie-watching options to send chills up the spine. The streamer’s vast selection of classic films include Night Of The Living Dead and the original Hellraiser, as well as newcomers like Saint Maud and the remakes of Suspiria and Candyman. There’s every shade of horror here, whether you’re looking for films that make you squirm, squeal, or laugh out loud. Read on for The A.V. Club’s comprehensive roundup of Prime Video’s best and scariest film options.
This list was most recently updated October 28, 2022.
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An American Werewolf In London
An American Werewolf in London | The Transformation
Rick Baker won the very first Best Makeup And Hairstyling Oscar for his ingenious practical effects work on An American Werewolf In London. His big showcase: the scene where a bitten American tourist becomes a creature of the night—a hilarious/horrifying set piece that required star David Naughton to undergo several different prosthetic permutations (a 10-hour-a-day ordeal), each shot progressing him into a new stage somewhere between man and wolf, while the makeup team stretched rubber torsos and limbs to capture the agonizing, bone-cracking physicality of the change. Interestingly, to do American Werewolf, Baker had to leave The Howling, that other half-comic werewolf movie from 1981. [A.A. Dowd]
Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made
Shot on a budget of just $60,000 (coincidentally the same cost as its most obvious influence, The Blair Witch Project), Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made presents itself as a long-lost 1970s arthouse horror flick about two siblings digging a hole to hell. But screenwriter David Amito, who co-directed with Michael Laicini, also augments this supposedly recovered cult curiosity with bookending narration and a “legal notice” that recount the numerous suspicious deaths and injuries they claim have befallen anyone who’s watched the entire film. Antrum also overlays its footage with various spooky occult symbols and audio distortions, which—as the aforementioned narration informs us—may or may not be the work of whoever also happened to splice in quick glimpses of a gruesome snuff film. Keeping up so far? [Andrew Paul]
Candyman (2021)
Candyman - Official Trailer 2
When the scares of this slasher variation do arrive, Candyman can be quite effective. [Director Nia] DaCosta instinctively keeps both audience and legend at arm’s length, occluding kills by focal length and abstracting them into slivers of light under a door or a red-splattered movement across a window you have to squint to catch. The reflective mood flip-flops with requisite carnage, and while the true nature of Candyman has changed, horror fans who come for blood will get it by the bucket. The jokes are applied with intent and purpose; the funniest smash-cut gag of 2021 comes after a Black character asks who would be foolish enough to do the Candyman prompt for fun, just before a white girl traipses down a hallway to her doom. It’s a throwaway goof until DaCosta sees the concept through to interesting places in the film’s final act… [Anya Stanley]
Coherence
The minimalist sci-fi mindbender Coherence boasts a scenario as tried and true as the walking dead: Bickering individuals hole up in a house during a crisis, discovering that the threat looming beyond their walls may pale in comparison to the conflict happening within them. There’s a wrinkle in the design this time, however, and it’s that the characters are their own worst enemies not just in a figurative sense, but in a literal one, too. Confused? Writer-director James Ward Byrkit has the answers, and he’s not stingy about providing them. What separates his film from other exercises in Twilight Zone trickery is its refusal to play coy with a high concept. Unlike, say, the feature-length rug-pull The Signal, Coherence doesn’t get off on withholding. It would rather milk its premise for all it’s worth than stockpile secrets. The result is an uncommonly clever genre movie, reliant not on special effects—of which there are basically none—but on heavy doses of paranoia. [A.A. Dowd]
Excision
It’s hard to discuss what’s so amazing about Richard Bates Jr.’s offbeat teen horror picture Excision without talking about what happens at the end, which is predictable, but in the best way. The last five minutes or so of Excision is the gory, appalling, Vault Of Horror eight-pager that the entire film has been building to, and pays off all the weirdly beautiful gore effects that Bates has previously strewn throughout the film’s stylish dream sequences. Yet what makes Excision such an original is what precedes that payoff. AnnaLynne McCord (in a gutsy performance, at once monstrous and sympathetic) plays a pimply, gawky high-school senior who has sexy fantasies about mutilation and spends her spare time researching ways she can help her sister Ariel Winter, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. The whole movie is as body-conscious as its heroine, watching with real fascination as McCord pierces her own ears, sniffs her used tampons, and imagines herself crawling across naked men and women so that she can submerge herself in a gore-filled bathtub. Long before Excision turns into the story of an adolescent mad scientist and her sick scalpel skills, it’s already been a celebration of viscera. [Noel Murray]
Ginger Snaps
