26 of the best horror movies on Hulu to freak you the hell out

The best horror films on Hulu, from "Prey" and "Infinity Pool" to "Jennifer's Body."

26 of the best horror movies on Hulu to freak you the hell out
From left to right, scenes from

Do you want to watch something scary? Well, you horror stan, Hulu is a great place to start looking.

Right now, the streaming service has a solid lineup of new and old frights, ranging from Hulu originals like False Positive, starring Ilana Glazer, to cross-genre international hits like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Of course, not all horror experiences freak us out in the same way — or to the same degree — so you'll want to know what you're getting yourself into before pressing play.

To help you out, we've combed through Hulu's catalog and selected the 26 all-around best horror movies available (in no particular order). 

Good luck out there, and remember: Never go alone!

1. False Positive

Pierce Brosnan in "False Positive"
Credit: Hulu

From Mother! to Rosemary's Baby, reproduction has been explored by enough horror titles to qualify pregnancy-terror as its own subgenre. In director John Lee's False Positive, co-written with star Ilana Glazer, the gross-out body stuff you've seen done countless times gets fresh framing with a snappy script that addresses modern mothering imperfectly but thoughtfully. Plus, Pierce Brosnan plays a campy, creepy OB-GYN villain you've just gotta see. — Alison Foreman, Entertainment Reporter

How to watch: False Positive is streaming on Hulu.

2. It Lives Inside

It Lives Inside stars Never Have I Ever's Megan Suri as Sam, short for Samidha, a first-gen Indian-American teenager who really wants to fit in at school. This means leaving behind the traditions her mother, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), and her former best friend, Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), hold onto dearly. The tension between the women is already beginning to boil over when we first meet them. So when Tamira embarrasses Sam in the hallway between classes one day by freaking out and claiming there's a horrible spirit trapped inside the jar she's been carrying around, Sam finally breaks — as does the jar when Sam smashes it to the floor in a fit of rage, telling Tamira to get a grip. 

Yeah, needless to say, Tamira was onto something. And now the very real loosed spirit, called the "Pishach," is coming for everybody. A Hindu devourer of souls and flesh that works its way into our world via negative vibes, it's found a feast here among these conflicted immigrants. Out from all of this, director Bishal Dutta crafts a Babadook-ish metaphor with big scary fangs – assimilation as the real American horror story. And we watch Sam spiral into a supernatural tussle for the souls of everybody she cares about, a trail of terrors left in their wake. — Jason Adams, Contributing Writer

How to watch: It Lives Inside is now streaming on Hulu.

3. Jennifer's Body

Megan Fox stands in front of parked cars outside a club in
Credit: Doane Gregory / Fox Atomic / Kobal / Shutterstock

It was exiled in cult-ville for a while, but Jennifer's Body finally seems to have secured its rightful place as a stone-cold teen-horror classic. Directed by Karyn Kusama (The Invitation) and written by Diablo Cody (Juno), the film centers on nerdy teen girl Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and popular queen bee Jennifer (Megan Fox) and their unlikely BFF love affair. Their friendship becomes unlikelier still when Jennifer finds herself assaulted by a Satan-worshipping rock band and accidentally turns into a literal man-eating succubus.

As the pile of dead horny teen boys begins piling up, Needy must stop her bestie from bleeding the entire high school class dry. And all of teenage-dom's fraught bullshit becomes weaponized in a teen girl duel to the death that could've only come from the keyboard of Diablo Cody. — J.A.

How to watch: Jennifer's Body is streaming on Hulu.

