The Haunting of Netflix House 4: The Netflix Master
September 29, 2016 2:30 PM   Subscribe

Comics writer Benito Cereno gives his now traditional guide to "good, notable, or at least interesting horror and horror-adjacent movies available to stream on Netflix" in October *, the spookiest of months.

* Except The Exorcist, watch that one now.
posted by Artw (62 comments total) 64 users marked this as a favorite
 
Robert Eggers's The Witch. Watch that tonight. Make sure you have a pillow to hide behind.
posted by Fizz at 2:37 PM on September 29, 2016 [10 favorites]


I don't think Netflix has The VVitch. Amazon Prime does though!
posted by Artw at 2:41 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


The Taking of Deborah Logan (super highly recommended; EXPIRING OCT 1! WATCH IMMEDIATELY!)

Seconded.
posted by kyp at 2:42 PM on September 29, 2016


My Mefi friendly picks would be The Babadook , Pontypool and A Girl Walks Home at Night.
posted by Artw at 2:43 PM on September 29, 2016 [10 favorites]


ArtW, I should have clarified. I have Netflix CA (Canada), which has been killing it lately with what its offering. I was very surprised to see The Witch being offered. Either way, do yourself a favour and try to find a copy. It's a very dark and disturbing look at hysteria and panic.
posted by Fizz at 2:44 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


housebound is AWESOME and i'm not even a huge horror movie fan and i just think it's superb. really hilarious yet suspenseful kiwi horror comedy

also whaaaaat white god is on netflix now? i need to watch it immediately
posted by burgerrr at 2:45 PM on September 29, 2016 [8 favorites]


Damn. I have fallen into a US-centric spooky fail...
posted by Artw at 2:46 PM on September 29, 2016


*scans list for The Invitation*
*sees The Invitation*
*nods*
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:49 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


The Babadook

Is scary, absolutely, but is also a movie whose emotional impact is much more than just "scary," given that it's essentially a struggling single mother and her emotionally disturbed child descending into madness. It's a terrific movie, but not really something for a fun fright night chill-out.
posted by Panjandrum at 3:05 PM on September 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


horror-adjacent

This phrase made me imagine an apartment-dweller complaining to their friend: "Geez, my neighbors are SO annoying; they're always screaming bloody murder!"
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:06 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Pontypool is really good, yes. I love The Host, as well.

Stake Land is like... I dunno, I'm pretty tepid on it, but my partner really likes it. Very YMMV. If you like supernatural, post-apocalyptic road trip movies, I guess this is a solid entry in the genre.
posted by tobascodagama at 3:11 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Is scary, absolutely, but is also a movie whose emotional impact is much more than just "scary," given that it's essentially a struggling single mother and her emotionally disturbed child descending into madness. It's a terrific movie, but not really something for a fun fright night chill-out.

So we watched it after a particularly trying day with the kids, and the person who we watched it with had also had a shitty day for similar reasons, and we all found it weirdly cathartic.
posted by Artw at 3:13 PM on September 29, 2016 [8 favorites]


Seconding Housebound--hilarious but moderately scary too.
posted by Wobbuffet at 3:37 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Housebound! Housebound! Housebound!

Don't read too much about it, or you'll spoil the twist. It is not especially gory or sexy or torture-y (though the protagonist is "trapped" at home by a monitoring bracelet), and is more of a older-school "something is afoot in this house/neighborhood" spooky-scary.
posted by Lyn Never at 3:39 PM on September 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


The Babadook
Is scary, absolutely, but is also a movie whose emotional impact is much more than just "scary," given that it's essentially a struggling single mother and her emotionally disturbed child descending into madness. It's a terrific movie, but not really something for a fun fright night chill-out.


I enjoyed The Babadook a lot, but for me the obvious symbolic load-bearing on the monster's part made it way less viscerally scary, because I was always thinking about what the movie was about instead of the actual stuff happening. I kind of wish it had hammered on the symbolic function of the whole thing less and trusted us to let that sink in retroactively.
posted by invitapriore at 3:46 PM on September 29, 2016 [7 favorites]


Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanely’s Island of Dr Moreau

Highly recommended, also would 100% back a show where Richard Stanley and Fairuza Balk team up and fight and/or commit crime.

