It's built from our twisted dreams, and our collective fears. It thrives in dark places, but can also live right out in the open. And the best joke the horror genre has ever played — and one it returns to again, again, and again — is that you always knew it would get you in the end. Our list of the best horror series on Netflix accesses a lof of the touchpoints that have always made horror scream — trudging zombies hungry for brains, unkillable slashers intent on body count, and cults with the hots for ritualistic murders — but it takes some left turns, too.
From slow-burn gothic scares and spooky cult weirdness to creative takes on undead freaks and opening wide the gates of hell, this is your sure-fire list of what horror series are hot on Netflix right now.
In the South Korean horror-fantasy series Hellbound, individuals learn of their fated, one way trip to hell from an executor — an "angel," though it really isn't — and then, at the prescribed moment, whether it's minutes or months from the pronouncement, three bruising supernatural thugs appear to carry them off to the deep. It's a premise with roots in creator Yeon Sang-ho's webtoon, and one that translates to television with a flair for illuminating the garish ways our contemporary reality can often feel like a construct. When cult leader Jeong Jin-soo (Yoo Ah-in) posts footage of these extra-reality abductions on YouTube, Hellbound cleverly uses the limits of that platform to disguise the limits to its own TV budget CGI. The result is a series that explores how the unwanted entry of the divine into everyday life can become not miraculous but horrifying.
As Hellbound unfolds, rival groups take action in the face of these frightening incidents. On the one hand, there's Jeong and the New Truth Society; on the other, there's Arrowhead, a violent youth gang. And caught in between are everyday people saddled with the realization that their existence and the world at large have become forever changed.
If you enjoyed Hellbound, you might also enjoy: All of Us Are Dead, streaming on Netflix.
If you've been paying attention to the Stranger Things universe, you've witnessed the evolution of psychokinetic government lab escapee Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) as she bonds with Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin). You were there for the disappearance and reemergence of Will (Noah Schnapp), whose immersion in an alternate dimension known as The Upside Down eventually brings the horrors of the Mind Flayer monster to Hawkins, Indiana. And you've seen a completely different monstrous entity, Vecna, get down with some grisly murdering of its own, as well as draw the plucky group at the core of the series into the alternate dimension itself. There's a lot going on in Stranger Things, and it's always intermixing horror, sci-fi, comedy, and teen drama.
But that particular brand of Stranger Things horror is also a mirror onto the '80s, a time when — from Fright Night and Cat's Eye to The Lost Boys and A Nightmare on Elm Street — it was always the youths who were getting into all kinds of freaky trouble. "I love watching kids grow up on camera," Stranger Things co-creator Matt Duffer told EW in 2016. "So the idea of seeing where these kids and these characters are one year later is cool to me. And it allows us to explore the mythology of our nether."
If you enjoyed Stranger Things, you might also enjoy: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, streaming on Netflix.
When it comes to Netflix, Feria: The Darkest Light co-creator Carlos Montero is probably best known for Elite, his Spanish private school drama that's more steamy than it is scary. But for this series set in the '90s, teenaged sisters Eva (Ana Tomeno) and Sofia (Carla Campra) are plunged into the center of some creepy and culty goings-on in their mountainous Andalusian village when their parents become the apparent perpetrators of a mass suicide, an incident that connects to a multi-generational attempt to build a literal highway to hell. Would you travel to damnation and back just to see your mom again? One of the sisters in Feria is more than willing.
"When we strip ourselves of our flesh, we find ourselves in the relief…You who preside over the hidden mysteries of the Supreme Triad, and shine during the night, Behemoth…" The rituals and testifying in Feria are full of bloodlettings, skin flayings, and people who were supposedly dead returning to their physical forms. And that's before we even mention the storm of supernatural elements that becomes a demonic gateway to the deep. In short, there's as much cult mystery in Feria: The Darkest Light as there is manifestation of the beyond, and it all makes for quite a horror story yarn.