4. Hatching

A perfect companion piece to Black Swan, Hatching is a Finnish horror film from 2022 about a tween girl ballerina named Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) whose overbearing influencer mother (Sophia Heikkilä) is far more concerned about presenting a perfect image to the world than any well-being, mental or physical, of her daughter's. That quest for perfection becomes a tad bit more complicated when Tinja starts raising the orphaned egg of a crow her mother murdered (for the crime of destroying a family portrait) — especially when the egg hatches and quickly grows into a massive carnivorous bird that Tinja tries, but fails, to control herself. (Just ask the poor puppy next door.) The monster bird is a wonder of puppetry (no CG here!), but the wonders of Hatching don't stop there; it's got 10 types of unexpected weirdness prepped. And you will absolutely not see where it's all headed until, like Tinja's mum, it's far too late to dance yourself outta this one. — J.A. 

How to watch: Hatching is streaming on Hulu.

5. Amulet

Alec Secareanu as Tomas and Carla Juri as Magda stand in a hallway, looking up, in "Amulet."
Credit: Rob Baker Ashton / Head Gear / Kobal / Shutterstock

The first feature written and directed by British actor Romola Garai (Atonement), Amulet is a gothic chiller about an ex-soldier named Tomaz (Alec Secareanu of God's Own Country) who's being chased by the ghosts of his past. Not literally — this is not a ghost movie — but via the very bad memories he carries with him from his unnamed war-torn homeland. Ones which we become privy to via flashback, and ones that become gradually more disturbing as the film goes on. Unable to accomplish much in his life, he ends up on the streets of London, where a nun named Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton) takes pity on him and gets him a job as the live-in helper to a young woman named Magda (Carla Juri) who's taking care of her ill mother, hidden away in the attic. That's never a warning sign!

Yes, this gig turns out to be not exactly what he was sold on, and his discoveries about these two women become as scary as anything bubbling up from his disturbing past. Before he even realizes it, Tomaz finds himself trapped in a whole new sort of nightmare. It's not so surprising, given there's an actor in the director's chair, that Amulet prioritizes the slow and unsettling build of its performances, taking time to establish a sturdy and enviable relationship between Tomaz and Magda that we come to care about. Right before horribly ripping that rug out from under us and revealing the shrieking chasm of horror that's been right beneath their feet — or in this case, up in the attic — all along. — J.A. 

How to watch: Amulet is streaming on Hulu.

6. The First Omen

Not that these habits deserve defending, but if one were so inclined, The First Omen is a good movie to point to when people say that Hollywood's insistent reliance on IP is totally fruitless. This is one of the (few and far between) good examples in which adding onto an iconic story bore some fruit. Presented as a direct prequel to Richard Donner's 1970 film, director Arkasha Stevenson — whose fine work on the two streaming horror series Brand New Cherry Flavor and Channel Zero should not go unspoken — suffuses The First Omen in a sense of dread that proves worthy of its forebear.

The movie tells the story of an American nun-in-training named Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free from Servant) sent to Rome to work at an orphanage. After bonding with Carlita (Nicole Sorace), the resident weirdo orphan who's kept locked in her room so she can devote all her time to drawing weirdo drawings, Sister Margaret becomes convinced that there is a plot surrounding the girl. Specifically, her fellow nuns and the priests in charge mean to sacrifice Carlita in some sort of pact with the devil. And if you do know The Omen, you can probably guess where this is all going, but Stevenson packs the film to the rafters with wildly unsettling imagery, and Free is such a terrific actress that you're drawn into this nightmare anyway, deeply dreading those final moments that you know are looming ahead. — J.A.  

How to watch: The First Omen is streaming on Hulu.

7. Villains

A man wears a pigeon mask in "Villains"
Credit: Hulu

Venerable horror icons Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe lead Villains, a Bonnie and Clyde-meets-Don't Breathe mashup with a sprinkling of '50s style you'll love. When criminal lovebirds Jules and Mickey decide to rob a house, they encounter a mystery within and must contend with the home's residents, played by Kyra Sedgwick and Jeffrey Donovan, to solve it. — A.F.

How to watch: Villains is streaming on Hulu.