Proof that America doesn’t have a monopoly on pre-fab suburban hellpits, thedarkly funny Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps takes place in a town called Bailey Downs, which looks like a new development that just kept on developing. In this squeaky-clean environment, the Fitzgerald sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), are like a two-person trenchcoat mafia, given to wearing layers of dowdy clothes and isolating themselves in glowering secrecy. If they look to other kids like they’re always sharing some nasty, private joke, that’s because they usually are. Their biggest passion is for suicide fantasies. For a class project, they arrange a slideshow of gruesome tableaux—impalings by pitchfork and picket fence, a bathtub drowning, a classic hanging with an eerily stenciled note around the neck. They love to kick around moony scenarios about the awesomeness of their own deaths, and they even have a suicide pact (“Out on the scene and dead by 16, but together forever”), but it’s one thing to toe the line, and another to cross it. [Scott Tobias]
Grave Encounters
Execution is everything in a found-footage horror movie, and execution is what makes Grave Encounters a worthy addition to the subgenre. The concept—a documentary crew enters an abandoned mental hospital in hopes of filming paranormal activity, only to get way more than they expected—goes beyond typical into the realm of cliché. The film opens with the same shots of the crew joking around and testing out their equipment you see in all found-footage horror movies, and the institution itself is so outrageously, exaggeratedly creepy—we’re talking bloody bathtubs and walls covered in the apocalyptic scrawlings of mental patients—that it’s hard not to chuckle. But the movie wants us to chuckle. Grave Encounters revolves around a very 2011 bit of meta-humor by making this particular documentary crew work for one of those cheesy pseudo-scientific cable reality shows, like Ghost Hunters or Ghost Adventures or Paranormal State or Psychic Kids: Children Of The Paranormal. [Katie Rife]
Hellraiser
Working with a modest budget, director Clive Barker created a bloody fairy tale complete with a wicked, if not quite evil, stepmother in the form of theater actress Clare Higgins. Playing the wife of ineffectual husband Andrew Robinson (Dirty Harry), Higgins barely hides her contempt as the two move into a family house once inhabited by Robinson’s hard-living, now-missing brother, with whom Higgins once had an affair. Thanks to supernatural forces, Robinson’s brother returns, sort of, as a skinless pile of organs that entreats Higgins to kill for him in an effort to flesh out his half-formed body. Meanwhile, Robinson’s scream-prone daughter (Ashley Laurence) begins to suspect that matters might be amiss, a suspicion confirmed by the arrival of four pale demons fitted out in bondage gear. One of these, a bald demon with nails pounded into his skull, has become the most enduring image of Hellraiser and its sequels, and rightly so. A deeply unsettling, S&M-inspired creature whose blurring of the division between pleasure and pain extends to a blurring of the division between good and evil, it neatly and instantly sums up some of Barker’s themes. Pinhead barely appears in Hellraiser, a film that, with its intense and uncomfortable family drama, might have even worked without him. With him, however, it becomes one of the most innovative and memorable horror films of the ‘80s, a middle ground between mainstream fare and the work of David Cronenberg, in its most powerful moments conjuring up the latter’s ability to make viewers feel uncomfortable in their own bodies. [Keith Phipps]
My Friend Dahmer
My Friend Dahmer, a coming-of-age drama tracing the struggles of an adolescent Jeffrey Dahmer to fit in at his high school, is going to make some viewers uncomfortable. Some may even lash out against the film, deeming it insensitive toward the families of the 17 men and boys Dahmer raped, murdered, and dismembered before he was apprehended in 1991. And the film does make a bold request of its audience: to try to understand, and even sympathize with, a teenage boy who, at times, seems like any other tortured adolescent—until you remember that he went on to murder 17 men and boys. If there wasn’t a Jeffrey at your high school, the movie implies, you may have been the Jeffrey. [Katie Rife]
The Neon Demon
Ever heard the one about the girl eaten alive by showbiz? That’s the meat, more fetid than fresh, that Nicolas Winding Refn tears his teeth into with The Neon Demon, which gives a deep-red (and Deep Red) paint job to the most moribund of cautionary tales: the rise and fall of a bright-eyed ingenue. Last time the Danish director shot a movie in Los Angeles, he made dream-pop noir from the minimalist crime sagas of Michael Mann and Walter Hill. Returning to the nocturnal cityscape of Drive, Refn perverts All About Eve into a baroque death reverie—bathing the fashion industry in harsh pools of giallo light, slowing time to a hypnotic crawl, chopping away all but the faintest traces of plot. Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it. [A.A. Dowd]
Night Of The Living Dead
George Romero’s landmark zombie thriller Night Of The Living Dead remains bracing, but nothing could compare now to the way the film was received back in 1968, at a time when even the gamiest exploitation movies were fundamentally goofy and harmless. The grainy black-and-white cinematography and the “They’re coming to get you, Barbara” joshing of Night Of The Living Dead’s opening scene led late-’60s audiences to prepare themselves for a cheesy throwback to ’50s drive-in trash, but George Romero quickly ramped up the intensity, then continued to tighten the screws, in a movie packed with surprising twists and vivid characterizations. It wasn’t just the gore that shocked viewers—although the movie’s rotting, flesh-eating ghouls definitely delivered on the zombie premise as well as any film had before—but also the way that Romero’s assured direction pulled people into his story of a freaky apocalypse and its ragtag band of survivors, before Romero turned mere suspense into outright bloody terror. [Noel Murray]
