Everyone loves a cozy night in, snuggled up with a blanket and a hot beverage as the darkness sets in while you try to find something to watch. There is no better time to watch a spooky movie or two (or three). Nothing gets your adrenaline pumping more than sitting in the dark after a watching a horror movie and thinking about all the creepy monsters that could be sneaking up on you. Recently, most people prefer to use video streaming sites such as Netflix to find shows and movies to watch, and while some may think their options of horror movies are limited on these sites, there is actually quite a selection. Just for your night-time spooky needs here are five eerie films you can watch to get your heart pumping.
1. Nails
This movie was recently added to Netflix, and it is perhaps one of the creepiest I’ve seen in awhile. The basic premise is that a woman gets hit by a car on her daily run and ends up in a not so typical hospital for recovery. She gets this overwhelming sense that she is not alone in her room, and of course there just so happens to be a creepy, old wooden door in her room that seems to pop open of its own accord. As the nights continue, her husband becomes certain she has gone insane since she keeps going on about this hideous monster that tries to kill her at night. After meeting with a psychiatrist, she finds out there was an old nurse nicknamed Nails who used to be an in-patient at the hospital before working at it. She becomes confident that it is the ghost of this man who is attempting to kill her, but she doesn’t know why. Then like a domino being knocked over all this information about her past and this hospital comes rushing forth, and it comes down to a race of time as hospital staff begins to die off and she loses the strength to escape herself.
2. The Invitation
This is also a relatively new addition to Netflix, and it is sure is a twisted one. This is an excellent choice for those who appreciate psychological horror as it follows the main character attending a party hosted by his ex-wife (may I add that this is very unrealistic for someone salty like me because I would never participate in anything hosted by an ex). After arriving with his girlfriend to this get-together, we immediately feel suspicious of his ex-wife and her new husband, they are way too happy and the husband in particular likes to lock the doors from the inside so that no one can leave. Over the next half of the movie, the main character keeps having flashbacks to the event that ultimately lead up to his split up with his ex-wife, and it’s tragic. He also notices the minor off-putting occurrences that seem to keep happening, but he can’t tell if it’s real or if he’s crazy. He begins to suspect that his hosts have some not so innocent plans for all the guests of the party and tries to act on it, but everyone else keeps telling him he’s overreacting and nothing is wrong. I won’t give anything away, but there is some significant plot twists and scares in this one that is definitely worth your time.
3. Gerald’s Game
I saw this one for the first time a month or two ago with my roommate, and it is a wild time. A woman and her husband go to an isolated lake house to get away from the world and attempt to renew the spark of their marriage. However, soon after arriving at the home the couple ends up in a sticky situation with the wife handcuffed to the bed and the husband refusing to let her go because she won’t embrace his fantasies. As the tension rises, the husband has a heart attack and died leaving his wife in the terrifying situation of being handcuffed to a bed with no one around who can help her for miles. Soon the sun sets, and she is already starving, dehydrated, and seeing hallucinations of herself and her dead husband trying to taunt her and tell her what to do. Over the course of this movie, you see the wife’s sanity slowly decline as everything seems to be going wrong for her from a dog breaking into the house and eating her husband’s corpse piece by piece, to the terrifying man who keeps appearing in the room at night to talk to her. This all leads up to the very adrenaline-pumping ending, and as a warning, it is definitely not for the squeamish.
4. The Houses October Built
This movie is a bit on the older side, it's from 2014, but it is perfect if you want to recreate that Halloween feel. This is one of those found-footage movies - which I know some like and some hate so you may choose to watch accordingly - about tracking down the scariest and most realistic haunted house out there. A group of friends take a camper on a cross-country trip trying to find spookier and spookier haunted dwellings progressively, but in particular, they are looking for the Blue Skeleton which supposedly makes use of real torture to achieve the ultimate scares. Of course, as they get into more uncharted territories of haunted houses that only a select group of people know about weird things start to occur around them. People begin to bang on their camper at night, and they begin seeing actors from haunted houses they’ve previously visited lurking around hundreds of miles from where they should be. At one point a cow heart is even left in their refrigerator, yet they continue to pursue their goal thinking all the occurrences mean they must be close. Eventually, they are left instructions carved into a pumpkin about how to find the Blue Skeleton, and that is where the climax of the film happens, but I’ll leave you to find out what happens.
5. Hush
If you’re looking for a movie that will make you flinch at every noise you hear for the rest of the night, then this is it. Hush is about a young, deaf woman who lives on her own out in a wooded area (not exactly the safest way to live but who am I to judge). One night her neighbor is being chased by a man and bangs on Maddie’s door but she doesn’t hear, and her neighbor gets stabbed to death. The man then knocks on Maddie’s door, and once he realizes she’s deaf, he decides to make her his next victim. He then proceeds to send her pictures of herself and sabotage her car and power so that there is no way she can escape. In a panic, she locks all the doors and windows, and when she comes face to face with the killer, she tells him she won’t say anything, but he pursues her. She attempts to escape several times before resolving herself to death, but she won’t go out without a fight, and she does some significant damage to the killer. The end is a twist but staying nonetheless. The horror from this film comes from the large sequences of silence since Maddie can’t hear, it makes your adrenaline spike as you wait for something to occur.
I hope you’ll get some spooky nights out of this list!
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