8. Sea Fever

If you're a fan of the ever-reliable subgenre of aquatic horror (think Leviathan or The Deep) and you've never seen Neasa Hardiman's 2019 Sea Fever, then are you ever in for a treat. Starring the capable twosome of Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott as a fishing boat captain and her husband who trawl the waters off of Ireland, the search for one big haul takes them and their crew into uncharted waters where, you guessed it, something sinister lurks below the surface. Meaning the surface of the water and then, unnervingly, beneath the surface of their skin. Convincingly marrying science with its horror a la Barry Levinson's equally underrated The Bay, Sea Fever manages to drag all manner of slippery grossness up; it becomes terrifying because the movie makes it seem terrifyingly plausible. — J.A.

How to watch: Sea Fever is streaming on Hulu.

9. I Saw the Devil

Lee Byung-hun peers around a corner in "I Saw the Devil."
Credit: Softbank Ventures / Kobal / Shutterstock

Essentially an extended chase scene between a cop named Kim Soo-Hyeon (Squid Game's Lee Byung-hun) and a psychotic serial killer Jang Kyung-chul (Oldboy star Choi Min-Sik) who murders Kim's fiancée in the film's incredibly disturbing opening scene, I Saw the Devil is a two and a half hour siege of relentless, breathless terror. 

It's not that we haven't seen this story before. It's basically a Western, just with sleek snowy parkas standing in for chaps. But it is very much how director Kim Jee-woon stages it all — a brutal knife fight between three men inside a moving car turns violence into poetry. As each man thinks they've gotten one over on the other, we watch them twist and turn toward hell together — it hits its marks but with such style. I Saw the Devil is thrilling, bloody, and extremely scary when it wants to be… which is thankfully very often. — J.A.

How to watch: I Saw the Devil is streaming on Hulu. 

10. Crimes of the Future

You think you know what you're getting into, with Crimes of the Future being hailed as the movie that finally saw legendary Canadian director David Cronenberg dipping his toe back into the Body Horror well that he so thoroughly defined, thanks to films like Videodrome and The Fly, that it became known as "Cronenbergian." And yet Crimes of the Future – which shares a title with a film Cronenberg made in 1970 but is not a remake – is even weirder and funnier and more out-there than you can imagine. 

Reuniting with his muse Viggo Mortensen, Crimes of the Future is really a rumination on the making of art. But in a way only Cronenberg could've come up with. Viggo plays Saul Tenser, a futuristic performance artist who has his deformed organs harvested on stage by his partner Caprice (Lea Sedoux) before growing new, even more bizarre organs in their place. Through no fault of his own, Saul becomes enmeshed in the battle between a group of evolutionary terrorists and the shady bureaucrats (including a hysterically strange Kristen Stewart) trying to stop them. It's basically The Man Who Knew Too Much but with lots of wound-fellating. Guaranteed to get under your skin! Where it will then wriggle around! — J.A.

How to watch: Crimes of the Future is streaming on Hulu. 

11. Prey

A young woman battles an alien in "Prey."
Credit: David Bukach © 2022 20th Century Studios

The widely successful prequel to the Predator franchise, Prey is set in 1719 and follows Naru (Amber Midthunder) as she tries to protect her community from our favorite clicking, creepy alien nightmare. Hulu also has the entire Predator franchise available for streaming if you’re up for a marathon. — Yasmeen Hamadeh, Entertainment Intern

How to watch: Prey is streaming on Hulu.

12. Enys Men 

This is definitely one for the more adventurous among us. Writer-director Mark Jenkin's experimental 2020 twist on the folk horror genre stars a terrific Mary Woodvine as an unnamed scientist who's been left totally alone on a remote island off the coast of Cornwall, England, to study local plant life. Specifically, a kind of flower that only grows there, and the lichen that is devouring it. As usually happens with people left alone for long stretches of time in remote places, the woman slowly loses her moorings and her mind, as time stops making sense and some mysterious ghost miners start appearing to her. 