I think Stanley's sci-fi/horror pic Hardware might be on Netflix also, though not on this list. Based on a 2000AD story! Awesome robot! Deserves some kind of lifetime achievement award in soundtrack excellence!
posted by Artw at 3:52 PM on September 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


Oooh, thanks for posting this list. I'm hosting a horror movie party in October, but at first glance much of the Netflix offerings looked like dreck.
posted by Gelatin at 3:54 PM on September 29, 2016


That's because their UI is haunted by the ghost of GARBAGE DISCOVERABILITY. Woooo-ooooo-oooo!

(Few video streaming services seem to escape this spooky curse)
posted by Artw at 3:56 PM on September 29, 2016 [8 favorites]


I've seen between 80 - 90 percent of this and there's nothing on here I hated. Good job!

Last night we watched "From Within", which I think is on Amazon Prime and not Netflix, but it was pretty good. I've expected other movies to steal from It Follows, and this is the first I've seen. As movies with stolen plot mechanics go, this was a good one. Even if the male lead was sooo underwear model it was hard to take him seriously.
posted by lumpenprole at 3:59 PM on September 29, 2016


Glad to see some horror comedies on that list that I haven't seen yet. Nthing Housebound. Sad to see that Severance is no longer available on Netfilx.
posted by audi alteram partem at 4:07 PM on September 29, 2016


Really weird that he didn't put any warnings on The Snowtown Murders, after being so clear on some of the others: it's full of child abuse and has a really graphic sibling-on-sibling rape scene.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 4:18 PM on September 29, 2016


My fun hobby has been compiling a list of what's played the FantAsia festival in the past few years, and then checking what's available on Netflix/Google Play/etc.

Let's-Make-The-Teacher-Have-A-Miscarriage-Club is not currently available.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:23 PM on September 29, 2016


Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanely’s Island of Dr Moreau

Highly recommended,


thanks for the recommendation.

I think I'm one of about nine people on the planet who LOVED the car crash of a movie that finally came from this debacle (final director's credit going to John Frankenheimer). Maybe I was on drugs at the time, but the combination of Brando being decadently, insanely Brando and Val Kilmer mimicking Brando being decadently, insanely Brando seemed a perfect evocation of utter madness ... and whatever the hell was happening in the rest of the movie, it was at least never boring.
posted by philip-random at 4:25 PM on September 29, 2016


The documentary and Stanley are... not kind... about the final result.
posted by Artw at 4:27 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Shout Factory has its own streaming channel (annoyingly riddled with commercials) with a generous helping of 80's horror fun. And MST3K.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:36 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


I just wrote about it so it's been on my mind, but #Horror, while absolutely not a great movie (it's kind of a mess) is gorgeous and interesting. But I guess it depends on how much you can deal with 12-year-old girls being terrible to each other even before the killing starts (it's not really scary, exactly, but I think it's worth a look).

I also really liked Haunter, but I'm a sucker for time loop movies, so ...

The Falling is sort of horror the way, I don't know, Don't Look Now is horror (Luc Roeg, son of Nicholas Roeg, was a producer on it and it shows in the best way) or Picnic at Hanging Rock are "horror." It's also imperfect but I have watched it several times and enjoy it each time.

I tend to like weird moody horror though (apparently about teen girls), so keep that in mind with these recommendations.
posted by darksong at 4:37 PM on September 29, 2016


The documentary and Stanley are... not kind... about the final result.

Gene liked it
posted by philip-random at 4:41 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Don't forget about Shudder, a streaming service just for horror that's like Netflix (but cheaper) and even has their own 24/7 streaming channels (link to auto-playing stream, free) so you can relive the whole "what the hell movie did i just tune into the middle of?" feeling of the old cable days.
posted by destructive cactus at 4:42 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


Again, this list is not and could not be completely exhaustive, and if I left off your favorite movie, I swear I was not targeting you personally.

Poor, sweet, innocent man, this is the Internet.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:59 PM on September 29, 2016


Did Shudder get better? I had a free trial early on and it was fine but I wasn't overly excited by the selection. But as I've noted, I tend to like weird, moody horror so maybe it was just not for me?
posted by darksong at 5:10 PM on September 29, 2016


Okay I've never seen or read We Need To Talk About Kevin because although I know next to nothing about it, the one thing I've heard is that it is bleak and depressing. But I keep seeing people classify it in the scary category. Can someone tell me definitively? I love horror movies, but if we're counting existential horror of the bleak-meditation-on-the-helplessness-of-the-human-condition variety (or similar - think Gummo or 21 Grams), then I'm definitely not interested.

