The Best Hidden Gem Horror Movies In Time For Spooky Season

It's October, find some friends and get the bejeezus scared out of you by these indie horror gems

For someone who watches as many movies as me, you’d be amazed at how many blind spots I have in the horror genre. I’m talking classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…never seen ‘em.

Growing up, I’m not ashamed to admit, I was just plain scared of horror movies. In a crowd, that nervous energy is really fun — watching The Conjuring with my travel basketball teammates yelling at the screen is one of my favorite moviegoing experiences of my life — but when I’m alone, picking out a movie designed to distress me seems like a form of self-loathing.

And even after I got hooked on movies and started overcoming my fear, I still watch movies alone a good 95% of the time. Thus, I just never caught up.

But as I talked about a few weeks ago in this newsletter, horror movies cannot be ignored in the modern landscape (or at least horror-inflected thrillers). They are really the only consistent box office overperformers, while maintaining some creative leeway for filmmakers (I’d like to think those two things are related).

Besides all that, the calendar has now flipped to October. It’s spooky season, and for the next few weeks we all want to watch a horror movie.

Of course there’s the classics, and each of those classics has now spawned sequels, spin-offs, reboots and reimaginings. If you want to watch Saw X or The First Omen or the 13th Halloween movie, be my guest! I honestly can’t be of much help there.

But the horror movies I love are the smaller budget indies, often with young or early-career directors who want to experiment and/or use the genre’s built-in audience to get financing for their first project. These movies are super creative, and often punch way above their weight in terms of style.

I’m trying my best to avoid horror-thrillers (though I prefer those and could recommend a hundred), as well as pure horror comedies (though if you haven’t seen Zombieland, The Cabin In The Woods, What We Do In The Shadows, or Shaun of the Dead, those are all bangers).

These are kind of what I’d traditionally think of as the movies you’d want to see when you’re with some friends and it’s dark outside and you’re looking for something scary to watch together. I’m also trying to give a few suggestions for each streaming service.

As with all these guides, I’m utilizing all of the 1000+ movie suggestions I’ve made over the past six years in my Friday edition of the newsletter, giving you the best of the best.

Without further ado, here’s Spooky Season Streaming Guide!

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Netflix