And so the movie goes — the woman's clockwork daily activities, which we've been using to navigate time's passing ourselves, begin expanding and contracting onscreen until we too find ourselves steadily loosed from any sense of reality. The film builds a rhythm, and then it turns it against us. Enys Men is a real trip, in other words. And one beautifully filmed on 16mm film; there are the kinds of images here — those strange flowers, especially — that will sear themselves deep onto your forever place. — J.A.

How to watch: Enys Men is streaming on Hulu.

13. Infinity Pool

Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth in "Infinity Pool."
Credit: Neon

Like The White Lotus on meth, director Brandon Cronenberg's nightmarish Infinity Pool sends a pair of married well-to-do beauties named James (Alexander Skarsgard) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) to an exclusive tropical resort to see what chaos they can wrangle up, all in the name of avoiding their marital problems. And does it ever wrangle up, first in the form of another pair of married well-to-do beauties – Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert). The foursome flirt over dinner, as beautiful rich people do, and the next day they find themselves breaking the resort's rules to head off into the countryside to taste a little local color. 

Unfortunately, the local color they find is all red – blood, gore, and some unknown science-fiction goo that traps them in a sticky tangle of consciousness cloning that'll have them wishing all the locals had wanted was their kidneys. Like all of Cronenberg Jr.'s movies to date, Infinity Pool proves itself to be a surreal puzzle that spirals outward into endless complexity, dissolving not just the walls of the body but those of the mind too. The barriers between our flesh and our fantasies turn to liquid in his hands — we're mostly water after all — and Infinity Pool means to drown us in its deep end. — J.A.

How to watch: Infinity Pool is streaming on Hulu.

14. The Host

Before South Korean maestro Bong Joon-ho went off and made the Oscar-winning Parasite in 2019, he seized the global stage's attention with this epic 2006 monster movie. It kicks right off with its titular amphibious monstrosity, the size of a city bus, leaping out of the Han River in downtown Seoul in the middle of the day and gobbling up a fleet of locals. Immediately, you know you're in for something new with The Host; usually monster movies take the Jaws route and conceal their beastie until the end. But Bong goes far above and beyond. Per usual. 

Besides being chock-full of incredible creature attack action sequences, The Host also manages to be an alternatingly heartbreaking and heartwarming family drama, with South Korean legend Song Kang-ho in the lead and Sense8 star Bae Doona kicking ass as his archer sister. As if that isn't enough, the movie is an act of political activism to boot, pointing its finger straight at the American military complex for poisoning Korea's waters. Bong juggles all the balls with perfect madcap aplomb. Anybody paying attention here could see right away this was a director going places. And we were right! — J.A. 

How to watch: The Host is now streaming on Hulu. 

15. Fresh

Jojo T. Gibbs holds a phone to her ear in "Fresh."
Credit: Searchlight Pictures / Moviestore / Shutterstock

Flipping the script on the dangers of online dating, Mimi Cave's dark dark dark 2022 horror-comedy Fresh shows how the dangers of the long-lauded in-person meet-cute can trump the worst even Tinder might have to offer. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Noa, who's seriously over the cyber-dating scene when suddenly a Prince Charming named Steve (Sebastian Stan, having a blast) bumps into her at the grocery store. They have an immediate connection, go on several dates, and Noa really thinks he might be the one.

Spoiler alert: Steve is not the one. This is a horror movie, after all. When the happy twosome decide to go on their first out of town trip together, Noa quickly learns Steve ain't no prince at all, and modern romance finds itself relentlessly skewered in Cave's skillful hands. This is the movie that proved MCU superstar Stan was up for taking seriously way-out-there risks. Without his hilariously creepy turn in Fresh, we probably wouldn't have then gotten his scrappy turns in A Different Man, Pam & Tommy, and The Apprentice. Fresh is delicious on all fronts. — J.A.

How to watch: Fresh is streaming on Hulu.

