Thrills and chills await movie buffs on Hulu, the streaming service that’s making its case to be synonymous with the horror genre. The platform is a reliable resource for viewers seeking pulse-pounding, thought-provoking horror, whether it’s mainstream fare like the Alien franchise or indie gems like The Vigil and Possessor. There’s a particular focus on non-English-language horror classics; recent French hit Titane is available, as are several titles from Korean master Bong Joon-ho (ever heard of an Oscar best picture winner called Parasite?). The A.V. Club is here to point you in the right direction, to minimize the time spent meandering through listings, and get you straight to the edge of your seat with Hulu’s most horrific offerings.
This list was most recently updated on June 10, 2022.
12 Hour Shift is not political, unless you want to count its grisly, madcap plot about a crew of night nurses and the organ-trafficking scam they’ve been running out of the back of an Arkansas hospital as a commentary on the American healthcare system. Mostly, it’s an ensemble comedy as black as a longtime smoker’s lungs, full of the kind of working-class gallows humor that gets you through a long night on your feet. 12 Hour Shift is Brea Grant’s second feature outing as a writer-director, but she’s best known as an actor. And that shows here: Although it boasts a large cast that includes David Arquette and wrestler Mick Foley, 12 Hour Shift hinges on the performance of May ’s Angela Bettis as Mandy, the opioid-addicted nurse at the center of her small town’s black-market organ trade. The material is edgy and at times outrageously gory and chaotic, but Bettis gives Mandy an exhausted, fed-up quality that keeps the movie on track, even (or maybe especially) when she’s pissed off about having to do everything herself. [Katie Rife ]
Released in 1979 at the tail end of a wave of science-fiction films, Ridley Scott’s Alien filled the future with a monster borrowed from the oldest reaches of the psyche, a pitiless creature dedicated only to devouring and reproducing, designed by H.R. Giger for maximum Freudian implication. Scott has said he set out to make a cross between 2001 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and his wish is reflected in the result: a nightmare set in the chill of a disappointing future. [Keith Phipps ]
If there’s a glimmer of hope that James Cameron won’t be wasting his talent with four more rounds of Avatar, it lies in the knowledge that this maestro of blockbusters is also, generally speaking, a master of sequels. The director knew how to expand his stone-cold Terminator into an awesome multiplex epic. Before that, he achieved the even more daunting feat of pulling a new sci-fi classic out of the shadow of an old one. Rather than try to replicate the glacial deep-space dread of a Ridley Scott movie arguably even better than Blade Runner, Aliens stomps on the gas, stranding an unfrozen Ripley (tough-as-nails Sigourney Weaver) on an outpost crawling with acid-bleeding creatures, alongside a platoon of over-armed but severely underprepared space marines. Few action or war movies released in the decades since can match Aliens for sheer adrenaline-junkie intensity, but there’s something affecting about its emotional arc, too—about the way Cameron turns the déjà vu storytelling logic of sequels into warped immersion therapy, allowing Ripley to overcome the trauma of Alien (and the loss of her daughter) by rushing back into the monster-blasting fray. It’s not a redo. It’s a rebirth, bursting bloody and triumphant from the cold body of a perfect genre specimen. [A.A. Dowd ]
Horror movies are full of reminders to stay out of the woods. And even if the ancient curses and masked psychos don’t get you, there are plenty of more mundane terrors waiting out there in the wilderness. Body At Brighton Rock, the taut survival thriller from genre director Roxanne Benjamin (Southbound , XX ), takes the latter path, eschewing supernatural menace in favor of more realistic but equally primal fears: Wild animals. Dead bodies. Rustling noises in the dark. With these minimalist elements, Benjamin casts a nerve-fraying spell, playing tricks on the audience by putting us into the head of a young woman who, like most of us, has no business being out there in the first place. [Katie Rife ]
Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell opens with the ’80s Universal Studios logo, only the first indication that Raimi, who’s been shackled to the Spider-Man franchise for the last decade, intends to go back in time. Specifically, he’s recalling his own time at Universal in the early ’90s, when he brought the splatstick hokum of his Evil Dead days to the studio playground with 1990’s Darkman and 1992’s Army Of Darkness. A sort of de facto Evil Dead 4, Drag Me To Hell picks up where he left off, trafficking in lots of supernatural mumbo-jumbo (gypsy curses, psychics, ass-whomping ghosts) as an excuse for gloriously over-the-top horror-comedy. [Scott Tobias ]
In the Stockholm suburb of Let The Right One In, terrible things can happen just out of sight. Kåre Hedebrant, a 12-year-old child of divorce, knows this well; he frequently falls victim to a pack of bullies in empty bathrooms or deserted hallways between classes. His new neighbor Per Ragnar knows it too. He uses the dark woods to drug passersby and drain them of blood while headlights flash on a nearby street. In the dark, victims and victimizers find common ground.
