Thrills and chills await movie buffs on Hulu, the streaming service that’s making its case to be synonymous with the horror genre. That’s especially this Huluween month, which has brought sadomasochists everywhere with Hellraiser 2022, David Bruckner’s reimagining of Clive Barker’s twisted horror classic. The platform is a reliable resource for viewers seeking pulse-pounding, thought-provoking horror, whether it’s mainstream fare like Marvel’s bloody Blade 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 best and most horrific offerings.
This list was most recently updated on October 7, 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 ]
The sheltered ballerina Natalie Portman plays in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan dreams of dancing the part of Odette in Swan Lake. But even in her dreams, she’s shadowed. She never imagines herself dancing with Prince Siegfried, the hero; her pas de deux are with Von Rothbart, the villain of the piece, the sorcerer who ultimately seals Odette’s doom. His spell transforms her into the swan: He gives her death and beauty wrapped together, and as the fevered film progresses, and Portman gets drawn further away from the childhood bedroom over which her mother (Barbara Hershey) keeps such careful watch, she starts to see the same pattern play out in life. [Keith Phipps ]
Blade was never a major character for Marvel, even after he became the star of a successful franchise. Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan had created the character in the early ’70s, making him just one member of a team of vampire hunters in their series The Tomb Of Dracula. Blade wouldn’t get his own series until 20 years after his debut, and he wouldn’t become a half-vampire daywalker in the comics until 1999, after he’d already been one in the movies. Reading comics, I’m pretty sure I’d only encountered Blade as an occasional teammate of Ghost Rider in the Midnight Sons imprint. As a character, he had no name recognition. He was a C-lister.
And yet New Line, after making a bunch of money with Friday, had seen commercial potential in a story about a black hero, and the screenwriter David S. Goyer, who’d gotten his start writing stuff like Death Warrant and Demonic Toys, and who would later become the architect of DC’s cinematic universe, had some ideas for the character. It’s a miracle that a Blade movie ever got made in the first place, and it’s even more of a miracle that it ended up being any good. But it was extremely fucking good… [Tom Breihan ]
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 ]
The signature shot of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies has a dark force careening through a Grimm forest at breakneck speed, as if released through the devil’s slingshot. Since the films are about the hell unleashed by readings from The Book Of The Dead, they have an anything-goes relentlessness that mixes quick, brutal shocks with Three Stooges elasticity. Produced with the high style and maximum viscera of Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead remake, Fede Alvarez’s appealingly nasty Evil Dead remake limits the Raimi wit, but compensates with an all-out assault of demon possession, mutilation, and buckets of gore. And while Raimi’s Stooges aesthetic—which was really more prominently displayed in the sequels than in 1981’s The Evil Dead—isn’t played up here, there’s enough outrageous unreality to make the brutality go down a little easier. It isn’t quite a cartoon, but it’s close enough. [Scott Tobias ]
Director David Bruckner’s Hellraiser is not at all the same as Clive Barker’s 1987 original. That might seem obvious, but it’s important to note—if for no other reason than to help set expectations. Bruckner and his screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski don’t seem altogether interested in the kind of psychosexual introspection that drove Barker’s film (or the novella it was based upon), instead leveraging the franchise’s iconography as a canvas for a different sort of psychological exploration.
As decades of rights-preserving sequels can attest, that choice is nothing new for the Hellraiser franchise, but fans of Barker’s queer proclivities may be disappointed that this 2022 version marks another propagation rather than a return to its roots. That said, Bruckner, Collins, and Piotrowski plant their vision in fields that are no less rich, terrifying, or gorily violent than the hellbound story that started it all…. [Leigh Monson ]
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 ]
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]
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a movie, but even its most ardent devotees concede there’s no point in watching it at home, whether or not you have a copy of Warner Bros.’ spiffy new Blu-ray. If it needs to be seen at all, it’s with an audience that comes loaded for bear, corseted and mascaraed, with its dancing shoes on and a bag full of rice in hand… [Sam Adams ]
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 ]
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 ]
[Bruce] Willis stars as a Philadelphia psychologist who, shortly after receiving an award for his work with children, is confronted in his home by a disturbed former patient (Donnie Wahlberg), who feels Willis failed him. A year later, he encounters a child (Haley Joel Osment) who reminds him of Wahlberg, a boy who eventually reveals he has some traffic with the supernatural. Though not without some genuinely frightening moments, The Sixth Sense is less a horror film than a moody piece of magic realism. [M. Night] Shyamalan’s approach, composed largely of Kubrickian extended takes, has a sense of purpose and an artful construction that respects both its story and its audience, allowing both to take their time sorting things out…. [Keith Phipps ]
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 ]
One primary takeaway from The Blair Witch Project , the found-footage horror film that started it all, it was the revelation that under the right circumstances, something as simple and resolutely mundane as a pile of rocks—or a bunch of twigs knotted together—could terrify an audience. And without costing a penny. The conceit has since become to the ’00s and ’10s what slasher movies were to the ’80s, amassing hit franchises (Paranormal Activity , [REC]) along with its own set of clichés, but V/H/S, an unusually strong found-footage anthology from a gifted collective of indie filmmakers, suggests it hasn’t been run into the ground just yet. Though hit-or-miss like all anthologies, V/H/S heightens the gimmick’s strength, using the shorter format to shape intimate, homemade, innovative shock effects, and limiting the time usually given over for mundane filler. It also, in its best moments, makes horror out of the 21st-century obsession with self-documentation. [Scott Tobias ]
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 ]