16. Immaculate

Newly minted movie star Sydney Sweeney seized her rightful Scream Queen crown (what a scream!) with this post-Roe v. Wade nightmare about a nun named Sister Cecilia (Sweeney) who finds herself blessed with an immaculate conception all her own. Or is it? (Unnecessary spoiler alert: Not so much!) 

After surviving drowning as a child, Cecilia becomes convinced that her life has been saved for a godly reason. She has a purpose. So when she's shipped off to Italy to work in a convent for sickly nuns, she grabs it, convinced this must be her path. Little does she know! The hot priest who invited her (Álvaro Morte) is a pile of red flags wrapped up in a sleek cassock, but it's not until Cecelia's belly starts growing that her suspicions take real hold. Immaculate bides its time, but its unholy destination is 100% one for the record books. Stumbling out of the end credits and back into the light, you will instinctively mutter a heap of Hail Marys whether you're Catholic or not. — J.A.

How to watch: Immaculate is now streaming on Hulu. 

17. Cobweb

Lizzy Caplan in "Cobweb."
Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate.

Vibing on similar themes as The Babadook and Coraline, director Samuel Bodin's debut feature stars C'mon C'mon's Woody Norman as a bullied eight-year-old named Peter whose overprotective parents Carol (Lizzy Caplan) and Mark (Antony Starr) don't much help matters. Refusing to let him partake in normal childhood activities like trick-or-treating, they keep him cooped up in the house most of the time, constantly warning him about a young girl who went missing in their neighborhood some years before. 

And then one night as Peter tries to sleep, a tap-tap-tapping on the inside of his bedroom wall begins, followed soon thereafter by a little girl's voice. And this little girl has nothing nice to say about Peter's parents. Slowly, Peter starts sensing his parents' strange behavior might be covering up a horrible secret, and before you can say "yellow wallpaper," the boy's suspicions begin unraveling his entire home life around him. Like a Grimm fairy tale sprung to life, this fabulous bedtime story features ace performances from all three of its leads (especially Caplan, who's clearly having a blast) and more goth atmosphere than you can shake a pumpkin full of bones at. An unduly overlooked gem! — J.A. 

How to watch: Cobweb is streaming on Hulu.

18. Skinamarink

Based on anecdotal data, Skinamarink works on about one out of every ten people who watch it. Those who do click with it may be few and far between, but this ultra low-budget indie leaves them shuddering in terror, unable to shake off its sense of absolute wrongness for days after. So lucky, we few! I do indeed count myself among those who found Kyle Edward Ball's experimental 2022 flick unnerving as hell. It got to me and then some.

The story, as much as there is one, involves two little kids named Kevin and Kaylee who seem to have been left home alone one night, as long as you don't count the sinister presence stalking the hallways, whispering to them from the darkness, and making the doors and windows of their home disappear. Time seems to stretch out infinitely, which can feel either entertainingly terrifying or like 100 minutes of staring at walls with the occasional glimpse of a haunted toy. If you are one of those able to vibe on Skinamarink's wavelength, then watch out. Those walls will stare right back. — J.A.

How to watch: Skinamarink is streaming on Hulu.

19. 28 Weeks Later

A group of people run through a tunnel in "28 Weeks Later."
Credit: Susie Allnut / Fox Atomic / DNA / UK Film Council / Kobal / Shutterstock

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 2007 sequel to Danny Boyle's revolutionary zombie movie 28 Days Later has never gotten the proper appreciation it deserves. Yes, tonally, it's a different beast, but I've always dug its concept of society crumbling all because of one man's simpering cowardice. Doesn't it just feel that way sometimes? 

Starring Trainspotting's Robert Carlyle as a man guilt-stricken over having run from a horde of infected and having left his wife to die, the film admittedly has a bit of a Jaws IV thing going on where the plague (slash shark) seems to have it out for one particular family, thereby straining all logic. But logic be damned, this one feels more like poetry, like a fairy tale turned to terrible life. — J.A.