Hedebrant has another new neighbor in Ragnar’s apartment, 12-year-old Lina Leandersson, who introduces herself to Hedebrant with the words, “I can’t be your friend,” then proceeds to spend every evening with him in the halfhearted park outside their apartment complex. Sometimes she smells bad and looks haggard. At other moments, she looks like a girl in the flush of youth. Meanwhile, residents keep disappearing, and Hedebrant starts to put two and two together about why he never sees his new friend in daylight. [Keith Phipps ]
The stranded family of The Lodge are locked in a cold war even before the harsh weather strands them indoors. Teenage Aidan (It ’s Jaeden Martell) and his younger sister, Mia (Lia McHugh), give a chilly reception to their father’s new fiancé, Grace (Riley Keough). Their resentment runs deeper than the usual reluctance to warm to a surrogate parent; it stems from a trauma The Lodge inflicts early, the tragedy and unspeakable loss—a jolt of shattering violence—that sends the plot into glacial motion. Grace, as it turns out, has deep wounds of her own. Her father was the leader of a radical Christian cult whose entire congregation committed suicide when she was 12, leaving her the only survivor. The first real glimpse we get of her is in the front seat of a car, back to the camera, eyes in the rearview mirror. They want to appear friendly. They mainly look haunted. [A.A. Dowd ]
Bong Joon-ho’s masterful policier Memories Of Murder follows the investigation into Korean society’s first serial killer, a methodical, elusive predator who raped and murdered 10 women within a two-kilometer radius. The killings evoked a special intensity of shock and despair, not only because the perpetrator was so difficult to snare, but because people simply couldn’t comprehend the scale of his crimes. Yet in the tradition of New Korean Cinema, which can shift tonal gears faster than a Maserati, Bong plays most of the events for broad, uproarious comedy while still managing a devastating undercurrent of sadness. It takes enormous skill to pull off such a high-wire act without diminishing the gravity of the situation, but Bong and his first-rate cast are up to the task, perhaps because they root the questionable antics of the film’s provincial detectives in palpable frustration and anguish. [Scott Tobias ]
Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a Western revenge yarn of such heightened cruelty and suffering that it basically demands to be read as allegory. Westerns, as a rule, are violent, and that perhaps goes double for the Aussie ones, which tend to be more pitiless than their American cousins, stripping the genre of its romance and derring-do. Even by those standards, The Nightingale is tough to take. Set in the Oz of 1825, it confronts audiences with the full horror of colonialism, including enough scenes of sexual assault to warrant the trigger warning offered up before several screenings of the film. But while what we see and can never unsee over the course of a grueling two-plus hours is certainly extreme, it’s not gratuitous. That’s partially because Kent, who made the spectacular spookfest The Babadook , isn’t some B-movie shockmeister, rubbing our noses in ugliness for the sake of it. She’s pulled back the veil of awful history to find a cracked reflection of the modern world—and a corresponding, hard-won beauty in solidarity among survivors. [A.A. Dowd ]
The last time Bong Joon Ho made a parable of class warfare, he set it aboard one hell of a moving metaphor: a train looping endlessly around a frozen Earth, its passengers divided into cars based on wealth and status, upward mobility achieved only through lateral revolution. Parasite, the South Korean director’s demented and ingenious new movie, doesn’t boast quite as sensational a setting; it takes place mostly within a chicly modern suburban home, all high ceilings, stainless steel countertops, and windows instead of walls, advertising the elegant interior decoration within. But there’s a clear class hierarchy at play here, too; it runs top to bottom instead of front to back, vertically instead of horizontally. And though we’re watching a kind of warped upstairs-downstairs story, not a dystopian arcade brawler, Parasite races forward with the same locomotive speed as Snowpiercer , with plenty of its own twists and turns waiting behind each new door. [A.A. Dowd ]
Haunted-house spookfest, stalking thriller, character study, mood piece: The different sides of Olivier Assayas’ bewildering but compelling Personal Shopper don’t overlap so much as touch one another in passing. Its heroine, the insouciant American expat Maureen Cartwright (Kristen Stewart), makes her living picking pricey clothes on behalf of a celebrity client; she’s also a budding spirit medium trying to make contact with her twin brother, who died of a congenital heart defect that she shares. In a sense, Assayas (Carlos , Irma Vep ), one of our most cosmopolitan living directors, has created a chic update to the gothic ghost story. In lieu of a horse-drawn carriage, the opening shot offers a Volvo waiting at the gates of an old manor house on the outskirts of Paris; the classic unsigned letter becomes an interminable series of texts from an unknown number, while the long expository conversation between Maureen and her employer’s lover (Lars Eidinger) might as well have been written for a Victorian drawing room... [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky ]