Should I watch We Need To Talk About Kevin?
posted by triggerfinger at 5:12 PM on September 29, 2016


Under horror comedy Ava's Possession is missing. It's fantastically funny and gory. Also, don't sleep on Dead Snow 2. Martin Starr is great. For a good survival horror, check out Preservation. Patrick: Evil Awakens is underrated too. Haunter is pretty good. I also liked Estranged, but it won't be everyone's cup of tea. Everything else seems to be covered. Good List. A+
posted by anoirmarie at 5:17 PM on September 29, 2016


Nobody should watch We Need To Talk About Kevin.
posted by Artw at 5:19 PM on September 29, 2016 [7 favorites]


triggerfinger I have to say (since you ask) that although I personally like truly bleak depressing stuff (a lot!!) Kevin was just...too much. its very well done and I am a huge Tilda fan but omg it's just...I could never re-watch that movie. so yeah...watch Trollhunter instead!! its really fun! beautiful visually
posted by supermedusa at 6:11 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


I read the Wikipedia* for We Need To Talk About Kevin, I feel it was enough.

*See also: Hogg, a bunch of those Euro Extremity movies, and the oeuvre of Gaspar Noe.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 6:24 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


They Look Like People was a very good, super-creepy no-budget horror thing. You know how folks over the last fifteen years or so have worn out the "the city is like another character! The music is like another character!" thing? Well, the sense of foreboding in this is kinda, well, I don't really want to say it, but, yeah, that.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 7:19 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


Nthing The Witch. Having come from a remote community, the madness of isolation the movie depicts can feel pretty real as the days get shorter and it gets darker & darker. The central performance by the young woman who plays the eldest daughter is very good.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:31 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Horror is such a tough category for me I usually don't even bother. I love a good psychological thriller more than just about anything, but am completely uninterested in most of the films in the horror category I watch.

Cheesy can be great, torture porn is not. Evil Dead (all of them), Hellraiser, Let The Right One In, all good. Under The Skin is a no, whatever gene makes things like The Conjuring interesting I don't have, and I won't even consider something like Saw.

I'm going to try some of the movies on this list, it looks promising. Why won't someone make a list of movies that I will like, guaranteed?
posted by bongo_x at 8:33 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


You'll like Deathgasm. It's so much fun.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:32 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


Would Nth all the above recommendations for Housebound, if it helps.
posted by Artw at 10:47 PM on September 29, 2016


Oh, yeah, Housebound is just wonderful. It has a little bit of a Wright/Pegg/Frost feel to it.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 11:44 PM on September 29, 2016


I... have actually already watched all but like a dozen of these. (And most of the "non-supernatural" category because I like ghosts dammit.) I really enjoy horror as a genre and will at least give a shot to anything that crops in that category on Netflix, which is our primary streaming service and has been for years despite kind of sucking in many ways.

I mostly agree with the recommendations; pretty much everything he said was highly recommended was indeed excellent. The only exception for me was "Deathgasm," which while I can see the reason people might enjoy it was just excruciating for me instead. I am very particular about comedy, and the characters and writing were just grating to me with their nudge-nudge-wink-wink We Are Meta-Humor posing. Also fuck's sake it's not hard to find a nerd to ask about D&D, don't just make up stupid shit.

In addition to Nthing most of the secondary shout-outs in thread so far, I have to give just another shout out to Rigor Mortis, as long as we're talking about roleplaying games. I found its completely po-faced absurdity to be hilarious and gratifying, and there is one scene in particular that I wish I could embed into roleplaying books as an example of what "spellcasting in combat" looks like.

(I just watched both "We Are Still Here" and "They Look Like People" just a couple of days ago. Liked both of them a lot. Though the former has a pretty big nonsense-plot problem, it goes down smooth, a distillation of horror-movie tropes and non-logic. Some cool monster design, too. The latter was a great deal of fun, where "fun" is defined by people who really enjoy being unsettled and disturbed for entertainment. I appreciated particularly that it did not do the traditional rote "Or WAS it!?!?!?" ending but instead chose its side and stuck to it, relying on empathy to generate the horror instead of trying to have it both ways.)
posted by Scattercat at 2:45 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I respect the hell out of the filmmakers of "They Look Like People" for making an unpopular choice in resolving their plot, rather than a vague or a crowd-pleasery one. And not only that, I thought they stuck the landing, too.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 3:15 AM on September 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


whatever gene makes things like The Conjuring interesting I don't have

The Conjuring bothers me because I absolutely adore Vera Farmiga,, and I'm generally willing to watch her in anything, and she's even great in that turd, but it's just such an awful movie with such a dumb premise and I was well aware of the Warrens as con-artists long before the movies became a thing, to the point that I simply can't behind it at all. Not even with Vera Farmiga.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:04 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


I would actually really enjoy a movie with the Warren/stand ins as con artists, with or without them encountering an actual real life supernatural menace and getting eaten by it at the end.
posted by Artw at 6:22 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


->triggerfinger I'm going to join the voices of people saying not to watch Kevin. It seemed bleak in a sort of cruel and unbelievable way. It's well directed and the acting is superb but I couldn't get all the way through it. I've heard the book is a lot better.

