Horror is firing on all cylinders right now. New great horror movies just keep coming out month after month, and it barely slows down. Just last year we got Bring Her Back, Sinners,<em> The Ugly Stepsister</em>, Weapons, <em>Frankenstein</em>, The Long Walk, 28 Years Later, Together, and Good Boy. That is an absurd run of quality horror for a single year, and it just keeps happening. But that also means even the greatest horror movies of the last decade can slip out of memory simply because there is too much competition for our attention now.
That goes double for movies that debuted straight on a streaming service instead of theaters, since they never got the big cultural moment of an opening weekend to cement themselves in everyone’s minds. Netflix, in particular, has gradually built up an enormous library of original horror films over the years, some legitimately great, and plenty of them have already faded out of the conversation, sitting there waiting to be rediscovered. So, here are Netflix horror movies that deserve way more love than they currently get.
‘The Ritual’ (2017)
Image via Netflix
The Ritual follows four college buddies who reunite years after one of their friends gets killed in a robbery. To honor him, they plan a hiking trip through the Swedish wilderness, and when one of them tweaks his knee, they decide to cut through the forest instead of sticking to the marked trail because apparently nobody in this group has ever seen a horror movie. They go on to find a gutted moose strung up in a tree, pagan symbols carved everywhere, and eventually a cabin full of twig effigies. And soon after, something starts picking them off one by one.
The movie works so well because it doesn’t rush to show you the monster. It lets the guilt between these four friends fester first, so by the time the monster finally shows up in full, you actually care who makes it out. It never blew up the way it should have because it only released theatrically in the UK, before dropping on Netflix a few months later. And when it finally became available to international audiences, it got buried under other bigger horror releases like The Cloverfield Paradox, Insidious: The Last Key, and Annihilation.
‘Blood Red Sky’ (2021)
Image via Netflix
Blood Red Sky follows Nadja (Peri Baumeister), a German single mother traveling overnight to New York with her young son, but she also happens to be a vampire who’s struggling to control her bloodlust. Then, a group of hijackers takes over the flight, and Nadja is forced to unleash the exact thing she has spent years trying to suppress in order to keep her son alive. Director Peter Thorwarth makes the most of the cramped, claustrophobic setting, turning narrow aisles and tiny bathrooms into genuinely inventive kill scenes.
When it first dropped on Netflix, Blood Red Sky became a huge international hit and even reached Netflix’s #1 spot in 50+ countries. But it faded from the conversation soon after, probably because large portions of the movie were in German. Foreign-language movies often have to work twice as hard to remain part of the mainstream conversation. Without a theatrical run or a franchise behind it, Blood Red Sky had its big moment, and then quietly disappeared despite being one of Netflix’s most entertaining horror originals.
‘Apostle’ (2018)
Image via Netflix
Gareth Evans, the filmmaker behind The Raid movies, took a hard left turn away from bone-crunching action and into folk horror with Apostle. The result was a brutal, atmospheric nightmare that remains criminally underseen. Set in 1905, it follows Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), an ex-priest who infiltrates a remote Welsh island cult to rescue his kidnapped sister.
The whole thing plays like a slow-burn Wicker Man for the first hour, then goes completely feral once Thomas figures out what is actually happening on the island. Apostle remains largely forgotten today because it fell into the same trap as many straight-to-streaming Netflix originals. They come out, people talk about them for a few days, and then they get buried under the endless stream of new releases. And folk horror had not yet become the trend it is today. If this had come out post-Midsommar, people would not have shut up about it.
‘1922’ (2017)
The movie follows Wilfred James (Sandra Bullock), who struggles with guilt after murdering his wife to keep their farm. As he descends into madness due to his actions and sees rats everywhere as manifestations of his guilt.
This adaptation is one of Stephen King’s rare hits that flew under the radar despite receiving critical acclaim with a score of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes.