Possessor is a mindfuck without a safe word: a slick, nasty bit of science-fiction pulp that’s as interested in shredding nerves as buzzing the brain they’re attached to. The premise, a nightmare vision of bodies snatched and unwillfully weaponized, could have been extracted straight from the racing noggin of Philip K. Dick. But that author’s dystopian premonitions are just one aspect of its genre alchemy, a stylish mash-up of Ghost In The Shell , Inception , Under The Skin , and Olivier Assayas’ corporate-espionage thriller demonlover . And as it’s both written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of Canadian horror maestro David, it should probably come as no great shock that Possessor includes some truly gnarly mutilation of the flesh alongside the mental variety. [A.A. Dowd]
Suffering has long been characterized as a woman’s lot, canonized in the form of Catholic saints and celebrated in literature and art. (Pablo Picasso merely made it explicit when he said , “Women are suffering machines.”) To defy this edict will bring further misfortune, leaving only two choices: either smile and let your soul die piece by indignant piece, or embrace the darkness and learn to enjoy it. Josephine Decker’s Shirley is about a woman who opted for the latter: Shirley Jackson (played here by Elisabeth Moss), author of high-school staple “The Lottery” and the oft-adapted The Haunting Of Hill House. Mocked by her peers, mistreated by her husband, and burdened by mental illness, Jackson lived with the psychic evils that lurk in her writing. But for Decker, what’s important about Shirley’s misery is how she used it to fuel her work. [Katie Rife ]
Heartless evildoers receiving their ironic comeuppance have been a horror staple since the days of EC Comics. The indie horror anthology Southbound puts a contemporary spin on this tradition, presenting five tales of irreversible decisions and their gruesome consequences. Sometimes the lessons in these mini-morality plays are ploddingly obvious—especially when Larry Fessenden explicitly explains them in his cameo role as a radio DJ—but then again, the same can be said for Tales From The Crypt. Set against the bleak landscape of the Southwestern desert, the segments overlap on several levels. Besides the Monty Python-style transitions, in which characters from one episode appear in the next, the movie also maintains a certain stylistic consistency throughout, which has its pluses (the segments share a timeless feel, à la Bates Motel ) and minuses (shaky hand-held camerawork is an unfortunate constant). Regardless, that cohesion is a credit to the creative forces behind the film, and a welcome change from the wild inconsistencies of horror anthologies like the ABCs Of Death series. [Katie Rife ]
Shadow In The Cloud is pure popcorn entertainment, superimposing the dynamic synths and narrative efficiency of a John Carpenter movie onto the burnished metal and green fatigues of a World War II adventure. This one stars Chloë Grace Moretz as Maude Garrett, a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer who’s been charged with protecting a highly classified piece of cargo aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress military plane departing from New Zealand. Maude is nobody’s fool—steadfast, driven, and tough as she needs to be to get by as a female soldier in the 1940s. But the male crew of the plane sees her as nothing more than a liability and a sex object, laughing at her attempts to establish authority and menacing her with sexual threats even before they force her into a ball turret dangling on the underside of the plane. From within these claustrophobic confines, director Roseanne Liang throws threat after threat at Maude and the crew, from Japanese fighter planes to one of the original variety of gremlins—here, a CGI bat/monkey/rat hybrid. A preposterous development midway through the film threatens to derail both the plot and the rah-rah female empowerment message. But if you can save the questions for after the movie’s over and concentrate on the pulpy derring-do, it doesn’t ruin the fun. [Katie Rife]
Let’s just say that the surprise winner of [2021’s] Palme d’Or, a.k.a. the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is about bodies. Young bodies with skin pulled tight over rock-hard muscles, and aging bodies desperate to recapture the suppleness of youth. Traumatized bodies, uncontrollable bodies, bodies in the midst of transformation. There are a lot of wild twists and turns in this movie, but underneath there’s a constant: the agony of being trapped inside of a human body, and the itchy, restless desire to transcend it. [Julia] Ducournau’s work is sometimes compared to that of David Cronenberg, and that rings true in the sense that both are obsessed with the erotics of disgust and the possibilities of a “new flesh.” Yet the similarities between Titane and Cronenberg’s Crash have been overstated. After all, a sexual predilection for cars is only one aspect of our heroine, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), and her fucked-up psyche... [Katie Rife ]
Yakov (Dave Davis) is adrift. Having recently left behind the Haredi sect of Orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn, he’s treading water and going to a support group with others who have struck out on their own from the traditions that have shaped them since birth. The world of cell phones and diverse socialization is new to him, and the landlord is lurking, ready for this month’s rent. So when Reb Shulem (Menashe Lustig), a friendly face from before, pops up with an offer for some easy money being a fill-in shomer for an evening, Yakov is, like so many horror protagonists, driven by necessity into the reach of danger... [Jason Shawhan ]