If you’re a fan of horror, and we’re taking every corner of the horror universe from classics to slashers to arthouse films to movie musicals to C-grade indies, Tubi has you covered. There’s plenty to peruse on this completely free, ad-supported site. We narrowed down their selection to our favorites. Here are the best horror movies on Tubi.
What are the best horror movies on Tubi?
While we picked our favorites, the site also has plenty of other horror films. They even have horror series for younger audiences — or for you millennials with a craving to rewatch all four seasons of Goosebumps. If only they’d add Are You Afraid of the Dark, and we’d be golden!
Pearl (2022)
Widely considered the best of A24’s Maxine trilogy, Mia Goth stars as Pearl, a young woman living on her parents’ remote farm in Texas. With her husband Howard away fighting in World War I, Pearl is stuck at home with her controlling mother and infirm father, and it doesn’t take long for things to start unraveling. Repressed, angry, and clearly unwell (we’ll put that in heavy italics), Pearl secretly abuses her father while barely keeping it together on the surface.
But hey, even killers-in-the-making have dreams! What Pearl really wants is to be a showgirl. When she meets a projectionist in town who tells her she has real potential, that dream suddenly feels possible — which, if you’ve seen X or MaXXXine, should tell you exactly how this is going to end. Written, directed, and edited by Ti West, Pearl is the completely unhinged prequel to X. It’s also streaming on Tubi.
Hereditary (2018)
Ari Aster’s Hereditary is family horror in the bleakest sense of the term. It starts as a story about a family dealing with grief after the death of their grandmother, and then it slowly gets worse. Toni Collette plays Annie, a mother trying (and failing) to keep her family together as one awful thing after another happens, all tied back to secrets her mother left behind. As Annie digs into her mother’s past, the film steadily shifts from domestic tragedy to something far more nightmarish. Though it’s not just the plot of the story that makes this film fantastic, it’s also the way in which the story is told. Think of this one as a feature of pure dread.
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
When The Cabin in the Woods came out, it completely messed with people’s expectations. On the surface, it looks like a very familiar setup. There’s a group of college kids heading to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and everyone fits neatly into a horror stereotype. But almost immediately, the movie starts tipping its hand. We don’t want to give the spoilers away, but we can just say there’s a lot more than meets the eye.
The film is directed by Drew Goddard and co-written with Joss Whedon (the duo who previously worked on Buffy and Angel), which explains both how sharp it is and why it occasionally winks a little too hard. No real complaints there, though, because it’s smart and genuinely inventive. If you want a different flavor of horror, this is one that knows the rules inside and out and has a lot of fun breaking them.
Talk to Me (2022)
This one flew a little under the radar in terms of horror press, but it’s well worth a watch. Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou and released by A24, Talk to Me plays with familiar horror ideas and folds in the logic of social media dares and viral games. In this case, an embalmed hand acts as a conduit as part of an occult party trick (think of its power as a souped-up Ouija board, which you also won’t find us messing with), where each player allows themselves to be possessed for 90 seconds. While it’s happening, their friends film the whole thing and post it online. Ah, modernity. If that sounds like a terrible idea, you’d be right — and the players are about to find out.
The Babadook (2014)
Coming out at the peak of the modern horror wave, The Babadook stars Essie Davis as Amelia, a widowed mother barely holding it together as she raises her young son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman in one heck of a performance). The situation is a mess from the start, as Amelia’s husband died in an accident on the way to the hospital when Samuel was born. And a growing Samuel has some tendencies that are difficult: over-neediness, violence towards other children, and generally out-of-control behavior that’s taking a toll on Amelia.
Things take a turn when a strange, malevolent pop-up book titled Mister Babadook appears in their home, and Samuel recognizes the top-hat figure as the evil he’s been dreaming of. Amelia takes measures to help her son, but soon she starts seeing him too. Though the film has its fair share of jump scares, the direction (Jennifer Kent), acting, and writing are what make this film masterful.
How we picked the best horror movies on Tubi
We narrowed down our choices to fan and critical reception, variation across the genre, plus a little personal bias. There are some others we left off the list that are fantastic films, including the original Maxine film, X (2022), and What Lies Beneath (2000).