How to watch: 28 Weeks Later is streaming on Hulu.

20. Alien

Witness the birth of three, yes three, horror icons! Ridley Scott's 1979 haunted-house-in-space masterpiece Alien gives us first the Xenomorph, the murderous outer space creature with acid for blood and a mean streak a million light-years long. And it gives us Ellen Ripley, the ultimate Final Girl brought to life by actress Sigourney Weaver, in what would be the first of four on-screen appearances by this character. Finally (and most importantly) it gives us Jonesy the cat, who's had enough of this shit for nine lifetimes. 

Still the best movie Scott's ever made, this horror classic about a group of space truckers who encounter one hell of a stowaway has lost none of its terrifying power in the four and a half decades since its making. Awash in killer character actors doing their thing (Yaphet Kotto! Veronica Cartwright! Ian Holm!) before getting torn to shreds one by one, every sequence of this movie, from chest-burster to Mother's countdown, deserves to be in the Horror Movie Hall of Fame. Just as long as they stay out of Jonesy's way. — J.A. 

How to watch: Alien is streaming on Hulu.

21. Piggy

Laura Galán in "Piggy."
Credit: Jorge Fuembuena. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

Sara (Laura Galán) is an overweight teenager living a deeply unhappy existence in a rural Spanish town; she can't even go for a swim on the hottest day of the summer without being mercilessly bullied by a gang of mean girls. (The film's title is their cruel nickname for Sara.) Those mean girls get theirs, though; they're kidnapped by a mysterious man who leaves behind one witness who could help save them: Sara herself. 

And so writer/director Carlota Pereda's 2022 film, a feature-length reenvisioning of her own short film from a few years earlier, introduces its troubling moral quandary — should Sara show mercy for those who tormented her? Or should she give in to her thirst for revenge and leave them to rot on the vine? Pereda manages to complicate our feelings on the matter with every twist, all while delivering a terrific and tense exercise from the small-town drama surrounding the mystery of the missing girls. Galán gives a wonder of a performance, making Sara difficult to love but tremendously easy to empathize with. — J.A. 

How to watch: Piggy is streaming on Hulu.

22. Suitable Flesh

When director Stuart Gordon died in 2020, a lot of horror fans feared they'd never again get a goopy and gross and downright disgustingly sexy H.P. Lovecraft adaptation again. With Dagon, From Beyond, and his Re-Animator movies, Gordon had proven the clear master of those cherished 1980s classics. Enter director Joe Lynch in 2023, who crafted Suitable Flesh as an ode to all things Gordon-ian, and gave us one of the most entertainingly sickening examples of them all. 

An adaptation of the Lovecraft story "The Thing on the Doorstep," Suitable Flesh stars Heather Graham as the psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby, who's busy leading a perfect life with her hot, sweet husband Eddie (Johnathon Schaech). Perfect, that is, until she starts finding herself drawn, somewhat erotically, to a new patient named Asa (Judah Lewis), who's convinced his dying father has been possessing him. From there it all turns into a ton of bloody body-swapping fun that all of the actors have a hell of a good time playing with, especially once horror icon Barbra Crampton (star of several of Gordon's classics) swings in as Elizabeth's own psychiatrist. Great old-school vibes with lots of pink goo – just what the doctor ordered! — J.A.

How to watch: Suitable Flesh is now streaming on Hulu. 

23. Censor

Niamh Algar looks out of a window in "Censor."
Credit: Magnolia Pictures / Moviestore / Shutterstock

The conservative argument that disturbing content (like horror movies, for instance) will rot a person's brain and turn them into a psychopath is brought to diabolical life in writer/director Prano Bailey-Bond's psychedelic 2021 thriller Censor. Set in the mid-'80s, when controversy over "video nasties" has taken England by storm, Censor stars a stellar Niamh Algar (Mary & George) as a prim woman named Enid who works for the British Board of Film Classification. Basically, it's her job to watch all of the really fucked-up movies and tell the filmmakers what they have to edit out if they want to be certified for public exhibition. 

