The 20 best scary movies on Hulu you can stream right now

We’ll be right up front: if you’re a horror purist, you’ll find that Hulu is severely lacking in great horror flicks. While there are plenty of scary and thrilling movies on offer from the popular streaming service, the pure horror genre is in meager supply. Luckily, we can still make a great list of the best scary movies on Hulu, assuming you won’t go into a rage over how many of our selections are not traditional horror films.

Read more: What’s new on Hulu

If you don’t yet have a Hulu subscription, it really is a terrific value. On top of the movies listed below, there are also some great comedies, documentaries, and TV shows available to binge. If you’re a horror fan looking to get the most bang for your buck, though, we highly recommend checking out Shudder, which is a streaming service made just for you.

If all you’re looking for right now is a good movie that will also inject a little bit of terror into your evening, you’ve come to the right place. Check out our list of the best scary movies on Hulu below!

The 20 best scary movies on Hulu:

Editor’s note: We will update our list of the best scary movies on Hulu regularly as the service rotates its movie library.

47 Meters Down

Everyone loves a good shark attack movie, and 47 Meters down is one of the better entries in this horror sub-genre. There is a plot about two sisters who want to go cage diving in Mexico. They run into some trouble when the cable holding the cage breaks and they drop fast to the ocean floor. Can they escape, while also avoid being eaten by the many, many great white sharks that are swimming around the cage? Stream it on Hulu to find out. 

Related: The best scary movies on Netflix

Parasite

Parasite was the surprise winner of the 2019 Academy Award for Best Picture. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. Direct Bong Joon-ho created a timely look at the class system that is still around all over the world. A poor family in South Korea poses as more well-to-do individuals in order to get employed by a highly wealthy family. The movie quickly takes a very dark turn and exposes both the poor family’s lies and the rich family’s secrets. This is definitely one of the best scary movies on Hulu.

Censor

This recent UK horror film is one of the best scary movies on Hulu. It’s set in the mid-1980s, and tells the tale of a woman who works the British Board of Film Classification. She looks at movies and recommends edits to remove any major violent content. One day, she looks at a horror movie that seems to have a plot that’s similar to the real disappearances of this woman’s little sister years ago. She then goes on a quest to find this movie’s director to see if he knows anything about what happened to her sister. She may not like what she finds out.

Let The Right One In

This 2008 movie is yet another foreign language film (from Sweden) on this list. However, it is still one of the best scary movies on Hulu. A 12-year old boy is dealing with typical things from his age. He gets picked on by bullies and is just looking for a friend to help him out.

Related: The best horror films you can stream on Amazon Prime

He then runs into a 12-year old girl, and they become friends. Then, the murders in his small town start to pile up, and he discovers his new friend is responsible. Why? Because this young girl is also a vampire. While this film is a tad slow at times, it is highly atmospheric and, of course, very scary in many parts.

Fresh

Here’s a recent Hulu exclusive movie that at first appears to be a romantic comedy. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays a young woman who is having trouble finding and dating the right guy. She seems to find him in the character played by Sebastian Stan, but as you will soon find out, he’s hiding a pretty big secret from her.

Run

Here’s another Hulu exclusive horror movie to check out. Sarah Paulson plays a mother to a teenage daughter who appears to suffer from a number of health issues, including paralysis. The daughter is looking forward to going to college to be on her own. However, she soon realizes that her mother may not be ready for her daughter to leave.

Fright Night (2011)

This remake of the 1980s horror classic stars Anton Yelchin who is convinced his new neighbor (Colin Farrell) is a vampire. He recruits his girlfriend and a washed-up magician (David Tennant) to destroy him, but that’s going to be harder than he thinks.

Copycat

Sigourney Weaver plays a  criminal psychologist who suffers from extreme agoraphobia due to an attack from a serial killer. She has since remained inside her apartment. However, when recruited by the police to help solve a new series of murders, she soon realizes that the killer is replicating other serial killers, including the one that attacked her.

My Friend Dahmer

Former Disney Channel heartthrob Ross Lynch plays the real notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. However, the film shows what it might have been like for Dahmer in high school, before he decided to become a killer and cannibal.