I also LOVE Stakeland and it's one of my favourite vampire movies (one or two awful plot twists notwithstanding). I think it did a really fantastic job of capturing a lot of the atmosphere of The Road that the movie didn't. Big Bad Wolves is pretty great too.

Creep would be the number one thing I'd unrecommend from this list. I thought it was utterly awful. One review summed it up as "a horror movie for people who look down on horror movies." I felt like the movie was wasting my time the entire way through. Burke and Hare is also awful as are the V/H/S movies. All the slashers are not worth your time, don't get suckered into Stage Fright just because Meatloaf voice acts in it (that was my mistake). Extraordinary Tales and Grand Piano were disappointing.
posted by Neronomius at 6:27 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


I love it when we do let's talk horror movie recs threads.

Has anyone else seen Let Us Prey? It's not on this list, but it really ought to be. Very cool Scottish movie that combines John Carpenter vibes, a bit of Prince of Darkness, a bit of Assault on Precinct 13. It has Liam Cunningham (Ser Davos from Game of Thrones) in an absolutely magnetic performance and Pollyanna McIntosh as the hero. And if you don't know and love Pollyanna McIntosh, what are you even doing in this thread?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:29 AM on September 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


Pontypool, FWIW, is as close to The Official MetaFilter Horror Movie RecommendationTM as it gets. It deserves it, too. It's awesome. Probably the only thing keeping Triangle from joining it as co-winner is its lack of easy streaming availability. (Though you can buy it on YouTube to stream now.)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:39 AM on September 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


Stake Land doesn't quite add up the sum of its parts, but it's fun. MeFites of a certain age may be taken aback to learn that the craggy old nun character is played by Kelly McGillis, who has something of a second career in horror, also having popped up in The Innkeepers.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:43 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


a bit of Prince of Darkness, a bit of Assault on Precinct 13

Sold.
posted by Artw at 6:50 AM on September 30, 2016


Kelly McGillis is no-foolin' the best part of Stake Land, though.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:46 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'll also reinforce Let Us Prey, which was a delightfully surprising exceeding of expectations, which is netflix streaming horror best case scenario. Will also assist in unrecommending Creep, although props to the victim character for hauling around an idiot ball of that incredible weight. He must have really worked out a lot to carry it all the way through to the end.

I'm surprised to see V/H/S Viral mentioned right along with the first two; I'd the impression from word of mouth that for as uneven as they were, the third was just dire in comparison.
posted by Drastic at 11:48 AM on September 30, 2016


A couple of comments on the list:
"Monsters" is pretty good as a little indie film - it's low budget and it's not really about the monsters so much as about people dealing with the aftermath. The low budget means they only had a few minutes of monster CGI. I saw it a few years ago when it played the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival.

"Pontypool", "The Babadook", and "The Host", are all good. (I'm impressed at how much "Pontypool" does with what appears to be a dirt-cheap budget. It is all in the words, which seems appropriate.)

I haven't seen it since the '90's, but I remember loving the level of meta-wtf in "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" (although I kind of assumed they'd go somewhere with the ending different than it actually was). I'd never seen any of the Elm St movies, but I'd picked up enough through cultural osmosis for this one to work.

"The Taking of Deborah Logan" sounds interesting and it expires tomorrow, but dammit, I'm just not up to watching anything other than happy shit tonight, so I guess that's off the list for this year.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:26 PM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh! One more: "Troll Hunter" was so much better than I expected. Fun little found-footage film.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:28 PM on September 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


"The Taking of Deborah Logan" sounds interesting and it expires tomorrow, but dammit, I'm just not up to watching anything other than happy shit tonight, so I guess that's off the list for this year.

