Paramount+ may be best known as the home of all these new Star Trek shows and everything related to CBS Television, but its library of movies is also quite robust. And that's a good thing now that we're deep into spooky season because it means that this streaming service that you probably primarily use for TV has plenty to offer in terms of horror chills and thrills.
And fortunately for all of us, Paramount+ has a large and varied horror library that always has something you're in the mood for. Whether you've got a hankering for more cerebral experiences like Saint Maud or the A Quiet Place films, or more fun fare like Orphan: First Kill or the Scream movies, or legit classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it's pretty darn likely that you'll be able to find something to your liking.
Of course, if you want to keep browsing, there are certainly other streaming services you can turn to for spooky time. We've got your rundown on horror on all the big streamers, from Netflix and HBO Max, to Hulu and Peacock, we've got everything you need to coordinate your horror streaming this fall. If you've got Paramount+, we're gonna find you some scary movies to watch.
Now, without further ado, here are the best horror movies you can stream this month on Paramount+, in alphabetical order.
1. 10 Cloverfield Lane
The Cloverfield branding serves no creative purpose whatsoever and is really a detriment to this story of three people trapped together in a survivalist bunker during a vague apocalypse scenario. But director Dan Trachtenberg's first film is so creepy and tense, with outstanding performances by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr, that it's easy to look past the still-inexplicable title.
2. A Quiet Place series
Some blind space monsters have landed on Earth, and the only way for people to survive is to be super quiet. And it turns out that Jim from The Office is a pretty darn good horror director.
3. Blair Witch Project 1 and 2
The movie that popularized the found footage conceit is still a great bite of cinematic comfort food. And if you're one of those folks who hated the sequel, Book of Shadows, back in the day because it got weird and meta, you should give it another shot now. Without the weight of expectations muddying the response, it's actually kind of a treasure.
4. Candyman (2021)
This sequel/reboot delivers a bit of a thematic curveball from the first movie by focusing on gentrification and its many side effects, and it's just as unnerving as the original. Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is a treasure.
5. The Descent
Every streaming service has to have at least one decent cave-based horror movie, and Neil Marshall's The Descent just might be the best one of those ever made. Claustrophobic horror at its finest.
6. Event Horizon
Paul WS Anderson's cult classic was gutted to the bone because the studio rushed post-production and wanted it to be less violent. But the cast is so good and the premise--space engineers accidentally open a portal to the hell dimension and now folks are developing some troubling fetishes--is intriguing enough to keep it afloat. Not to mention it's still plenty violent. It's one of those movies that shouldn't work, but really, really does.
7. I Know What You Did Last Summer, and its sequel
Scream writer Kevin Williamson had this script sitting on a shelf for years, and after Scream was a hit, this more standard slasher story was fast-tracked. And we're glad it was. The incredibly '90s cast--Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze Jr--is a delight, and it's nearly as much fun as Scream itself was even without the overt self-awareness.
8. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Seen as a commentary on the anti-communist fervor of all that fun Red Scare McCarthyism of the 1950s, the original Body Snatchers still haunts all these many decades later.
9. New Year's Evil
A Los Angeles radio DJ is hosting a New Year's Eve Party at a big Hollywood hotel, and a guy is going around town murdering women to mark the new year in each US time zone. It took some time for this film, which features an original punk soundtrack, to gain some cult status--while it's not really that scary, the soundtrack lends it some unique energy that leaves quite an impression.
10. Night of the Living Dead
George Romero's original zombie picture is still better than most zombie entertainment that's come since. And to be honest it has more substance, too.
11. Orphan: First Kill
As fans of the first film, we had a hard time imagining how a prequel could possibly be a good idea. Impossibly, they actually came up with maybe the one idea that was worth doing, and the result is a delightfully subversive little movie with a really fun performance from Julia Styles.
12. Overlord
You get twice the horror with this one--the horror of war, since it's a World War II movie, and the more normal horror movie horror of murderous zombies.
13. Phantoms
Might be remembered best as a Jay and Silent Bob joke ("Affleck was da bomb in Phantoms, yo"), but that's unfair. While Phantoms--about the population of a mid-sized Colorado town disappearing without a trace--has great energy and ends up being a legitimately fun creature feature.
14. The Ring
Very few American remakes of Japanese horror films have been worth anything, but The Ring manages to go much further than just basic competence: Gore Verbinski's film is clearly better than its source. It helps when you have a powerhouse lead like Naomi Watts, but Verbinski's vision was singular.
15. Saint Maud
Before she was Galadriel on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Morfydd Clark played Maud, a nun who struggles to distinguish between feelings of divine inspiration and her sexual urges. That may not sound too upsetting at first, but we're talking about some serious, heady A24 stuff here. Saint Maud is going to take you on a trip, if you know what I mean.
16. Scream movies
It's legitimately shocking that all of these movies are great both as parodies of the horror genre and also simply as horror movies themselves. It's an extremely difficult line to tread because it's so easy to accidentally slip too far into being one or the other. But these films have done it, and you can't go wrong with any of them--the first four are all here, with the fifth on Showtime.
17. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
It's an anthology movie adaptation of the anthology TV show Tales from the Darkside, which was itself a sort of unofficial TV version of the anthology movie Creepshow. Despite that convoluted origin, this intentionally silly film features solid writing by George Romero and author Michael McDowell, and it really hits the spot when you need that self-aware '80s-style camp.
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