In 2017, a list of the top 10 scariest movies on Netflix was released by the streaming service, showing that many of their viewers aren’t ready for the numerous scares offered up on demand. It’s interesting to note the movies deemed "too scary" to finish are kind of all over the place in terms of the genre. There are moody explorations of what it means to be a woman, run-of-the-mill ghost stories, and body horror that will make you shudder every time you look in the mirror. So it’s hard to say what freaked out audiences so much it made them switch back to binge-watching The Office for the 20th time. Paul Tassi of Forbes managed to get viewing data from Netflix that showed viewers turning off around the 70% mark. The streaming service claims this is how they can tell the audience is too scared to finish the movie, as opposed to just turning it off because they were bored. Netflix believes that if someone sits through most of a horror movie, the only reason they’re not finishing it is because it’s too much for them. The truth is anyone's guess, but it’s worth diving into to see what scenes are really affecting viewers.
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Out of all the films on the Netflix list, The Conjuring is the closest match for a classically classified horror movie. Despite being considered popcorn fare, The Conjuring is a masterclass in horror by James Wan. The director uses lengthy shots, forced perspective, and good, old-fashioned jump scares to freak the audience out while telling the story of a haunted family and the investigators trying to help them.
The initial thought that comes to mind when seeing the sequel to The Human Centipede on this list is "Why are you lying Netflix? No one watched this movie." But that would be ignoring the cultural curiosity that surrounds this series of films about various people trying to sew people rear-to-mouth in order to make a human centipede. This film is a Rorschach test for what grosses you out.
This anthology of horror films from Mexican filmmakers is the perfect international addition to the slate of movies like V/H/S and XX. Each short offers viewers a different reason to sign off when things get too intense, or just utterly weird. Every short in this collection goes out of its way to show you something you can't unsee.
Coming from Canada, The Void is the 2016 installment from Astron-6, a filmmaking crew that traffics in a variety of genre films, all of which are well worth your time. The Void is the most overtly horror of their oeuvre, and it includes nods to horror classics like Hellraiser and the stories of HP Lovecraft. The story follows a local sheriff as he finds himself in the middle of a cult ritual that's meant to merge our universe with a monster universe where no one has any skin and pyramids float in the sky.
Much of JeruZalem is shown through the first-person POV of a Google Glass worn by a girl named Sarah (Danielle Jadelyn), giving it a visual style that keeps the audience on edge. It's almost like you're living in The Blair Witch Project . The first half of the film is spent acclimating the audience to the unique visual style, but then zombies start overwhelming the city of Jerusalem, and it feels like you're living through it.
Raw, the 2017 French horror film about a girl going away to college and discovering that she has extra-carnivorous tendencies is, what you would consider a prestige horror film. The film is a slow burn that follows Justine (Garance Marillier) through her downward spiral into consuming taboo meats.
The 2016 remake of Cabin Fever acts as a more distilled version of the original film, hitting many of the same beats while dispatching the annoying college students in increasingly gruesome ways. Like the original film, the 2016 remake opens with a memorably visceral scene - and things just get more crimson-soaked from there.
2016's Carnage Park is like a tapestry that reveals more of itself every time it's viewed. Initially, the film follows the structure of Sam Peckinpah's best work. The visual tone is warm, everyone is in trouble, and early on, the audience is made aware no one's getting out of the movie alive. The film, directed by Mickey Keating, follows a woman in peril who's fighting for survival in a desolate fenced-off desert. She's being pursued by a Vietnam vet whom she can't seem to outlast.
The oldest film on the list of movies that scared Netflix's audience is Teeth , a film that feels like the spiritual predecessor to Julia Ducournau's RAW in every way. Both are off-kilter coming-of-age films about young women who discover they have an inherently destructive nature, they were each critically acclaimed, and they both have some seriously hard-to-watch moments. After Dawn (Jess Weixler) discovers she has teeth in her privates (a surprisingly common theme in myths and popular folklore about women) she begins to explore her sensuality while biting off men's members.
Piranha 3D (there are only two dimensions on Netflix) is an outlier on this list of the "scariest" movies on Netflix, especially when you consider the fact that Piranha is essentially a spoof of Jaws - the film literally opens with Richard Dreyfuss dressed like his character from the seminal Spielberg film meeting a dark fate. The film was directed by Alexandre Aja, the guy behind High Tension and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, so he knows how to effectively make his audience squirm, but Piranha doesn't offer the existential or gross-out scares of his biggest forays into American cinema. Instead, it acts as more of a satire of American party culture, albeit a graphic one.