I felt the same but watched it last night. I thought it was pretty good. Actually fairly creepy (I think very few movies are) and not badly done for low budget. Of course I had plot and "why don't you turn on the frickin lights that are right there that we saw earlier when you were in this room" problems but better than most I've seen.
posted by bongo_x at 2:22 PM on September 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


I thought "Deborah Logan" did a bang-up job making the old woman creepy as hell. It kind of wandered off into goofy absurdity toward the end, but I enjoyed that part too, for different reasons.

The V/H/S movies are indeed all wildly uneven and definitely not high art, but I think they all have their moments. The first is the best, easily. V/H/S Viral is definitely the weakest and tried to go for spectacle when it didn't have the visionary chops or the budget to manage it, but some of the interstitial bits were interesting. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're bored and/or drunk and also a fan of horror schlock in general.

"Let Us Prey" I'll grant was better than I was expecting from the title or the statement of the premise. I get a little tired of the Judeo-Christian oligarchy for demonic temptation flicks, but I am always a little more positively inclined towards films that manage to get some sympathy for the devil in instead of just relying on the audience to parse him as "bad" and leaving it at that.

I <3 Trollhunter forever, not least because one can frequently, when browsing the Internet, point at the screen and shout "TROOOOOOOLLLLLLL!"
posted by Scattercat at 2:27 AM on October 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Oh, cool. It's still there today - I guess it expires end of day, maybe? I'll try to watch it today once my wife's awake (she was also interested in seeing it.)
posted by rmd1023 at 5:51 AM on October 1, 2016


Okay, "taking of Deborah Logan" was still streaming this afternoon and we watched and that was some grade A good spooky shit.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:16 PM on October 2, 2016


I'll add The Last Days and The Colony -- both are surprisingly good and available on Netflix streaming now (links are to movie previews).

The Last Days is a Spanish-language film, so, it's subtitled. Very little actual violence, but atmospheric, dread-focused and mysterious.

The Colony is, just, wow. Some serious gore in places, and what the hell IS this cast? If you liked Snowpiercer, this one's for you.

I'm shocked I haven't seen These Final Hours show up on any lists, but Hollywood's optioned it for an American remake. Honest to god, if apocalyptic themes are your jam, this is the best low-budget indie you'll see all year. Ranked right up there with Monsters, IMO. So disturbing, so beautiful as well... I wept at the end. Really great stuff. Warning: If you're not an Aussie, you may want to turn on subtitles. It really helped as an American viewer; I'd have missed a ton of important dialogue otherwise. On a scale of 1 (Monsters, Pontypool) to 10 (Re-Animator, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), I'd rank the gore/violence factor around 4.5ish for These Final Hours. And I absolutely abhor torture porn -- you couldn't pay me enough money to sit through something like Hostel. One time I accidentally just HEARD about 3 minutes of the movie Audition and had nightmares for a week.

I'd rank The Last Days around a 1 or 2, honestly. The Colony's probably closer to 8.5 (TW: cannibalism). So if you decide what to watch by gore/violence factor, hope that helps!

(I work from home two days per week and have really gotten into streaming horror, sci fi, zombie and apocalypse-themed movies and TV series lately -- I wish someone would do a similar list for Amazon Prime streaming and Hulu, because their search and categorization interfaces make using the word "shite" an insult. It's sooo much worse than Netflix's discovery engine, I can't even articulate it.) Well, and I work, too. I just have wicked ADD and need something thrilling playing in the background to keep me from just reading Metafilter all day.

If you haven't seen Dead Set yet and are a zombie genre fan, it's pretty great. it's a miniseries riffing on the UK Big Brother phenomenon, so it's aged a bit -- it came out in 2008 -- but it's still scary as hell.

And if you have Amazon Prime I'll recommend Vyzhit posle / The Day After -- it's a Russian tv series about... vampire supermodels? zombies? Scientifically engineering a Master Race of Perfect Russians? who the hell knows. No English trailer to link, unfortunately, but I was engrossed and sad that I can't find series 2 in English/subtitled, since it's aired already on CTV. (Apparently they're filming series 3 now.)
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 11:16 AM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Dead Set is good, yeah. It's written by Charlie Brooker, who does Black Mirror.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:04 PM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh cool. I saw "Last Days" a couple of years ago at the a festival. I remember thinking that the filmmakers thought their SF twist was the agoraphobia virus (or whatever), whereas I thought it was that GPS would work deep underground. Overall an enjoyable movie.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:32 PM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Taking of Deborah Logan Is stilll up there - just watched it and it was pretty fun.
posted by Artw at 11:51 PM on October 15, 2016


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