If you enjoyed Feria: The Darkest Light, you might also enjoy: Archive 81, streaming on Netflix.
The Haunting of Hill House, the debut entry in creator Mike Flanagan's Haunting anthology, is adapted from Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel of the same name and set across two timelines: in 1992, when supernatural events plague the Crain family upon their move to and eventual flight from the titular home; and twenty-six years later, when the scares from way back are still living in the present, and the siblings and dear old dad must face the chilling frights of their collective past. Timothy Hutton and Henry Thomas both star as patriarch Hugh Crain, with Carla Gugino, Elizabeth Reaser, Kate Siegel, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Victoria Pedretti, Michiel Huisman, and Annabeth Gish rounding out the cast.
"Hill house is the most iconic haunted house in literature," Flanagan told EW in a 2018 interview, "so of course the opportunity to spend some time there was irresistible. Those themes of paranoia, freedom, and confinement, the fragility of self, the ambiguity of the supernatural…those were all elements of the source material that I wanted to take a stab at."
If you enjoyed The Haunting of Hill House, you might also enjoy: The Haunting of Bly Manor, streaming on Netflix.
When it came time to follow up his pair Netflix horror hits — The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor — filmmaker Mike Flanagan had something equally chilling, but a little bit different in mind. In Midnight Mass, when Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) returns to his remote island hometown, his encounters with the mysterious Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater) quickly turn into an eerie stew of belief, resurrection, supernatural intervention, and bloodlust.
It's a story Flanagan had been preparing to tell for years: "I don't know how long I could have gone without writing it," he told EW. "There's a very natural thing that happens where, if you're writing anything that tiptoes into a personal place, you find yourself vomiting up all sorts of things into it. It's happened to me with Hill House in a pretty big way. It happened with [Bly Manor]. This one, though, was the story I always wanted to tell."
Flanagan also drew from his usual round of players for Midnight Mass. Kate Siegel, his regular collaborator and wife, is here as a brave schoolteacher on the island, and Rahul Kohli (iZombie), Annabeth Gish, and Henry Thomas were all a part of either Hill House or Bly. What's in store for everyone in Mass are revelations that true faith does not equal true vision, and that when somebody tells you they're an angel, you might want to do some independent research. That is, if you want to keep breathing.
If you enjoyed Midnight Mass, you might also enjoy: The Midnight Club, streaming on Netflix in October 2022.
The French horror drama Marianne is full of murderous prose coming to life, straight up satisfying jump scares, cursed runes, and various personal cruelties inflicted on its characters. But what might be most cruel is that Netflix axed it after only one season, a move the streamer has made with more and more aggression as it deems a title unready or unsteady for prime time fame. Marianne, which maintains its slow burn sense of dread, almost certainly deserved to explore that more in a second season. But as it is, the series becomes one of the more artful and engaging one-and-dones in the Netflix horror series library.
Victoire Du Bois (Call Me By Your Name) stars as Emma Larsimon, a novelist who discovers that the characters she's put on the page have emerged in real life, with a mixture of murderous, possesive, and demonic results. As Emma returns to where it all began for her, she confronts what she's created alongside her old friends and their collective dramas. But not everything is as it seems — not even words on a page — and, naturally, not everyone survives.
If you enjoyed Marianne, you might also enjoy: The Unsettling, streaming on Netflix.
The Canadian horror anthology series Slasher — which debuted in 2016 on the short-lived horror platform Chiller before migrating to Netflix — operates on a pretty conventional premise for the genre: consider the masked killer, consider his victims, and consider their stupidity for becoming slasher fodder in the first place. It's a trope that's generated reams of screams and gallons of fake blood for generations of horror films, and Slasher just carries the line across your throat a little further.
Slasher isn't here to elevate, explore, or artfully stylize horror. It's here to put people — often sexy people — in situations where, for example, episodes of the anthology feature titles like "Digging Your Grave With Your Teeth," or the camp counselors' secrets make them dead meat, or a guy in a blue mask eviscerates the impossibly horny for perhaps unknown reasons. And sometimes, in horror, that's really all that needs to happen.