John Carpenter’s Vampires

This film from legendary horror director John Carpenter stars James Woods who leads a team of Catholic Church-supported vampire hunters. However, the team gets more than they bargained for with their latest mission to destroy a vampire nest.

Lake Placid

Sometimes you can have comedy inside your horror movie, and this 1999 film is one of the best in that small subgenre. It’s basically a sendup of the Jaws franchise, except that the creature isn’t a great while shark in the deep ocean, but a massive 30-foot crocodile in a relatively small wilderness lake. It has some funny bits but it’s also one of the best scary movies on Hulu.

Oculus

Karen Gillan plays a young woman in this film who is convinced that an evil haunted mirror killed her parents years ago, instead of her brother, who was blamed and put in a mental hospital. Can she solve this mystery and destroy this evil object, or will she become its next victim?

Sputnik

This is a Russian language (with English subtitles) horror film from 2020 that offers a very different fictional view of the Soviet Union’s space program in the 1980s. Cosmonauts bring . . . something back with them on their return to Earth. As it turns out, the only surviving cosmonaut from the trip has an alien that’s living inside of him. It’s not friendly. While this movie is clearly influenced by the original 1979 Alien, Sputnik takes some excellent turns of its own, making a truly scary sci-fi film.

Possessor

Brandon Cronenberg, the son of horror movie master David Cronenberg, lives up to his dad’s reputation with this 2020 movie. It stars Andrea Riseborough who can actually go into the minds of other people and control them. She uses this talent to become the ultimate assassin. However, one day she finds that her latest “possessor” is fighting back against her control. 

Thelma

This film doesn’t tell a simple story with some jump scares scattered throughout. Instead, it’s much artsier and abstract and might even take a second watch for you to fully understand what’s going on.

The plot of Thelma centers on the titular character, a young woman heading to college. Although she seems like a fish-out-of-water at the large school, she eventually befriends another young woman to whom she is instantly attracted. However, Thelma is harboring a dark power that she doesn’t even know about — but it could destroy everything she holds dear.

As a heads up, Thelma is yet another film on this list of the best scary movies on Hulu that is not in English. There are subtitles, however, so we suggest that you still watch the movie because it’s pretty spectacular!

Willy’s Wonderland

Here’s another horror-comedy to check out. Nicolas Cage has one of his most unusual roles as a drifter who has some car trouble in a small town. He has no money but a mechanic offers to fix his car in exchange for becoming a night janitor at a shut-down kids entertainment center that has animatronic creatures. However, he soon learns that these creatures can move and think on their own and they are not happy.

Mirrors

Kiefer Sutherland plays a security guard at an abandoned apartment store. Unfortunately for him, the store has a lot of haunted mirrors, which are filled with evil spirits that are wanting to get out into the real world.

Ghost Team

A group of misfits decides to become paranormal investigators in this horror-comedy. They go to check out what they believe to be a haunted farmhouse, but they quickly learn that the farm has more than just doors moving by themselves.

The Feast

A business dinner party at a wealthy family’s home is assisted by a mysterious young waitress. The family and their guests later learn this woman is much more than she originally seems to be on the surface.

Lights Out

A young woman and her brother have to fight in their home to save themselves from a supernatural force. The entity only appears where there is no light, so naturally, the power goes out in their neighborhood.

Honorable mentions

Here are a few more scary movies on Hulu that didn’t make our final list:

• False Positive – A Hulu original about a woman who is desperate to get pregnant, but may have found the wrong doctor to help her.
• Land of the Dead – Director George Romero’s fourth movie about zombies deals with both the undead and the remaining humans in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• The Host – Here’s an earlier movie from Parasite’s Bong Joon-ho about a massive aquatic monster in the waters of the Han River of Seoul.
• The Clovehitch Killer – A teenager in a small Southern town starts to believe his father may be an infamous serial killer.
• The Resort – A group of young people on vacation take a side trip to an abandoned tropical resort island, and soon find out why it was abandoned.

That’s all we’ve got for the best scary movies on Hulu! Be sure to bookmark this page and check back often as we will update it with new titles as they become available.