Stuck at home on Halloween? Hey, it happens. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a great, scary time at home. And if you’ve already exhausted the horror movie possibilities of your DVD/Blu-ray collection, and if the pickings on Netflix are looking pretty slim, you may want to check out the Amazon Prime movies selection. Their instant streaming service has a huge selection of movies in just about every genre including a lot of great horror movies.
Of course, neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime (nor any of their instant streaming competitors) has a selection as large as a decent brick-and-mortar video store. If you’re lucky enough to still have on in your neighborhood, make sure you offer them your patronage. But then again, on Halloween, their horror movie section might be pretty picked over too, which would send you right back to Amazon Prime movies anyway.
Related: What If Netflix Was a Video Store?
Amazon Prime, like many instant streaming services, can be a little tricky to navigate. It’s full of conventional classics like Scream, Evil Dead 2 and An American Werewolf in London, but it’s also riddled with films you may not be familiar with. Or worse, have incorrectly heard are bad.
As always, CraveOnline has you covered. We’ve sifted through the nearly 1,000 Amazon Prime horror movies currently available to find ten particularly awesome films that most audiences either missed in their theatrical run, or haven’t heard of at all.
And as always, and with any list like this, there will be some movie lovers who have seen everything already. We celebrate those audience members for their dedication, but we don’t want to take everyone else for granted. These are ten movies that deserve to be discovered and re-discovered by burgeoning horror aficionados and casual moviegoers alike, and if you have an Amazon Prime subscription, you can watch them all for free.
10 Best Amazon Prime Horror Movies:
Did we miss one of your favorite Amazon Prime movies? Let us know what you consider as the best horror movie available on Amazon Prime in the comment section below!
Editor’s Note: All of the above films are currently available on Amazon Prime as of the date of publication, but their availability on the service is subject to change.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
10 Awesome Horror Movies on Amazon Prime
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John Dies at the End (2012)
What do you get when you combine the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and "Supernatural?" You get John Dies at the End, an incredibly bizarre and energetic horror comedy about guys who take a mysterious drug called "Soy Sauce" and begin having visions of extra-dimensional demons. Directed by Bob Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep) and based on the book by David Wong, it's one of the most unusual horror films in recent years, but it's very funny and totally wild.
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Dumplings (2004)
Dumplings originally appeared as a short in the horror anthology Three Extremes, but the feature-length version is even better. Fruit Chan's film stars Bai Ling as a woman who sells special dumplings that make older women young again, but the ingredients are rare, and disgusting. But her latest customer doesn't care, and is willing to go to scary lengths to get more...
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Grave Encounters (2011)
On the surface there isn't much difference between Grave Encounters and any other found footage horror movie. It's about a team of documentary filmmakers investigating spook stories at a decrepit asylum, and guess what? The stories are true. But first-time directors The Vicious Brothers direct Grave Encounters with real ingenuity, leading to unexpected scares and exciting supernatural set pieces that make their film stand out from the competition.
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Monkey Shines (1988)
George A. Romero is best known for inventing the zombie genre, but there are a lot of underrated films on his resumé that have nothing to do with the living dead. Case in point: Monkey Shines, a strange but surprisingly effective chiller about a quadriplegic man whose helper monkey develops a taste for murder. It's an odd situation to milk for genuine suspense, but Romero does an impressive job.
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Ravenous (1999)
Originally overlooked by critics and audiences alike, Ravenous has since picked up a dedicated cult following. It's easy to see why. Antonia Bird's bizarre horror-western hybrid stars Guy Pearce as a coward stationed at an isolated fort, where the local legends about cannibalism turn out to be true. An unusual cast of characters, unexpected plot twists and some brutal action make it too weird to be a mainstream success, but too distinctive to ignore.
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Shakma (1990)
A nerdy gang of live-action role-players runs afoul of a homicidal baboon in Shakma, a film that isn't really "good" in any objective sense, but is absurdly fun anyway. That baboon is pissed off, and it looks like the film's dorky cast is in real danger the entire time.
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Shivers (1975)
Long before he was the critically-acclaimed director of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg made cheap high-concept nightmare movies like Shivers. A perverse new parasite creeps its way into a high-rise apartment, where the residents are infected and begin sexually brutalizing each other. It's a zombie movie with a sordid twist, and Cronenberg films it like a hygiene movie gone horribly awry. It's low-fi, but if you can get past that, it's also genuinely terrifying.
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The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
Hugh Grant and future "Doctor Who" star Peter Capaldi star in The Lair of the White Worm, a sexy and borderline wacky tale of a snake cult hiding out in England. Amanda Donohoe plays the impossibly erotic ringleader, and director Ken Russell lends his usual orgiastic theatricality to a film that remains his most accessible, and by far his most fun.
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The Legend of Hell House (1973)
A group of parapsychologists move into a haunted house to prove, once and for all, that ghosts are real. Yes, you've seen it before, but this familiar horror trope has rarely been done better than in The Legend of Hell House. It's all creaking noises and frightening backstories and fear, and it's got a big bang of a climax that entertains as much as it scares.
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Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
One of the best horror comedies - period - stars Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine as mild-mannered rednecks mistaken for homicidal maniacs by idiot teenagers. So the idiot teenagers try to kill Tucker and Dale, and keep accidentally killing themselves in front of two lovable yokels who have no idea what's going on or why. It's a fiendishly clever inversion of hackneyed horror clichés, and it deserves a much bigger audience.