Note: The most recent season of the series, Slasher: Flesh & Blood, is streaming on Shudder and stars the one and only Canadian icon of body horror himself, David Cronenberg.
If you enjoyed Slasher, you might also enjoy: Hemlock Grove, streaming on Netflix.
The Walking Dead (and its universe of spin-offs) has been around so long that it's safe to think of the pioneering zombie series itself as being pretty much undead. But that's not the case, as the post-apocalyptic horror saga that debuted way back on Halloween night 2010 is airing its 11th and final season on AMC in 2022. So why not catch up on the first ten seasons as they chronicle the onset of the zombie mutation, the advance of the walkers, the collapse of society as we know it, and the rise of perpetual battles between bands of human survivors?
"Please! This is not what I signed up for!," longtime star Andrew Lincoln recounted to EW way back in 2010, and back then his character Rick Grimes had only been hacking corpses, draping himself in entrails, and tossing aside severed limbs for two episodes. Lincoln would go on to tough it out for (spoiler alert) nine seasons of TWD mayhem.
From Norman Reedus' arrow-tossing hunter Daryl and Lauren Cohan as the fiery Maggie, to Danai Gurira's katana-wielding Michonne and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the psychopathic boss Negan, the ensemble cast of The Walking Dead features a deep, deep bench, which is all the more reason to dive back in and explore the fates of all its characters. Who made it through the initial fights? Better yet, who will survive the horrific landscape of a world overrun by zombies and grinding human vs. human conflict all the way to the series finale?
If you enjoyed The Walking Dead, you might also enjoy: iZombie, streaming on Netflix.
If you're looking for a healthy dose of atmosphere with your horror, Cracow Monsters has you covered. The Polish series pits a band of university students against a host of paranormal threats — ancient evils, mysterious wraiths, demons with deadly vendettas — and doesn't cut away from the action whenever Alexsandra (Barbara Liberek) has to suddenly strike down whatever beast from beyond has shown up with an axe to grind. But in Monsters, special effects and practical horror makeup combine with lighting techniques and a powerful sense of place to make Cracow itself a puzzle box of horror.
In this show, everything is always wet, it's always the middle of the night, and all routes lead through dark corridors and into murky alleyways. And what goes bump in the night isn't just a nightmare, but your actual nightmare. Andrzej Chyra, Malgorzata Bela, and Stanislaw Linowski co-star with Liberek in Cracow Monsters, and a disparate cast of youthful paranormal hunters rounds out the crew.
If you enjoyed Cracow Monsters, you might also enjoy: Diablero, streaming on Netflix.
Brand New Cherry Flavor stars Rosa Salazar (Alita: Battle Angel) as an aspiring filmmaker who arrives in a ramshackle, overgrown, pulp novel-ish, and illusory '90s Los Angeles, where her professional plans are quickly derailed with the introduction of a witch named Boro (Catherine Keener). Cue up a rogue's gallery of supernatural manipulation and bloody misadventures, milk baths that conjure evil doings, and spells that cause people to vomit kittens. A foray into the seedy underbelly of show business and the city itself, this horror series also includes dastardly curses, dreams bending into dark shapes of reality, and zombie henchmen who do their boss witch's bidding.
Brand New Cherry Flavor was adapted from the Todd Grimson novel of the same name by creator and showrunner Nick Antosca, who previously helmed Channel Zero (now on Shudder), a horror anthology based on the Very Online legends and scary stories known as creepypastas. And while Cherry Flavor is definitely into fetishizing its horror side, what it loves most is blanketing its world in queasiness spiked with hyperactive drug euphoria. It's got scares, it's got style; it's also got Catherine Keener playing a wise and wiley bad lady witch, which is really all you need. And if a weird door in the floor opens, why not go down it?
If you enjoyed Brand New Cherry Flavor, you might also enjoy: Vampires, streaming on Netflix.