A Quiet Place Part II
A Quiet Place Part II (2021) - Hiding in the Restaurant Scene (2/10) | Movieclips
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]
Saint Maud
The new converts are usually the most intense. Even those raised in an evangelical environment complete with speaking in tongues and creationist puppet shows (à la the subjects of the infamous Jesus Camp) can’t compete with the flinty fervor of an ex-addict who’s found God. Some even replace old vices with religion, in a kind of one-to-one swap of self-destructive obsession. Such is the case with the title character of writer-director Rose Glass’ first feature. Maud (Morfydd Clark), a home nurse with a troubled past, depends on her regular fix of communion with the divine in order to stay on her newfound righteous path. And when she doesn’t get it? Well, you’ll see. Saint Maud’s combination of talky chamber drama, Paul Schrader-esque character study, and visceral body horror is an ideal fit for A24. In fact, the film contains a scene that’s in direct conversation with an oft-quoted sequence from one of the distributor’s early “elevated” horror triumphs, The Witch. And if there’s no taste of butter for Saint Maud, that’s because her supernatural visitor is the Old Testament type of angel, the kind that inspires both transcendent awe and bone-shaking fear. [Katie Rife]
Sharknado
In a stunning sequence of unadulterated camp, Sharknado proves it knows what it’s doing. A successful B movie not only embraces its more ludicrous tendencies, but finds a new, even campier angle to exploit. It acknowledges that it’s ridiculous even while the characters, facing a shark or a sharktopus or a sharknado, don’t. In the case of Sharknado, it sends Ian Ziering into the belly of a Great White with a chainsaw so he can cut himself out of the Great White with a chainsaw, and then drag the presumed dead Nova out with him since it turns out they both got swallowed whole by the same Great White because sometimes life hands you awesome, and it’s called Sharknado. [Caroline Framke]
Suspiria
Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece Suspiria (1977) is beautiful to look at, but calling it an art film is a distinctly revisionist impulse. Although the heightened aesthetics and hysterical melodrama of Italian opera have undoubtedly influenced Argento’s style, he also overlays those high-art impulses onto B-movie genre forms. Shot mostly without sync sound and dubbed for both its Italian and American releases, Suspiria wasn’t intended to be a museum piece. In fact, take away the delirious beauty of the color-coded lighting and surging prog-rock score, and you’ve got a simple slasher movie, a film whose “witches at a ballet school” mythology is a mere delivery device for the real attraction: the violent, symbolic violation of young female bodies. Not so with A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s new remake of Suspiria, a film that replaces Argento’s fixation on sexualized violence with arthouse ostentation. In his version, Guadagnino doubles down on the commitment to aesthetics that has given Argento’s original such staying power, but draws from a wholly new set of influences: Soviet-era Eastern Bloc architecture, folk-art collage, ’70s feminist performance art, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. What was bright and colorful is now drizzly and gray, and what was lurid is now self-consciously weighty. [Katie Rife]
Train To Busan
South Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho found a fresh take on the zombie-breakout flick by narrowing and elongating its shape; he constrains most of the action to a single high-speed rail, challenging a band of human survivors to safely pass from car to car. Yeon clearly establishes the rules governing his flesh-eaters early on and works within them well (one clever set piece involving a climb through the luggage racks will leave one’s nails in shreds), though his humans don’t have that same thought-through quality. (Pregnant woman and dutiful husband? Check. Workaholic dad and precocious young daughter? Check. Tragic teenage lovers? Check.) But a zombie movie content not to aspire to any loftier subtextual readings needs little more than a skilled choreographer of action, and there’s plenty of evidence that this film had one in Yeon. Ooh, do “demons in a submarine” next! [Charles Bramesco]
The Wailing
Pure evil proves an elusive matter for a provincial policeman to investigate in the Korean film The Wailing, a supernatural thriller that veers between caustic comedy and blood-soaked horror over the course of its operatically intense two and a half hours. It’s anyone’s guess why the film’s otherwise peaceable rural-village setting has lately seen a rash of grisly murders. Yet perhaps the most mysterious thing about The Wailing has to do with the spell it casts rather than with the mechanics of its plot. The Wailing might be a somewhat meandering and nonsensical genre recombination, but that spell never breaks over its lengthy running time. [Benjamin Mercer]
World War Z
World War Z Official Trailer #1 (2013) - Brad Pitt Movie HD
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]
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