So day after day, Enid sifts through the worst stuff imaginable, going frame by repulsive frame. It doesn't help that she's got her own childhood trauma involving a missing sister lurking about, which one film that she watches in particular seems to trigger a few repressed memories of real hard. And before you know it, our precious Enid finds herself falling down the filthy rabbit hole of exploitation cinema, her sanity a mere splatter upon its walls. And thank goodness nobody was around to censor Censor, because this is one fucked-up good time. — J.A. 

How to watch: Censor is streaming on Hulu.

24. The Feast

One of the best of the recent folk horrors that we've seen in the wake of Midsommar and The Witch, Lee Haven Jones' Welsh 2021 fright-fest The Feast is deeply creepy, stuffed to its tippy-top with hair-raising imagery that I dare you to forget anytime soon after. Set against a small dinner party at the country estate of a rich and powerful family, led by politician-father Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), it's easy enough to see pretty much where The Feast is going from its start. Anyone would clock these rich people as immediately awful, and the local girl Cadi (Annes Elwy) who's been hired to help out with the party has some sort of off-kilter and sinister vibe from the moment she steps onto their property. 

And yet the disturbing depths Jones takes everything to still shock – it's basically Triangle of Sadness meets The Wicker Man, but with way more booby-trapped genitals then that equation might at first imply. And to cap it all off, the mossy nightmare vibes of Bjorn Stale Bratberg's cinematography are absolutely breathtaking. This is, simply put, one of the most beautiful-to-behold horror movies of recent years. — J.A.

How to watch: The Feast is now streaming on Hulu.

25. Bone Tomahawk

A woman sits talking with a man in "Bone Tomahawk."
Credit: Caliber Media Company / Kobal / Shutterstock

The absolutely vicious first film from director S. Craig Zahler (who went on to make the also-vicious action flicks Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete) remains his best work to date, somewhat by leaps and bounds. Bone Tomahawk is a 2015 Western set in 1890s California about two morons (David Arquette and Sid Haig) who stupidly desecrate a Native American burial site and end up dragging their entire town into utter hell for it. 

Their blunder sets into a chain of events that forces the sheriff (Kurt Russell) and a pack of local men (among them Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Patrick Wilson) to head out into hostile territory to save the wimmin-n-chillin', as the saying goes. Oh and did I mention that the tribe they're up against are inbred troglodyte cannibals that all the other Native Americans steer super clear of? That's probably an important detail. Featuring one of the most grotesque scenes of violence put on screen in the last 20 years, Bone Tomahawk makes the "hard" in "Goes Hard" work extra extra hard y'all. — J.A.

How to watch: Bone Tomahawk is now streaming on Hulu.

26. When Evil Lurks

Another one that goes super duper hard, Demián Rugna's When Evil Lurks lurched its monstrous way toward us in 2022 out of Argentina, telling us of the apocalyptic outbreak that happens after an evil spirit is not sufficiently disposed of by brother-farmers Pedro and Jaime (Ezequiel Rodríguez and Demián Salomon). Dropping pieces of its bizarre world-building little bit by little bit, Rugna keeps us guessing as to what the hell is happening as this seemingly small mistake spreads outward like the plague — evil infecting everything it comes into contact with; a genie that cannot be stuffed back into its bottle once loosed. Pedro and Jaime pick up family members along the way as they try to first stomp out their error and then just run from it – it's a road trip through the belly of hell, and When Evil Lurks isn't afraid to tear apart the most innocent among us as we all stare on helplessly. — J.A.

How to watch: When Evil Lurks is now streaming on Hulu.

UPDATE: Apr. 24, 2024, 5:00 a.m. EDT This article has been updated to reflect current streaming options.

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